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Foreign.
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Hello. Welcome to the Financial Therapy episode of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. Well, really this week, the business and finance news of our entire lives. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Anna Shymansky of Breaking Views.
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C
Hello.
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B
I'm also here with Emily Peck of HuffPost.
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D
Hello.
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And we have for the whole episode, and dominating the entire episode, one of the best humans in the world, Amanda Clayman. Amanda, hello.
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A
Hello.
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B
And tell me who you are and tell me about your podcast.
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A
I am a financial therapist and I have a podcast series, special series on death, sex and money called Financial Therapy with Amanda Clayman, where we are talking to some people about what is happening in their lives and specifically in their financial lives since this whole pandemic started.
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B
Because as I believe the technical term is shit has got real. Right now we are going to talk a little bit about, well, a lot about our emotional connection to money on an individual sense, in terms of savings, in terms of debts, in terms of families. We have a Slate plus segment about families, which is worth becoming a Slate plus member just to listen to. It's a great, great episode. And thank you very much to everyone who wrote in with questions that we might be able to put to Amanda. We actually answer some of them on this show, and it's all coming up on Slate Money. So let's dive into this. Amanda. We are in the craziest economic times of our lifetime, pretty much. There's rampant unemployment, which dwarfs anything that we saw during the financial crisis. People are weirdly saving a lot more money than they've ever saved in the history of America. According to numbers that just came out on Friday, there's a bunch of people being pulled in multiple directions. My first big question for you is psychologically, emotionally, is this just a crazy, unprecedented time for everyone, or are you just seeing the same things, the same problems that you've always been seeing with people and money, maybe just in a slightly more acute fashion?
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A
Well, we're still the same human beings that we've always been, and we still have the same sort of cognitive and emotional programming that we have always had. So the ways that we're responding are normal in so far as, I mean, I see them in lots of ways in terms of when people undergo upheaval or there's great amount of change. The thing that's really unique here is how pervasive the amount of change is. Usually if we're going through something huge and overwhelming individually or, or even in a family or community or regionally, there's still somewhere where you can look in the world where it seems like things are going on as normal. And right now, everywhere we look, there's sort of. There's nowhere to spot. Right. Like, imagine we're turning in circles and we're just looking for some fixed point to focus on and spot. We don't really have that now because everything is moving.
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D
Well, that's terrifying.
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B
And is that good or bad? Is that terrifying or is that kind of. Is that reassuring in some way that we're all in the same boat?
- [04:14]
A
I think for some of us it's reassuring, and for others of us, it leads to the feeling of, I don't know. I don't know how to start to begin to rebuild a sense of safety. And that's where I think it's easier, in fact, to be me as a financial therapist, because in order to stabilize, we can always come back to a sort of, like, emotional grounding point. Like, we start to build that. That feeling of safety within ourselves as opposed to somebody, like, on the analytical or advisory side who's supposed to be able to predict or tell people what they should do according to the rules of the outside world. Like, the outside world has gone upside down. So I think it's really incumbent upon all of us to. To focus on how we can just, first of all, work on our physical and emotional safety and then start to reassess kind of how we want to navigate this crazy new world.
- [05:17]
C
I'm curious how the unique nature of this may make your job a little bit harder, though, because I imagine often a lot of people's economic anxieties, you know, may. Some of them may be very realistic and some of them may be slightly unrealistic and just related to overall anxiety. But in this moment where, you know, almost everyone has to worry about potentially losing their job, you know, we have no idea what's going to happen in the next few years. I just imagine that may make it harder to tell people, like, well, let's look at what's happened in the past. You know, I just imagine that would make it harder.
- [05:48]
A
It can be, but in terms of the. The response of, like, let's look at what's happened in the past. Like, actually, we can still do that from an emotional point of view. We can. We can say, let's look at times in your past where things have been really unsettled or where you've been afraid or where you felt out of control. How did you navigate those particular moments? Can we. Can we reconnect to some of the capacities that you tapped into in those times. So again, it's like, I mean this. The thing that I find so compelling about working with people therapeutically around the role of money in their lives is that you can be flexible in working on either the emotional side of the sort of rebalancing or on the concrete side of the rebalancing. And this is a time where we really need to go to the emotional side first because from there we can be much more effective at the concrete stuff.
