Money - The Greatest Taboo

People are usually more willing to talk about sex, politics, and religion than they are about their personal relationships with money. How much we make and how much we spend are often considered top secret affairs, as well as a subject of speculation by others, usually those who suspect that they have less than those about whom they speculate.

Many work places have company policies against revealing one’s salary to others, guarding I suppose against the mass uproar that would result from people finding out their relative worth due to others in similar positions or with similar longevity or output. On public opinion surveys, the one question more people refuse to answer over all others is related to their income.

Freud (1908) equated money with feces and wrote about our unconscious connection of money with sex, babies, and gifts. Other major theorists (Fenichel, 1945; Ferenczi, 1952; Turkel, 1988) have expanded on this, viewing money as representative of all things (material and emotional) that can be given or withheld, as well as a symbol of personal worth, competence, control, and security. When I think about my own history and relationship to money, I agree that they were on to something.

When I was in private practice, I often felt embarrassed when clients inquired about my fee, not quite feeling like it was within my rights to collect one. If they showed signs of leaving the session without payment, it was next to impossible for me to remind them of it. In my own analysis, fee increases have often felt like serious narcissistic injuries. As clients, we do not want to be reminded that we are paying for the “love” of those who would help us. I had a therapist once who was constantly changing her individual and group fee, struggling no doubt among her personal politics, her need to support her family, and her own money demons.

I know people who threaten, sometimes overtly, that insufficient attention paid to them (sufficient being a constantly changing concept) will result in rewrites of wills. Others find it impossible to be happy for someone else’s good fortune – whether it be a completed home renovation, a trip-of-a-lifetime, or an early retirement. They can only see other’s good fortune in relation to what they don’t have or feel they can’t get. I’m not saying that I’ve never felt that way either. I’ve written before about feeling envious of others (see How much is enough? 8/20/10) and stuck in a life trajectory that I perceived led nowhere (see If I just worked harder, 9/6/10). I am still mystified by how some people manage to maintain spacious (and I assume expensive) NYC apartments and just cannot figure out how they do it (and wish I could).

After I wrote my blog entry about paying off credit cards, my sister commented that she was surprised as she never knew I had a balance. And I was surprised that she was surprised. She and her husband, she informed me, make it a practice to pay their credit cards completely every month, even if it is a stretch. My best friend does that too. What’s funny to me is that all those months (perhaps years) of carrying a balance, of getting almost to zero and binging out on something, I could have paid it off in one swoop. I don’t live month to month, hand to mouth. I haven’t robbed Peter to pay Paul since my thirties. My credit score is stellar. So what kept me from just writing a check and being done with it? Everything is in one’s history, as my “heart mother” would say.

My mother sat my sister and me down at our green-topped kitchen table one Saturday when I was about 8 years old. She had four small round Tupperware containers big enough to fit maybe a serving of pudding or jello. She had turned each one into a bank by cutting a narrow slot in the lids, and her mission was to teach her daughters fiscal responsibility. She laid down thick magic markers, one black, one red, one green, and said that we could decorate our banks any way we wanted. One container would be designated for savings; the other was for spending.

Then she said we would each receive a weekly allowance of 75 cents. Three quarters. “How much goes in each one?” I wondered. Three quarters, two containers. “Well, what do you think you should do?” she asked. “Fifty cents to spend and twenty-five to save, or twenty-five to spend and fifty to save?” I knew instinctively the right answer to the question. There was that word “should.” Dutifully, I said we should save fifty cents and keep twenty-five for spending. Mom looked pleased. I reluctantly dropped two quarters into the savings container on which I had drawn flowers and a house, and one into the spending container decorated with stick people with skirts and ponytails. Mentally I was already calculating how many weeks it would take me to accumulate $1.59, which was what a new doll outfit cost in the second floor toy department of W.T. Grant’s in town. Forever.

The experiment didn’t last very long, a few months at most. Sometimes she didn’t have the quarters to give us, sometimes she was busy and said she’d give them to us later. I never forgot when it was allowance time, but I learned to gauge when it was ok to remind her and when it was best to let it go. The Tupperware banks became repositories for the occasional dollar we’d get in a greeting card for a birthday or holiday or a 50-cent piece from my grandfather. 

Several years later, somewhere around 14, when I was too young for working papers and hadn’t yet convinced anyone with little children that I was a viable babysitter, tired of asking my parents for money and eager to be independent, I brought up the concept of an allowance again. I made my case carefully. They could give me a set amount that I would use to buy lunch at school, to go to the movies or bowling with my friends, to buy candy and pop from the corner mini-market, and keep myself in Dippity-do and Noxema. Then I wouldn’t have to keep asking them for money. How much did I think I needed, they wanted to know. I low-balled it, believing that I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting a “yes” but not wanting to completely sabotage my chances. I was stunned when they considered my figure, and said ok to my proposal.

I felt so grown-up when mom counted out one and five dollar bills into my waiting hands, and I rushed up to my pink bedroom to create envelopes I would label “Lunch,” “Fun,” “Candy,” and “Personal.”  But this didn’t last long either. Mom didn’t always have the money to give me every week, and I felt guilty asking her for it. But my desire to compartmentalize my money, designating “funds” for this need or that want was established.

