Chatting Money

Yippee, excited to introduce this blog, which aspires to be an interesting – yet helpful and entertaining – spot to chat about money. I’ve noticed in my life, there is rarely an occasion to chat casually about choices made about money. Turns out I’m a woman, and specifically I notice that money choices are rarely discussed with my women friends.

When I see my girls, we laugh often, chat about many aspects of life, and we always we cover relationships. Parents, siblings, kids, friends, spouses and partners especially, sex lives, arguments, those always get covered. In younger days, the conversation was hey, did that guy call back? He did what?? At some point the talk evolved to kids – pregnancies, parenting challenges we have, kids we may still have – should we freeze our eggs? Have you thought about adoption? And we can always talk workouts and skin and hair choices (why is it so hard to find a great stylist!?), vacation thoughts (girls trips are key), books (almost always fiction – Michelle Obama is a recent exception) to recommend. But we don’t really often chat about hey, I’m trying to determine if I can save enough to buy a house? And ladies, what’s your sitch with your 401k?

Actual story – last week I was in a sports bar watching football, sitting next to two men I didn’t know (not as many of my women friends enjoy this activity with me). I’d say they were late 20s, maybe 30, and swear on my luggage, at the commercial break one leaned over to the other and said “So, how much of your take-home pay do you put aside?” The other guy was a bit sheepish, and said he thought he should do more – I wondered why did he think he needed more?? How does he have a gauge – is there a right answer there? The conversation continued, just casually, about 401k vs savings account, one guy is thinking he wants to buy a condo. I marveled – as I honestly don’t remember ever asking one of my girlfriends hey, how much of your gross pay do you save?

As we ladies earn more $$ than prior generations, take more leadership spots in business and society (wooohooo 2019 US Congress), it’s time for us to feel comfortable gathering wealth and therefore financial control of our lives. For that to happen, women need to be confident in their money knowledge.

90% of women don’t feel confident about money, according to Suze Orman’s book Women and Money. It’s the key building block of life, of your daily stability. I’ve now done my own research – by that I mean my informal survey of my most beloved female friends and colleagues – and they tell me that (1) they don’t really enjoy talking about ‘financial stuff’, they have no interest in it, and often (2) they don’t have a very extensive knowledge, so it’s not an area they enjoy chatting up. They feel like they have so many priorities in life, their family, home, career (honestly, most of the top items I hear repeatedly are pretty selfless?), that often thinking about money has just been at the bottom of the list.

If you think about it, women don’t often have an environment to give money decisions significant attention at any stage in their lives. Unless you had a parent or adult give you regular starter tips as a child (what bills are, what a share of stock is, how a mortgage works), years and then decades go by with us only thinking about money decisions when absolutely necessary, a stranger we don’t willingly spend free time with. Hey, wouldn’t casually reading a breezy blog be a way to meander toward getting to know that stranger?

Because here’s the thing – I really DO enjoy chatting about money. I absolutely want to think about how much to put down on a house, and whether index funds are a interesting, and why banks charge so many fees….I could go on. Since I dig that stuff, and I read books and articles about it regularly, I decided I want to become somewhat of your “money concierge”! You know, when you do stay somewhere fancy, the concierge tells you best places to eat, how to get there, gets tickets to the great show – essentially gives you all the options, and you choose what you want to do.

It would be handy to have someone give you the same info for buying a house, learning about interest rates, spending logically, investing a bit – but makes it a bit fun (not kidding, getting wealthier is FUN!), right? That of course was rhetorical, since I can’t hear you, but did you notice I dropped in early a fact from Suze Orman’s book? I like talking and learning about all this stuff, so my goal is to chat up my musings and learnings here, with anyone who will actually read.

There will be new posts regularly, different topics, and I’d love any comments people want to share! Let’s all chat and get a bit more comfortable with the source of security in your life, you know, money. Money isn’t going to change your life, but taking care of it gives you total freedom to change your life any way you want!

Let’s start with this – a fascinating thought….how much money do you think you will make in your lifetime? Gaze out the window for a sec, what’s your ballpark estimate? Did you come up with an estimate? Do you think $500K, a million dollars, 3 million? If yes – but wouldn’t that make you a millionaire?

Here’s a general estimate we can do together…let’s say Jenna is 30, and making $40K (which is about the average in the US in 2018, if interested). She started at $32K at age 22, so that means just between 22 and 30, Jenna already made $285K. OK, so after age 30, let’s assume a 3% raise for Jenna every year until age 60 (we all know some years are bigger, some not so much, 3% is fair estimate). The grand total? Between ages 22 and 60, Jenna’s TOTAL salary is $2.25M! She never earns 6 figures in any one year, and is a millionaire in her earnings.

What’s the point here??? Well, building wealth is not usually a problem with income – it’s a spending problem, it’s what you DO with that salary.  (Just for fun, if Jenna was earning $60K at age 30, estimated life salary total is about $3.5M – try easy math for yourself, take your salary this year x 40 years, see what you get).

We’ll keep chatting about how to best use all those earnings in your life, all the decisions about where your millionz go. Enough for today, let’s keep chatting!