Kajillionaire

money and its unrealities

A photo from the set of Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire” (2020)

Though it’s one of my favorite things to do, I understand why people rarely discuss money with one another.

It’s like sex. The poles of extremity are populated with those who are either deathly afraid or neurotically obsessed, and few make up the sensible middle. Our parents have a lot to do with how we see it, and to that end we tend to follow directly in their footsteps or chart a path opposed. Some people are so bad with it that it sends them to jail. I can’t think of a single person who isn’t fraught about it, who doesn’t squirm.

I am afraid to write about money and my relationship to it, but I seldom consider fear to be a good enough excuse for inaction. I’ve experimented with discussing it publicly over the years; I frequently share details about my income in order to bring awareness to parity in the music industry, and I occasionally give advice about freelance accounting. But my personal relationship with money is stickier, more vulnerable. It exposes the things I wanted, how I triangulated my desire through capital value. It involves sharing the ways I was greedy and stupid and confused. I have a personal desire to read more writing about money and the darkness that people’s relationship with it reveals. So, in the interest of that, here is my darkness.

My own family ran the gamut of stressful money situations: good years, bad years, mild tax evasion and/or nonpayment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce attorneys, the summer my grandparents paid for groceries. Growing up where I did, in wealthy suburbia, I considered us to be noticeably hard-pressed. Then, I grew up a little more and realized that we were more or less the average American family. The average American family is, of course, constantly under considerable financial stress.

When I was growing up, I always wondered what it might be like to be rich — to not worry about money. Then I became rich, and I worried more about money than ever.

The story of my crippling financial avoidance is not a sympathetic one. It started when I was twenty, making more than both of my parents combined, and my anxieties came from an inability to handle money rather than an inability to make it. Not being accustomed to having money, my lifestyle creep was immediate and severe. Not being accustomed to money, I had no idea what money could do.

At first, I was living in Los Angeles in a cozy studio that cost me $1,100 a month. My wifi network was called Princess Palace. I was making some money. Then I started making more money. Then I moved. I moved again. I blinked and blacked into my life; I was carrying a modular sofa into a house I was suddenly renting for nearly five times what I once paid for my baby studio. I was going out to dinner every night. The weight I gained was made up of small plates of filet mignon and potato gratin. I was checking my suitcases curbside at the airport. I paid off my student loans — all of them. I contributed generously to a friend’s short film. I contributed generously to a complete redesign of my own living room.

I knew I didn’t need all of this stuff, or to be living at this level — the happiest times of my life were when I was beatniking across the country and my bank account never cleared $120 — but I didn’t know what to do or how to slow the roll once I started, plus everyone seemed to think that this is what one should do with that kind of money.

But at a certain point, I didn’t even know what I was doing with it. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I wasn’t looking at my money at all. I would spend recklessly, save haphazardly, and spend every tax season sweating through my sheets and moving money around to save my own tail. I was completely terrified of numbers of all kinds, not wanting to know what I didn’t know and fearing that something huge was piling up that I wouldn’t be able to escape from. When I was twenty-two, I got a tax bill for $75,000 and considered desert exile. I skimmed articles about financial planning; every once in a while I panicked and threw my whole paycheck into a random savings account. I knew that other people had family friends who were “money guys,” but I didn’t know any of those people well enough to ask for their help, plus I figured that having a “money guy” was a state decided by birth. I frequently fell into intense spirals of shame, offloading thousands at a time to mutual aid funds and non-profit organizations, as though that would absolve my personal feelings of guilt.

When I started making $100,000 a year, I felt impossibly rich. The year I made $300,000 I somehow, inexplicably, felt poor.

This is obviously ridiculous. Of course, I was not. I was a rich person! I was in the one percent! The tax payments that seemed to hang over my head like an anvil were only so colossal because I was making a colossal amount of money. But it didn’t seem to matter. Every night, I lay awake wondering when it would all be taken away, when I would realize that I’d flushed everything down the drain because I was too scared to look at it, what would happen when I had to move out of a house so big it scared me to walk around in its darkness at night.

I started to think that it might never go away, this fear of not having enough. I started to think that having more than you need makes you believe that you need more than you have.

It’s a maddening thing. The “golden handcuffs” trope of rich people being unfulfilled by their riches is classic and stupefying, and their stories make me want to shake them by the shoulders and say “literally try being poor for one fucking day I promise you it is worse!” I am under no pretensions that I would be happier making $12,000 a year than $1 million, in the way that some people appear to have noble savage fantasies about the American underclass. There is no romance in being so completely abandoned and abused by the system of capitalism and the penalties it foists on its poor. There is absolutely a floor of income necessary to fulfill basic needs without immense stress, to be able to fill your head with things other than thoughts of money (real, logistical, practical thoughts — not just vague anxieties).

