As everyone contemplates the wreckage of their retirement accounts, I figure it is as good a time as any to reflect on my financial problems. I have always been bad at money. While generally competent and highly functional, I am somehow terrified of anything to do with finances.
I would basically summarize my approach to all practical money matters as some combination of hope and avoidance. I think I learned what a 529 savings plan was when my daughter went to college and I realized that I didn’t have one.
When I was growing up in a house full of books, my otherwise fantastic mother somehow conveyed the message that it was vulgar to talk or even really think about money. My mother cared more about a good sentence than anything you could buy. If something broke in our house with two dogs, two cats and five children, she would say, “It’s just a material object.”
Because of all this, I somehow missed the life lesson that in order to not think about money you have to have enough of it. Sometimes I worry about passing along these extraordinarily unhelpful attitudes to my own children. I worry that they are in the air in my household.
When I see a spreadsheet of any kind my mind blurs; the numbers dance uncooperatively on the page. On some deep, shameful, utterly irrational level, I think it is because I have been conditioned to think: Where is the man who will explain this to me? That was another one of my mother’s ideas—that there are certain aspects of life that men should take care of. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to transcend this with all the thinking I have done on sexual politics, but it is harder than it seems to tune out subliminal messages from your childhood.
When I was getting divorced, I realized that dreamy months writing books would not actually support me and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. I had no benefits outside of my husband’s job. I had no savings. I had never thought about getting a job with more financial security.
On a walk with one of my friends, our girls eating muffins in their strollers, she mentioned that her mother had advised her to always be financially independent so she didn’t rely on a man. I remember wishing my mother had said that to me. Though she was an ardent feminist, her view was more: make sure you always have a man around.
Eventually I found my way to a job and the miracle of a paycheck materializing in my bank account every month, but it was still hard to support my daughter and baby son in an expensive city. Sometimes at the height of my single-mother years I would just leave the mail in a pile, as if not actually laying eyes on a bill would make it vanish. I have an active imagination, and I could almost wishfully think away a heating bill.
Tori Dunlap , author of “Financial Feminist,” calls this “the ostrich effect.” (One day as I was contemplating a particularly egregious financial mistake I had just made, an Instagram algorithm helpfully conjured Dunlap for me.)
This ostrich time was a dark period for my credit score, which dipped alarmingly into unrespectable citizen territory. It took a couple of years of concerted effort and drab discipline to get it back in shape. I figured out the advantages of not repressing your mail the hard way.
Around this same time, I learned that several of my male colleagues at my university were earning significantly more money than me. They were not in any way more qualified. They had, however, done something I would never in a million years have dreamed of doing: They asked for more money. My mother would, as she once memorably put it, rather “cut out [her] tongue than ask for more money” for something she wrote.
I asked Dunlap how women can get rid of this particularly entrenched squeamishness, which I continue to struggle with. She pointed out that it is hard for women to ask for more money because we are socially conditioned to be selfless. “Asking for more money feels selfish. You feel like you are being greedy.” To her, the solution is to “start being OK with that uncomfortability.”
These days, I often force myself to ask for more money, and I almost always get it. I have trained myself to do this, even though it still feels like the most awkward thing in the world and goes against every particle of my being. I have stopped pretending that I write for the sheer love of writing.
These days I have gotten better at things like retirement accounts and college savings plans, but I lost a lot of years to financial anxieties and mishaps. I imagine another life where I had been more organized, where I had mastered basic financial concepts, where the sight of a tax return or retirement savings account didn’t plunge me into a panic.
Then I remember that I kind of do have that other life: my daughter’s. She can be different, more adept, less avoidant, more assertive. I need to sit down and have the “Don’t be like me” talk with her, and with my son, too.
As Dunlap generously puts it, there is no such thing as being bad at money. You just have to learn it like a language. This gives me a glimmer of hope for both myself and my children, since language, unlike math, I can do.
