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Talking about money is easier than you think
I used to treat money conversations with friends like a trip to the dentist. Necessary, sure. Also something I’d put off as long as humanly possible.
Then one night my friend Brandon and I were splitting a pizza and he said, totally out of nowhere, “What do you pay for rent?” And I told him, and he told me. Nothing exploded. We talked for maybe ten minutes about rent and car payments, that kind of stuff, and then we moved on to arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza. (It does. I’ll die on that hill.)
I walked home that night a little stunned at how easy it had been. I’d spent years building money up into this enormous, sweaty topic, and it turned out to be about as dramatic as talking about the weather.
I think a lot of us grew up in households where money just wasn’t discussed. Maybe your parents fought about it behind closed doors. Maybe they were private about it out of pride, or because their parents were private about it. Either way, plenty of us absorbed the idea that money talk is rude, or at least risky. We carry that into adulthood, and we end up doing weird contortions to avoid saying simple things like “Hey, you owe me $25 for the movie tickets.”
What seems to happen, at least in my experience, is that the dread is way bigger than the conversation. You spend a week rehearsing how to ask your roommate to pay their half of the electric bill. You imagine them getting defensive. Then you finally say it, and they go, “Oh, crap, sorry, sending it now.” The whole thing takes eleven seconds. All that anxiety, for eleven seconds.
There’s a reason for that, I think. Most people are reasonable. Most people don’t want to owe you money, and they definitely don’t want you quietly resenting them. When you bring something up plainly and kindly, you’re actually doing them a favor. You’re handing them an easy way to fix something they might’ve been feeling a little guilty about anyway.
The trick, if there is one, is to keep it boring. Don’t make a speech. Don’t apologize five times. Just say the number and what it’s for, the way you’d mention that you’re out of milk. Something like “Hey, the electric bill came in at $118, so your half is $59.” That’s it. No subtext, no drama.
It also helps to talk about money when nothing’s wrong. That pizza night with Brandon was low stakes precisely because neither of us needed anything from the other. We weren’t asking for loans or chasing debts. We were just two friends comparing notes. And because we’d had that easy conversation, the next time something money-related came up between us (he covered my ticket to a show and I forgot to pay him for a week), it was no big deal. He texted “Yo, you still owe me for the show,” I paid him, and that was that.
I’ve started thinking of it a little like stretching. The first time you try to touch your toes after years of sitting at a desk, it feels impossible and kind of painful. But the more you do it, the less it hurts, until one day you realize it’s just a thing your body can do.
Money talk works the same way, I think. The first conversation is the hard one. After that, each one gets a little smaller and a little more normal, until it’s barely a conversation at all.
I’m not saying you need to start asking everyone their salary at dinner parties. Please don’t. That’s a different kind of bold, and I don’t think most of us are ready for it. But if you’ve been sitting on a $30 IOU for a month because you didn’t want to “make it weird,” it’s probably fine to just mention it, casually, the way you’d mention anything else.
My guess is your friend will say “Oh, crap, sorry,” and pay you before you’ve even put your phone down.
And then the two of you can get back to arguing about pineapple.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.