Blogs: The Almighty Dollar

Is there anything quirky about your personal relationship with money or spending? To what do you attribute it? Personality, childhood experience, spousal relations? We asked PT's bloggers (blogs.psychologytoday.com) about their habits.

Pound for Pound

I treat money like I treat everything else in life—with a healthy dose of positive reframing. When I moved from London to New York City, there were two dollars to every pound. My new friends invited me to baseball games and corporate shindigs but I shook my head with genuine regret. "Sixty dollars? That's like 60 pounds. I just can't afford it." But 60 bucks for activities that were more up my street didn't seem nearly so much. Martinis and tapas in the latest hot bar? Well, 60 bucks was really only 30 pounds! —Susan Carnell (Bad Appetite)

In Sickness and in Wealth

Having dealt with a disease and come out the other side with myself and my family intact, I have come to value money less and health more. Illness is so much more stressful and frightening than lack of funds that financial issues have never been able to stress me out in the same way since. —Pamela Weintraub (Emerging Diseases)

Publish or Pay

When I was at Columbia University, deep in a "publish or perish" stage of my career, I struck a deal with myself, according to which I had to either write a certain number of pages per day or lose five bucks. I didn't want to give it to a good cause, because then I'd justify not working as a charitable act. And I didn't want to give it to a bad cause, because that's just wrong. I decided to leave it on the subway in a little envelope. A lot of publications came out of that rule. —Dan Goldstein (Decisions, Decisions)

Charging Ahead

I avoid using cash whenever possible. I even pay cabbies by credit card. I strongly suspect it's because all through med school, nearly every trip to the ATM was an ordeal—one where there may have been a negative balance. —Paul Dobransky (The Urban Scientist)

No Cents in Worrying

I am both painstakingly meticulous and maddeningly careless about money. I grew up with no sense of money. My mother's parents bickered constantly about it and so she vowed never to do the same. In fact, I don't recall ever hearing money discussed while I was growing up. My meticulousness comes from a hoarding streak that I'll blame on genetics. (I still have my clothes from eighth grade.) —Rachel Herz (Smell Life)

My Treat

I am very, very good at not spending money. Heeding my Depression-bred parents, from earliest childhood onward I picked up pennies from the street and refused to spend them, enduring the ridicule of pals who—already at age six—called me cheap. I'm glad to have superhuman cash-saving skills, especially in today's economy, but some observers equate saving with selfishness. The prejudice against frugality in this country runs deep. —Anneli Rufus (Stuck)

Blog Commenters Get Fired Up

In response to a post by Paul Raeburn (About Fathers), dozens of commenters aired their grievances against child support policy.

"Looking at child support guidelines in my state, it's clear that child support is nothing more than disguised alimony. There is no relationship to actual costs to raise a child." —Patrick Grady

"I see both sides. I don't feel that child support should be a reason for the custodial parent to sit on their bum at home and do nothing. Child support is that: to support the child." —Angie