But, in my case, I realized that there is also a ceiling. Past a certain point, the money I made didn’t matter. Its excess made me feel sick and confused, always wanting something I couldn’t even justify my desire for. Grasping complete emptiness in my hands. It was hard to explain to people — my hardworking, financially stressed parents in particular — how and why it could be worth walking away from it. But I wanted to leave my job, and the thing I was promised by the culture — that a certain amount of money would arrive and make other compromises on my values worth it — never came true for me.

When I decided to go, I knew I needed to look honestly at my money. In a practical sense, everything about my life would need to change, including and especially how I was conducting my finances. On my previous salary, I could skate by with the privilege of being able to “find the money” somewhere, but the road to my new life was paved with question marks. Anything could happen, including the unlikely but possible reality that I wouldn’t make any money at all in the coming years. I was twenty-three. The idea that “anything could happen” now, for the first time, felt something like a threat.

I decided that the only thing scarier than looking transparently at my money was keeping myself in the dark. I was so, so ashamed to confront the recklessness, the apathy, the depression, the anxiety, the greed, the hunger and the despair that populated my financial documents. The week I spent logging my past years’ expenses in spreadsheets was difficult. I had to keep taking breaks. Every night, I would down a few glasses of wine in order to get through the next month of statements. I’d cradle my head in agony over some of the ways I spent my money. I didn’t even remember half of the purchases. How could I have been so stupid, so thoughtless? When did I decide that I needed this, and how did I justify it? How much more could I have sent to mutual aid funds? How many people were starving?

Coming to grips with my physical objects was a second nausea. Moving out of LA, I was disgusted by the expensive things that I had bought only to fill my expensive home. The idyllic picture I had of my young adult life — one where no one had to worry about money, where the house was big enough and the possessions luxurious enough that everyone inside had no choice but to feel perfectly comfortable — had caused me to pursue a completely perverted idea of domesticity. We moved four times when I was a kid; It was as though I believed that throwing money at something would keep it in place. But it didn’t feel like I lived in a comfortable home. It felt like I tried to stand in front of a billboard of normalcy, smiling, smiling, smiling.

I downsized by ten, and we moved to New York. I saved everything I could, and I prepared for the worst. I am grateful that the worst did not come. Though I am no longer in the upper echelons of income, it’s because of my years there that I was able to drift back to normalcy with a sufficient cushion of safety. The profound privilege of that kind of income, even just a few years of it, has caused a ripple effect throughout the rest of my life that I will forever benefit from. Because of that, I had the freedom to slow down and save up. That is what wealth can grant you — the possibility of making mistakes and changing your mind, a process that is among the most human in the world. It is a profound injustice that this is not afforded to all.

I’m twenty-five now. I have an emergency fund and systems for everything. My budget is meticulous, and I clock into Google Spreadsheets with loyal regularity. I don’t spend how I used to; I can’t imagine it. The things I purchase mean much more to me now, and the money itself means much less. I feel freer to give, because I’m less afraid of having less. There’s a decent chance that I’ll never again make as much money as I did at twenty-two. I’m grateful for that.

There is something sort of beautiful about tracking every single dollar I’ve ever spent. It’s the closest thing I have to an objective document of my life, far more consistent and honest than any journal I’ve ever kept. Little reminders everywhere — wow, I really did take that budget flight back from London to Newark, and oh, now I remember how it felt to see my wonderful boyfriend waiting for me, willing to carry my bags and cover the cab all the way back to the city when I was too tired to take the rail. And, yes, five metro swipes in one day for the time I wanted to go to the beach and the park and the vintage store and to dinner when I got back from tour to remember how beautiful life in New York is. Ah, here it is, the $2,000 I moved from savings when I had to get an emergency rabies shot. Oh, yes, $115 spent on other people’s memoirs at Barnes and Noble the winter I was going through a colossal personal crisis and convinced myself that 24 was old enough to start writing my own. There it is, all the evidence of my life. An expensive perfume I never wore, a cheap pair of sneakers that I practically slept in. One drink too many, one dinner too soon (evidenced by a bodega charge later that night). I dutifully account for it all, my love and my shame and my evidence of wanting and doing and being and working and spending and living. It’s all there, anyway. Might as well look at it.