Episode 200: You and Your Money
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
On this, the show’s 200th episode, we’re talking about women’s relationship with money…
“I would sit down and have panic attacks when it came time to pay my bills. The numbers might as well have been martian to me in those moments because I was so scared.”
“Women still have this trauma around money. The way society talks to women about money is completely different than the messages that men get about money. And so there's this shame and this guilt and this discomfort around money for women specifically, that I think men don’t suffer the same way or don't experience the same way.”
Improving an awkward relationship. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
A couple of months ago I was hoping to get some feedback from listeners on an idea for a show. So I posted on the Facebook page asking how much time you spent thinking or worrying about money, or worrying that you weren’t thinking enough about money. Given that women tend to have quite different money lives than men, I wondered if it might be a good topic for discussion. Once I asked the question, the comments began to pile up.
Your comments covered a lot of ground and I can’t talk about every aspect of what you raised in this show. But I think it’s fair to say that women have a more anxious relationship with money than men. Most of us are paid less, for starters. We often work in industries that pay less. We tend to take career breaks, usually because of family responsibilities. This affects the amount of money we earn over a lifetime…and thus the amount we can save for retirement. Add to all this the fact that we live longer than men so we need our money to go further.
One listener who posted on that thread sent me a voice memo outlining what she wishes she’d thought about in her early years in the workforce.
“I grew up in the sixties and seventies, during the hippie era, and we used to say ‘never trust anybody over the age of 30.’ And we said that because we really thought we would be young forever, but then ‘poof!’ in the blink of an eye here I am at the back end of my sixties and I don't know how I got here so fast.
The problem is that I would like to retire. But I haven’t saved enough money to be able to do that and I am going to have to work full time probably well into my seventies before I’ll be in a position to do that. And even then I’ll probably have to have some little side gig for supplemental income. I wish I could send a message back to my younger self and tell me to make sure that I was diligent about saving for retirement…at this point it’s a little late for me to make a major dent in my savings although I do continue to try, but I wish I had known then what I know now.”
That’s Rosy in Pennsylvania. She says she didn’t do any saving for the future in her twenties and thirties, a time when admittedly it can be really hard to think about being in your sixties or seventies. Particularly if you’re American and you may have tens of thousands of dollars of student debt to pay down. That takes precedence in a lot of people’s minds.
I didn’t ask Rosy what her upbringing was like - what lessons she’d learned about money growing up. But …so many of us find money hard to talk about - because we’ve been told it’s rude to discuss it, especially as women, because of how our families dealt with money, whether they had enough of it, what money represented to them…and most of us never learned a thing about savings, credit cards or interest while we were at school.
One of the other comments I got on that social media thread read, in part:
“It is such a triggering topic for me as a woman who did not learn about money until it was too late and has struggled with all things math from my childhood. Fast forward through two marriages/divorces that destroyed me financially due to my absolute ignorance and naivety about money and I am STILL at age 45 trying to figure out how I’m ever going to pay off debts, let alone think about saving for retirement.”
That listener’s name is Sarah Wolfe. I asked her if she’d be part of the podcast, and she said yes.
Sarah grew up in Michigan with a single mother. When she was in middle school, she and her brother went to live with her grandparents. She says her mom was not a good role model when it came to money.
“I would venture to say that my mom had zero skills when it came to making money and managing money. She never really was able to hold down a job. And she's an artist. She was a very talented artist. And actually, one of the reasons we went to live with my grandparents initially was because she got a scholarship at a local community college in northwest Michigan for art. And so she needed to focus on that. And so my brother and I moved in with our grandparents, but she didn't, she didn't graduate. She didn't finish. And when I was a little, little girl, she was on welfare and we had food stamps.
It's interesting to look back. I don't have any memory of her ever doing anything to manage money.”
Sarah wasn’t learning anything about finances in high school, either. She struggled quite a bit with academics - years later she found out she had Attention Deficit Disorder.
She did land a scholarship to a theater program at Wayne State University in Detroit. But she found that hard going, and ended up dropping out. Then, she met a guy. They dated for a couple of years and got married when she was 21…
“I did get pregnant, and so I think we did have the conversation about me staying home, at least at first with the baby. And that's what we did. I stayed home, but I did work through a lot of my pregnancy, and I think that he sort of had this idea that he was gonna be the breadwinner.
