What my college friendships taught me about money

Andy* was my first college friend. We are bound by music and TV shows, but our secular Jews need to complain about everything. But after the shine of the first month of school had worn off, I noticed that she became nervous when I suggested going out to eat off campus, which I did often because I chased good food like a spaniel chasing a squirrel. She didn’t understand why we would want to spend money on eating out when we had unlimited access to the dining room downstairs. At the time, I felt rejected because food adventures were my main way of connecting. Looking back, I see that not only was she right, she was so much the food was available and had already been paid for, but her reaction was probably based on protecting her own financial situation.

Before Andy, I never thought much about my socioeconomic status. I met her in the first few days of my freshman year of college, at an exorbitantly expensive private liberal arts school in an already expensive old money town—a place where people casually talk about parking spaces for their yachts. I was 3,000 miles from the California suburb where I grew up, where I had always had friends from quite a variety of backgrounds: some lived in sprawling McMansions, others in modest apartments and single-story houses. My family ended up somewhere in the middle. But it wasn’t until I arrived at college, where students were either worried about money or busy flaunting their wealth, that the invisible lines dividing us all by class suddenly became clear.

At 18, I was unable to have meaningful conversations about socioeconomic status because I didn’t pay attention to it.

Although my scholarship and financial aid softened the blow to my family’s budget, sending me to this school was still an important commitment for my parents and grandparents, although I knew little about it because we didn’t talk about it at home. We also didn’t talk about how much cheaper it would have been for me to stay in California (with the greatly reduced in-state tuition there). The bottom line was that I would go to college no matter what. I would choose where, no matter what. And we will make it work, no matter what. I didn’t ask any more questions.

Experts featured in this article

Aja Evans, LMHC, is a certified therapist, speaker, and writer specializing in financial therapy. She is also the President-Elect of the Financial Therapy Association and the author of Feel Good Finance.

Many college students call themselves “poor,” but few take it literally. Andy did just that. She spoke openly about her family’s finances and the difficulties associated with her expensive education. If she was poor, I didn’t know who I was. But I knew I didn’t have the same money worries that seemed to follow her through every class, meal, and study session. At 18, I was unable to have meaningful conversations about socioeconomic status because I didn’t pay attention to it. I now know that ignorance of my own situation was itself a result of my financial privilege. In my entire life, my parents only had to sit me down once, in the midst of the 2008 recession, to have a tough conversation about money and what we could afford. I don’t remember this ever coming up again.

Financial therapist Aja Evans confirms that, typically, people who are somewhere in the middle (what we would call the middle and upper middle class) are the least in touch with their financial truths, while people who are on the extreme ends Spectrum people tend to know more about money and whether they have it. Even if a rich kid isn’t directly involved in conversations about money management, chances are at least some of those conversations are happening around that kid. Conversely, children raised in low-income families learn early—directly or indirectly—about how and when to spend money. Those least likely to talk about money are often kids like me: kids who grew up comfortably without needing anything, but don’t necessarily have trust funds.

“Education isn’t always accessible to everyone,” Evans says, which means it can be jarring to enter college where suddenly these economic disparities are on full display.

“The emergence of a new bubble full of diversity can be really shocking, be it economic diversity, social status, wealth, race, etc.,” she tells PS. “You might say, ‘I had no idea 18-year-olds were driving a brand new Infinitis,’ or maybe you’d say, ‘Don’t everyone have a car?’ It will be new to people if it is different from their home standard of living.”

Having an open dialogue about money and my family’s financial situation would have greatly benefited me heading into college. It might have been easier for me to meet Andie where she was and discuss how we had developed different values ​​that stemmed from our unique, individual relationships with money. Perhaps it would help me to be less judgmental of Andy and not respond to her concerns with my own concerns. And maybe it would have helped me make better financial decisions after college, instead of spending beyond what my media salary could actually afford.

I don’t blame my parents or grandparents for not sitting me down to talk about it. They worked hard to put our family in such a comfortable place and gave me more than I could ever hope to repay them financially, spiritually, and genetically. (I have beautiful hair.)

Plus, I recognize that these conversations are really difficult, and Evans emphasizes that as well.

“Talking about money is extremely difficult, and parents haven’t yet figured out how to talk about it with their kids,” she says. But that’s starting to change. With the pandemic, the recent recession and the proliferation of social media influencers dedicated to financial wellness, debt and even bankruptcy, the taboo against talking about money is slowly fading, she adds.

Evans says the truth is that “you can’t necessarily assume someone’s socioeconomic status without asking them directly.” We often don’t know where a person’s money actually comes from. “People assume that someone can afford something just because they do it, but that’s not necessarily the case. This person may be drowning in debt.”

Comparison is so important in college studies that some of us may have majored in it as well. For many young people, college is the first time they’ve been around a group of other kids whose lives up to that point have been different from their own. It can be disorienting, but it’s also one of the best selling points for going to college if you can at all: You meet new people who challenge your worldview in sometimes uncomfortable ways. Socioeconomic status is just one of the differences that students will definitely notice, and that’s great. But comparison is no good if it ends up making you feel bad, warns Evans—which is what Andy and I needed to hear at that age.

“Please try not to tie your net worth to your self-worth,” she says. “You are a valuable person whether you have money or not, and if anyone is going to treat you badly either way, it’s probably not your people. It can be very difficult at a time in life when you have these friends that seem like the most important thing in the world.”

Andy and I didn’t stay friends not because of money, but because of other (really important) incompatibilities. (I’m sure it didn’t help that she caught me at a time when I was so closed off that I even said out loud that bisexuality wasn’t real. The joke is on me, my obsession with Chappell Rohan and my growing collection of small tattoos. . ) The lessons I learned about myself, my status and my world may have outlived the friendship, but I am still grateful for it.

*Name has been changed for privacy reasons.

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is Deputy Editor of PS Balance. During her seven years as a reporter, her beats covered the entire lifestyle spectrum; she has covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate and agriculture for Ambrook Research.