The day the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic — March 11, 2020 — happened to be our 41st wedding anniversary. The virus then forced my wife Elvira and I to live apart from each other for the next 18 months — I in New York City, she in Italy, the two worldwide epicenters.
But luckily, I developed a survival strategy: I talked money with her. Oh, we talked family, too, as well as friends, food and, yes, our apocalyptic reckoning with microbes. But I talked money more than I ever had in my 68 years.
Full disclosure: I had a decidedly iffy history with money. Early in my life, as a boy, a teenager and a young adult, I regarded money as vastly overrated. My family talked money ad nauseum. My response: What was the big deal? After all, my parents and grandparents paid for everything.
But I had an issue with money only until I grew up and had to make any. That changed my mind fast. Suddenly I realized — a shock to the system! — you needed legal tender in order to live.
So all through 2020, I talked money with Elvira — how much I was earning and how much I expected to earn. I updated her about retainers secured, projects completed, invoices sent out.
My reasons for talking money so voluminously that particular year were many. Five months before the pandemic officially started, I had left a job I loved after 12 years, my longest tenure ever, to open my own consultancy. So, accustomed to a regular paycheck from gainful employment for the previous 28 years, I was now a start-up, spelling a whole new ballgame. I had to hustle especially aggressively to bring in every dollar.
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I had other reasons. We were maintaining households on both sides of the Atlantic, an expensive proposition. We also planned for me to move to Italy as soon as possible, likewise costly, and to invest in residential real estate. Oh, yeah, and I was scared the pandemic might kill us.
So making money for our family took on unprecedented importance. No wonder I talked a blue streak about money with Elvira — about the hourly billing rate I charged, the new clients I landed, the prospects I was pitching and my projected annual revenues.
As it turned out, business was good in 2020 despite the pandemic. I pulled down more income than I ever had in a single year in my 45-year career. I was understandably excited about that.
Fortunately, Elvira indulged me. She heard me out. I think she understood why I talked money so much. The more I talked money — and the more I reaped — the better I felt about all of us confronting a pandemic. My attitude, crazy as it sounds, boiled down to this: Maybe we were all going to die, but at least I was making money.
No wonder I talked money so much. Shock waves from the pandemic sent the world economy reeling. “The COVID-19 pandemic has posted unprecedented social-economic challenges and disruptions to societies and individuals,” a 2022 literature review in "Frontiers of Psychology" reported.
My attitude, crazy as it sounds, boiled down to this: Maybe we were all going to die, but at least I was making money
Some people were hit especially hard. About three in every 10 U.S. adults said they worried every day or almost every day about repaying debts, 29% worried about the ability to save for retirement, 27% worried about paying bills and about covering health care costs and 19% worried about footing the bills for rent or mortgage, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey of 10,334 people.
More to the point, a majority of couples (52%) “found it easier to talk about money” with each other, showed the 2021 TD Bank “Love And Money” survey. “Even with the clear financial set-backs imposed upon Americans by COVID-19,” a bank spokesperson said, “we’re seeing money conversations increasing among couples and the stigma around discussing finances diminishing.”
It was only later, after the pandemic receded into our collective rear-view mirror, that I recognized another, underlying reason I talked money so much in the teeth of my frustration and fear. It came from love — my love for Elvira, my love for our children and grandchildren, and my love of life. It was intended to reassure us all that we could stave off disease and death, that we would be OK.
And so for the first time I perceived money as more than merely a medium of payments exchanged for goods produced and services rendered. Never before had I recognized that through money we could express love. And that’s what I tried to do all through the plague: quantify that love via money.
It was as if talking money, and earning it, would act as a vaccine that endowed our family with immunity against all those nasty lethal airborne pathogens.
It was as if, in earning money for my family, I was saying, "Here you go. This is how much I love you. This is why I work so hard. This is what I do to make you happy."
I still talk money, but only now and then. I eventually managed to move to Italy. Our family was reunited. We consolidated our households.
Money still matters, and always will, but the pandemic came to an end. And right around the same time so did my need to talk money to get through it.
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