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This may come as a surprise from someone who is a Contributing Editor for Business, Personal Finance and Career, but I don't like to talk about money.
Truth be told, I avoid the topic at all costs. I hate money. Yes, I like to use money. But I hate what it does to people. It divides. It judges.It makes people who have great personal success feel like failures.
Money causes insomnia, tears, heartbreak and humiliation.
I have lots of drama around money.
As someone who has been a business owner for the majority of my career,I have had great success and horrific defeat.
As a small business owner (that is code for cash flow is the bane of my existence),I have described my life as walking a tight wire without a safety net.
I am always one client budget cut away from disaster.
And so, it was with some trepidation that I agreed to host a MeetUp for Personal Finance&Career.
Riding down the escalator from the Macy's Closing Event on Saturday evening, Patricia Jenkins, who blogs about Travel for Uptake,
asked how my Birds of A Feather Session on Personal Finance and Career went.
"It was a small, intimate group, " I said. " But we had a fabulous conversation."
She then said she had wanted to attend but there were two other competing sessions.
So it goes at a great conference. Lots of competition. Kind of like running a business.You can learn a lot from your competition.
I didn't do a head count but we definitely had under 15 people. We had some PR folks from Edelman who have worked with Wal-Mart on trying to figure out what kind of personal finance advice Wal-Mart customers want--evidently not advice on how to save money at the grocery store. They have much bigger issues to contend with.
There was a contingency from WiseBread and Allese Thomson, community manager for Wesabe. If I didn't mention you here, it's only because I didn't get your card-- please give a shout out in the comment section.
Given the economy, given that money is often at the root of marital stress, given that decisions to stay at a job,leave a job, or start a business all center around MONEY, it's ironic that so few people want to talk about it.
What it came down to,according to the group in the room, was that words matter and when it come sto this particular topic, the words don't resonate.
The group suggested that the problem wasn't the topic of money,or even strategies to manage it the main problem was with the words Personal Finance-they're a little too sterile. A little too rigid. Very much too masculine.
Is it just the name? Is it the topic? Or, is it a little of both? Intuitively, money management is a topic that should be getting lots of eyeballs. Yet, for many of us there is a lot of shame around money. There's that debt. There's that dwindling 401(k) and the mortgage that is now higher than the value of the home.
The Gen Xers in the room said they don't know who to trust. How do you vet a personal finance blogger to make sure their advice is something you should trust?
In addition to their qualifications, The Gen Xers have some concerns that advice that may have been solid in the 1990s is no longer relevant in a whacked out economy.
So for those of you who either couldn't attend BlogHer 08, or had other pressing issues during our MeetUp time slot, I want to hear from you.
Tell us what you want to read about regarding this thing called personal finance aka money management aka the root of all evil aka money makes the world go around.
Oh, and I do have a theory why there was such a small contingency of personal finance BlogHers. They not only have a budget they probably stick to it. And, they probably have conferences like BlogHer in the discretionary expense column instead of the fixed expense column.
Just sayin.
Image Credit: CafePress
Elana writes about business culture at FunnyBusiness
