Show Me The Money

Money is both an interesting topic and an interesting concept to me, even though I shy away from publicly discussing my finances and I’m completely dreadful with money management despite great lessons from my parents. Like anyone else, I’ll say the occasional life is expensive, but deep dives into my financial situation is super off limits and I’m not the only one. 

From the beginning of time people have been raised to be hush hush about what they make and how they make their money work for them. It’s been said that it’s tacky to discuss how much you make and how much you spend on big purchases. But truthfully the only way to even the playing field when it comes to money and what we should be demanding is to discuss what we make - maybe not openly but at least with people in your age range, profession, level of education and more. 

This year I put on my vision board that I wanted to have more honest conversations about money - especially when it comes to salary because I’ve come to realize that the only way to know what I should be making is to have a firm grasp on what people around me are making. And it’s not for nosiness but to get myself ahead. So far, I’ve had maybe 2 of these open conversations and even still, it was super uncomfortable for me and I probably wasn’t as open as I could have been. 

I’ve tried to start dialogues on twitter but the fact is people have been so conditioned to not honestly discuss salary that unless it was an anonymous poll, I’m never sure who is actually telling the truth. Nonetheless I’ve found that polls are the best way to start conversations surrounding the topic and I’ve asked several poll questions on my profile.  

Initially I wanted to get an idea of the average weekly take home pay amongst my peers. 

When I initially posted the question, I had a few people ask me why I didn’t put a number higher than $750, but truthfully at the time my numbers were based on what seemed to be numbers people threw out when they were talking money, no matter how contrived those conversations were. I believed the average to be about $500 a week since that seemed to be a popular number whenever someone wanted to say “you don’t even make x amount”. And based on the results a higher number wouldn’t have mattered much since $750+ received the lowest number of votes anyway. 

At the time I posted the polls, I was heavily interviewing so money matters in relation to interviews was extremely important to me. I wanted to know what people were asking for and if they were getting that number and it seemed as if no was the prevailing answer. Also I realized after the fact that there was overlap in the way I worded the responses but I think people understood what I meant. 

I still have more money questions. And want to have more open and HONEST conversations surrounding money. Lately I’ve been obsessively reading money diaries in the Refinery 29 website and would like to do a version that’s more localized on my site but no one seems up to it because they don’t want people to figure out which one is then. However I’m determined to bring it to my site because I think people need this kind of information to know how they should be moving when it comes to what they make. But until I figure out how it should be, more twitter polls will definitely be happening.