To Personal Finance, My First True Love

Over the long weekend, I was toying with a creative prompt: “What are you afraid to write?” Reflecting on the last dozen interviews I’d done for Rich Girl Nation, the answer took the form of a complicated love letter to the self-help genre that raised me.

To personal finance, my first true love:

Our love affair began in 2018 as many love affairs do: in the desperate heat of a late summer evening. It was an immediate, overwhelming infatuation that consumed my thoughts and warped my focus. I’d sneak away to private conference rooms where I could indulge the fantasy on my laptop, safe from prying eyes, and sensed even then it was only a matter of time before I’d blow up my 10-year plan so our courtship could unfold out in the open. 

Your rules-based structure made the whole world feel pure, orderly, and limitless, keeping me up late to read and waking me early to write. Unable to contain my enthusiasm about our new relationship, I shook my affection like champagne and sprayed it all over the page, becoming fluent in the clean-cut language of responsibility and risk management. For a while, things were easy, good. We were happy. 

Then, as is usually the case, the cracks started to show. I never really cared for your friends, who seemed unbothered by the irony of lecturing about the importance of frugal living from the captain’s seat of a private plane. The wealthier they became from selling middle-class people bridges to make ends meet, the more openly they adopted politics that pried open the gap their work supposedly existed to close, pulmonologists moonlighting for Big Tobacco. This lent the advice an air of tender betrayal, landed gentry atop real estate empires issuing edicts for how to navigate unaffordable housing. 

For a field so proud of its mastery of numbers, the impossibility of the math bewildered me after I noticed median incomes were no longer able to buy median lives. Suspicion rusted in my gut that our answers were really only for those who had managed—through combinations of birth, luck, or brilliance—to avoid the multiplying sand traps of our economic system long enough to turn a little into a little more. 

Still, no one loves financial literacy programs more than those in power, because as with shuffling the holdings in a managed mutual fund, all the action leaves the noble impression of doing one’s job. Those who ruled over state and corporate budgets alike were more than receptive to the idea that what workers needed most was not more money, time, or access—all hard, expensive—but the costless grace of knowledge. Financial literacy granted easy absolution to lenders extending subprime mortgages or multinational corporations cannibalizing a community’s small businesses or private equity firms looting pensions. It allowed power the perfect alibi that someone should’ve known better. 

Before long, our once-natural communication became tense and strained, my repeated questions unaddressed. There was no satisfying explanation for why the median citizen of countries with lower levels of fiscal sophistication still managed to accumulate more wealth, beyond the assurance that Americans were just uniquely bad with money. The years wore on and the cost of living crisis deepened and still, the commandments remained faithfully unchanged: Avoid debt, only spend on what you value. But what about the half of Americans who just valued making rent on time or finding a pediatrician who accepted Medicaid? The fault never lay with the predator, only the prey; the preferred mode of protection from payday lenders and claims adjusters was better education, not legislation. These dead ends compounded like interest, our joint account approaching default. Love, once curdled, can feel rotten. Preaching our gospel started to feel rotten, too. 

Where, then, does that leave us?

All this time I felt you were asking me to overlook too much, but maybe I’ve been asking too much of you, too. Would things really be better in your absence, or would even more of us simply get washed away by the creeping tide of institutional landlords and “buy now, pay later”? Having a financial plan means retiring with between two and three times as much—that has to count for something, even if it’s nowhere near enough. 

Our toolbox might contain only the insufficient manual levers of austerity and tax breaks—the triple threat of the HSA fund for the $100 emergency room ibuprofen; the 529 plan for the multi-six-figure education—but refusing to use them won’t make a power drill appear. Still, shielding people from awareness of their vulnerability only makes them more vulnerable. An empowerment that fashions tiny, striving capitalists out of every individual sunders them from their source of real power—each other. This is a truth I can’t unsee. And even if you won’t admit it, I think you see it, too.

I suppose I’m not angry with you, personal finance. I’m angry with the world that made you so necessary. We’ve grown apart, but maybe we still want the same thing: to make money make sense.