Money and Me
“Look at those houses, sweetie.”
My mom was driving me through the richest part of our town, admiring the million-dollar oceanfront homes. In her yearning gaze, I knew that what we had wasn’t good enough.
I grew up in a home that was conflicting in nearly every imaginable way. My dad was born and raised in New York and a lifelong blue-collar employee of NYC. My mom was born and raised in communist China and left when she was 29 to seek out the American Dream. They disagreed about the oil splatters left on the appliances from my mom’s home cooked Chinese food, whether to have a house with one floor or two floors, and raising me with American values or Chinese values. Most of all, they argued about money.
My mom and I bonded over shopping. We would spend hours at Bed, Bath and Beyond, JCPenny’s, and Macy’s. I’m not sure what we were looking for, but there was always something new. Another deal. Oh look, a coupon! There was always something missing that we had to fix or fill.
“Take this straight to your room, don’t let your dad see.”
After a day of shopping, the guilt was a heavy blanket over us. She wasn’t supposed to be spending money on things we didn’t need, so she would hide the bags in my closet and sneak them out when my dad wasn’t home. She would make sure to catch the mailman before my dad got home so he wouldn’t see the credit card statement from Macy’s.
Not only was the household conflicting, I received conflicting messages from my mom herself. She would easily spend hundreds of dollars on clothing, as long as it was on sale, but would also wash our Bounty paper towels so they could be reused. Nothing was to go to waste so that we could save a few pennies here and there. It didn’t make sense to me.
It wasn’t until I started on my journey to financial freedom that I learned these were signs of a shopping addiction. Like mother, like daughter, I inherited these traits after a lifetime of this being my “normal.”
Before I understood money or my family’s actual socioeconomic status, I thought we were struggling. Through the attention placed on what we didn’t have, I wasn’t able to see what we did have. I could only see what we were missing.
“Try and save 50% of your money for a rainy day.”
My dad, on the other hand, taught me how to save. He encouraged me to save 50% of my allowances, babysitting money, and birthday money. He took me to the bank to open my first bank account, and taught me about interest and CDs. He implemented allowances for me to learn the value of working for my money. I even had a little piggy bank that said, “for a rainy day.”
But it was way more fun to spend money than to save money, and I always felt like I was disappointing my dad. In my first year of college, I lived on State Street in Chicago, one of the largest shopping districts. In the 4 blocks between the classrooms and dorm rooms, there was Forever 21, H&M, Macy’s, and Urban Outfitters, just to name a few. My friends and I would stop in these stores nearly every day after class and I always felt the need to buy something.
I was striving to fit in and became a chameleon—changing what I thought, what I wore, and what I said in order to be more like the people around me so that I could be accepted. My friends would often say they were broke, so I started to say it too. It couldn’t be further from the truth but I made every effort to appear as if it were so. I was broke—from shopping every day.
After college, I was struggling to pay the bills. I still had my dad’s voice in my head to save 50%, but being a perfectionist with an intense all-or-nothing mindset, I felt like I was failing if I couldn’t save enough, so I just stopped trying.
Just to add to my confusion, the person I dated from high school through after college, had his own ideas about money. He believed money was evil, and people who had money were greedy, fake, and had to do selfish things in order to get there. He upheld those who had little money as “good, honest” people and those who had wealth as “bad” people. He once said he wished he could get a big pile of cash and just burn it. He had watched families be torn apart over money and his solution was to rid the world of money. In an effort to get his stamp of approval, I accepted his world view, and created even more internal conflict. I took on his wounds of being hurt by people with money.
I was caught between two worlds: the one that was ingrained in me to shop shop shop, buy buy buy, and the one that I striving to gain approval through by pushing away any money that came towards me because I didn’t want to be seen as a “bad” person.
I started a slow downward spiral when I got my first credit card after college. Ever heard of retail therapy? That’s exactly what I did. I didn’t have the awareness at the time that I was shopping any time I felt anxious or sad. I would feel this all-consuming need to research for hours about a product before making a purchase, and it was obsessive. It would be all I could think about, and it helped distract me from the underlying and unaddressed trauma from my life. There was always something that I “needed” to have and it felt like this giant growing bubble of tension that could only be popped when I made the purchase. Immediately afterwards, the feeling of “needing” the item disappeared, only to be replaced by shame of spending money I didn’t have.
Over time, I developed a belief that I was bad with money and I couldn’t be trusted. Anytime a large amount was deposited into my bank account, I felt like I needed to move it or get rid of it somehow so that I wouldn’t end up using it to buy more things I didn’t need.
My wake-up moment came in Anthropologie. I was standing in line, about to swipe my credit card for some fancy dresses that I didn't need but felt like I "HAD to have." I had $5 in my checking account and over $8,000 in credit card debt.
I kept telling myself, "I can put the dresses down and walk away," but my body was frozen. I couldn't will myself out of the line. I felt impulsive and reckless. I knew I was digging myself even deeper into debt but I couldn't stop myself.
I handed over my card, feeling my stomach already clenched with guilt, knowing the shame that would come soon after, while also excited for the rush of buying something new.
This was the moment I chose to make a BIG change.
Read: How I Paid Off Over $10,600 of Credit Card Debt in One Year