The Three Genres of Money Problem

Lessons gleaned from writing an advice column about money

Little known fact: money does not grow on trees. It just organically accumulates beneath very small plants.

People don’t talk about money enough. And I don’t mean this in the crass sense that they don’t brag about material things, but in the sense that money affects everyone and yet discussing it is taboo. The only people who can really afford (in both senses) to avoid the topic at all are usually so wealthy that it causes very few problems for them.

I’ve been thinking lately about what people avoid discussing because I’ve been writing an advice column about money for Slate, called PayDirt, for the last two and a half months. Readers submit questions to Slate and I answer them, and there are already some recurring themes. I reserve the right to revisit this after I’ve been writing the column longer, but from what I’ve seen so far, there are three dilemmas that appear so often, in slightly varied forms, that I’ve begun to think of them as distinct genres of money problem. Here they are, in order of importance:

Check splitting drama

Some people should just never go to restaurants because the check creates more anxiety for them than the experience of eating out creates pleasure. The recurring letters I get about how to split checks have a similar theme: when the letter writer eats with a group, they eat…