"Every regret/time travel fantasy I have is real estate based."
+ would you try 'intuitive spending'?
Hi and welcome to The Ladybird Purse, my weekly newsletter about women and money. I’m not a financial advisor; just a woman trying to work it all out.
I’m not done with the Gen X series, but it’s on hold for a bit while I wait for some interviewees to get back to me.
I loved this post from the ever-inspiring Dana Miranda about intuitive spending (note: includes references to intuitive eating):
I think I’ve been unintentionally engaging in intuitive spending this year and it’s changed how I feel about money. I got a 0% credit card to enable me to do a balance transfer. But the original card doesn’t allow balance transfers (go figure) and so I started putting as much spending as possible on the 0% card to free up the cash to pay the original card.
I’ve found having that one stage of separation from my bank account surprisingly relaxing. Obviously I know I’ve still spent the money and will have to pay it back (am already paying it back) but having a card that doesn’t feel like real money has made it easier to spend. Dana writes,
Intuitive spending doesn’t mean buying everything all the time. It doesn’t even mean following your every whim or impulse — because when you learn to listen to your body […] you realize you don’t want everything all the time. You learn to recognize when you feel compelled to buy something because a friend has it, because your family has expectations for a holiday, because the grocery store’s layout steers you toward it.
That’s certainly been my experience. And since trusting myself is one of the things I’ve struggled with over the years, it’s been a gamechanger.
This week’s interview…
…is with Glynnis MacNicol. I’ve loved both of her memoirs I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure and No One Tells You This and her Substack is wonderful too.
I’ve thought about this post a lot since I read it last year. Particularly this from one of her readers who responded to an anonymous questionnaire:
Ask for more money all the time, cash, affiliate links, shoppable wish lists of gifts you would accept…ask to be included in estate plans, for free stuff of all descriptions, more cash money to fuel your future. And cash. Did I mention cash? Be as shameless about cash as you are about other appetites and needs. You know if you had a windfall it would be in very good hands! Let it be known!
I love this! We should all be asking for money more! And please know that I will always joyfully accept any/all of the above!
PSA!
If you’re in the UK, do you know about Airtime? It’s a cashback app and the money you earn can be used to pay your mobile bill.
I signed up to this in, apparently, 2019, though I don’t have much recollection of it. A couple of weeks ago, I idly tapped on a link on o2’s app and saw that I had about £20 credit. I tapped the button to redeem it and found I could transfer it to my bank account (rather than applying it against my mobile bill), so I did.
But then I noticed there was another £50-ish “inactive” credit going back a few years. At first I thought, oh well, missed out, but then I decided to contact support… who got back to me within a couple of hours to say the credit becomes inactive if you don’t access the app for six months, but that they’d restored it. Seventy quid! From an app I didn’t even remember I had! Delighted.
Shops include Waterstones, Boots, Ikea, Morrisons, with cashback of up to 15%.
I have a referral code - N8J9NNQK - which earns us both 50p (and an extra £1 if you spend within 7 days) which is not much, but certainly better than nothing!
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An interview with Glynnis MacNicol
Glynnis MacNicol is the author of three books including I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure and No One Tells You This. She wrote, produced, and hosted WILDER: A Reckoning with the Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, for iHeart Media. She has contributed to numerous collections.
She writes the weekly newsletter Good Decisions. She lives in New York City.
What is your relationship with money currently?
I would like more of it, and this fact dominates most of my conversations to the point of nauseum.
What’s your earliest money memory?
I started getting an allowance around age seven or eight. It was one dollar a week. To receive it, my sister and I were required to make our beds everyday, and then strip them and remake them on Sundays. We had to put half the allowance in savings and record what we spent the other half on (candy). Simple but it really stuck with me.
My parents were terrible with money, so I imagine this was my mother’s small way of trying to correct that. And I’m always grateful for it. Not that it made me a genius with money, but it made me unafraid to always know where my money is and keep track of what I’m spending it on (replace candy with vintage caftans).
What advice would you give your younger self about money?
Buy an apartment. Every regret/time travel fantasy I have is real estate based. I wish I’d been talked to about savings and downpayments and mortgages early on.
It seems insane now, but even in the nineties there was a pervasive sense that women who bought their own apartments were cutting themselves out of the marriage market in some way. As if there was something shameful in being financially stable and independent.
I still remember that Sex and the City episode where Miranda buys her apartment, and the real estate agent says “just you?” As if Miranda is not living the room of one’s own dream so many of us hold dear.
What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve made?
I make small ones that add up. Which is maybe worse.
I think because financial security is so elusive in New York, particularly as a writer who is not partnered, I can justify purchases that bring me pleasure (clothing, for the most part) by rationalizing the fact they will make no great difference to my financial security (or lack thereof). But it adds up.
I think of that scene in Sex and the City (AGAIN) where Carrie does the math on her Manolos and realizes it’s an apartment downpayment. I wish a New York where 30K could be an apartment downpayment still existed, but the point stands.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever spent money on?
I spend well, so it’s a long list. Shortly before Covid I basically doubled my extremely affordable rent to boomerang out of Red Hook, Brooklyn, to the UWS. I had a great situation in Brooklyn, living upstairs from one of my oldest friends in New York, but I found the location isolating in a way that became untenable. I love everything about where I now live.
I once bought a vintage Michael Vollbracht caftan from Female Hysteria, which remains one of my best clothing purchases. I travel a lot and I always consider that money well spent.
Do you have a retirement fund? If not, do you have a plan?
LOL.
Translation: I’m a single, freelance writer in New York City, with no family support. America is a casino, and NYC is the highrolling back room. Stay tuned.
That said! One of the greatest things ever said to me was by my high school best friend with whom I’m still very close. She was talking about her retirement savings, and I quipped, I have none, and she said, the way you live your life is what people save up their whole lives to be able to do, even briefly. And that is both very true and was an enormous relief to hear.
I live an extremely full life, and always have (in part made possible by good health…in America health is literally wealth), and one of the trade offs for that is an absence of what we understand to be financial security. Of course, the near total absence of a social net in this country means everyone who is not enormously wealthy lives with a serious degree of financial precarity. See above re casino.
What would you do with £10,000?
Again, because this can’t be emphasized enough, the sad truth of life in America is I’m not sure 10K makes that much difference. Like that’s barely half a year of not very great health insurance payments. Or less than three months of rent. I’d probably take close friends on a trip somewhere. Or to do a day at a high-end spa followed by an over-the-top meal with lots of champagne.
What little luxury could you get with a tenner?
British Cadbury chocolate (Flakes and Twirls forever) from Carry On Tea and Sympathy, or the deli at 9th and 2nd that has a good selection.
If you were me, what would you want to ask women about money?
How did they learn to get comfortable with it, or if they’re not, why?
Historically speaking women have only had access to their own money for the blink of an eye. In this country, we only got access to credit cards and bank accounts in our own name in 1974.
I was a waitress for most of my twenties, and a small slice of the women who came in were amazing tippers, generally because they’d also been servers at some point (to wit: I tip 20% min even for the worst service, because it is an exhausting way to make a living). But mostly the women tipped badly.
This was true when I moved into the startup space: women investors did not part with their money easily (or as easily as men). I think we continue to have an anxious relationship with money. Where it’s coming from. How to keep it. There’s still a newness to it, and a deep fear of scarcity
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