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D
It almost seems like it's an opportunity now if you're using money as sort of like your safety, like your security blanket or as, or your job as like your status and where you feel most safe, to have it kind of ripped out from under you is like an opportunity to look at like your family bonds, your emotional bonds, like the other things that make you human. It kind of like exposes money for what it is to some people. Like a crutch for other things maybe.
- [07:17]
A
Yeah, absolutely. That's very well put. We project so much meaning onto money and when money's going well, we tend to not even be aware of the meaning side. So for example, like one place where a lot of people are in crisis right now is that they've lost their job or there's been some sort of interruption in earning. And if being making money, being a good provider, if these are like your well worn tabs to self esteem and identity, then that's an identity crisis. It's not just, you know, a crisis of how you're going to pay your bills. It really is a question of like, who am I when I'm not in those roles? Do I still, do I still like myself? Or how do I sort of fit in? How does this experience fit in with the picture that I have of myself? So yeah, all of these other things tend to sort of like pop up and we become much more aware of where that meaning came from. So it's like, why is the role of provider or earner so critically important to us? Why did we like, what does it give us? But what other ways do we have to kind of feel like we're still a good human being even if that root to self esteem is blocked for the moment? Does that make sense?
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B
Yes, that makes perfect sense. And it makes perfect sense for the people who have lost money, which is obviously a bunch of people who have lost their jobs, who've lost income. There is a flip side which I see going on, and I mentioned it earlier, that we just saw a massive Unprecedented increase in personal savings in this country. It seems that the people who haven't lost income, who haven't lost money, are doing kind of the opposite, that they're increasingly saving money, socking away money, precisely to be able to have that kind of feeling of reassurance of, well, you know, things might go bad, but I'm going to sort of try and protect myself as best I can and have as large of a bank balance as I possibly can in anticipation of like anything that might go wrong. Is, I mean, psychologically that's understandable, but is that healthy? Is that a good idea?
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A
Like emotionally speaking, it can be. You know, all of this sort of exists on a continuum. Like there's no behavior, especially there's no financial behavior that's all the time good or all the time bad. It's, it's really a question of how kind of rigid that is for us. So I think that it's a, like you said, it's a normal response when we feel out of control, we want to hold on to things. I mean, it can lead to some funny irrational behaviors. Like, like I do tend to see people who have money, and this is, has been borne out in the research too. I'm not discovering this, but like we, when we have money and the future is uncertain, we tend to hold on to that money. But we may be using other methods to meet our needs. Meaning, like people tend to use credit cards more often in order to preserve their savings. And that's just like that natural sort of safety hoarding. We kind of like, we file away and we treat money differently depending on where it comes from or if it's our money or somebody else's money. So we have to dig a little bit deeper to see what's going on in that savings behavior if it's causing conflict in a relationship. For example, like if someone is saying this is the thing that we need to do, we need to like have no extras in our life right now. And anything that would be an expenditure related to self care gets eliminated. And then there's another partner or there are other family members in that system who are sort of like, you know, that's creating more stress for them. We'd have to look at that choice to save money and hold on to money more holistically in terms of what needs is it serving and what other needs are getting forfeited or deferred in order to try to pursue that way as a way of managing anxiety. I sometimes describe it as we're using money in this matrix of Competing needs. And even as we sort of can use it for one purpose, we have to look at what other needs may not be being served by that same behavior.
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B
Amanda, can I just say you are the first person to ever explain to me on an incredibly intuitive and emotional level, that exact phenomenon of why do people run a credit card balance while also having money in the bank in savings? Which. It violates every logical financial imperative. But it makes sense, sense to me now on, on that emotional level. So thanks for that.
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D
It fully makes sense. Also, I was just thinking, as an aside, this is such a hoarding crisis. It started with the toilet paper, and now we're seeing it in people's savings accounts. It's just like you just want to hunker down with your frozen foods and your toilet paper and your money, but with money, it loses value. Like if everyone's hoarding it. Right. We've talked about that before.
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C
Yeah, it's something in economics. They talk about the idea that for an individual, it might be very rational to, you know, not spend, to save as much as they can in a cr. However, for the overall economy, that's, that's really bad.