He was gonna be the one that brought home the bacon. And I, I thought the same thing. I thought he would do that too. I paid a lot of attention to money at that time, but I didn't know what to do with it. We didn't have much to work with. That's all I remember. And I remember trying to budget everything in a very similar way that my grandmother did on a piece of paper <laugh>. But I never thought about the future. It was just barely like making it paycheck to paycheck, you know. There was always fear I remember, and a lot of anxiety around money even in those early days.”
She says her husband had bad credit, so they bought a car they couldn’t really afford using her credit. She had her first son at 22 and her next one soon after. But the marriage broke up after about five years. Her ex had family support in another state and they decided the kids should go and live with him for most of the time.
At that point she had a day job as a receptionist, an evening job at a department store…seasonal work…but her ex wasn’t working. Sarah found out she’d be the one paying child support.
“Child support was calculated based on all of that, like me working all of these jobs. And at that time, he was working zero jobs, when he was with his family. And so I got to pay child support. And it was a lot of money for me at the time. It was not expected. I was so naive about how any of this would work.”
She was chasing her tail all the time. She wasn’t earning enough to pay off her car, rent, other bills, and pay child support AND taxes. In her late twenties she went back to school to train as an aesthetician, a job she’s now been doing for 17 years. She also met someone else and quickly moved in with him. They later married. But that guy turned out to be emotionally abusive…and he was physically abusive to her kids. They split up.
During the marriage Sarah says they’d begun working to make a dent in his debt, but not hers.
“In my mid-thirties is when it really hit home. Like, I am in a really bad place and I need to figure this out. I need to figure out what working with money looks like. I need to figure out what it looks like to work with what I have. I need to figure out how to make more so that I can actually dig myself out of this giant pit of debt that I'm in. And I would sit down and have panic attacks when it came time to pay my bills. Literal, actual panic attacks where I would freeze up and just start crying and sobbing and, and look at the numbers. The numbers might as well have been martian <laugh> to me in, in those moments because I was so scared. There were times in those early years after my second divorce where I would be sitting down to pay my bills and realize I had no money for food and I was out of food and I would just be praying at work that day that I would get some cash tips so that I could go to the grocery store and buy myself a meal.”
AM-T: “Were you hungry?”
“There were times when I was hungry. Yeah. I, I never went completely without, but my fridge was pretty empty sometimes…it was very stressful, to say the least.”
AM-T: “What role do you think your upbringing and your thoughts about what women should have and what women should do, how did that play into this, d’you think?”
“I really think that the example that was set for me and probably for so many women is that we don't need to worry about it. We don't need to think about money in the same way that men do. Whether that's from religion, you know, religious backgrounds or just cultural backgrounds. Of course there are exceptions to that. There are plenty of women who have done well for themselves and were given the right examples. My experience, however, and the experience of so many women that I still meet to this day, are that we don't need to be the ones to worry about it. And that is a huge problem. That was the biggest problem for me is that I didn't need to worry about it. I just needed to find a man who would worry about it. And that did not happen for me.”
She says her mother would push this message throughout her childhood…
“I just need to find a man. I need to find somebody to take care of me…she would literally say those things.”
AM-T: “Did she ever find a man to take care of her?”
“No, no, she didn't, not really. She ended up being taken care of by my grandparents until they died. They supported her financially. And Ashley, even like, I was really interested in like historical romance novels when I was in high school. And even those examples were, and that's true of the history of women though too, you know, those historical romance novels, which were fiction, were actually depicting a lot of what was actually true for women, is that women needed to be supported by men. And that was the message I was receiving even in the fiction I was reading, that was very romanticized and appealing to me.”
AM-T: “When did your thinking about money start to evolve? I mean you wrote quite a long post on the show’s Facebook page about your experiences. And now I know more about your story I think you were quite hard on yourself. But what do you wish had been different, what do you wish you had known going into adulthood?”
