Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments. You inspire greatly with your story about sharing your financial life with a friend.

I also am finding interesting personal growth sharing details of my life with my friends and letting them in to share my decisions and serve as accountability partners and sounding boards.

It is pretty empowering to trust my friends. I guess I am a slow learner! LOL!!

I love your site!
Catherine

And I also LOVE LOVE LOVE the idea of getting real about how money actually affects our friendships… because I am willing to bet that how we treat money affects how treat our friends.

What has always driven me crazy since I was old enough to own more than a pink plastic piggy bank, is that we as women don’t talk about our money with our friends… not really, not honestly and not personally. We don’t talk about how much money we make or express our personal fears about not making enough or losing it all. But, we do love to make conjectures about how much someone is making based on her current handbag. And, who hasn’t been jealous, judged another woman for how she chose to spend her $, or wished to be as lucky as our friend with more money?

As a girl from the South Side of Chicago I never imagined that one of my closest, dearest, friends – soul sister really – would be a former debutant, whose great-grandparents had butlers, and who had something that I never even thought of getting… an inheritance! I believe in my heart that one of the reasons we are so close is that we are brutally honest about money – what we make, what we fear, and how differently we were brought up. I can remember the actual day that her and I broke the ice and spoke the formerly unspeakable – our salaries. Since then I have learned from her, found compassion for myself and others because of her, and seen that all people, no matter how much money they have, struggle with their relationship with money… and in the end are just real people.

From that moment on, we have been there for each other in all of our life and financial ups and downs. When she divorced… when I left my corporate six-figure job to work for myself… paying for private school… everything! Being able to share my own financial journey with her has made all the difference, not only in our friendship, but in my life.

I really believe, that if we do not fully share our relationship with money and our financial life with our soul sisters, then we miss out on a connection that can be so much deeper and more fulfilling. It doesn’t mean we need to swap bank statements each month… it means that we share our lives fully, and that includes money, the numbers and the emotions.

Here’s to great relationships with money and our girls…

Christine Arylo
http://www.letsgirltalk.com