Yesterday I finished this sequel to the bestselling novel Confessions of a Shopaholic. I definitely needed to read something funny during this time. If you haven’t read the first book yet, it’s about a 20 something year old woman named Becky who, as you guessed by the title, loves shopping a lot. Her love of shopping gets her in a lot of financial debt and on top of that she isn’t making enough money at her job to keep up her lifestyle. Honestly it’s been a year since I read the first one, so I forgot some key plot points, but I was able to remember a few key characters, like Becky’s boyfriend Luke. This time, Luke moves to New York and she goes with him, hoping to land her own TV show. But she still hasn’t paid her overdraft fees and is still in a lot of credit card debt, and the many stores around NYC don’t do much to curb her shopping addiction.
I’m the complete opposite of Becky. I don’t really shop unless I absolutely need something and wasn’t really into shopping for hours and hours growing up. (Except for that one time I had to find an outfit for a wedding I went to. That was definitely an adventure). I thought personal finance just meant saving money for your retirement. But after educating myself on finance by way of the personal finance blog The Financial Diet (TFD) I gained a different perspective on things like credit, investing, negotiating salaries, etc. While I appreciate the financial advice that experts like Suze Orman and Jean Chatzky have given, and while I still save my money, reading The Financial Diet and learning about those things showed me that having credit isn’t always a bad thing and that you can save money but also you can allow yourself some nice things once in a while as long as you take the responsibility to manage it. And nice things doesn’t just mean material things, it can be donating to your favorite charity (or the two go hand in hand, you can buy from companies where the money goes to a good cause). I like donating to social causes, that is one way I’ve been treating myself.
Also, several of the people who speak on the TFD blog remind us that people who work in personal finance are human beings who have dealt with things like credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck in their own lives, so it’s not like they’re just shelling out advice just for kicks. They actually went through those issues with their own money and are totally fine talking about it without feeling ashamed. At one point in the book, Becky gets publicly shamed when people find out she is in credit card debt. They assume she has her finances totally together just because she talks on a show about personal finance and managing money. But let’s face it, if she had all her finances together, there probably wouldn’t be a Confessions of a Shopaholic book series at all. There is a very loving and supportive atmosphere whenever I visit The Financial Diet blog and channel because Chelsea and the other people who speak on the channel remind us that personal finance isn’t just about saving every penny, it’s deeply tied to class, privilege, access, and other factors such as race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. There is a wider stigma attached to talking about money in our society, and I think Millennials and Gen-Zers in particular have challenged that stigma by having these honest conversations about personal finance without making someone feel embarrassed or like a failure just because they haven’t paid their bills in time, etc. Also a lot of people in these two generations have graduated in school debt or graduated during economic recessions (the 2008 one in particular was pretty bad). Also, we’ve had to deal with rising home prices, stagnant wages and a general increase in the overall cost of living in a lot of places, so shaming someone for money problems is counterproductive and does nothing to address these wider issues. Even though it’s of course important to take responsibility for your finances, there’s some things you can’t control, like the COVID-19 pandemic this year. A lot of people have lost their jobs and with that, their means of making a living, so the stigma around discussing finances is useless at this point because everyone’s finances had been affected in some way, for better or worse. As hard as it is to talk about money, reading Shopaholic Takes Manhattan and the TFD blog have taught me that you really do have to push past those feelings of shame in order to have honest discussions about money. Those conversations are emotionally difficult of course because you end up going back to your past and thinking about mistakes and failures, but the more people feel comfortable talking about money, the less they will feel ashamed to discuss it. Becky is at fist ashamed to talk about her debt, but she learns that through being honest, she is able to regain people’s trust and also trust herself more.
This honesty with herself enables her to win in the end and she pays off her debt by selling all the clothes she bought. Even when the people she works with on Morning Coffee want to feel pity for her and want her to still feel sad and bogged down by her past debt issues, she doesn’t let them tell her how to feel and is able to move on with her life. That’s part of personal finance, too, is not letting past money troubles permanently define who you are. Luke sees this change in her, too, and he changes his attitude towards her as well.
I can’t wait to read the 3rd book in the series, Shopaholic Ties the Knot!
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