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Money for all seasons I: income, spending and age
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Money for all seasons I: income, spending and age

This is the first of two posts in which the seasons of life and finance are outlined. In the next one, these are used to ‘profile’ and project financial health.

I have been joking that people have different preoccupations in different decades of their lives. During their 20s people are mostly interested in ‘sex, drugs and rock-n-roll’ (well, I was anyway); in their thirties, people start thinking about mortgages and children; in their forties, people worry about pensions and insurance; in their fifties they move to varicose veins and elderly parents; in their sixties concerns are focused on retirement and haemorrhoids; and after that…well, I have not got that far.

A couple of days ago, it suddenly hit me that in fact the building blocks of our lives and our finances are also very different at different stages of our lives. Have to admit that the theme John and I have been focusing on lately – the differences between generations – did help me crystallise this idea. Meanwhile, it was obvious from the outset that it is not very helpful to un-pack the relationship between earning, spending and the stages in our life by decades – earning and spending patterns don’t fit in decades; also the periods are not really even – some characteristics persist for longer than others.

This is when I remembered about the Wheel of Life. No, not the one that separates the different areas of life and is used by life coaches to make you consider your balance (my life is so out of kilter at the moment that any reminder of balance sends me into a fit of nerves and anxiety). The wheel of life I am talking about is the one painted by the pioneer of modern Bulgarian art in the Preobrazen monastery. It looks like this and the picture comes from a lovely blog called Zikata – if you would like to learn more about this monastery and the icon the link is here.

This Wheel depicts life as the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. This made me wonder what would happen if instead of thinking about our earning and spending by the decades of our life we think in terms of the seasons in our life.

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Five things older people have and young people…
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Five things older people have and young people…

…need or would like to have. But before we go any further I wish to make it clear that this is not a mid-life crisis; like many other things in my life the inevitability of a mid-life crisis is planned for the Summer of 2014 when I’ll be dressed in leathers, on a Harley, my son sitting behind me riding towards the West coast of the US.

The reason I got thinking about the great things that more advanced age brings is that I have been catching myself feeling really fearful of aging. Not surprising, really! Looking at the world we live in, we are surrounded by images glorifying the rigour, freshness and innocence of youth. On the walls in my gym – great looking, slim young people on top of mountains; on placards – young people with lovely smiles; at the cinema…oh well, what is on screen is an entirely different matter altogether. Or is it?

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Five differences between women and men and their effects on our relationship with money
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Five differences between women and men and their effects on our relationship with money

 

Today is International Women’s Day and although we are not very big in celebrating it in the UK – we have shifted our celebrating to the much more politically neutral and commercially expedient Mother’s Day – I want to mark it. After all, I am from Bulgaria where people really believe that ‘men are the head of the family but women are the neck’ and celebrating women and their strength is important. Every 8th of March Bulgarian women get flowers from husbands, lovers and children.

International Women’s Day started as a socialist event to promote equal rights for women, including the right to vote. A century later most women on the planet vote, and most women have access to labour markets but we still earn only 10% of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s property. This is despite the fact that women a becoming more and more prosperous in the Western world; this is not ‘the world’ right? Is there anything specific about women and money?

This made me think about key differences between the way in which men and women relate to money. I believe that apart from the layers of cultural conditioning the different ways in which men and women relate to women boil down to the following:

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