“Not-so-personal finance”

I don’t write much about personal finance, mostly because I still don’t really feel that I have any idea what I’m talking about. It is a topic I’m very interested in, however, as you can tell by the sheer number of PF blogs on my blogroll.

Money, possibly because I’ve never had much, fascinates me. How much people have, how they spend it, why they save it, how people live — I really enjoy talking about it. Among my friends, the only real taboo that comes up in conversations like these is the sometimes vast difference between what people make. As a journalist, for instance, I’m never going to make as much as a computer programmer. I sometimes have a real problem with envy, but for the most part I enjoy talking with my friends about this kind of stuff.

How does this match up with the old prohibition against talking about money, politics and religion? Well, according to the New York Times, not much for my generation.

Still, young workers seem somewhat less likely to adhere to this convention than older ones. The study found that 90 percent of those over 35 who were surveyed agreed with the statement “you should never let your co-workers know how much you make,” while 84 percent of subjects under 35 agreed.

But between friends almost anything is fair game. Beth Kobliner, the author of the best-selling “Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties,” said she had noticed that many young people now “have no idea what their boomer parents earn, but know every intimate detail about their close friends’ salaries, 401(k)s and debt loads.”

I do know what my best friend  and my boyfriend make, and I think I have a general idea of the range into which most of my friends fall. The Times looked at the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and saw a pattern that, for once, I don’t disagree with.

“This is a generation that is much more attuned to teamwork, collaboration and sharing information,” he said. “Everything they do is a kind of group event. How do you know, when you get your first job offer, if $45,000 is a good offer, a bad offer or an O.K. offer? You go to your friends.”

I went to my boyfriend and the journalist community on Livejournal when I got the offer from my current job. They helped me look at the whole package, not just the first number.

I’m optimistic that conversations like this are a breakthrough, that people sharing this kind of information will help people make better decisions. I don’t think I’ll ever reach the level of Obsessive Consumption, in which the author posts drawings of everything she’s bought for the month, but I’ve thought about doing something similar. What’s holding me back? The fear that showing my friends what I actually spend my money on will make them like me less, which I realize is completely irrational.