When then twenty-six year-old Elle Hunt was asked to keep a money diary for the Guardian last year, the purpose was to dispel the common belief that millennials are spendthrifts. They, too, the thinking goes, could enjoy the delights of home ownership and flush 401(k)s, if only they would stop wasting money on avocado toast and turmeric lattes.
For four weeks, London-based Hunt documented every pound spent, from her daily commute to a £181 cut-and-color to over a hundred pounds on bar tabs. She ate out for lunch almost every day, and she often went out of her way to get the better, and more expensive, coffee near her workplace. She was single, with no children or dependents, living with a roommate in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city with an acute housing crisis where over twenty-two thousand homes sit empty because they were bought for investment and not occupancy. She had savings, but with buying property beyond her reach, it was more of a rainy-day fund than a means for executing a life plan.
The diary went viral, and the condemnation was swift. A reader told Hunt she was “wasting her life,” another added that she was bringing “shame” upon her family. The audience was publicly aghast that she would spend one hundred quid on a Taylor Swift concert ticket; after all, there are so many bands and artists who need financial support. Others focused on her salary—somewhere around £40,000 for a media job—and called her a “poor little rich girl.” Many—many—used the opportunity to tell the world how frugal they are—“I read it whilst eating my homemade wrap for lunch”—the frugality somehow implying virtue. Even the financial expert brought in to comment in the original article dunked on her vices. When you’re spending so much on coffee while complaining about runaway housing prices in urban areas, he wrote, “you’re starting to lose a bit of the moral argument.”
Hunt’s was hardly the only money diary to go viral this way. There was the New York City intern whose rent is paid by her parents, an Instagram influencer earning $604,000 a year, a Toronto couple with almost $500,000 in debt, and a Scot on the dole. No matter the income level or the employment status, each expense was suspect. “[H]ere’s a tip to save money.dont buy coffee and sugar when you have less than a tenner” an anonymous account scolded the Scot. Several readers expressed horror that the steeply indebted couple still ate sushi. If a money diarist mentioned buying a top at H&M, a commenter found cause to mention sweatshops. If another line-itemed a stop at McDonald’s, someone was there to say veganism is the only ethical choice.
Not even sex diaries inspire as much moralizing as the money diary (nor are they even close to being as popular or viral-friendly). These days all romantic and sexual relations are understood to be about power, and they are discussed in the language of health: if you date a notably younger or older person, you’ve “got issues”; if you are in a committed relationship with a partner of the same age, economic and educational background, and salary, you’re “healthy.” Tales of promiscuity and lust inspire mild reactions like “get therapy.” Love is love, polyamory is trending, everyone is sex positive, and Midwestern churches are flying rainbow flags. All our indignation has found a new target in the genre of financial disclosure.
Prosperity is Personal
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the financial industry underwent deregulation, and as consumer protections from credit card companies, banks, and short-term lenders were stripped away, the idea of personal financial responsibility as a coping mechanism took hold. Everyone was trying to fleece you, banks added fees for speaking to a teller or using your debit card outside of the country or asking for a paper statement or putting money in your account or taking money out of your account or closing your account. And the high priests of personal finance materialized in clouds of smoke, offering a prosperity gospel of discipline and attentiveness, if only you paid them on the installment plan.
The 1990s saw the rise of Suze Orman, Vicki Robin, and Dave Ramsey, gurus who built self-help empires of books, TV and radio shows, financial planning and counseling, all with the same message: document and account for everything. Any excess or frivolity was waste. Why throw away $3.50 on a cup of coffee when you could shove it in a Roth IRA and retire a millionaire forty years later? Meanwhile, interest rates were stagnant, so if you wanted your savings to grow you’d have to funnel it into investments, where a bunch of finance bros could do whatever they wanted with it. We all remember what happened after that.
But for all their financial expertise, most of these wizards still recommend buying property amid a manifest housing crisis. They advocate for “smart” investments while Wall Street bilks small-scale investors. And you don’t see any of them testifying in front of Congress against the lax regulation of short-term lending operations. But if you find yourself in a spiral of debt because you needed some cash when your car broke down a week before the end of the month, they’ll say it’s your fault for agreeing to the terms laid out in a payday loan. That those are the only terms under which the economically disadvantaged can find credit is not up for consideration. If you were not outright lied to, it is your responsibility, they’ll explain, to live up to your obligations. If you call into one of their many syndicated radio shows asking for advice, they’ll grill you on personal expenses, not on how your insurance company left you in a pile of medical debt despite your coverage. (And really, if you signed an agreement with an insurance company, you’re probably to blame for not researching your options thoroughly.) In a recent episode on his YouTube channel, Ramsey rebuked a caller for living outside his means by supporting his orphaned niece and elderly mother. He urged him to reconsider that support. (...)