To be continued……

References:

Fenichel, O. (1945). The drive to amass wealth. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7, 69-95.

Ferenczi, S. (1952). First Contributions to Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel Publishers.

Freud, S. (1908). Character and anal erotism. Standard Edition, Volume 10. London, England: Hogarth Press.

Turkel, R.A. (1988). Money as a mirror of marriage. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanaysis, 16, 525-535.

Financial Fantasies and Realities

I took a two-session class on retirement planning at a local university in late March. I’m one of those people who heretofore didn’t want to know if I was saving enough for retirement. I have no idea if not-wanting-to-know is the public norm or not. I only know that my not-wanting-to-know was a function of the fact that even if I wasn’t saving enough, it didn’t matter – I had no more to save. It was what it was, regardless of the sufficiency factor.

The reason I decided to attend the course was two-fold. One is that I have been so stressed at work the last couple of years that for the first time in my life, I have begun to dream about just stopping. I wanted to find out if, in fact, it might be possible. The second reason evolved out of my no-shopping commitment and my determined paying off of credit cards. Put that in the category of the realigning of values.

One of the instructors at this workshop reiterated how emotionally laden the issue of money is. As I listened to other people talk about their individual circumstances, similar themes emerged. Giving. Getting. Saving. Having. Not having. Deserving. Undeserving.   Lots of feelings.

When I opened my first IRA, I had lived in New York City for only a couple of years. I was in my early 30s, and I wasn’t making enough money to get by. I had been lucky enough to get a couple of freelance jobs that paid some lump sums, but with no taxes withheld. Being naïve and grateful for the extra cash, I had no idea about the tax implications – what it meant to be self-employed. So when April 15 came around and the bookkeeper where I worked helped me with my income taxes, for the first time in my life, I owed the government money. Lots of money. Of course, ‘lots of money’ is a relative concept, but when you don’t have it, owing anything is a serious blow. The bookkeeper suggested that if I opened an IRA, it would cut down on my debt. Well, I did have $2000 which represented payment from one of those freelance jobs. I had been hoarding it for months as my first-ever safety net and NOBODY was going to take it away from me. I remember standing in the usual long line at my bank during a lunch hour, ready to open an IRA account with that money, and thinking (in almost a panic) that this was like a commitment to LIVE until at least age 59-1/2 to get my money back. Now approaching 58, almost the age I couldn’t imagine being, I laugh at the memory.

Feelings indeed. I think about my beloved mom who worried about paying her heating bill every winter and who took in college kids in order to pay the mortgage long after it was paid the first time (a long story, but totally due to my father and his financial indiscretions). She had an insufficient pension and social security check as a result of having stayed home to raise the children, after which she was abandoned for a younger model. She went to work in low-wage jobs since she was education-less and stayed long past the usual age of retirement until illness forced her to stop.  

I think about my dad who thought the orchard that surrounded my childhood home bore dollar bills instead of wormy sour apples. He was always spending money he did not have, not little bits --  big bits on new business ventures and other projects that kept my mother worried and busy juggling funds. When he passed away, he had nothing. He never planned ahead for anything.  He never really grew up.

I think about my best friend who, as a result of her childhood experience, grew up determined to have/save enough so she never ever had to ask anybody for anything. She sleeps at night knowing that she has two pensions to assist her in her old age, that is, if the pension funds supporting them remain solvent.

Another friend with a Ph.D., approaching 80 years old, went back into the classroom this year to teach after decades away because she needs the money to live. And old and dear friend, a waitress her whole life, also almost 80, recently lost her [second] husband of thirty years. She faces the possibility of having to sell their home because her husband’s lucrative pension died along with him.  Still another acquaintance in his late 60s  - a man literally still stuck in the sixties - has absolutely nothing put away for his future – and he actually makes enough that he could be doing so. He’s suffering from a combination of denial and magical thinking.

There was an article on Yahoo! News a couple of weeks back featuring a 70-year-old woman who has no savings. She once owned a fashion design business that never became as successful as she’d hoped and now sews little girls’ clothing to supplement her small social security income. She laments that she’ll have to work until she dies. The responses to that article are stunning – everything from anger at her Berkeley education, snarky comments that she should sell her property (she has some), suggestions to get some alimony out of one of her two ex-husbands, and chides that she is just a whiny old privileged white woman. Others commented that her story serves as a warning to others that entrepreneurs should never plow all their income from business ventures back into their businesses (as she did). Granted, she is not without choices, as many (if not most) are. She’s not in danger of having to eat pet food. [Introduce me to someone who is, and my check is in the mail!]   

I went back to the article because I had forgotten some of the details – what I recalled were the things that push my buttons… old & no money. The vehemence in the public’s responses to her underscore just how emotionally laden the issue of money is. I’ll come back to this subject again.  In the meantime, the bad news is that barring some unforeseen intervening variable, good or ill, an early retirement is not in my future (bleagh!). The good news is that I should be able to stop working at the age my cohort is projected to receive full social security payments --  66. That is, of course, if social security is still around. I can't even think about that!