- [12:58]
A
That always rubbed me the wrong way in terms of like, like putting that, that burden on an already burdened individual and saying, like, your individual in this particular crisis, like, like, you are stressed, you want to take care of yourself, you want to take care of your family. Oh, but by the way, you are also responsible for the overall health of the economy. Like, it's, it's. We, we really, in our, in our society and in our economic system, we, we look very closely at, like, how we prioritize our values in the system. And we, we tend to over focus, I think, on the individual and create a lot of, like, on the one hand, opportunities, hopefully for an individual, but we put a lot of burdens on the individual as well. So. So I just, like, I don't really have an answer to it, but, like, that's one that I feel like. I feel like somehow that is unfair to, like, something's wrong systemically if we're saying to people, oh, by the way, you also have to take care of every small business in your community. And I don't know if I'm explaining that very, but I feel an unease.
- [14:22]
B
It's a really good question. It's definitely a tension right between. On the one hand, emotionally, I want to be able to sock away savings because I'm entering an incredibly uncertain period in my country's history. But then at the same time, I also feel this emotional imperative to help support my local small businesses. And those two are intentions.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And I would also say, I mean, I would definitely say probably like that economics lesson would probably not go into a therapy session. But I also think this fits into how the government can help because I think part of getting people to feel comfortable spending is also giving them that security that they will continue to have some type of money coming in, that it's not all simply reliant on them completely.
- [15:15]
A
And you know, every. Like I was saying, all behavior is sort of on, on a spectrum of good to bad. And that goes up to the macro level too. When we look at our systems. Like our system can be really good at doing some things and very limited in doing other things. And I think this is one of the times when we're discovering or becoming more aware of some of the limitations in our system because there's. We've left individuals holding such a big bag of risk. And the question is, does that risk belong so squarely on the shoulders of individuals or should there be a different sort of systemic response that alleviates that? And it's hard to ask because it's such a big question. I mean.
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D
Yeah, and part of the reason Americans are able to save right now is because the government actually acted and gave everyone a bunch of money. But now a lot of people maybe are holding onto that money because. Because come July, those extended benefits, the unemployment benefits run out and there's no indication that more checks are coming. So it's sort of like you were made secure, but not really.
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C
Right.
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B
The checks, like the $1,200 stimulus checks, were absolutely presented as a one off thing. And if it's a one off thing, then it makes perfect sense to save it. If it's ongoing income stream, then it makes much more sense to spend it. So if you want people to be spending that money, you don't make it a one off thing. But this is a great segue into one of the letters we got. Amanda, can you read or preci. Or something? The one from the guy who was like, I'm fine, so why am I pinching pennies?
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D
I like that one. I felt like I knew that guy.
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A
So my wife and I are retired. Our pensions and Social Security cover our expenses. We have substantial savings and investments and no debt. Yet I still pinch pennies shopping mostly at Walmart and Costco, and feel compelled to ferret out the best deal on every purchase. How can I learn to be more relaxed about spending? This is a great question, because my first sort of follow up would be like this. Penny pinching sounds like that has been his sort of mode probably his entire adult life. So this was a behavior that had certain benefits, like had a good outcome. He's comfortable now, he has guaranteed reliable income, he has savings. But what I think he's articulating is my circumstances have changed, but my way of managing money has not. So the anxiety that got him to a safe place, that sort of. The anxiety did its job in a way. He responded to it more or less appropriately. And now he's saying, like, I would like to be free of this feeling that sort of worked out for me. And that's one of the things that I actually love about money. So I said earlier that we can work on either side of the equation to rebalance, right? The emotional side or the concrete side. Even when we become aware of our feelings, like, that's not a guarantee that awareness is going to make them magically disappear. Like, insight doesn't go. We can have great insight about our issues. Anyone who's been in therapy knows this doesn't mean as soon as we go aha. That all of a sudden that sort of. That tension or that baggage floats away. So I would recommend working with the numbers, so coming up with a spending plan that is more where there's some freedom and even just to like to make a little nice boundary around freedom. Because trying to experiment with this is absolutely going to kick off that anxious response. So if I were to say, like, you are going to, I don't know where this gentleman is or what his fancy grocery store is like here in California. It'd be like if you went to Whole Foods or Pavilions or whatever your fancy place is instead of going like to Costco and Walmart. And that's where you grocery shopped, even just for a week to try it out, like, and sort of. But then you. It's almost like exposure therapy, right? If you're afraid of spiders, like, you can look at a picture of a spider and then you can sort of watch video of a spider. Like, you can engage in a small safe behavior that sort of outside of that, that natural desire to kind of clench. And then we look and we see, okay, what happened? Like, did that feeling come up? How did you live through that feeling? Was there anything that was about this that you didn't anticipate? Did it cause any actual stress to your financial situation? And we can sort of play in all of these really lovely ways in order to, to start to access and move and shift some of the Feelings that surround it.
