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Dear Pete,
Do you talk about your personal finances with your friends? A group of my friends openly shares financial realities, sometimes with gory detail, while I choose to speak only in generalities. It’s not like these are intimate conversations, either. Most of the time, they occur in social settings in a really casual and sometimes reckless manner. Am I wrong for not sharing how much they share? If I’m being honest, some things people have shared have created resent and judgment within me, and I don’t want people to have those feelings about me. Am I being too sensitive?
—Michael, Indianapolis
At the conclusion of each summer, my children squeal with joy as I begrudgingly take the trek down to our neighborhood pool and finally agree to swim with them for an hour or so.
Grab a drink. There’s a lot to unpack here.
My kids go to the pool all summer long, and I sometimes go with them. Although, until the last day of summer, I’m fully clothed in the shade as any self-respecting ginger should be. I have zero desire to frolic half-nude in community waters with people I know. I feel this way whether I’m in tip-top shape or in my more common Midwestern sturdy form. And just like you, Michael, I sit there judging the dads who have the fraternity-letters ankle tattoo from 30 years ago, and I sometimes resent some of the dads who apparently don’t enjoy smashburgers as much as I do. The “show and tell” just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
I feel the exact same way about discussing finances with my close friends.
The reason is quite simple: Context is everything, and there’s no way you’ll ever have enough context to understand another person’s financial life, especially in casual, social settings. You don’t know enough about a person’s childhood, their spouse’s childhood, their health problems or their insurance’s ability to mitigate the costs of those health problems. You don’t know about the financial strength of their employer, their risk tolerance and/or their family obligations.
When you only get bits and pieces of a financial reality, your brain becomes a two-bit screenwriter as it attempts to fill in the blanks. Only, you fill in the blanks using your own sensibility and experience, which generally dismisses the uniqueness of your friend’s human experience. I realize we now live in the world of oversharing, thanks to social media, but it’s the lack of context that drives us further away from people, not closer together.
The inherent problem with discussing finances with others is that the use of numbers convinces you that you should quantify your progress in relation to the other person’s numbers. But the numbers are pointless without the context, which generally only accompanies a more intimate and private conversation.
I’ve personally heard rather benign financial “show and tell” conversations go off the rails because of the lack of context. I was once part of a conversation in which people were comparing emergency funds, which frankly seems rather innocuous. However, the person with the healthiest emergency fund was the beneficiary of a large estate, a reality few people knew, and the person with the smallest emergency fund had put himself through college, a fact he shared with only his closest friends. Let’s just say neither had a great poker face, and feelings were hurt.
The other complexity worth considering is how little perspective others have when witnessing a financial reality different from their own. A financial professional has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of financial lives. Your euchre buddy likely doesn’t have this breadth of experience. Two families with what seems like the same existence in terms of family structure, age and income can have wildly different financial lives and likely do.
Talk religion and politics all you want with your friends and acquaintances, but I’d avoid superficial financial conversations like the plague. The only way I would ever share an ounce of financial information with anyone is if I were asking that person to provide me accountability. And in order to provide me accountability, they would need every morsel of context. Maybe this is why I don’t get invited to cocktail parties.
Michael, life is too short to subject your friends, or yourself for that matter, to lazy, uninformed financial perspectives. And remember, whatever judgment and resentment you’ve formed from their oversharing also lacks the context necessary to justify your new feelings.•
__________
Dunn is CEO of Your Money Line powered by Pete the Planner, an employee-benefit organization focused on solving employees’ financial challenges. Email your financial questions to askpete@petetheplanner.com.
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Our societal taboos against discussing salary have a serious negative effect: perpetuating discrimination.
As for other financial discussions, there’s a time and a place. While it’s a potential minefield, there’s a benefit that comes from authenticity, but there’s an art to knowing if, how, and when.
Well said. Our society needs to be more open about money. Not everyone had a great mentor that filled them in on the small details of money. By sharing with one another we can help each other.
I agree in regards to salaries and discrimination.
Totally agree about salaries and discrimination. Excellent point.