few of us actually know
much about each
other’s >nancial lives.
Even among friends,
talking about how
much each of us earns,
owes, and saves is
taboo. The problem
with silence is, to borrow a phrase from the
adoptee rights movement, that secrecy
breeds fear. And shame.
The fear is that we
might not be commanding as high an
income as our peers —
and therefore we are
stupid. Shame ?ows
from the nagging possibility that we may
actually be commanding more . . . but have
less to show for it. This
road also leads to the
word stupid.
In the absence of
knowledge about the
>nancial practices of
others, we become gullible to the assertions of professionals. Like mortgage
lenders. (Including ours, who hinted, in
2003, that people like us were looking at
quarter-million-dollar homes.) Indeed, the
highlight of CNBC’s Suze Orman Show is
the segment “Can I A=ord It?” in which
anonymous callers ask Ms. Orman, the Dr.
Ruth of personal >nance, if, say, a vacation
in Fiji is a reasonable thing to contemplate. So great is our hunger for economic
disclosure that Orman’s verdict is less
enthralling than the numbers—income,
savings, debt load, home loan—scrolling
down the screen. “Ann from California” has
$600,000 in retirement? No kidding?
Orman’s implicit message is “you are
not alone.” You are not the only one who
has blown up credit card debt into a thun-
derhead of calamitous proportion. You are
not the only one who has spun out on the
black ice of medical bills. Orman is right.
But television is no substitute for conversation. Imagine if we all collectively
queried each other: “I’d like to devote the
rest of my life to solving the climate crisis.
Can I a=ord it? How?”
Our stories about money, when told
without nostalgia or judgment, provide
perspective. On the bleak day four years
ago when I handed the piano teacher the
last of my crumpled cash, I walked
around my house and looked at everything. Nothing is allowed to break. I willed
the furnace to keep humming, the gutters
and downspouts to hang on, the barn roof
to not collapse. And I paid a visit to Ruth,
an eighty-year-old potter. She listened to
my story and then told
me one of her own —
about the time her
father was laid o=
from a New Jersey silk
mill and her mother
boiled chicken legs for
dinner — the part of
the leg that begins
south of the drumstick
and ends with claws.
Here was the point:
her knowledge, as a
child, that everyone
else’s father was likewise unemployed, that
everyone else’s mother
was likewise turning
poultry bits into gelatinous glop, was what
made the Depression
bearable. We were all in
the same boat. It wasn’t
private.
Last fall a manufacturing company contacted me about a
writing project that
involved analyzing envi-
ronmental health risks. The budget for the
project was “in the low six >gures.” Was I
interested? I walked around my house
and looked at everything. This time I
imagined change. The barn could become
a studio. My daughter could have her own
bedroom. But as negotiations continued,
it became clear that I would be required to
sign a con>dentiality agreement regarding proprietary chemical processes. I’d
have to keep secrets. I thought about
Ruth’s chicken legs. I thought about what
my own grandmother had told me: Silence
is the sound of money talking. I said no. a
Children living in Sandra Steingraber’s house
receive as a monthly allowance $1 times their
age. If that proves insufficient, she will accept
bids on home improvement projects.