“I think it's a real shame that how to handle money isn't taught in schools. That would've been really helpful for me because I was coming from a family who didn't know how to manage money and didn't even know how to make enough money. I wish that my mother had taught me how to deal with money, which she couldn't have because she didn't know. I wish my grandmother, my grandfather could have spent more time showing me how to deal with money. But they didn't know either. They had no retirement accounts and they didn't know anything about <laugh> Roth IRAs or anything like that, which I still don't know anything about those things. I wish that there was more out there in the world in schools and with mentorships or something, some way to teach me how to deal with the stuff of life with money, how to save.
I also wish that I had never opened up a credit card account. I wish that I had learned not to deal with credit as much as possible and just work with the money that I had in my account.”
Today, at 45, Sarah is in a better position than she was ten years ago. She’s less afraid, more focused.
“It’s taken me many years after ending my second marriage to get to the point where I am now, where now I actually still do have some anxiety about money, but I have gone to therapy, I have read books, I have talked with people, I've done anything and everything I can think of to try to sort of heal this trauma essentially that I had about money, and to just do whatever I need to do to get ahead.
So I'm making enough money now that I can actually start working on paying off debt. And my partner now is somebody that I can actually have conversations with about money. And even though he's not supporting me financially, he is a good sounding board for me. And he does help me in some ways, he's a generous man.
So I feel like I'm in a much better place. Like I can actually start working on it. I feel really disappointed that it's taken me this long and I feel like I'm really behind the game. And it's pretty scary, actually. My future feels a little scary because I don't know how - I have to pay off my debts before I can even think about saving for the future. And that feels like a long way off. So I'm 45 years old now, so I don't know when I'll be able to retire and what that will look like, but I'm hoping if I do the work, I can make that happen somehow. So I feel hopeful, and I'm trying not to stay in a place of feeling discouraged. But at least I don't have panic attacks anymore.”
Sarah says she picks a word to focus on each year - this year was ‘strength’, 2023’s word will be ‘money.’
Kristine Beese is the same age as Sarah. She’s spent much of her career in finance. And while Sarah is frustrated that money management isn’t touched on in most high schools…Kristine is aggravated by the way the financial services industry - her industry - fails women. She’s now the CEO of a startup called Untangle Money.
Kristine grew up in Canada with professional parents. But they never sat her down to talk about money either. She’s worked in finance for years both in the UK and Canada - she also has an MBA. But her parents don’t entirely trust her expertise.
“I used to work as a stock analyst and my dad would ask my husband, who is not a stock analyst, but he was in the finance industry, about money, and stocks. And my husband is very feminist and he’d be like, well I think Kristine would probably be the person, she works hand in hand with the trading floor, she’s been on the trading floor…no, no. It’s very gendered in my family, very gendered.”
I knew Kristine hadn’t started her career in finance. I was curious about how she’d made the switch, and why she’s so fired about about women and money.
“Sometimes people find this a bit off putting, but when I first got out of university, I was an engineer in the oil and gas industry and I had my own company and I had my own employees and I made lots of money and I didn't know what to do with it. And I went to the bank and I had this awful interaction with a gentleman there who just made me feel stupid and made me feel small and made me feel like the money I was making wasn't important. And you know, that was, I was in my twenties and, and that kind of really inspired me to learn more about money. How do I get it working for me? How do I do it the right way? Where do I start and, and want to figure it out on my own.”
She learned a lot during her years working in banking and money management.
And being part of the financial industry, she knew it didn’t cater well to women - it didn’t meet them where they were, take into account that they’re paid less, or that they don’t work as much over the course of their life as a man will - or that we tend to pay more for a lot of services. She points out that in the US women’s salaries plateau around age 40, whereas men’s keep going up until they’re 55.
Kristine met her co-founder a few years ago and that woman, Ria, was in her 20s…but her experience of the financial services industry matched Kristine’s from two decades ago. Both women saw a need for services that catered specifically to women…and their financial planning startup Untangle Money was born.
Still, Kristine says it’s been challenging when she’s out and about, talking about what she does, to get people - women included - to embrace this topic.
“Earlier on I said I made a lot of money, and I used to never say that. I used to never say I was successful and, and that I liked making money because it was so offputting. And it sort of, you know, it set me at this deficit and then I have to claw my way back and, and try and earn people's humor, earn people's, you know, get them to like me…because it is so offensive. And so at parties now, I say what I do and then all of a sudden there's no people around me anymore.”
