Money money money

Yes, people with different habits and values can be friends. It's all about compromise and appreciating each other's differences.

The answer to someone who spends like a drunken sailor but complains about debt is to ask first "do you want my advice or are you just venting" - if the person wants advice you can suggest a credit counselor. But if it is a good friend and we've been down that path before, I tell her that I can't listen to the complaints if she is not going to do something about it (e.g., get herself on a budget, see a credit counselor, etc.).

As a Personal Finance blogger who has just gone through bankruptcy, I can tell you for sure that since I have "mended my financial ways", ie-I now do socializing on the thin dime and I've "lost" a number of so called friends and aquaintences.

Having gone through the mess of bankruptcy and now trying to rebuild my fiscal life, I am (by choice) more limited in my social outings, weekends away, etc. I don't shop for sport, I shop because I need something not because I want something. I'm not the only one, there is a whole world of PF bloggers who are trying very hard to reduce debt, eliminate credit card debt, student loans, mortgages, get better savings that are struggling with this issue on a daily basis

Most people are not comfortable discussing personal finance with close family, much less, friends, even close ones. Heck, most families don't discuss finances.

I currently maintain close friendships with people on many sides of the financial spectrum and find it can be difficult to separate my money-feelings from my friend-feelings. For example, I have friends who live in debt and still depend on their parents for much financial help, and I want to encourage them to work on their own financial freedom and pay down their debt, but I feel like that crosses the line of friendship too much. Then I have friends who have no debt and are doing financially extremely well, and I often have feelings of jealousy and envy towards them. I try my best to keep my "money-feelings" to myself and concentrate on my friend-feelings, and with my good friends this is very easy to do. It's with not quite as good friends and coworkers where it gets more difficult and I have less patience to really try to ignore my money-feelings. Of course that also probably has to do with hating my job!

It's somewhat hard - I think that 'Friends with Money' illustrated it well, with couples talking about their friends' situations in the car rides home - you (or at least I) just end up wondering 'where does all of that big salary and bonus go? why do they still have cc debt, when they could pay it off?' You just wonder that away from your friends. As far as direct discussion, it's just an off-limits topic since it's too easy to veer into judgmental territory. I think I'd be unhappy making the decisions that they're making, but there's not many productive conversations we can have around that. Instead, I know I'll be spending more at dinner when I go out with them, and they know that hanging out with me will usually involve staying in.

It's really similar to talking about weight and health, or parental discipline styles, I think. You can find ways of working around your differences, but the topics are so emotionally volatile that you don't want to idly discuss your differences. It can be weird to hand out with friends who differ from you in such significant ways, and I think that a lot of friendships wither because of these kinds of strains, but I've been lucky in avoiding (most) of this so far.

I run into this ALL THE TIME. I am a young 20-something, but I have a good job and no debt, which gives me a pretty fair amount of disposable income. I have other friends in my same situation, and we enjoy going to nice dinners, getting pedicures every now and then, and taking a girls trip once a year or so.

I have two other friends that are in different financial circumstances though. Both make less and/or have large debt obligations which prevent them from being financially able to go out or splurge much at all. One of them reguarly says "sorry I can't afford it" when we invite her out to dinner. I feel bad, but honestly it's affected our friendship. We rarely see each other now.

The other friend constantly wants to go shopping with me and go to Starbucks and out to lunch! Not only am I pretty frugal when it comes to those things, it's hard for me to do them with her anyway since I know she has loads of debt (not to mention no savings and terrible credit). I'm not her mom, and I don't want to say things like "maybe we should stay in and watch movies" when both of us really want to try that new restaurant. But I also don't want to contribute to her indebtedness or encourage her to splurge when I know she shouldn't.

Readers may be interested in the organization Class Action, which offers workshops to help couples deal with differences in class/income background, and some of their workshops include how to deal with differences in materialism. See:

http://www.classism.org/

My own story about relating to people with different values on materialism:

My father was very opinionated about being anti-materialism. He peppered his Ph.D.-level discourse to the three young children with comments about the average overly-materialistic American, known as "Boobus Americanus," exemplified by categories such as tourists who can't handle the lack of luxuries when traveling to third-world countries and campers who go to national parks in motor-homes decked out with electronics rather than experiencing nature in a tent and sleeping bag. This contrasted with our hardy family, who slept on dirt floors in mud huts when my father was on his Fulbright in Liberia, and roughed it in hand-me-down sleeping bags in Desert Valley, California. One of his slogans was "No pandering to baby-stuff," a statement that rung out when any of the kids clamored for something that wasn't materially necessary, such as wanting to drink chocolate milk instead of plain milk. The family hero was Ralph Nader, and today my regular Christmas gift from my father is a year's subscription to Jim Hightower's "Low Down" and Consumer Reports.

I imbibed my father's values, and for the most part, today I appreciate this childhood training. A result is that my ability to be happy, day-in-day out, doesn't rest on purchases and material attainments (but sometimes the opposite: look at how little I can get by on! Wheeee!). Still, I've come across two places where this intense childhood training has given my pause: dating, and dealing with wealthy/materialistic relatives.

Dating: its not really a problem, I guess, but back in my dating days, when I met someone, even if we seemed compatible in some ways, as soon as I saw an overly materialistic side, I checked out of the relationship pretty fast. And my partners were probably checking out too, since I didn't value what they valued, didn't wear expensive clothes, live in a stylish apartment or even drive a car. So probably that's a good thing, to have an easy, early sign of incompatibility. (And my Life Partner is wonderfully compatible on this score thank goodness.)

But the point where my father was unnecessarily stringent was his open contempt to his children about family relatives who were wealthy/materialistic. When we went to visit the wealthy relatives, Dad made disparaging comments about their overly nice house or wondered why they said couldn't afford to send their children to private university, when they had filled their house with luxuries. Imbibing these comments at family visits, the result was that I didn't like the relatives. Dad, you went too far. I love you for the slogans like, "We don't buy things advertised on TV", but it took me a couple decades as an adult to learn to appreciate the cousins on their own terms.

My friends and I have found ourselves taking turns as "rich friend" and "poor friend". We are open about our financial situations with each other. We can have just as much fun making dinner together at home and watching a movie or going out and walking in the park as we do when we go to a restaurant. It is more important to a true friend to spend time with you than to go shopping for things we don't really need anyways. Sometimes we even go grocery shoppign together, it might not sound fun but it actually is. If I'm dying to try a new restaurant and my friend can't afford it, some times I'll say "oh, I'll pay this time, and you can take me out some time in the future. I really don't mind." and likewise, sometimes my friends offer to pay. We just always make sure to remember that we offered, we were not aksed to pay, so there is no obligation for the other to pay us back. With gas prices how they are, we sometimes compromise: "I'll order takeout if you drive out here!" I have always been comfortable being honest about my financial state, and so have my friends. I am never embarassed to say "Maybe next time, I can't afford it right now." if someone calls to invite me out. If I see them less because of it, I know that the experience of going out is more important to them then actually spending time with me. Some of my friends have little to no debt and lots of disposable income, others are in quite the opposite situation, and I have no problems finding ways to get together whatever the circumstances.