Learning How to Talk About Money When You've Always Lived Alone

Yesterday, I wrote about how bills are split in blended families. In that post, I mentioned that I’ve always lived alone. So, I thought that today I’d share a little bit more about the relationships I’ve had and the role that money has played in them.

I Have Mostly Lived Alone

I say that I’ve always lived alone, but that’s not exactly true. Most of the time, I’ve lived alone. But there were a few exceptions. I moved out of my parents’ home into a house my real-estate-owning mom owned when I was 18. I lived alone there except for two super brief periods when different boyfriends lived with me (for a couple months each.) They didn’t pay any bills.

Then I lived in a truck and traveled the country with a boyfriend for awhile. We ended up running out of money and moved back into my parents’ house. We didn’t pay rent. I was in my early twenties, and we were there for less than two years. Then, I moved back into the previous house alone. During that time, I became a single foster parent, so children lived with me.

After that, I moved to San Francisco with my best friend. We split the rent on a place together. He took care of certain bills and I took care of others. In the first year, we also ended up with two other roommates. One of them paid rent. The other didn’t. Throughout that time, I was the one responsible on the lease for paying the rent. Since age 28, I’ve lived alone in my own apartment.

Learning to Communicate About Money

The biggest challenge for me in the living situations that I did have with other people was that I really had no ability to communicate about money. One of my roommates would do this annoying thing where I’d say it was time for the rent, and he’d just avoid giving me a check for days, pretending like he hadn’t heard me. I didn’t know how to deal with this and would just get passive aggressive.

Then they moved out and I was on my own. I actually rented out the spare room in that apartment for a little while. That was in the very early days of AirBnb. All of the finances were handled online through that system, so I never had to actually ask those people for money directly.

After that, I moved into a one bedroom place. I’ve lived alone there for well over a decade. So, I’ve honestly never really had to discuss my money with anyone. However, it’s an area of my life I’ve always wanted to get emotionally healthier about. Therefore, over the years, I’ve worked hard to learn how to communicate about money with my partners, my family, and some of my friends.

Talking About Money With My Bestie

Some friends are easy to talk to about money. Others aren’t. When learning how to communicate about money, it’s smart to choose your interlocutors wisely. Pick people that are good at these conversations. For me, my best friend turned out to be a great person with whom to discuss money. We were often in the same place at the same time financially. We also had a really strong foundation for our connection.

He’s the one that moved with me and was the roommate I split bills evenly with. To be honest, we didn’t really communicate much about money at the time. We have always been kind of easy about shared money. Neither of us loves to talk about it but also neither of us “keeps score.” I think we’re both pretty good about evenly picking up the bill, paying more when we know we’re the one in a better financial place at the time, and not really worrying about the rest.

So, even though we haven’t had to talk about money too often between us, we’ve talked about it a lot in terms of how each of us are handling our own. We’ve shared our struggles, our successes, the apps and systems that work and don’t work for us. In terms of learning how to just discuss money, this has been my easiest relationship.

Money In My Romantic Relationships

It’s been far harder to handle money in my romantic relationships. And yet, this is the area that seems most important for learning to talk about it. For years, I avoided doing so. And then for more years, I bumbled my way through those conversations. It helped, in a sense, that I never shared housing expenses with a partner. However, that’s also meant I was never forced to figure that part out.

In two of my major relationships, the amount of money earned (or not) seemed to be a huge problem. In both of these, we lived separately, paid entirely separately for our own lives, and generally split “going out” and shared vacation costs 50/50.

In the first, I was actually doing super well in my life. My partner at the time was a student. It made him really uncomfortable that I earned so much more than him. We tried to discuss it but we were young and we never really got too far with it. Today he’s one of my best friends and he’s one of only two people I’ve ever borrowed money from.

In the other, my partner couldn’t get over the fact that I was in a lot of debt. We were together for over six years, and we talked about moving in together. However, whenever it came time to have discussions about moving forward with our relationship, he’d freeze up. He always said that money was the reason. He claimed that he couldn’t handle the precariousness of my fluctuating income and my high levels of debt. We tried to talk about it, but I’m not sure we ever got anywhere. I’m not honestly sure if that was even his real reason for leaving the relationship. After all, I can only take him at his word.

What Will Happen When I Move In With A Partner?

So, now I’m in a happy long-term relationship. I think there’s a good chance we might want to move in together someday. I started talking about money with him super early on in the relationship because I wanted to get comfortable with these conversations. He’s pretty comfortable discussing money. We seem to be fighting it out. Of course, after decades of living alone and handling all bills myself, I’m curious about what will happen if we do move in together. Will we still be able to have healthy conversations about money? How will we decide to handle it? I just hope that having done all this work on myself, and working together, we’ll figure it out.

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Kathryn Vercillo

Kathryn Vercillo is a professional writer who loves to live a balanced life. She appreciates a good work-life balance. She enjoys balance in her relationships and has worked hard to learn how to balance her finances to allow for a balanced life overall. Although she’s only blonde some of the time, she’s always striving for total balance. She’s excited to share what she’s learned with you and to discover more together along the way.