In my recent quest to collect as much information as possible to educate myself about finances and investing (and area in which I am negligently ignorant) I came across a book that has proven to be highly valuable, if not a bit unsettling. It’s “Prince Charming Isn’t Coming: How Women Get Smart About Money” by Barbara Stanny.
Now, having spent my life as a highly contrarian, radical feminist with HUGE aversions to the idea of marriage, I have never in my entire life succumbed to the ‘prince charming’ fantasies that are apparently still rampant among women. In fact, I am often surprised when I meet women who have them, because the idea seems so out-dated to me that I find myself feeling like I am looking at an old hand-crank record player: it’s one of those things I know existed at one point, but I never really thought I’d see one in real life. So imagine my surprise when, while reading Stanny’s book, I discover that — though my motivations may not always be the same — I have spent my entire adult, professional life demonstrating the same type of behavior as the women she writes about (including herself) who spend their lives being financially short-sighted because of an underlying belief in the myth that one day ‘Prince Charming’ is going to show up and financially rescue her.
Truly, the realization is shocking. And more than just a little appalling.
I recall very vividly a year and a half ago, when my partner and I were meeting with our financial planner for the first time. The meetings would leave me feeling so blatantly hostile and antagonistic than I’d want to scream at someone just for the hell of it. I wanted him to lead dealing with all of this stuff, and I didn’t want to have to do anything more than sign my name on the dotted line.
From not long after we started living together, we’ve had a joint bank account and combined finances… which he has mostly managed. The second I handed everything over to him, I mentally checked out. Intellectually I know better than that. And if someone had told me I would do that, I would have been offended and argued that I would never be that stupid, “girly” or irresponsible. I am the primary breadwinner. The idea that I would voluntarily turn into a mental marshmallow and hand the reigns for EVERYTHING over to someone else is utterly preposterous!
And yet, shockingly enough, that’s precisely what I did.
I recently started reading David Bach’s book, “Smart Couples Finish Rich.” I like David Bach’s books a lot, but this one I have not yet been able to finish, and now I realize why: Bach strongly argued that a couple must deal with their finances together, and the idea of having to do that again was so monumentally unappealing that I stopped reading the book.
Now, my reasons were not always the same. I never specifically wanted a man (husband, boyfriend, partner, whatever) to manage my money, I just wanted anyone who could/would do it. I always just figured it’d be a bookkeeper or financial planner.
Much like I never intended to do my own housework, I just expected that I’d have a housekeeper. In point of fact, one of my underlying reasons for being so career-driven has always been so that I can hire the help that I need to manage the daily tasks that I thoroughly dread. I’m really not kidding. Most little girls grow up wanting to find a rich husband who will take care of them. I grew up wanting to be a highly well-paid professional who could just hire whatever personal staff I needed to deal with life’s unpleasantries.
It’s actually only been in the past year that I’ve started learning how to deal with domestic chores. Because I hate them so much I have spent my life avoiding them, and I’ve finally come to realize that dealing with my money is precisely the same as dealing with the dishes (which is the household chore I hate more than all the others combined). And, amusingly enough, now that I’ve learned to manage how I approach it, I’ve started discovering that they are infinitely less miserable than they have ever been before. Ditto, once again, my feelings about dealing with money.
One of the other things that I’ve recently realized is that I’ve always used being a workaholic as an excuse to not deal with my money. Educating myself and getting up to speed enough to deal with it intelligently would detract from work, and — just like a love life — anything that detracted from work was not welcome in my life for years. I tend to view my time as valuable, based on the rate that my employer pays me. So, at about $50 per hour, I didn’t want to squander that time on something that wasn’t directly valuable.
Admittedly I can be a bit slower than I like to admit sometimes, because the absolute STUPIDITY of that logic only just fell into place. My time is worth far MORE than $50 per hour. And yet the only way I am going to have a net worth greater than that is if I make sure to create it myself. If my employer if paying me enough to come out to $50 per hour, then that’s our arrangement and that’s fine. I will give them the time they are buying. But they don’t get “freebees” thrown in on top of that! Not when taking that time I have been donating to someone else’s bottom line can be re-shifted to my own education and financial future to INCREASE the over-all value of my time.
My other big obstacle is political. I am a socialist. As such, I’ve always been highly conflicted about having (as my Mom used to say) a “champagne appetite on a beer budget.” It’s actually taken until a couple of different events converged recently that I’ve been able to reconcile my internal conflict on this topic.
I recently told someone that, just because I am a socialist who doesn’t buy into the notion of money-worshipping, didn’t mean that I don’t know how to play the capitalist game. And that, as long as that is the world in which we are living, then those are the rules I need to excel at unless I’m going to drop out of the race entirely and be content to live on a commune somewhere.
The truth is, that would be an option. My younger cousin actually lives on a commune. But that is absolutely up her alley. For all of my political ideals, I do have expensive tastes, and I like certain creature comforts that simply require money. So a long time ago I decided (mostly unconsciously) that I was going to attain a level of success and financial independence that would be required to have the lifestyle I wanted. I have done that. But what I haven’t done is the conscious work that goes along with it to properly manage and grow my money in such a way that I would not always be in jeopardy of being beholden to an employer.
So, now it’s time to do that.
If there is one thing that I know it is that my political inclinations drive me to wanting to do certain types of work that do not pay what I am accustomed to making. As a result, I have always had to make a choice: do the type of work that truly excites and invigorates me and make shit for money, or find ways to be motivated to do work that pays well. Now, as I learned from one of my former employers, I can only push that envelope so far in the “whore” direction before no amount of money is worth supporting an organization I just find offensive. So I look for places that are politically in line with my beliefs for the most part, so there is nothing out-right egregious about my working for them. Yet on a daily basis, this is not the truly fulfilling work I would most like to be doing. So I am making a compromise. It’s a perfectly tolerable one (for the time being), but it’s still a compromise.
I know myself well enough to know that eventually the compromise will no longer be worthwhile and it will be time to go. So I can move to another job, but it will be the same thing all over again. And eventually that will be too much, too. In the end, the only thing that is going to make me happy is to be able to do political and socially-valuable work… the kind that pays shit. So in order to prepare for the day when compromising is no longer acceptable to me, I need to take advantage of being paid well in the meantime to build up my own financial status to the point that when that time comes, I can take a job without having to worry one way or the other about how much it pays.
And, the fact is that I am a socialist, but I am also a pragmatist, and I fully acknowledge — perhaps resentfully — that money is the key to having the power to make your own choices and not being trapped. And if there is one fear I have in the entire universe, it’s being trapped. I’ve always only ever considered that fear on an emotional level and in the context of relationships, but it’s equally true of finances. And now that I see it in the same way, it is crystal clear to me that I’ve spent the past decade putting myself on a course that is going to take me to my worst nightmare: being (financially) trapped.
For the first time in my life, I am actually excited about the prospect of tackling this. It is no longer innately intimidating or aggravating or antagonizing or too tedious to have the patience for managing. It’s part of what I need to do for me. And it feels bizarrely good.
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