Even after the revelations of manipulation, corruption, and criminal activity on the part of mortgage brokers, banks, and investment firms, there was plenty of moral condemnation of individual homeowners for agreeing to terms they could not “honor.” There were mass evictions and a recession and a growing homelessness problem; at the same time there was mounting public suspicion that the real villains were borrowers who took out impossible loans. When U.S. News and World Report asked “Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” they listed “homeowners” first. (Media consultants were suspiciously missing from the list.) The crackerjack New York Times opinion pages wrote that assisting underwater homeowners “rewards irresponsibility.” And today this moral creep can still be found on investment websites that contend “homebuyers . . . were definitely not completely innocent.” At the same time, these arguments are being rehashed for the student debt crisis, often explicitly in the language of morality.
All the while, the cage has gotten smaller and better reinforced, and the human behavior within that cage has been subjected to a more exacting moral gaze. This has long been true for food stamp recipients who are monitored for “wasting” government “handouts” on soda and booze, or for single mothers on welfare who might be too slutty. But now that monitoring has spread to those asking not for assistance but merely sympathy. This moral-financial surveillance now extends to the humble domain of the freelance writer.
Penny for Her Thoughts
After the economic crash, after movements like Occupy brought anti-capitalist discourse into the mainstream, millennials got a bevy of electronic whazzits to help them with cage maintenance. Apps like Mint, Digit, SmartyPig, Stockpile, Tiller, GoodBudget, Personal Capital, Stash, and Acorns automated the budget and savings recommendations that Orman and her ilk had preached for twenty years. Podcasts and websites like Side Hustle, The Minimalists, Money Girl, Modernfrugality.com, NerdWallet.com, and TheBillfold.com promised to “demystify” personal finance and “remove the taboo” of talking about money. (...)
These interviews fit within a broader trend of documenting all productivity online, where writers hashtag their #amwriting word counts for the day, gym rats post their reps, and eating disorder vamps count their caloric intake and output. The motivation for such self-presentation lies somewhere between accountability, humblebragging, and outright fabrication. Nevertheless, the gratuitous logging of monetary goings-on for the internet’s gold-star approval, without taking into account that financial standing has more to do with a family’s generational wealth, recalls the behavior of mutants with good genes, an ascetic nature, and probably a lot of fire in their natal charts, who claim their weight and muscle mass is the result of paleo dieting and self-discipline. Research has shown for years that weight is not a simple equation of how many calories you consume and how many you burn, and that our food supply in America is vastly poisonous, but we still listen to these dolts telling us their thinness proves their moral worth.
by Jessa Crispin, The Baffler | Read more:
For four weeks, London-based Hunt documented every pound spent, from her daily commute to a £181 cut-and-color to over a hundred pounds on bar tabs. She ate out for lunch almost every day, and she often went out of her way to get the better, and more expensive, coffee near her workplace. She was single, with no children or dependents, living with a roommate in one of the most expensive cities in the world, a city with an acute housing crisis where over twenty-two thousand homes sit empty because they were bought for investment and not occupancy. She had savings, but with buying property beyond her reach, it was more of a rainy-day fund than a means for executing a life plan.
The diary went viral, and the condemnation was swift. A reader told Hunt she was “wasting her life,” another added that she was bringing “shame” upon her family. The audience was publicly aghast that she would spend one hundred quid on a Taylor Swift concert ticket; after all, there are so many bands and artists who need financial support. Others focused on her salary—somewhere around £40,000 for a media job—and called her a “poor little rich girl.” Many—many—used the opportunity to tell the world how frugal they are—“I read it whilst eating my homemade wrap for lunch”—the frugality somehow implying virtue. Even the financial expert brought in to comment in the original article dunked on her vices. When you’re spending so much on coffee while complaining about runaway housing prices in urban areas, he wrote, “you’re starting to lose a bit of the moral argument.”Hunt’s was hardly the only money diary to go viral this way. There was the New York City intern whose rent is paid by her parents, an Instagram influencer earning $604,000 a year, a Toronto couple with almost $500,000 in debt, and a Scot on the dole. No matter the income level or the employment status, each expense was suspect. “[H]ere’s a tip to save money.dont buy coffee and sugar when you have less than a tenner” an anonymous account scolded the Scot. Several readers expressed horror that the steeply indebted couple still ate sushi. If a money diarist mentioned buying a top at H&M, a commenter found cause to mention sweatshops. If another line-itemed a stop at McDonald’s, someone was there to say veganism is the only ethical choice.
Not even sex diaries inspire as much moralizing as the money diary (nor are they even close to being as popular or viral-friendly). These days all romantic and sexual relations are understood to be about power, and they are discussed in the language of health: if you date a notably younger or older person, you’ve “got issues”; if you are in a committed relationship with a partner of the same age, economic and educational background, and salary, you’re “healthy.” Tales of promiscuity and lust inspire mild reactions like “get therapy.” Love is love, polyamory is trending, everyone is sex positive, and Midwestern churches are flying rainbow flags. All our indignation has found a new target in the genre of financial disclosure.
