Friends & Money

Hi All! First time reddit-poster, really excited to have found /FIREyFemmes after lurking on /financialindependence for a while.

I’ve seen a number of posts on financial independence about who people share their financial plans and significant digits with - often resulting in multitudes of answers that boil down to “nope no one never, lost all my friends, just my spouse, just my mom, I would never”. As a woman who has gradually built up financial knowledge culminating in my current early retirement goals, I’ve always found it extremely gratifying to try and share the knowledge I have with my female friends, despite varying levels of interest.

In terms of my salary, I’ve never found openly sharing it with other women in my field to lead to tension (maybe they just always make more ☺). I’ve only spoken about my raw savings numbers to friends in similar salary ranges, because I can imagine it might be discouraging to friends who aren’t able to make progress as quickly as I can, but I have with others to illustrate the power their money has to grow if they make changes in their spending. No one likes a proselytizer, but I’ve had some fairly good results framing things as “these are changes I’ve made, they were hard at first but now I actually feel better about my lifestyle, and I’m excited about how it’s working out. I can tell you more if you’re interested” type thing.

As my life has become more frugal and my goals have completely shifted over the last two-ish years, I feel so much more connected and comfortable with my friends who I’ve been open about my plans and savings with. I try not to be judgmental about the friends who make profligate spending choices (the lack of financial education and thoughtfulness in our culture is a big reason why I want to share my learnings with my friends), but the default activities of spending time shopping, getting cocktails, brunch etc. definitely can create a barrier.

What are everyone else’s thoughts on money discussions with friends, especially in the context of female friendship?