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B
So this is something I actually did, no thanks to me, I have to say. It was entirely my wife when we started spending money. And this is very shortly after we moved in. And it's been sort of ongoing ever since. We started spending money on our apartment that we were renting and, you know, starting with just like repainting it, but then, you know, doing improvements and that kind of thing. And I had this just intuitive idea that if you're renting a place, you don't spend money to improve it. And the only way to get to. My wife basically persuaded me, well, let's just do this. She's like, she didn't persuade me. She told me, we're just going to do this, and. And then we did it. And it made my life better. And I'm like, wow, that's actually like, oh, okay. I can see how spending money in that way, even though it violates some kind of intuition that I have about where one should and shouldn't spend money is, actually can have positive effects. And that has been. That was like a real eye opener for me. And it was absolutely something that you could never tell me. You could only show me. You have to learn it by experiencing it.
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C
Yeah, I was someone who was like, notoriously. I mean, I'm still cheap. I'm still very cheap, but I was really cheap when I was younger. And it is true that it was just this kind of, you know, to start by saying, like, okay, well, here's a small amount of money that can be like fun money for the week and kind of starting there and then saying like, well, okay, well, you know, if I don't pinch every penny for a month, what does that look like? And, you know, you can kind of get to a slightly healthier place where you can enjoy your life a little bit more while still being cheap.
- [22:22]
A
Yeah, those. Those rules. What I think people often. Nobody tells us that the rules that we have about money, we think that they're coming from our sort of rational assessment. But so much of the time they're actually an attempt to manage the feelings that we have. And specifically anxiety is a really big one. So when we're trying to manage our fear that we have of not being in control, of not knowing what the future holds, we will come back and sort of control something in front of us. We'll control our money, and that makes the feeling dissipate. But whether or not that creates a good financial outcome or a good life outcome, sort of, that's another question that we need to Sort of follow up on.
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B
I want to. Before we move on to the next question, I just want to take this to the absolute extreme, this idea of, like, how do I feel more comfortable spending money? And talk a little bit about private philanthropy? Because one of the things that I see over and over again, and I spent a lot of time writing about and looking at philanthropists, is the people who have made money, people who founded companies or who have. Have made hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, are entirely comfortable with the idea of, now I can spend it, I can give it away philanthropically. People who have not made money, whether it's people running foundations or whether it's the children or the grandchildren of the people who made the money, are universally uncomfortable with the idea of giving that money away, even if it's their job. And so they tend to do one of two things. They either start talking about impact investments, which is a way of trying to sort of improve the world without decreasing the amount of money they have, or they do this thing where they give away, like, 5% of their money every year and they invest the rest so that the total amount of money they have in an ideal world doesn't go down and they can keep the money in perpetuity while still giving, like, the interest away, basically. And it seems to me that it's almost. It's incredibly rare for people who haven't made the money to be comfortable giving it away. And philanthropically, it would be obviously vastly superior for those money for those people to feel comfortable giving it away. Is there any conceivable way that we.
- [25:04]
D
Can help them get taxes?
