The Feminist Financial Handbook. Brynne Conroy

Читать онлайн книгу.

The Feminist Financial Handbook - Brynne Conroy


Скачать книгу
stress saw an income decrease of 18 percent to 30 percent. While we’ll never be able to dodge all stress, we can relieve some of it by letting go of the idea of becoming that woman with a perfectly balanced life, and potentially improve our finances while we’re at it.

      Instead, we can go with the flow, allowing ourselves to live our best lives rather than what we think is the life of the “perfect” woman. Because she doesn’t exist.

      The Imperfect Wealthy Woman

      We’ve established and accepted that the “perfect” or “super” woman is a myth. But we can still find wealth even with all our perfectly normal imperfections.

      Defining wealth is tricky business, though. Traditionally, the word is associated with mountains of money. While that’s certainly one aspect of wealth, you can have tons of cash and still be totally miserable. We also need to pay attention to factors like our physical health, mental health, social networks, and overall contentment.

      If you’re working 60 hours per week in front of a screen, you may have a ton of money but not a ton of physical activity in your life. You may also be having a hard time connecting with your friends and family because of the scarcity of free time. This is a problem because our social connections play a large role in our mental health and have even been identified as a corollary factor in living a longer life.

      And then there is contentment or happiness. This is such a complex topic that the entire next chapter will be dedicated to it. Before we delve into how to be happy, though, take a minute and think about your own values. In much the same way as you prioritize your time, consider how you prioritize these factors as contributing to your overall wealth status. Because a wealthy life isn’t all about dollars and cents.

      Take Action

      •Let go of the idea of superwoman.

      •Prioritize these five areas of your life:

      •Family

      •Friends

      •Work/School

      •Volunteer/Community Efforts

      •Personal Goal

      Be sure to rank them in order of importance to you now, not by how important each has been to you in the past. Also make sure you are making these decisions without outside influence.

      1.

      2.

      3.

      4.

      5.

      •Before you get into evaluating your money, think about how you are doing in other areas of your life, as these can affect your perception of being your wealthiest self, too. Some examples include physical health, mental health, social networks, and overall contentment.

       Chapter II

       Money Isn’t the Key to Happiness

      Stop chasing cash. And stop chasing smiles while you’re at it.

      We’ve established that you won’t find happiness in having it all—primarily because that’s an unachievable goal. We’ve also identified that happiness or contentment is a primary concern when we’re defining what a wealthy life looks like for us as individuals. Despite that, you may be surprised to find out that the reverse isn’t necessarily true: the amount of money in your bank account does not dictate your happiness levels.

      According to research by positive psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, only about 10 percent of one’s happiness level can be attributed to our circumstances. Our circumstances include things like where we live, how we look, and—yes—how much money we make. That means that our income has far less than 10 percent bearing on how content we are in our life.

      That being said, not having enough money can lead to higher stress levels. Higher stress obviously makes us less content—or satiated, as scientists phrase it. If you are making $32,000 per year, your satiation levels are highly likely to improve if your household income jumps up to $70,000 per year, since those extra tens of thousands give you the resources you need to make it through daily life and tackle obstacles and emergencies that may come your way with far more ease.

      There is a tipping point, though. In 2018, a new study came out with new numbers as to how much is needed to achieve peak money-to-satiation ratios in different areas across the world. Here in North America, that number is $105,000. If your household income is below this amount, more money would likely make you more satiated. Beyond that amount, however, more financial wealth is not worth pursuing if you’re trying to use money to bring you contentment.

      The most recent government-verified data shows US households have a median income of $59,039 USD per year, while the median Canadian household income is $80,940 CAD per year. This indicates that more than 50 percent of our respective populations would see greater satiation levels if they brought in more money annually.

      But remember, income is only one of several factors that contribute to only 10 percent of those satiation levels. More money is going to help, but it’s not necessarily going to make your life abundantly joyous.

      Where are our efforts better spent? I talked to Carol Graham—Leo Pasvolsky Fellow at The Brookings Institute—to find out. While Graham doesn’t tell people how to become happy, she has extensively studied contributing factors to well-being, especially across global populations of women.

      Meaningful Experiences

      The American Dream, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as, ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ may just be toxic in the way we currently interpret it. Because this is a feminist book, we’ll take a look at the fact that these words were lifted and altered—and the underlying reasons why.

      Thomas Jefferson did indeed steal this phrase from John Locke, an English philosopher who focused on society and politics. The original phrase was ‘life, liberty, and property,’ but seeing as how Jefferson and several other of the founding fathers counted human slaves as their own property, they couldn’t very well get behind the idea that the government was responsible for making sure everyone owned something. After all, in their world orientation, some people were themselves property.

      The founding fathers also did not believe that non-landowners should have a voice in democracy. The common reasoning was that those who didn’t have property were not as well educated and would vote without having full access to information. In a day when newspapers took forever to circulate and literacy rates were low, the argument nicely ices over the thinly veiled heteronormative, white male fragility which can be found right under the surface of its logic. These men wanted no threat to their power, and they viewed themselves as superior over others despite laying out some the most liberating principles the Western World had seen in quite some time.

      The founding fathers eventually gave every white man the ability to vote but hedged their bets by establishing the electoral college—a group of representatives who vote on behalf of your state. To this day, the electoral college can vote either in line with or against what the people of their state actually want.

      Locke did use the term “pursuit of happiness” on a separate occasion, but he viewed it from a very different perspective than we do today. Our capitalistic and individualistic society tends to pursue happiness through material means. That means we pursue money. We pursue the house with the white picket


Скачать книгу