During a mentoring session last week, one of the panel said that in our country people would rather talk about sex than money, because that’s how much emotional baggage there is around money in our country.

I thought this was surprising. My groups of friends have discussed money many times over the years. Not on any regular schedule, but when it’s come up naturally. Which has happened a lot over the years! Examples include:

• when one was celebrating having paid off their house
• when one was dealing with a family member renter who wasn’t paying their rent
• when one had a major health event and couldn’t work for a while
• when the regular rounds of layoffs at IBM impacted or threatened to impact our group
• when we were discussing guardianship and wills and bequests, especially regarding our minor children

Maybe it has to do with us being naturally a very frugal bunch. Our favorite activities are ones where we spend a lot of time talking together, preferably either outside over a geocaching hike in the woods (or hunting munzees) or playing disc golf, or during less outside-friendly-weather it might have been inside over a geeky board game or a potluck dinner.

Maybe it has to do with us being a very logic-oriented and data-driven group. We’re all either computer people or married to computer people (if you live somewhere with engineers-a-plenty, they’d fit right in too).

My family has discussed money regularly, both at our own dinner table with the kids, and I’ve discussed with my siblings and parents, comparing what we’ve learned and what our tax strategies are.

So now with a counter-example, we’ve proved it’s not a requirement that we have to be afraid of discussing money.

That leaves us with two points:

• What are the benefits of being comfortable discussing money, that we should go through the effort to get to this state?
• What do we need to do to become comfortable discussing money?

Benefits of being comfortable discussing money:

What we can’t discuss, we can’t get on the same page about. And when there is more discussion, then an educational rising tide lifts all boats. You can learn, and help your friends learn, battling the financial mis-information that runs rampant. Predatory companies are taking advantage of the lack of financial education and regulation in this country to legally inflict crippling levels of interest on debt payments, while consumers focus not on “can I afford this” but rather on “can I, in the best of times, afford the monthly payment”.

Bonus:

All of this comfort discussing money with our friends meant that when the COVID-19 hardship hit, and furloughs and paycuts and job losses, we didn’t even have to check in with eachother to make sure that food would still be on the table. Instead we could focus on the social/emotional support, rather than having to go through the discovery process of “what might our friends need now?”. And that was a lovely place to be, one less worry in the storm.

What do we need to do to become comfortable discussing money?

Start. Find people and sources you can trust, and start asking questions. A great resource to start with is Investopedia, or one of the self-study websites sponsored by the National Endowment for Financial Education, or find a fiduciary financial advisor who is also an educator at heart.

If you’re less embarrassed to discuss sex with your friends than you are to discuss money, maybe it’s time to reconsider that stance. And tell me how it goes, what worked best for you, I want to cheer you on for your learning journey!