If you talk too much about money these days, chances are really good that you’re going to feel really bad.
Even if your 401(k) has recovered some, your job situation could be iffy. Or maybe you’re decades away from getting out of debt.
Things are so touch-and-go that you feel like if you asked Suze Orman if you can indulge in a drive-thru McDonald’s meal, she’d immediately chirp: “Denied.”
So maybe it is time to take a deep breath and offer a collective: “So what?”
Nobody’s saying go out and run up more debt on that plastic, mind you. But maybe it’s OK to admit that no matter how well-educated you are, you’re still broke. Or if not technically broke, that you’re running scared.
“I wish that more people would come out of the closet as broke people,” said Laura Lee, 40, who lives in Rochester Hills, Mich., and wrote a new book called “Broke Is Beautiful: Living and Loving the Cash-Strapped Life.”
“A lot of people are feeling broke.”
I talked with Lee at the Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills, where signs of wealth still abound. Gorgeous mansions are a short drive away on Lone Pine Road. A black Corvette in the church parking lot had a license plate reading “Morefun.”
Lee, who was working Monday as one of many volunteers preparing the church’s massive rummage sale that runs today through Saturday, says even people with hundreds of thousands of dollars can feel broke if they dwell on what they think their net worth should be.
She quotes a poll of New Yorkers that found that people who earned more than $200,000 a year are more likely than low-income people to feel poor when seeing others with more money.
Her book offers another interesting stat: In a 1999 poll, college freshmen predicted that they would be earning on average $75,000 a year by the time they were 30. This was at a time, she says, when the average 30-year-old was earning $27,000.
Many people, Lee maintains, suffer delusions of wealth. But she doesn’t put herself in that category.
She says, for example, that she mainly buys her clothes twice a year at that church rummage sale where women’s sweaters start at $4, jackets at $7 and slacks at $5. Prices are lower on Friday and Saturday.
Her income can be sporadic. She receives money when she writes books, such as an earlier one called “The 100 Most Dangerous Things in Life.” She also writes speeches for corporate executives.
And Lee stays in lower-priced hotels when she travels during about half the year with a Russian ballet artist as part of a business they’ve built that offers master ballet classes across the U.S.
Lee studied theater at Oakland University but has had rough years when her credit score wasn’t all that good. She shops at Busch’s Fresh Food Market but says she often buys ramen noodles.
Still, “I’ve always felt more secure relying on myself to create my own job than relying on someone else,” she said. “You rely on them to continue to need you — it’s always seemed less secure to me.”
But she knows many people don’t feel the same way.
Lee’s bottom line: It’s up to you to determine how you feel about your financial situation.
“Define yourself as an artist and you give yourself permission to be ‘starving,’ “ Lee writes in the book. “This can be a great liberation.”
The most practical thing to do with your resources, she maintains, is to put them toward what makes your life worth living.
Think about this.
If times are tough, it may help to take a second job or put every dollar toward paying down debt — if that fixes a problem.
Or it could be time to admit that you’re just aspiring to live a life that you realistically can never afford.
“If you can’t change your situation, you can change your expectations,” Lee said. “Your identity is not your credit score — your identity is something else.”
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