This is Emotional Investment, Joel Anderson’s column about money and how we think about it. To suggest a subject or get in touch, email emotional.investment@slate.com.
The day before my deadline, I got a text message from the veteran journalist who was going to be the subject of this week’s column. They had concerns about how they would be portrayed. “Maybe we need to talk about this,” they wrote to me Thursday.
I quickly realized that we were going to have a problem. The interview subject is someone I’ve been friendly with over the years, with us sharing texts about our favorite teams during football season and once meeting up for lunch when I visited their city.
Ordinarily, I shy away from writing about people whose lives are already somewhat known to me, but I thought this could be different. This column is about feelings about money, after all, and I appreciated their candor and thoughtfulness in a recent social media post I’d seen about their current professional reality—namely, the low pay. And the timing seemed grimly appropriate: Their post went up about a week before many more news organizations announced layoffs and buyouts. And those job losses came on the heels of one of the worst years in the news industry.
I asked them if they would talk to me for a column; they eagerly accepted, thinking our prior relationship would give them a safe space to be vulnerable.
We talked for more than two hours, going into intimate detail about the extent of their financial troubles and the difficulty of finding freelance work that pays a livable wage. Our conversation also touched on even more personal issues, like divorce and addiction and how they had impacted their life.
Their responses became tense when I followed up for specifics: How much were you making back then, when you had a staff job? How much now? What did that divorce settlement look like in dollars and cents? They preferred to keep it vague. Of course, “six figures” could mean anything from $100,000 to a cent short of $1 million. “Lol I guess I’m not as comfortable talking about money amounts as I thought I was,” they wrote. After commiserating with my editor later that night, we decided to anonymize their account and strip most of the identifying details out of this column.
I learned a lot from this experience. When we launched Emotional Investment, I knew soliciting stories from people about their thoughts about money and how it had impacted their lives would be extraordinarily difficult. This is why my wife was hesitant for me to write about our finances in this column and why I was worried about mentioning my parents at all.
Even if we feel OK about the objective facts of our relationship with money, we worry about how these stories and confessions will travel. It’s hard to think about how other people will interpret them and how they might judge us. When we share the details (and we so rarely share details, particularly dollar amounts), we lose control of that and lose the ability to control our own narrative, and that’s scary. Will readers think we’re broke? Irresponsible? Privileged? Elitist? The now-anonymous subject of this column worried that my comparison of their current income to what they earned in the past painted them as a “has been.” I can understand wanting to maintain control of your narrative, even if you’re a professional writer who understands the demands of journalism.
But I also think, after the past couple weeks we’ve seen in this industry, from the layoffs at the Los Angeles Times to the implosion of splashy news startup the Messenger, that talking honestly about the infeasibility of freelance work is important. So here is an anonymized version of our conversation.
First, some context: This journalist was in the midst of realizing a long-term project they’d been working on wasn’t going to pan out. And even after getting good print work, they knew the rates didn’t make sense—$1,500 for a 3,000-word reported feature that requires travel wasn’t going to work out to a reasonable hourly rate. So they were preparing. “I’ve been taking out some zero-interest credit cards, just in case. I took out a personal loan to get me through the first part of the year,” they told me. After the big project fell apart, they were scrambling. “That was going to be part of my income this year.”
Here are the parts of our conversation that stuck with me.
On how divorce changed their financial reality:
I remember having to pay as much as a third as much in divorce attorney fees as I got in the settlement. And I did not expect it to be a fight. It turned into a big fight.
We were very comfortable. And I went through a period of not having to think about money, which at first blows your mind and then you get used to it. It’s amazing.
I think I’ve heard other [people] who get divorced say this too. You go from like 60 (miles per hour) to zero. Or maybe not zero, but from 60 to 30 in terms of, like, your lifestyle.
I did not slam on the brakes. I did it more slowly than I wish I had in terms of, like, “Oh, I no longer live a life where I can just do things that I used to do.”
Oh, this is a big one right now, which is that something broke, so I’ll fix it. I’ll pay to get it fixed. But, no, that’s not actually how my life is right now. What I am is back to living a kind of a normal life where I once was living a life where I was incredibly privileged to be able to just fix everything that needed to be fixed.
