Financial literacy is resistance

We are kept ignorant about money so we will allow ourselves to be exploited.

I hate learning about money. It makes me feel ill. I will do almost anything not to have to understand how my finances work, how much money I have, and what it might mean for my future.

Gaby Dunn has taught me that this is how capitalism controls us. By us, here, I mean especially women and other minorities (me) and people who are poor or financially insecure (not me). Because we do not understand our own money, we are prey to: those who lend money, those who exploit labor, and those who sell us things we cannot afford. This is, in general (I am no economist) why the people who were hurt in the 2008 financial crisis were people who were already hurting financially.

We in academia are subject to this, too.

Faith-based financial planning

I always thought that to understand money was to sell out. I always believed that I was driven by passion, not greed. I do not aspire to wealth and my appreciation of financial security is relatively new. (This is of course, in part, because I have always had a financial safety net.) When I decided to enter academia, I thought that I was choosing a profession I believed in instead of choosing one that would make me money.

There’s a story I like to tell about this. Years ago, before grad school, I was in a truck with some colleagues deep in the mountains of New Mexico. We got a flat tire and the driver got nervous, and so after we replaced the tire, I offered to take over. I was driving on this dirt road that descended very quickly down a mountain and as I drove forward, a crack in the road began to widen under the truck. Soon the truck was straddling a ravine. A boulder-filled ravine. I had no idea how to get the car into and through the ravine without destroying it. So I closed my eyes and accelerated.

Basically this is how I make financial plans. When I applied to graduate school, I basically knew where I wanted to end up: I knew the job I wanted and the lifestyle I aspired to. I saw my graduate education as the boulder-filled ravine. I closed my eyes and accelerated.

Some costs

I knew that I was making financial sacrifices to follow my dreams. But I did not balance that with any clear understanding of what those sacrifices were, of how much they would cost me, and of what it would mean for me in the long term.

This has remained true as I have made decisions about my academic life including:

• Selecting a graduate program
• Paying my own way to conferences in other countries
• Paying for educational opportunities not funded by my degree program
• Negotiating for, accepting, and turning down jobs
• Moving across state lines (five times!)
• Building a professional wardrobe
• Buying furniture

I have literally no idea whether any of these financial investments were reasonable or beneficial. But I’d like to find out.

Some questions

• How much does field work & archival work cost?
• How much do conferences cost?
• What are the financial costs of post-grad academic precarity/contingency?
• when should you pay out-of-pocket to do fieldwork?
• when should you pay out-of-pocket to go to conferences?
• how do you know if you should take a contingent post-grad position?
• When and how to take on student debt and credit card debt
• How to decide whether to take external paid work
• How to decide when to do work for free
• What is exploitation and how is it different from just not making enough money?
• What does it look like to value things besides money when you are also in debt/struggling?
• How do these decisions look different if you are not a U.S. citizen?
• How do these decisions look different if you are a caretaker of any kind?

The Ravine

The end of the story about the ravine is that I got a flat tire immediately and we had to abandon the truck.

In our academic and professional lives, we deserve better than that. My goal here is to answer the questions above with clear, simple, practical information. The kind that can help you and me make informed decisions on both a small scale (should I attend that conference?) and a large scale (should I accept that job?).

On Twitter I said “What if financial planning were a part of graduate education?” We all know it’s not going to be, not for everyone. So here’s a place to start.

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