you're too cool to have your worth on loan

what happens when your financial identity lives inside someone else | fhg #97

This week I read a book that technically shouldn’t have existed—a book that only came to be because something awful happened to someone. It was Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers¹ and I couldn’t help but feel proud, yet devastated over what it took for her to find her sense of self.

I think memoirs are a better way to learn about life lessons than reading a book purely on personal finance. But Strangers actually struck me in an overwhelming way on how easy it is to lose your identity and worth as a woman, in Belle’s case it was to a man and her marriage—in my case it has been to other people and things.

That is the unlock that I always tend to point back to here in the Financial Hot Girl world, ensuring you like yourself enough so that your downstream financial behaviour doesn’t bite you in the backside no matter how wealthy you are. It’s something I see women do a lot in life—outsourcing their identity and worth.

So let’s make sure stories like Belle’s are only those you read, and not write.

𝜗ৎ In this issue:

• Signs your identity is being outsourced

• What it costs to have no identity

• What to expect as a woman

Belle Burden, at home in New York City, taken by Adrianna Glaviano. Picture from Vanity Fair.

⟡ How do you know if your identity is being outsourced?

If you’ve been reading these newsletters for a while, you’ll be familiar with the fact that for a long time, my sense of worth lived in whether the people around me accepted me. I wanted to be cool, smart, someone worth inviting.

I bought things to belong. Said yes to things I couldn’t afford because I was more afraid of being left out than having no money. Ostensibly, I was spending money—but really I was actually was renting a version of myself that other people might find worthy. It felt completely normal.

I call this the self-hate tax—the money you spend not because you want something, but because you don’t feel like enough without it.

Belle describes something similar in Strangers, her version inside a marriage. The belief that she could do things seemed to run through her ex-husband rather than herself.

Identity outsourcing signs to look out for:

1. Your mood tracks someone else’s opinion of you

   When the relationship is going well, you feel capable and clear. When it isn’t, you feel lost—not just sad, but uncertain about who you are. (This could also happen in other domains—work projects, sports, etc)

2. Your financial decisions are reactive
   You spend to keep up, to belong, to not rock the boat (a common one!)—or you hold back because someone else’s opinion about money has become your own.

3. Independence feels uncomfortable

   Managing your finances alone, making a big decision without running it past them first, funding your own life on your own terms—all of it feels harder than it should. You feel incapable.

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✦ What identity outsourcing costs

The cost of outsourcing your identity is simple: you have no financial ground to stand on the moment someone else decides to move.

When your name isn’t on things or when you don’t really know what’s in the accounts. When your earning potential has been slowly, reasonably, sensibly deprioritised in favour of shared logistics. When you only exist financially in relation to someone else—you exist, but financially you’re invisible.

It’s one of the most financially exposed positions a woman can be in, because her financial stability becomes contingent on someone else’s continued (and assumed) goodwill. Goodwill which is not a legal document or an asset, and tends not to hold up particularly well under pressure.

And in Belle’s case, she did everything right by the logic of the relationship she evidently thought she was in. She still ended up having to fight to be seen, financially and otherwise, because she assumed there would be goodwill.

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⟡ Stability ≠ safety (again!)

I’ve written about this before but what Belle describes—and what I think a lot of women will recognise in her book—is stability that was being read as safety. A life that looked whole, built on a foundation that turned out to be one person’s continued willingness to hold it together until he decided he didn’t want to overnight.

The gap between stability and safety is invisible from inside a relationship that’s working and you only really see the gap when the relationship stops, because relationships have the infrastructure to prop the illusion of safety up. Recognising this is also recognising how stability might be propping up your worth and/or your identity.

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꩜ On expectations as a woman

Expecting people to treat you the way you treat them is expensive, because you are often measuring your worth based on this assumption.

Throughout the memoir it’s obvious that Belle was kind, generous, and well-meaning in the context of her believing she was with a partner for life. And the person she loved most still chose, repeatedly, not to see her². No amount of goodness on your part guarantees goodness in return, a gloomy fact of life—but also a fact that should never get in the way of you wanting to be kind and generous in this world.

This is why protecting yourself financially is self-respect. You can give as much as you want, not expect anything in return, and not need others to recognise it in order to feel worthy.

The women who move through life like this understand that loving someone doesn’t transfer responsibility for your own financial safety onto them, because at the end of the day they are owed nothing by anyone except themselves.

If your relationship ended tomorrow (just as a thought experiment) would you know exactly where you stood financially, in no less than exact terms? Would you feel confident making decisions about your life? Do you know what your opinions, likes and dislikes are? Would you know how to define yourself without the relationship? Would you have money that is only yours?

Most people don’t know, but it’s a self-knowledge problem that’s very fixable from the moment you are aware of it.

Until next week,

— Dev xo

1. If you haven’t heard of it, Strangers is a memoir on marriage, separation and divorce, and as an American socialite—you get a unique insight into the author Belle Burden’s life, the financial implications of this divorce—and what it looks like from the inside of a wealthy heiress’ life.

2. It’s not clear or point-of-fact that this influenced her sense of self-worth and identity as a woman (wife and mother otherwise), but I can make an educated guess that it did, as it does for most people.