On keeping up with the mortgage payments:
I worry about it all the time. I worry about keeping it, but I have convinced myself, you know, this is my retirement, and you can go into debt to keep your retirement.
I feel like it is my retirement that I am living in. I put all my savings into this. I have, like, a 401(k) that I haven’t been able to put much into in the past three years. I was still married when we bought this, but it was our second home.
But I remember talking to my dad about, like, how I don’t have any savings left. And my dad was like, “You’re living in your retirement. That’s your retirement.”
My monthly payment is less than $3,000, which is still high. But for the area, that’s not bad. And if it stays that way for the rest of my life, that’s pretty good.
It’s a nice one-story [house] that’s manageable. I can imagine living here for another 10, 15 years. I mean, it is an investment. And I know I’m lucky. I talk to some people who—we do money commiserating and they’re like, “But you have a house.” And I have to keep remembering, “You’re right. Yes. Yes.”
On how their childhood changed after their own parents got divorced:
I look back and realize we were closer to the bone than I realized. Maybe close to the bone is too strong of a word … we lived modestly. When my parents divorced, things became much sketchier for my mom, and I did live with her for the first part.
We had, I would say, a boom-bust situation. When she made a big commission, she would buy steak for dinner, and we’d go to Neiman Marcus. And then we had times when the lights got shut off. My mom was very tasteful. We did a lot of thrifting. She had a good eye.
My dad around the same time … my bedroom at my dad’s house, the mattress was on the floor. And he had patio furniture in his living room.
On becoming a journalist:
When I was in my 20s, I moved to New York, and I just had this idea that I’ll figure it out. I was fortunate enough to put together a career pretty quickly. I just thought, “Oh, this is going to be easy for the rest of my life. I’m just going to keep succeeding. I’m just going to keep getting jobs. And all I have to do is write and be good at it.” The meritocracy.
This is being a white person, by the way. I mean, it’s true, right?
On the end of earning a livable wage as a freelance writer:
You could make a living. Fifteen years ago, I made a living as a freelance writer. The pay scale—that’s where the difference is, right?
Today, I make $600 a column writing some places and like $750 others. Most places seem to pay about $1 a word. People can do the math. Being a freelance journalist is no longer sustainable.
Imagine how much you’d have to be writing and how much energy it would take to write 10,000 words. If you got paid a dollar a word, writing 10,000 words a month. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t write that fast.
I’m not hustling it like you should. There are people out there who have gigs that they write for like industry specialty publications. That’s different, like if you get a gig writing for Mechanical Engineering. Whatever. I’m just saying, if you get a gig writing for a professional organization, that sometimes that can be pretty lucrative and regular work.
On why they don’t want to write a newsletter:
I know some people—pretty much all of them white guys—who have the confidence to be like, I have opinions worth putting out there as many times a week as possible, right? It is hard to see the market for them getting bigger. But from a writer’s point of view, producing two fucking newsletters a week, how do you even do that?
I’ve always had the opinion there should be some kind of rotation for the sake of the health of op-ed writers. Op-ed writers shouldn’t write for more than six months in a row, or something like that. You run out of opinions pretty fucking quickly.
That’s why I’ve kind of refused to start [a newsletter]. [Substack reached out] early on and maybe I should have taken it. It was in the six-figure days. But I was making money.
And on why they don’t think we need any more newsletters:
I think they’re doomed, because I started signing up for newsletters and paying for newsletters as soon as my friends started getting laid off. And it quickly became like $50 a month or more. And do you know how much a New York Times subscription is? OK, so digital access is $25 a month. … It’s less than all my friends’ newsletters. Also, what do you get from a New York Times? You get hundreds of bylines.
On the prospect of never again making a livable wage as a writer:
I learned to take care of myself. But it’s funny because I think there’s a part of me that always, at some point, thought that eventually someone is going to take care of me. That’s the goal, is eventually what you want to do is work hard early so you don’t have to work so hard all the time.
I do sometimes feel like that’s what I’ve just secretly always really wanted was just, like, I don’t want to keep working as hard my whole life. But I’ve never framed it as, “And then I will take care of me,” right? It’s always been kind of like: I’m going to work hard, and then eventually, like, something will happen where I don’t have to work as hard.
