So I Have This Friend (or, on mooching)

What do you do when, say, a friend comes to visit and suggests you go to THAT restaurant with the amazing food and the great atmosphere, the one that makes delicious food but hits your wallet big-time? Then, say, this friend orders an entree and drinks and more drinks and a side of this and a bit of that, laughing it up and saying how good it all is, only to say, when the bill comes, that she can’t cover it?

You only ordered something small, because, well, you’re on a budget after all. And your friend says something about how she doesn’t make much money and it’s hard to find good work and you know? Maybe you can help her out?

This happens to me sometimes. Not frequently, and not with a lot of people. But with some people very frequently, in fact with one particular person all the time. I’ll know I can spend $10, so I’ll order something small; Friend knows she has $10 in her wallet but orders something big, knowing I can help her, if it comes to that.

I don’t mind giving to my friends; in fact, I believe in it. But maybe there’s some kind of line we can cross with giving. Maybe at some point, giving becomes excusing? Maybe at some point, my “sure, here’s another $10″ becomes “you don’t have to be responsible for what you do”?

This same friend has been looking for a better job, on and off, for almost a year. She makes $8 now, so, yeah, she doesn’t have much money. So what do I do? I offer to help her with her resume, thinking that this could help her get a better job, help her make better money. I spend three hours one Friday night beefing it up and reorganizing and formatting, etc. I send it to her and say, voila! like she’ll fall over herself gushing with praise. She doesn’t respond. She never says if she’ll use it.

The truth is, she never asked me to look at her resume. It was my idea, my plan to help her get in a better financial situation. In other words, it’s what I’d want someone to do for me. Just like I’d want someone to help me if I needed money, though, to be honest, I’d never, ever, not-in-a-million-years order something I knew I didn’t have the money for. I wish someone had helped me make a resume when I was frustrated, desperate for a job. I wish someone had given me advice and guidance to getting the right position. I wish someone would help me when I feel like I need it.

But do I wish that only because I’m looking back? I mean, if I hadn’t done anything, would that have meant I needed help that no one gave or that I didn’t want it (the jobs/resumes/whatever) enough?

What do you think? Can you give too much to your friends? Is there a way to know if you can? And how do you train yourself to stop helping people who don’t want you to? How do you love them enough to say, You can do it yourself? How do you love them enough to say, Sure, I’ll pay for it again?

Image: cedric1981

Do People Go into Debt for Wedding Rings?

My out-of-town friend this weekend, in passing, was telling me about her future diamond. “I don’t care if he has to go into debt for it,” she said. “It better be big!”

I laughed, and told her that she better be joking. She was joking, right? She just laughed.

This is something I’ve never even heard in passing, the idea of taking out a loan to pay for an engagement ring. I guess anything’s possible, especially in debt-filled America, but seriously: Do people actually go into debt for wedding rings? Do you know anyone who did?

How Movies Set Us Up To Want

If you, like me, find yourself more interested in movie characters’ real estate or wardrobes than the plots or story line, you’ll appreciate this post over at Escape Brooklyn.

In it, she cites a recent MSN Money article that points out the discrepancies between what movie/tv characters have and what they supposedly do for a living.

Among the examples are Eva Mendes’s character in Hitch, a gossip columnist with a $5,000/month-rent New York Loft and Ann Hathaway’s Andi in The Devil Wears Prada, who gets loads of free designer clothes at work.

I’d add the following:

Gilmore Girls: A beautiful Victorian house, all meals ordered or eaten out & gorgeous, new clothes every season… all on an innkeeper’s salary? OK, they couldn’t pay for Yale, but even still!

27 Dresses: Katherine Heigel’s character lives in a beautiful, vintage apartment in NYC. Her sister visits and calls it “cute.” I think we all know that had to cost a pretty penny. And she’s someone’s assistant.

The truth is, as a manager in the Chicago area making a mid-level salary, I can’t even afford a two-bedroom condo in my area. So do you think movies set us up to want more so that we’ll spend? Or is allowing us to pretend we can afford X, Y & Z part of a movie’s magic?

Makeup Alley Visitors

I saw that I’m getting some traffic today from a message board on a site called Makeup Alley. If you’re coming from there, or if you know about it: give me the 411.

What is it? What is it for? I want to know!

Scrolling through the site just now, I see it’s about different beauty products and stuff?

Raise Your Hand if You’ve Tried Online Dating!

You know, no matter how many times I see those smiling couples on eHarmony or match.com commercials, I still hang my head in embarrassment and shame when I admit I’ve tried them. Yes, I’m serious, both about trying online dating and about being humiliated. In fact, in the interest of full disclosure: I am mentally deleting and rewriting this post, wondering if I’m even comfortable admitting this to the PF-blogging public.

My second cousin met his wife online, after 40+ years of being a bachelor. Unfortunately, they’re now divorced, but I could name a handful of other people who I know successfully found a match on the Internet. Different social spheres, different values and interests; one thing in common: looking for love.

I just don’t know.

A friend of mine is a new tester of the online systems. She’s been on two dates so far and is choosing to be very selective. “I narrowed all my criteria as far as I could,” she told me. The second guy, whom she met last week, seems promising. “I signed up for six months, even though I might be someone sooner. I figure, if I meet someone, it would have been a small price to pay.”

What’s your opinion?

What Do You Think Will Happen to Rental Rates?

A friend of mine is moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, in a few months, so I was looking online at apartments in that area. (Full disclosure: I figured it’d make a great back-up plan if I decide to move)

Can I just say one thing: Moving to the South sounds like a better and better option. Why spend $1000 to rent a one-bedroom in Chicagoland when I could pay $500 to share an adorable place with a friend in Virginia?