- [25:09]
A
I mean, kind of. Yeah, they're not. That's too much work for one individual to be able to get through that individual in order to do. I think maybe the healthier collective thing needs structural help in doing that. Because my. I had a great casework professor who would always say when we would come up with, like, these great ideas for what clients should do, and she'd be like, you don't even have a client yet. Meaning, like, this person is not bought into the idea that something needs to change. Like what you're describing. That is not an individual of distress. That is an individual for whom the system is working just fine. They have a way of getting their needs met through their money. They may feel very sympathetic about the need that's out there, but not necessarily enough to be so uncomfortable that they would. They would take that loss individually. If the person's not in distress, if they're not motivated, if they're not coming to you with the question of I want to do this thing, but I feel myself tensing up and holding on to that money, then it's impossible for anyone to be so persuasive, barring any sort of like major crisis or shift, to be able to kind of like loosen up that normal tendency to want to hold on to that money.
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D
I have. Well, I have a million questions for you Amanda, but one that I was thinking about as we're talking is, is financial therapy for people who have money. Like what about the people who, for whom they have to shop at Walmart? Do you know what I mean? Like the people for whom, like it's not that if they don't budget like that it's going to hit the fan for them.
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B
How much do you cost?
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A
Well, I, yeah, totally. I welcome that question because I've been in the field long enough. That is the central challenge, taking on this as a specialty. And so here are all the things that I've tried. I mean right now one of the ways that I support myself is through doing a lot of like consulting and speaking and media stuff. It's funny to me that that has become more my job. But it works because it allows me to also kind of have the work I do with individuals be. I don't need to pay my mortgage based on that work because it's really tough to be a financial therapist and to be self supporting. And I do believe that therapists and all professionals deserve to be paid. But when you're going into a field where 100% of your clientele is going to be in some sort of financial distress, either like the concrete distress or emotional distress or combination. How to make money is I think a very practical and ethical question you have to ask yourself. So when I try to support myself just being in private practice, I do find that that very much limits who I can work with in a way that makes me. It's just not as I'm sympathetic to everybody's financial problems, but I find that a little bit limiting creatively and professionally. I've also sort of worked by, I've worked in an agency, a social service agency where I created a financial wellness program in that social service agency. So the clients again did not have to wasn't a fee for service model. They could see me for free as long as they met the eligibility criteria of the agency. So I got paid by the agency. It's free to clients. Like, like I, I think one of the struggles for financial therapists is how do you make money in this field in ways that feel ethical to you and are, I mean, I guess lots of, lots of people would be perfectly fine like just being part of a wealth management firm and God bless, that's great, but it's, it's just kind of not where I feel called to work. But it's a pickle. It is a pickle.
- [29:32]
D
The people who can afford it.
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B
Is that something which is quite common. Are there, are there a bunch is do what? Do most wealth management firms have like dedicated full time financial therapists?
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A
I think it's one of the few. The short answer is no, but it's one of the few jobs that you can have as a financial therapist. Like where, where there's a job for you as opposed to you being in, in practice for yourself. And the other one is like you can be in academia, you can work. There are other like, like clinics that do sort of emotional and psychological work in addition to the like financial literacy and coaching work that they do. But it's, it's still a bit of a hodgepodge.
- [30:21]
D
That makes sense. Do we want to do another question?
- [30:26]
B
Yeah, let's have one final question. Which, which is the, which is the one we wanted to.
- [30:29]
C
I was thinking maybe we'd want to talk about debt.
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B
Oh yeah, let's talk about debt. So one of the themes that was running through the emails we received was about debt, which is obviously a massive financial issue. But there was one thing in particular which stood out, which was student loans and the kind of the way that student loans have a different emotional valence from other kinds of debt. So let's, let's dive into that one quickly.
- [31:01]
A
Okay, so this is from a listener in Maryland and she writes just a little bit of history. Growing up my parents were bad with money, particularly my dad. Through luck and privilege and some amount of work, I'm now pretty stable financially. She goes on to say that she is. So she, she graduated from college, she's married, they have stable jobs in an emergency fund and that she and her husband both have student loans. And then she says I have huge feelings of stupidity and worthlessness and failure around my loans. My parents particularly my dad, said shitty things to me about how I ever managed to get in such a bad situation, meaning having student loans which didn't help anything. So her loans are federal, no co signers, never missed a payment. And she goes into some detail about like that because she works in public service, she was enrolled in the public service loan forgiveness program. But that through some sort of complications with her servicer, some of her loans were enrolled, other ones were. And so they weren't qualifying. Those payments that she was made weren't part of qualifying for that forgiveness program. And that this was, this brought up so many feelings. She says she. It made me so angry and dealing with fed loans is so frustrating. But her husband has helped her a lot. When I was most despondent, he said to me that having student loans is not a moral failing, just like it was a fact. I had no idea how badly I needed to hear that until he said it. It's hard to shake though, the feeling that I have failed in an important way.
