By Brooke Berman
I was 30 and had moved into the apartment of my dreams with the roommate of my dreams. Once unpacked, we decided to throw a series of dinner parties to introduce our friends to each other. We drew up a guest list and a menu, then split up who would buy what. (I had dessert and wine). We did not set a budget, but because we’d decided on pasta and salad, I assumed it would be reasonable. At the time, I was earning roughly $1,250 to $1,500 a month as a freelance fact-checker while pursuing a life in the theater. My share of the rent was 600 dollars. Life was lean. But we were artists. It wasn’t hard to live within my means.
So I was shocked when my roommate came back from grocery shopping at the luxe Dean & DeLuca. (New Yorkers of a certain age will remember it as the fancy gourmet and coffee shop on Broadway and Prince. I think Felicity worked there in season two, around the time she cut her hair.)
The point is, our pasta dinner cost what a steak from the local Grand Union grocery might. And this is when I realized we’d never discussed numbers.
I think of this experience more and more often, over 20 years later, as I watch the economy and my family’s finances fluctuate. The Wall Street Journal calls our national economy a “roller coaster soaring and falling through tariff shocks, a cooling job market, robust AI investments and a near-record close to the U.S. stock market.” In the entertainment industry, where I’ve been making a living, more and more people are out of work. TV writing jobs dropped by 42% last year. And it’s not just us; many, many middle class Americans are feeling the rising cost of living and, specifically, of healthcare.
I used to believe that creatives like me might struggle in our 20s but eventually tap into some form of financial security by middle age. But everyone I know is back to basics with their finances. And so, our ability to navigate money, learn its language, and speak about it coherently is more crucial than ever.
By and large, women of my generation were raised not to talk about money. Many of us find the conversations around who has it, who doesn’t, and how to get/earn/ask for more charged. We have been told that our money, or lack thereof, is related to self esteem (not unlike our love lives) and if we could only “own our worth” we’d magically call in more money. While that is not untrue, it’s not the whole story, and it leaves us in the dangerously related realms of self-blame and magical thinking. We can ask for sex with more ease and confidence than we can ask for money. Can you imagine an episode of Sex and the City/And Just Like That where, after Cosmos, those friends divide up the bill and talk about mortgage payments? What if this were normalized, or even just modeled for us?
For writer Rebecca Walker, talking about dangerous subject matter came easily, but “talking about money was the hardest. Harder than talking about feminism or polygamy!” Walker’s book, Women Talk Money, came out of these difficult conversations. Despite the challenges, Walker knew that “in telling our stories we are set free.”
“Everyone was struggling, and all of a sudden people could talk about it,” she says of the period after the 2008 financial crash. “There was an urgency that opened the floodgates and helped us all be more honest and transparent about our struggles with money.”
“That’s the way our class system is perpetuated and the way economic disparity is maintained. People don’t talk about their finances, the money they have, the money they want. They secret it in this shame-based ethos that’s very dangerous. But talking about it [money] with my friends allowed us to pursue other ways of talking about and making money.”
For UK-based writer Keris Fox, a midlife divorce was the catalyst. She writes, “Over the years, I’d tried to get a handle on money – read books, tracked spending, tried budgets, etc – but nothing stuck. And then, in 2018, my marriage ended. I was on my own for the first time since my early twenties, responsible for myself and my two sons, and my financial situation was precarious, to say the least. Quite a few of my friends were in a similar situation. One had never even been involved in the financial side of her marriage at all, didn’t know who their energy provider was or who their mortgage was with. I realized we should all be talking about money a lot more than we are.” And so Fox began a Substack, The Ladybird Purse, devoted to midlife women and our money habits. She even trained to become a Trauma of Money counselor! Fox talks to women at every stage of financial literacy and abundance or lack thereof, asking, what does it feel like?
When my former roommate and I faced up to our misstep in The Dinner Party Experience, we realized the mistake we’d made in not discussing a budget beforehand. In assuming we were on the same page, we’d side-stepped an opportunity to get granular – and get real. Neither of us had the skill set at the time to do that.
Moving forward, we talked about numbers. We began to pay our monthly bills together over breakfast at a local French bakery, specifically so that our experience of doing the monthly math would be met with some aspect of pleasure (we’re both foodies, we wanted generous bowls of coffee and fresh croissants.) This is a habit I have taken with me, ensuring that monthly money meet-ups with friends, business partners, even in my marriage, are pleasant or at the very least, involve food.
Are you talking about money with your partners? Business, love, familial or otherwise? And if not, why? While my husband and I definitely fight, we don’t fight over money. We know what’s coming in, what our expectations are and how much we have to spend. And when the numbers don’t add up, we make a plan.
Whereas it used to be impolite, talking about money could and should be standard fare. Especially now when so much is in flux. These conversations will definitely set us free. The ability to name something brings clarity and with that clarity, an opportunity to break with an old narrative and write a new one.