AM-T: “Whereas men can and sometimes do talk about money very openly and it is OK and almost expected in some realms for men to talk about how much they earn and it’s almost like, I’m doing my chest out here, almost a testosterone thing…but for women it’s very, very different, it’s considered far less acceptable for us as women to talk openly about money.”
“Yes. And it's interesting ‘cause if you look at women's magazines, they talk about budgeting, they talk about stretching the dollar, like we've all heard this, right? They talk about be keeping your money safe. It's very, it's really restrictive when it comes to money. And then when you go to like men's health magazines or magazines directed and targeting men, it's about like the sky's the limit and ‘you're gonna be great’ and like, ‘invest your money, get all the Rolexes’ and it's more, very aspirational. And so it's, but the interesting consequence of this is that men end up feeling like they know a lot about money when really our education is fairly similar. So every study that's ever looked at the performance, the investment performance of men and women at the retail level, so that's you and me, that's average, like everyday people, it's non-professionals.
So at the retail level, women outperform men. So women actually are better investors than men. And part of it I think comes from the fact that we aren't overconfident. So we do kind of, you know, the best way to do your money is to keep it simple and set it and forget it. And that's really aligned with how women actually invest their money. Whereas men, they have all these aspirations, swing for the fences, and they end up having this almost exuberance or this need to get more performance than is realistic out of their money. And they end up making poor decisions because of it. And so they, in the long run on aggregate, they end up underperforming women. And I really do think it's a disservice the way they're spoken to in a similar way that's a real disservice the way we are spoken to because we don't - we're not taught to get our money working for us. And it is a meaningful amount of our future money needs is is getting our investments working for us and investing and being invested in the market.”
AMT: “In your experience with the women you talk to, how much is there a fear around money essentially, or I guess it could be a fear around money and what the lack of it might mean. But what I really mean is a fear of, ‘I don’t how to talk about this.’ The fear of being seen as stupid because you don't know enough.”
“Yeah. So we did a listening tour in the very beginning and you know, I'm really fortunate cause I have friends from all over. And one of my friends said she felt intimidated just going into a bank. She's like, it's so sterile, it's so buttoned up. She's just not in that type of an industry. And she just didn't even feel comfortable there. There's a lot of conflict of interest built into the industry and I think somehow we feel it, it often feels like there's some sales tactics going on. So another thing we heard from women is it was hard to discern when the advice was actually for them, or whether that advice was given to sort of tempt them into purchasing products that, you know, they would make more money on - the salesperson. And the other thing we heard is there's a lot of anxiety for women around money. And this is documented. Women's number one sources of anxiety are tied. There's two, it's money and it's their children. And women see money as safety, women see money as security, so there's an attachment to cash. But back to the emotions and the negative emotions specifically. There's shame, there's guilt. Annabelle Williams in her book, talks about how as a society we've normalized the idea that women's spending is frivolous and men's spending is discerning.”
AM-T: “Interesting. That is interesting. And hang on, Annabelle Williams's book, what is that book?”
“Her book is called Why Women Are Poorer Than Men and What We Can Do About It. And I highly recommend it.”
One reason women are poorer than men is divorce. In the majority of cases - in heterosexual relationships - women end up financially worse off after a divorce. And as several listeners pointed out in that social media thread…women will sometimes stay in bad relationships because they feel they can’t afford to live independently…
Kristine says it’s true women often won’t be able to have the same lifestyle outside of the relationship…but that doesn’t mean they have to stay.
“If you're kind of wondering, you know, what are the first steps I should take while, and I've been married 10 years and I know there's ups and downs, and they don't necessarily mean they go anywhere, but how can I start preparing in case this doesn't work out? One of the best things you can do is start getting some bills in your name, get a credit card, start putting things on it, there's some great points ones out there. Just start building your credit.”
