Why It's so Hard to Talk About Money With Friends—and Why You Should Do It Anyway

Why It's so Hard to Talk About Money With Friends—and Why You Should Do It Anyway

Jolene Latimer  Wed, April 7, 2021

Plenty of us feel totally comfortable talking with our close friends about almost every topic—sex, parenting, even politics. But what about money? In many cases, finances are the final conversational frontier among friends. While many old-school cultural taboos have been broken or at least softened, the stigma surrounding money talk remains—and it's a cultural norm that could actually be robbing women of the very conversations we need to improve our finances.

"You can be embarrassed if you have too little, or embarrassed if you have too much," says Diana Machado, who runs a business in Canada to help women find financial community. "There's no easy outlet to reach out and say, 'I need to talk about finances.'"  Conversations about how to earn money and manage it are important in a world that still undervalues women's labor and financial education. Yet many women find themselves uncomfortable bringing up even the topics of salary or earnings (not to mention discussing financial hardships and discrimination) among friends, especially if they were taught growing up never to ask someone how much they make.

For Machado, these taboos were part of the culture shock she experienced moving to North America from the Azores, a cluster of islands off the coast of Portugal. During her childhood there, she experienced the opposite.

"When I was growing up, everyone in our community knew our financial circumstances," says Machado. "My mom would always have women around her who were all in the same boat and understood what we were going through."

At that time, it was typical for men to be the family breadwinners, which Machado explains made financial stability—while feeding the family on one income—difficult. This became especially true when Machado's father began spending an increasing amount of the family budget on alcohol. To make ends meet, Machado's mother turned to her friends, the women in her community, for support.

"My mom would clean houses... They would pay her with food," says Machado of her mothers friends and neighbors. "I loved seeing women supporting each other. I always knew we would never be alone."

It's typical for women in many parts of the world to form communities around money, whether informally, in Machado's case, in formalized rotational savings groups. In Africa, for instance, traditional, female-driven, peer-to-peer savings co-ops—called tontines—see women friends come together to help each other afford emergency expenses or larger risks, such as starting a business.

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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-hard-talk-money-friends-214858346.html