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D
That is so sad. She has not failed at all.
- [32:53]
A
No.
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C
And it's, it's just odd how we do, you know, view different types of debt differently. Like I have a mortgage, which is debt. I don't view that as a failure and I think most people don't. But for some reason student loans are often put in this category as though they are something people shouldn't have. Even though obviously like in order to get a good job you often have to go through a four year college, which for better, for worse costs a lot in this country. So it's very hard for almost anyone to get to that stage without taking on debt.
- [33:22]
D
Yeah.
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B
Why is it, Amanda, that you think that student loans in particular cause a level. Let me rephrase it because I think I might be assuming an answer which isn't true here. When you talk to your clients. Is there a kind of spectrum of types of debt with maybe mortgages on one end which are fine, and some other kind of debt at the other end which causes much more sort of feelings of self hatred or failure.
- [33:56]
A
Student loans are, there's such a weight, a particular kind of weight around them oftentimes I think number one, because of how vulnerable we are in that position in life when we are, I mean, I was going to say new to adulthood, but we may not feel like we're adults at all and yet we are sort of put in a position where the price of entry into a good life or the hope or potential of a good life means a permanent financial obligation that their are very few ways to get out of. So we are in a position of great disempowerment. I mean, it's true we could choose not to go to college and lots of people have found ways to like work full time and take longer to graduate, etc. But, but culturally that's not the picture that we have in our heads of what college looks like. And, and there's Such a heavy amount of marketing and a degree of financial savvy that's necessary to make good decisions about loans. And that's hard. It's hard to be savvy when we feel kind of vulnerable and disempowered and there's somebody telling us that this is good debt and not to worry and that it'll all be okay once we sort of get over our natural sort of fear and maybe even aversion to debt and take this on. So there's a lot of potential that we don't know about. And so we're making that decision from a place that can feel really scary. And we also might have some ideas about somebody should be taking care of me in all of this. Either my parents should have had this information and guided me better, or like the counselors and people who are helping me make decisions about school should have provided more guidance, I shouldn't have been manipulated, etc. So when we come out the other side, if, if our loans are so burdensome and we don't really have a way to go back and revisit that decision, that is a pretty tough place to resign ourselves to. Like, that we can get there. But it's. It's not. It takes a lot of work and compounded here. Like, I mean, this dad situation, it's like there's a whole novel here around the. The father's what she's perceiving as. Like, you know, my parents were bad with money, particularly my dad, so he's messed up. He's at fault for something. She doesn't say it, but I wonder how much of there is also like, hey, parents, you should have had some money for college. Like, you kind of left me holding the bag for this. And I sorted it the best that I could. And now she's in a situation where she doesn't. She's like. I hear her looking around like, who the hell is here to help me and support me? Like, the systems that I want to be able to trust and depend on. Like, will there even be public service loan forgiveness in the future or will that be taken away too? Like, there's. This is an example, I think, of a lot of our early, like, developmental trauma around trust and who is a reliable caregiver? Who can we turn to when we need something? Will our parents step up in those situations? And then we sort of like, we project that sort of pattern everywhere we look. So, like, I don't think that it's at all coincidental that she started talking about her loans by Talking about her dad.
- [38:08]
B
So we're going to have a Sleep plus segment all about families and whether we inherit our attitudes to money from our families.
- [38:18]
D
Oh, and I also want to know about how I should teach my kids about money. Oh, if you can do that in five minutes.
- [38:24]
B
Exactly. Raising kids with a healthy attitude to money or even like, what is a healthy attitude to money? I have no idea. Let's finish with that. Amanda. Like, have you ever met a human being who has a healthy attitude to money? And is it even something that a parent can aspire to?
