The Money Diaries Book Tour: A Firsthand Look at Female Finance

A third tray of cheese circulated past me and I reached over to add a hunk of white cheddar to my awkward cocktail party nowhere-to-set-things-down dance – pinching a glass of free red wine between my right forefinger and thumb and using the remaining three fingers to maintain a precarious grip on my already-cracked iPhone 6S. The cheese joined three grapes and a slice of cabrese salami in my left hand.

Normally I hated the milling and small-talking that accompanied networking-style events, but this evening was different. I had paid an (very reasonable) entry fee of $15 to attend the Refinery29 Money Diaries book tour in exchange for an evening of complimentary hors d’oeuvres, Costco wine served in stemless glasses and a copy of the book, which retailed for $26.99.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, having never attended a book tour before, but my scrappy work friend Kylie had brought it to my attention and shared a mutual interest in getting filthy rich.

Kylie is the type of friend to whom you could bring just about anything and be met with unbridled enthusiasm: She is smart and driven, but not in the obnoxious Type-A way that I fear people must perceive me to be smart and driven.

She is a creative, fiery redhead who would often surprise me in her interests – the type of person who would tell you she became friends with a cross-dressing drug dealer at an underground disco in the same breath that she noted she was halfway through an online MBA program she was paying for herself with money she earned freelancing for Fox Sports.

I loved Kylie because she represented all the things I was not: spontaneous and innately at ease in her own skin. Her car would break down on the side of the road because she’d forgotten to fill it with gas, then she’d get a $90,000 offer from a tech startup to work on their user experience.

Kylie was a paradox: She didn’t match the profile I created in my brain for a Productive and Highly Functioning Adult®, and yet she seemed, at every turn, to outpace me in her career – and have more fun doing it.

Even our choice in outfits for the book tour reveal a lot: Kylie had come straight from work, still in a lacy dress and white booties, hair in a bun on the top of her head framed by a pair of enormous earrings comprised of some collection of feathers and gemstones.

I had gone home from work to unwind a little before the event started. Before I left, I had curated an outfit that felt like it fit the occasion. What says “boss bitch with a 401(k) who goes to book tours?” I had chosen a fitted cheetah print J. Crew sweater that I tucked into dark wash jeans and accented with the knockoff Gucci belt I scalped from a street vendor in Chinatown – because nothing says fiscal prudence like counterfeit goods.

When it was time to take our seats for the guests of honor, a young woman and an older woman found their way to seats onstage. The backdrop, décor, and accents in the venue looked as though they had materialized directly from the Instagram Explore page, dripping in the precise trendiness that only a Millennial media company could generate.

The young woman’s name was Lindsey Stanberry, the “Work & Money Director” at Refinery29, and the older woman’s name was Manisha Thakor, the VP of Financial Wellbeing at Brighton Jones, a prominent wealth management firm that even I, in my ignorance, had heard of. I sat there carefully trying to mentally project their logo on the wall from memory as the introductions rolled.

It was clear that Lindsey was intended to be the bridge between the audience, a group of predominantly young white women, and Manisha, who was an established financier with an intimidating pedigree.

At every turn, Lindsey would offer a personal touch that made someone in the audience feel better – she had student loans and had a child and bought a home, she’d reassure, inadvertently highlighting how ludicrous it is that the presence of one thereby makes the other two achievements seem unrealistic.

After giving intensely personal money origin stories (Manisha dove into the salacious details of her divorce proceedings in which her ex-husband’s mistress sent her a greatest hits compilation of their amorous email correspondence, proving the point that ladies, sometimes the pre-nuptial agreements work in your favor!), the pair took questions from the crowd.

I was on the edge of my seat.

Having been in group settings of this nature before with a panel of speakers and painfully short Q&A sessions, I was certain that was the stopping point for the evening. I was wrong.

Hand after hand flew into the air. Here, in this room of 200 female strangers, women asked questions that – by definition – revealed personal financial details.

“I’m in a lot of credit card debt and I don’t know how to break this cycle.”

“Should I be contributing to my 401(k) or trying to build an emergency fund?”

“My boyfriend and I want to buy a home, but I have a lot of debt,” to which Lindsey contributed her personal experience of being both a person with debt and a homeowner.

I didn’t know young women had these questions, let alone felt encumbered enough by them to attend a book tour on a Monday evening and ask a virtual stranger for help in front of a crowd. Even in retrospect, it was a radical event.

I learned more in those two hours than I had in the previous 22 years of my life about personal finance. It cost $15. And there was wine.

As I drove home that night, I felt a strange sadness for the women in the room. For a brief moment in time, our paths intersected in the venue space of an arts building for 120 minutes. The lives of 200 women who wanted – either desperately or just curiously – to know more about what they were supposed to do with the paychecks they were receiving every other week. About how to get ahead in a world where boards of directors bore uniformly white male faces and questions about investing invited incredulous scoffs from male friends.

Who knows when we’d get another opportunity like that one? I wondered. To this day, I still haven’t.

The crux of the issue, of course, is that it takes a branded book tour with an Instagram hashtag and free-flowing merlot to get women to talk about money. Can you imagine an event of the nature geared toward men? “Money Diaries,” in which a room full of men sit around and ask a more established man what they should do about their spending problem or high interest rate?

In some ways, women have more potential to be good with money because we’re, on the whole, more willing to acknowledge what we don’t know and ask questions – we don’t feel the pressure to have it all together financially the way our male counterparts do. If a woman admits she doesn’t know what she’s doing with money, it’s hardly front page news. If a man admits it, it’s perceived as failure.

The provider archetype stifles men just as much as it disadvantages women.

The fact that there’s a “Money Director” at Refinery29 ironically highlights that talking about money is such a relatively new thing for media targeted at women that it’s something that has to be intentionally developed and titled. Director of Telling Women It’s Ok to Care About This.

Even financial conversations between friends can feel strained and intentionally vague.

How do we erase the stigma attached to discussing personal finance openly? If Refinery29 has the right idea, it’s wine and free stuff.