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Our Finances Have Changed but the Awkwardness Hasn’t
It’s always weird to talk about money
I have made it a practice in these personal essays to be open and honest about many aspects of my life — including money. I’ve written about our unexpectedly huge tax bill last year, and how I think keeping our personal financial situations secret hurts us all, and even about how getting a four-book deal didn’t even sort of solve all our money worries. I wrote a one-week spending diary for Business Insider magazine, detailing our monthly income and outgo (and the unfortunate mismatch there).
There is so much secrecy around money in our culture. In my own industry, publishing, we periodically see movements like the current #PublishingPaidMe, where authors are going public with their book advances, exposing some pretty jaw-dropping racial disparities; and there are a few individual authors, such as John Scalzi and Jim C. Hines, who have been open about their earnings for some time. These, however, are exceptions.
I have long argued that this secrecy only serves the folks at the top. The bosses and the publishers and the politicians, all the people who decide where the money goes: they benefit by keeping us all fragmented, in the dark, and, frankly, ashamed of how poorly we’re doing (or think we’re doing) — as if our struggles are our own fault…