- [38:43]
A
Have I ever met a person? Yes, but not as a client, because those people do not tend to figure me out. But I always like when I, when I run across people who, like, do have great clarity about what's important to them in life and how money is, is a resource that, that fuels that. And they have good boundaries and, you know, they have good behaviors, but they're not too rigid. Like, I, I'm literally like, oh, like, like it's a wonderful animal in a zoo. I'm so excited to observe it because I. The reality is that, that no person is really, like, psychologically and emotionally perfect. Right. And we, we do tend to project whatever's going on with us inside some way into money. So the norm is to run into funny little quirks and bumps in this part of our lives. When it comes to kids, I first want to just let parents off the hook a little bit and pivot that you don't know what your child's financial life is going to look like. And so you can't necessarily, you don't know what lessons they're going to need to be prepared for the choices that are in front of them. Like, for example, I work with a lot of people who are entrepreneurs, who are creative professionals who don't have a lot of stability in their financial lives. And they have, maybe they were raised by accountants, you know, who were so careful about having a budget and, but couldn't teach them anything about, like, how you make decisions when the future is unknown with your money. So, like, I think it comes out of a desire to protect our kids. But if the best thing that we can teach our children is how to look at money without getting overwhelmed, like, if they can see us be able to sit with the financial decisions in our life, to be able to plan and organize our behavior, like how we work to meet goals, so that's modeled and they see however that that works. They just know that that's a normal thing that grown ups do. And if you can also be a place for them to talk about the dilemmas in their financial life. So, like, I have this money, I want to, I know I'm saving to the for this goal, but I also, like, my friends are asking me if, if I'll go to the mall with them. And I know if I go to the mall, I'm going to spend that money. Instead of being like, you should do, you should save, don't go with your friends. Like, to not necessarily need to be prescriptive in that moment just to be like, ooh, that's a tough one. I get it. Like, being with your friends is important, but you're also working toward this and be a holding space for that decision making process that empowers and affirms their ability to sort of hold both realities of wanting to be with friends and also wanting to meet a goal without having to just shut one down.
- [41:51]
D
I love that. But I'm at the point where one of my kids has just asked me, like, do you have a hundred dollars? Does that mean we're rich? Kind of questions, you know, sometimes. And I have to say, no, I have a hundred dollars, but it's not a lot of money. And there's like confusion. I thought it was a lot of money. We try to explain relative amounts.
- [42:11]
A
Where kids are coming from with their questions too, I think is so, it's so fascinating. And like, if you have more than one, one kid too, like, you'll like, that question can have different meaning even for like the two kids in the same family who are asking it.
- [42:31]
B
So I definitely wanted to have a numbers round this week because partly because there's a family angle to the number that I wanted to bring in. And the whole way that families relate to money is in my number, which is $360 million. And $360 million is the amount of money that the Jenner family told Forbes that Kylie Jenner had in revenues in 2018. This is, we've talked about this multiple times on the show before about whether Kylie Jenner is a billionaire and if she is, what it means. And a lot of that came from this money. And they actually showed Forbes tax returns. And 360 million was the amount of money that Kylie cosmetics made in 2018 according to the Jenner family at the time. But now we discover, according to filings from Coty, which bought a majority of the company, that in fact, in 2018, the revenues were only 125 million. It was one third of what the Kardashian Jenners were saying. And this sort of incredible need to exaggerate how much money you're making when $125 million of revenue is, like, not enough and you need to treble. It is so interesting just from a psychological perspective.
- [44:10]
D
It's the Carl Icahn move.
- [44:12]
B
Exactly. Like, yeah, I'm not one of those people who makes a mere $125 million a year. No, I make $360 million a year. It's like, what?
- [44:21]
A
I wonder how much they know, though. Like, do you really think that they are tracking that that closely? Maybe it really is like they were forging tax returns.
- [44:30]
B
According to Forbes, they. They were literally forging tax returns to. To try and just show that they were making more money than they actually were.
- [44:40]
C
Yeah.
- [44:40]
D
How did I miss this story? Felix, thank you for bringing it to our attention. This is like the fourth continuing coverage of the General Fortune.
- [44:47]
C
I just like to point out.
- [44:52]
B
Any more numbers? Who else has a number?
