Salaries are a tricky one. Although I’ve mentioned it in this blog in the past, I do try to refrain from the discussion. I think people base too much emphasis on their salaries, and if you’ve read the Millionaire Next Door you know you can save a whole lot of money on a very tiny salary if you’re disciplined enough to do it. So to me the salary discussion doesn’t buy you much in terms of knowledge or understanding. If it does come up I prefer steering the conversation toward general financial topics that can broaden your mind and your portfolio.

I did write a post awhile back on how to answer the age old… how much do you make question… you can check it out here.

Mom/Step-dad work on the envelope system so my step-dad would always show me the budget and how things worked. They didn’t even have a debit card until last year.

Dad/Step-mom taught me alot about investing and getting me started on 401k and roth.

Among my friends (most of them are co-workers) we don’t talk specifics, however if someone did ask me I would fell comfortable talking about it.

However, since I work in a small company everybody knows what everybody makes. I also have two financial confidants who not only know how much I make down to the last dime but also how much debt i have. I have found it extremely helpful to have people, who’s opinion you value because you know they are being honest, who you can bounce off ideas. We can’t go it alone.

I’ll be looking at his entire portfolio of investments and bank accounts and suggest ways to optimize it it.

He gets to opimitise his investments and I get some extra income!

I also find that it’s somewhat broken down along gender lines. I’m a guy and most of my friends are guy and we’re pretty open. While my gf and her friends seems less apt to discuss salary and the details of purchases. It could just be my friends too.

Although they don’t have as much money in the bank as my husband and I, their lives are certainly no less rich, in fact in some ways they may be much richer. You certainly don’t want to ‘compare resources’ as the second anonymous commenter said, even dollar for dollar the comparisons surely can’t be equal.

As for my friends I’m the “financial guru” and they’ll often ask me about car purchases and such. They all know (or at least have some idea) how much student loan debt I have. They don’t all tell me their whole financial picture, but I think they know they can talk about it with me if they need to.

I guess money just isn’t awkward for me.

I grew up in a household where my parents really wanted to be more open with us about finances (they both regretted that their parents hadn’t been) but it was really hard for them, and I still don’t know a lot about their situation. I picked up a lot of their habits and views on when it is “appropriate” to discuss such a topic.

Since then, however, I’ve gradually realized how much harm can come from such a pattern – on the few occasions where I first broke through and brought up topics with friends like “do you have retirement savings already?” or “do you pay of your credit card bill every month?” I was shocked at some of the answers – friends I had assumed were in nearly exactly the same place as I were doing very, very different things – and in almost every case, we were all just basically copying what our parents had done.

Now, I think of this as almost a political issue – it’s frustrating that my friends and I all worked hard to make it to the educational and professional levels we’re now in, only to be re-sorted financially by the habits of our parents. I feel like the tendency for middle class people in particular not to discuss money is one of the things that keeps class lines entrenched.

But, it can be hard to break through this pattern, too – even when I want to, I’m very, very ginger about ever putting someone in a situation where there’s much potential for a direct comparison of resources. I still try to talk mostly in terms of abstractions (eg, I’ll talk about having an IRA and why I picked a Roth, but I won’t say how much is in it!). And I still let a lot of things go, even when they worry me….