Prosperity is Personal
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as the financial industry underwent deregulation, and as consumer protections from credit card companies, banks, and short-term lenders were stripped away, the idea of personal financial responsibility as a coping mechanism took hold. Everyone was trying to fleece you, banks added fees for speaking to a teller or using your debit card outside of the country or asking for a paper statement or putting money in your account or taking money out of your account or closing your account. And the high priests of personal finance materialized in clouds of smoke, offering a prosperity gospel of discipline and attentiveness, if only you paid them on the installment plan.
The 1990s saw the rise of Suze Orman, Vicki Robin, and Dave Ramsey, gurus who built self-help empires of books, TV and radio shows, financial planning and counseling, all with the same message: document and account for everything. Any excess or frivolity was waste. Why throw away $3.50 on a cup of coffee when you could shove it in a Roth IRA and retire a millionaire forty years later? Meanwhile, interest rates were stagnant, so if you wanted your savings to grow you’d have to funnel it into investments, where a bunch of finance bros could do whatever they wanted with it. We all remember what happened after that.
But for all their financial expertise, most of these wizards still recommend buying property amid a manifest housing crisis. They advocate for “smart” investments while Wall Street bilks small-scale investors. And you don’t see any of them testifying in front of Congress against the lax regulation of short-term lending operations. But if you find yourself in a spiral of debt because you needed some cash when your car broke down a week before the end of the month, they’ll say it’s your fault for agreeing to the terms laid out in a payday loan. That those are the only terms under which the economically disadvantaged can find credit is not up for consideration. If you were not outright lied to, it is your responsibility, they’ll explain, to live up to your obligations. If you call into one of their many syndicated radio shows asking for advice, they’ll grill you on personal expenses, not on how your insurance company left you in a pile of medical debt despite your coverage. (And really, if you signed an agreement with an insurance company, you’re probably to blame for not researching your options thoroughly.) In a recent episode on his YouTube channel, Ramsey rebuked a caller for living outside his means by supporting his orphaned niece and elderly mother. He urged him to reconsider that support. (...)
Even after the revelations of manipulation, corruption, and criminal activity on the part of mortgage brokers, banks, and investment firms, there was plenty of moral condemnation of individual homeowners for agreeing to terms they could not “honor.” There were mass evictions and a recession and a growing homelessness problem; at the same time there was mounting public suspicion that the real villains were borrowers who took out impossible loans. When U.S. News and World Report asked “Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis,” they listed “homeowners” first. (Media consultants were suspiciously missing from the list.) The crackerjack New York Times opinion pages wrote that assisting underwater homeowners “rewards irresponsibility.” And today this moral creep can still be found on investment websites that contend “homebuyers . . . were definitely not completely innocent.” At the same time, these arguments are being rehashed for the student debt crisis, often explicitly in the language of morality.
All the while, the cage has gotten smaller and better reinforced, and the human behavior within that cage has been subjected to a more exacting moral gaze. This has long been true for food stamp recipients who are monitored for “wasting” government “handouts” on soda and booze, or for single mothers on welfare who might be too slutty. But now that monitoring has spread to those asking not for assistance but merely sympathy. This moral-financial surveillance now extends to the humble domain of the freelance writer.
Penny for Her Thoughts
After the economic crash, after movements like Occupy brought anti-capitalist discourse into the mainstream, millennials got a bevy of electronic whazzits to help them with cage maintenance. Apps like Mint, Digit, SmartyPig, Stockpile, Tiller, GoodBudget, Personal Capital, Stash, and Acorns automated the budget and savings recommendations that Orman and her ilk had preached for twenty years. Podcasts and websites like Side Hustle, The Minimalists, Money Girl, Modernfrugality.com, NerdWallet.com, and TheBillfold.com promised to “demystify” personal finance and “remove the taboo” of talking about money. (...)
These interviews fit within a broader trend of documenting all productivity online, where writers hashtag their #amwriting word counts for the day, gym rats post their reps, and eating disorder vamps count their caloric intake and output. The motivation for such self-presentation lies somewhere between accountability, humblebragging, and outright fabrication. Nevertheless, the gratuitous logging of monetary goings-on for the internet’s gold-star approval, without taking into account that financial standing has more to do with a family’s generational wealth, recalls the behavior of mutants with good genes, an ascetic nature, and probably a lot of fire in their natal charts, who claim their weight and muscle mass is the result of paleo dieting and self-discipline. Research has shown for years that weight is not a simple equation of how many calories you consume and how many you burn, and that our food supply in America is vastly poisonous, but we still listen to these dolts telling us their thinness proves their moral worth.
by Jessa Crispin, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Liana Finck
