Making Friends with Your Finances
Money doesn’t have to make us crazy
July / August 2003
By Jon Spayde, Utne magazine
Money scares me. I’m clueless about it. It feels like a mystery, a threat, a force of nature entirely beyond my control.
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There. I said it. Now I’m breathing again, and after I wipe the cold sweat from my palms, I’ll be ready to continue.
It’s not easy for an American male to admit that the getting, spending, saving, and investing of the green stuff has him freaked—but that’s how it is for me. I’m just not a money guy. I open cellophane-window envelopes with apprehension—even the ones with checks in them. I’ve tried budget after budget, and they’ve had no more effect on my money sense than fad diets do on my waistline.
I look around and assume that everybody I see handles money with ease and savvy. The prosperous-looking young couple emerging from the gleaming SUV are super-earners and snappy investors, heavily into obscure but high-performing tech stocks. The gray-haired biker roaring by on his Harley probably owns a string of tattoo parlors—his saddlebags are full of bundles of 20-dollar bills headed for the bank.
In my better moments, I realize that I’m not alone in my confusion about the almighty dollar. If statistics are anything to go by, many, many of my fellow Americans find money and credit hard to handle—that is, if they’re lucky enough to have enough of it to handle. Bank-issued credit card debt has more than doubled since 1994. Eight times as many people are going bankrupt today as during the Great Depression (and our population has only a little more than doubled since then). There were 1,539,111 “nonbusiness” bankruptcy filings in 2002 alone—roughly equivalent to the population of Philadelphia.
Wait, you say—those stats don’t necessarily prove that Americans are bad with money. They may show that our standards of what constitutes prosperity—even just plain old economic security—have been so skewed upward in the last few years (particularly in the go-go late ’90s) that most people, with the exception of the super-rich, have been trapped into (1) living beyond their means, (2) falling behind at a precipitous rate, or (3) both. At the same time, corporate scandals, the post-dot-com economic downturn, and the 9/11 shock to the nation’s soul and pocketbook have made for the darkest cloud of economic uncertainty since the oil-crisis ’70s. (And as for the poor, they’re practically invisible under the current Republican administration.)
Well, yes, but all of this merely underlines the real dilemma that we, the money-challenged, find ourselves in. The internal confusion we feel when we try to make sense of money is matched by the genuine strangeness of money. If it were only a matter of confused individuals (us) getting clear about something simple and rational (money), we could all be experts in an afternoon. But money—the supposedly cold, clear numbers on the bottom line, the “beans” that bean counters count—has been freighted with all kinds of irrational baggage from time immemorial.
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