I have to say I had never thought about this until Anthea, the New Zealand listener you heard in the last show on age and possibility…raised it with me. One of the reasons her new life after divorce was so tricky is that she couldn’t get a credit card initially…Those years she’d been out of the workforce and married, she was the secondary name on her and her husband's joint credit cards. But he was the primary cardholder. So she found herself coming out of her marriage with a big gap in her credit. It was almost like she didn’t exist.
As Sarah said, the idea of retirement can seem pretty daunting to a lot of women who don’t feel remotely financially secure in their 40s. The financial services industry puts so much emphasis on saving for retirement, on having enough money to live in the style to which you’re accustomed, after you stop working. But as Kristine found out through some of her clients, not all women are interested in that.
“And coming from finance and coming from this sort of background, I was just sort of told everybody wants to live on their own for 30 years in the same style of living that they've always done. And it was the first time I was really told that there's actually kind of a lot of judgment around that statement, and not everybody wants to give up enough now to then be able to afford that later. And so their expectations are different. So we now talk about golden girls retirement or downsizing in retirement. And so for women who maybe feel like they're really behind on saving for retirement, there's this amazing option where they can lower their costs of living by essentially having roommates.”
You may have read about this, there have been quite a few articles in the last couple of years focusing on single women living together as they age, like the Golden Girls of the ‘80s series. And it may not be for everyone but it’s an option that more and more women are choosing to take up. Especially as life is more expensive when you live alone, and teaming up saves money.
“Exactly. And you free up more money to live with. Right? I think the other thing that frustrates me about the industry is, especially with the like frivolous spending for women idea, is that, you know, you have to take out all the joy of spending money. Well what's the point of earning money if you're not enjoy spending it? And so what we really want you to do, and we talk about this, is figure out what you like spending money on and then try and spend more money there and try and get everything else free or cheap or try and be really creative with all the other things. But for the things that you really wanna purchase and own and really bring you joy, go for it. Try and figure out a way to make that happen because that makes day to day life worth it.”
As we came to the end of our conversation, I asked Kristine, but what about someone like Sarah, who we just heard from earlier? She might be listening to this thinking…all this stuff about investing and retirement…I’m nowhere near that right now. I’m just starting to pay down my debt.
Kristine has her own experience of debt - and lots of thoughts on it. Her second degree involved taking out a big student loan…and she quickly adapted to the debt.
“And so like, what's another a hundred dollars? What's another thousand dollars? What's another $500? And I just kind of, it was going in the wrong direction. I was just, I wasn't paying it down and yet I didn't feel it because it became so normal and I adjusted so quickly. It's such a big number anyways. What's a little more? So we call this the debt spiral.
It is always better to work your way out of debt because the end goal is options. And so yeah, the future may not look like you're living the same lifestyle you have today, all the way into the future, but it will never look like that if you don't start paying off that debt. It's always the first step and there's always ways to make these things work. You can work a little later, you can live with other people, you can take on side hustles. I don't actually like this one ‘cause I feel like a lot of people end up investing more into their side hustle than they ever do make. And I would rather sort of work with what you can control. You can also look to a downsized lifestyle and I think you can find a lot of joy in those things because I think living within your means can give you so much more security than any item could give you.
So as she sees that number tick down and an amazing job for like, well on her, it's gonna go down faster as well, ‘cause there's less interest going. And so it can be this really exciting race to the end.”
Kristine is a fan of Canadian financial planner and author Shannon Lee Simmons, who’s written two books called Worry Free Money and Living Debt Free….
“She has an incredible assortment of strategies for how to motivate yourself to pay down debt. So one of them is sticky notes for every month that it's gonna take you to pay down debt on the wall and then just celebrate ripping one off every month and throwing it into the trash.
So it's very tactile…having a way to bring that large debt number into your day to day and celebrate your achievement towards getting that out of your life. The other thing that's great is that we do live for a very long time, so time is your biggest advantage…you know, as women we do have a lot of it in front of us so it may feel like we've started too late, but it's never too late. We are the youngest we're ever gonna be today.”
Kristine Beese in Toronto. Thanks to her and Sarah Wolfe for being my guests on this show. And thanks to Rosy for sending me that voice memo.
I will link you to more information about Kristine and Untangle Money under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. I’ll get you the final episode in January.
In the meantime Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and thanks as ever, for listening.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.