- [44:54]
A
I have a number, but. But mine is so, like, I don't know. I should have gotten a juicier, Kardashian related number. I was looking at the Pulse of the American Worker survey that Prudential put out. They checked in on American households. I forget what the sample size was in April and May to see sort of what was happening in specifically the world of work. And so the number is 72%. And that is the percentage that grade their employers response to the pandemic as a B or higher. Which surprised me because I thought that a lot of people would be much more unhappy in their work than they are. But I think this is a time when people are feeling more grateful and more connected to their employers in many cases. And I think maybe especially as sort of safe in the government seems to be a little harder to come by when we do feel like there are. There's an institution that, that is more reliable in our lives that can be good. But the same survey said that, like.
- [46:09]
B
Although it has to be said.
- [46:10]
A
Yeah.
- [46:11]
B
I mean, just to just sort of jump in here, like, by definition, if you're one of the people who's been fired, then that person who fired you is not your employer.
- [46:22]
A
Absolutely true. It's absolutely true. But this is like, maybe I'm just so in the complaints these days about how hard it was that I found it encouraging that as many people as 72% of those who are working like their employer's response. But of course, the, let's see, of the ones who gave it a C or less, more than a quarter of those were or no 40% of those were actively going to look for another job as soon as all of this volatility has passed. So I think to them to find.
- [47:04]
D
A job when unemployment 20%.
- [47:06]
A
It's very true.
- [47:08]
B
Anna, do you have a number?
- [47:10]
C
I do, I just kind of changed it, but I'm gonna use go with this. So my number is $563,500. So that is the league minimum for Major League Baseball. And I bring this up just the.
- [47:27]
B
Salary for baseball players.
- [47:29]
C
It's the league minimum for.
- [47:31]
B
So that's the minimum amount that a baseball player makes.
- [47:34]
C
Yes. For mlb, a lot of them obviously make significantly more than that, but that's the minimum. And I just bring this up because it's interesting because right now as we're kind of talking about money and the meaning of money, we have this fight going on in Major League Baseball that you're actually not seeing in other sports over money right now and over what people should or should not be paid if they decide to go back to play. And it's just. And it's interesting because the deal that they came out with actually was fairer in a way and that the players who make less money would take less of a hit to their pay cut. Whereas if you make like over $20 million, you take a much bigger hit. But you also are still making millions and millions of dollars. So it's just another example of this kind of how people view money differently depending on kind of how much they're making or don't view it differently depending on how much they're making.
- [48:24]
A
So true.
- [48:26]
B
Emily.
- [48:26]
D
I had two numbers queued up. One was kind of a bummer, so I'm not going to do that one.
- [48:30]
B
And no bummers.
- [48:32]
D
This one. Yeah, Bummer free zone in Westchester. My number is $15.5 billion, which is a lot of money. And that is the amount Americans spent on frozen food during the 11 week period that ended on May 16th. So like during the hunker down time, and that is for a 40% increase from a year ago. So people got really into frozen food. Like the kind that you would think no one wanted anymore. Like, you know, like Hot Pockets or. I'm sure Felix doesn't know what that is, but. Or frozen lasagna and all this stuff. And like freezer sales were also up. So it's unclear if people will keep buying like this kind of junky frozen food forever. But a lot of people now have like the extra storage space for the frozen food. So I'm curious to see if people keep up with this kind of like buying frozen pizza kind of behavior or not.
- [49:27]
C
There is also frozen vegetables.
- [49:29]
D
Yes. And they're delicious.
- [49:30]
A
Yeah. With Anna, I'm like, I need to stick up for frozen food here. Like our family has lived on Trader Joe's frozen tempura shrimp. That could be many meals in the Clayman household.
- [49:45]
C
Yeah.
- [49:45]
D
And there was a piece in the New Yorker actually about restaurants in New York and other places that are selling their food frozen because you can't go to the restaurant anymore. So that's kind of interesting too. But I don't think that's really part of the 15 billion that much.
- [50:02]
B
So that's it for Slate Money this week. Thank you, Amanda, for joining us. It was great to have you. Thank you to Jessamine Molly for producing and thank you to everyone who wrote in. Do keep the emails coming as ever. The email address is slatemoneylate.com we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.