🧵 Thursday Thread: Can we talk about money?

We can't live without it but many of us have tarnished relationships with it. So, let's dig into our beliefs about money and how those beliefs shape our behaviors and, in turn, our lives

We all know how “the cost of groceries” played out in the landscape of our most recent election. And while it wasn’t that simple, money is a major driving force not just in politics, but in every aspect of the daily lives of those of us who live under late-stage capitalism.

I grew up “poor.”

I put that in quotes because we had a car, a roof over our heads, and almost never went hungry, until my mom lost her job for good, stopped paying heat and water, eventually lost her house, and became homeless for a stretch of years during which she lived first at the Y and later, I’m not sure where, because by then we were effectively estranged in the wake of my own stint in foster care. But “poor” is a relative term, and I mean no disrespect to those living in abject poverty.

Already, in what I just wrote about the economic circumstances of my childhood, you can hear that my relationship with and thoughts about money are complicated.

My mom came from a family of hardboiled Iron Range working class democrats, railroad men and laundry women, big drinkers with big personalities who had passionate beliefs about how the world works and how it could work better. To say that my mom had opinions about money would be an understatement. It was the root of all evil. It could not buy happiness. Those who had a lot of it were morally suspect, if not bankrupt. In this way, I absorbed, over the years of my confusing and sometimes terrifying childhood, that the way my mother sat at the roll top desk at the end of each month, swearing and adding and timing her checks against money not yet in her account, made our family somehow more virtuous and pure than others who had more—especially if they had more than their share.

Friends, I cannot tell you how much these formative and largely unexamined (until much later in adulthood) beliefs about money fucked up my ability to even think about money or relate to money, let alone handle money, plan money, manage money, etc. And by the time I became a single mother of three children—a single mother with a very angry ex-spouse seeking to abuse me financially for leaving the marriage—it became clear to me, however slowly and painfully, that I really needed to rehabilitate my relationship with money. My kids were depending on it.

It’s been a long, slow haul, but the one thing that’s been a constant for me in the rehabilitative process has been a focus on generosity as an antidote to those deep-down fears about money as inherently dirty. I haven’t figured a lot else out, but I have held onto this one guiding principle which is that if you share the money, it’s cleaner, right?

That’s probably why I was so intrigued by Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study post this week, The Case Against Budget Culture, in which she interviews Dana Miranda, author of the book You Don’t Need a Budget and the newsletter Healthy Rich. I haven’t read Miranda’s work (I had never heard of her until Petersen’s post), but the interview was fascinating, and really made me think (as well as feel a lot less like a shit for never having been able to set a budget for the life of me … because, numbers). I recommend the whole interview, but, in short, Miranda said, among many other provocative things:

Budget culture guides our financial decisions from a place of greed, rather than generosity. Most of us aren’t greedy people, but the way budget culture teaches us to think about money is rooted in greed. Every conventional rule about money management is biased toward the belief that wealth accumulation is necessary, so financial advice is designed to teach us to hoard money and feel like a chump giving it away.

I haven’t ever heard anyone argue against “budget culture!” It makes me feel easier around money just to read that (though I imagine it might make some others, who are good at budgeting, feel the opposite of easy).

For me, the closest I’ve ever come (and maybe the closest I will ever get) to feeling ease around money is when I started seeing it as a flow of energy—this is something I learned from the book The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist, a recognized global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger, and supporting social justice and sustainability, who says:

Money is like water. It can be a conduit for commitment, a currency of love. Money moving in the direction of our highest commitments nourishes our world and ourselves. What you appreciate appreciates. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. Collaboration creates prosperity. True abundance flows from enough; never from more. Money carries our intention. If we use it with integrity, then it carries integrity forward. Know the flow—take responsibility for the way your money moves in the world. Let your soul inform your money and your money express your soul.

Twist is walking the talk, and I believe her. Still, I wonder how this works for those who simply don’t have enough money to meet basic needs and be safe. It feels like one of those endless loops, like any other intractable problem (I can recycle, compost, and be a vegetarian, but none of those actions will make a fundamental dent in the structural problems causing climate change).

Still, though, our money beliefs are worth probing, I think—because even though we cannot, individually, solve the problem of money and how it is distributed in our country (and world), we are still affected in our own lives each and every day by our beliefs and misbeliefs about money. The beliefs are the part we can attend to, rehabilitate, nourish, and fortify.

So, what are your money beliefs, and where did they or do they come from? And how do your formative money experiences continue to play out in your life today? What are your money hangups and fears, aversions and judgments?

I would love to hear from you on this electrifying question. And the money question is, by the way, incredibly relevant in the arts, where it has become nearly impossible to earn a living; it’s never been easy, but a sustainably remunerated career as a writer is now nearly a pipe dream—so, how do we value our art in ways that sidestep money?

Or, do we?

I’m so curious to hear your thoughts. Thank you for being here and sharing. Be kind, of course. Money is a sensitive topic, and we’re here to build each other up, always, never to tear anyone down.

Love,

Jeannine

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