Who decides these outrageous rentals, and do you think they’ll drop if real estate prices keep falling? Or will they go up since more people are renting than buying, so there’s a more competitive market?

Is It OK to Hide Money from Your Spouse? (and other such questions)

Lately, every radio station I click has something to say about money, from telling me 55% of women in my age bracket don’t have $500 in their bank accounts to advising that getting out of debt is financial priority #1. This morning on my way to work, I caught a call-in session regarding the question that provoked this post’s title: Is it OK to hide money from your spouse or significant other, and, what’s more, do you do it?

 Turns out it was provoked by this recent article in USA Today: “Money, fidelity go hand in hand,” which, essentially, likens physical fidelity with financial. It quotes a relationship therapist who says all the people in her practice commiting adultery are also financially deceptive, from hidden charges to fund the extra relationship to other things. And it goes on to cite all kinds of statistics: 62% of married respondents feel a secret credit card is a major violation of trust, and 6% of marrieds feel it’s grounds for divorce.

I found it interesting, if fairly unapplicable to my current situation. It got me thinking about the root of hiding money issues from the person one is closest to, the person one shares everything with. Why would someone want that?

Then I thought maybe it stems from the same reasons I like to have new clothes and enjoy spending money when I want to–there’s something in all of us that wants to decide autonomously, without judgment.

Incidentally, on the way back home tonight, I caught another talk show while flipping stations. This one, I don’t even know who the hosts were, had a man call in to discuss the discrimination in our current divorce system, while he sat outside his own home, holed up in his car.

“Why do women get more money?” he wanted to know. “I mean, what makes them deserve that?”

Inside the Mind of a Spammer

I really want to know: how do spammers make money?

When someone leaves a comment on my blog like “What a Tuesday!” or “skdfjsldk 123231 go to,” what is the payoff? When hundreds of junk e-mails crowd random inboxes, what is the benefit to the mail senders? I understand the ones with website links; they’re trying to drive up their linkage rating or draw people to their advertising. But what about the other ones?

If you have some secret window into the spammer’s world, please let me in. I can’t for the life of me figure it out!

Let’s Get Something Straight: Is It Just Money?

My 47-year-old coworker K tells me her husband is the cheapest man alive. He’s the one making her work part-time and he’s the one worried about their income. He’s in sales, she hasn’t said in what industry, and commands a high salary. So when she’s angry with him, she tells me, she spends his money.

“The kids had a great Christmas this year because I was mad at my husband,” she says. “They got all sorts of stuff.”

The rest of us laugh like crazy when she shares these stories. She’s a wonderfully sweet woman who loves her children, you can tell, and she is easy to work with, easy to laugh with. We split our sides at the thought of her, crazy with a credit card, packaging purchases to make a point. We laugh too, I think, because we are shocked and surprised and maybe a little jealous that she can be so open about her financial habits. Who admits, out loud and without embarrassment, that she spends in frustration? Who admits she does something a little unwise with her money?

I, for example, don’t tell my coworkers that for a first date I almost always want a new outfit. I don’t say that I could probably shop every weekend without getting bored or that right about now I’m itching to take a trip somewhere. My other coworker T avoided for weeks telling us that she used to eat on $3 a day, back when she was starting out, that she has been living under a drug-dealer in order to keep her $425/month rent, that her parents practically threw her out the door at 18.

It’s hard to talk about money.

I submit that one of the big reasons we don’t talk about money is the same reason I love to PF-blog. It’s very, very personal. And because it’s personal, there’s big opportunity for approval, intimacy, judgment and, largely, rejection. I love the anonymity of my site (which I’ve questioned sometimes and truthfully still catch myself worrying about and then censoring my words) because I can, in theory, say anything without being judged. Or, if someone does judge, he or she doesn’t really know me anyway.

Money is hard for people to discuss because it affects so much of life: where you live, how you live, potentially how you feel about yourself and your friends.

I’d like to change this, sometimes. I’d like to out-with-it and tell the world my financial status. I’d like to start a trend of it’s-just-money thoughts among my friends. But I fear that’s not possible. I fear what would really happen is I would bare all and regret it.

I guess, bottom line, is there’s a part of me that fears what it would do to my relationships and how it would hurt them. Because while it is just money, and money’s not life, my friendships are valuable and delicate and worth preserving.

What’s Your Earliest Money Memory?

Recently, I acquired Suze Orman’s Nine Steps to Financial Freedom through paperbackswap.org. The first part of the book invites you to think back to your earliest money memory: when you were a child, did you feel worried, ashamed, desperate for money? She asks a series of questions, all intended to glean information from your past. This, she says, is key in discovering your deepest associations with finances.

What were the best presents you remember receiving as a child?
Did your friends have things you didn’t?
Did both of your parents have to work, and did your friends’ moms not have to?
Were you ashamed to bring your friends home?
Did your friends have nicer clothes, toys, etc.?
Did you hear your parents fight about money?

For me, my earliest memory, as far as I’ve been able to think back, is of being embarrassed to have a nice house. It sounds a little funny to say now, but childhood perspective is very different. My parents lived in an upper middle class neighborhood, but most of my friends from private school lived in smaller or less expensive homes. I wanted desperately to just be the same as everyone else, to blend in and not be noticed for where I lived.

When my parents built the house we live in now, random teachers would ask me how it was coming along. I mean, teachers who’d never taught me or who’d taught me a long time ago–who never talked to me otherwise–knew about the house and wanted to ask about it. This was another way I felt singled out and resented it.

What about you?