How Much is “Enough”?

September 2020

My financial concerns have taken on an existential tinge recently.

When I first received my full-time salary at Southwest, I was over the moon. It was many magnitudes beyond any amount of money I had ever been paid before (read: $12/hour), and when I heard about other young women my age babysitting at night after work to make extra cash, I practically scoffed in relief – I’ll never need to do that, I thought, I’m making plenty!

Of course, it takes approximately one cycle of utilities bills and a car insurance payment to realize that “plenty” is more like “barely.”

My perception of my salary was distorted because I had pitifully low expectations for my first job and had been more or less sheltered from the fact that merely existing can be expensive. I had heard $35,000 was a pretty standard starting salary for a public relations major (a shameful sum that I suspect hasn’t changed much in the last decade, despite inflation and the rising prominence of PR jobs), so my baseline expectation wasn’t too hard to beat.

I wasn’t managing my money responsibly (by any definition of the word “responsibly”), but I never felt like I was denying myself or stretched thin. There was always some money left over in my savings account at the end of the month, and the rest was forked over to Discover for my amateur-hour cash-back credit card’s monthly statement.

If you know me now or have spent longer than 18 seconds on this site, you may be surprised to learn that I was totally content with that.

I didn’t think about money that much, to be candid – I knew I had enough to pay for my life, and I didn’t think about it often beyond that. I assume this is how most people interact with the money that belongs to them. At some point, that changed.

In retrospect, I think my perspective shifted while briefly dating someone several years my senior who made almost twice my salary. I was envious of the way he seemed to pay for things without thinking about it; once, I remember calculating how much must’ve been on every paycheck, and I nearly choked.

Undeniably, I felt my income was scant and deficient by comparison. Growing up, I imagined I’d marry someone who would make more than I did and ride that gravy train to the retirement home – but unfortunately for me and my under-eye circles, after spending about a week in Corporate America, I realized I don’t want to be out-earned or bank-rolled by anyone.

My relationship with money now

Fast-forward to today: I track every dollar coming in, every dollar going out, and, at any given time, I have between 2-3 different streams of revenue on the side to supplement my full-time income. My savings and investments have (finally) topped the six-figure mark, and I spend an inordinate amount of time scheming ways to get more.

While I’m sure my parents would read that and beam with pride, sometimes I wonder if it’s healthy to be so preoccupied with learning everything there is to know about finance and – more importantly – applying it with such fervor and relentlessness that the ultimate price becomes all of my free time and brain bandwidth.

(Of course, I’m being slightly hyperbolic: But the sentiment stands. I transformed from someone who physically recoiled from the word ‘budget’ to someone who’s attempting to write the book on it.)

I became addicted to watching the number go up

Net worth tracking is beneficial for the same reason it can be harmful: Those of us with a competitive lean find the quantitative justification of our worth as a human being to be powerfully addictive.

This holds even more true in a culture like the one we live in; a capitalist, individualist society that places a lot of value on things and people that earn is the most conducive environment imaginable for perpetuating an obsession with producing (and being compensated for) value.

To make matters more hilariously dangerous, the #girlboss-y strain of feminism has created a precarious connection between female empowerment and female career success – a pink, glossy sheen for capitalism!

I hate to admit it, but I’ve been beer-bonging that Kool-Aid for as long as I can remember. It was easy to fetishize and romanticize being a high-earning workaholic, because our cultural norms do most of the heavy-lifting.

Throughout school, my GPA was the number that helped to define me. My GPA and self-esteem were positively correlated.

It took a little bit of time for me to isolate a more grown-up way to measure my contributions, but post-graduation, my salary and net worth replaced my GPA as the metric by which I more or less judged my value in the world.

The fundamental difference between a GPA and a net worth is that a GPA has a ceiling: Once you get the 4.0, you simply have to maintain it. There’s a way to win in that system. A net worth has no ceiling: There’s always another comma to reach for.

I thought the minute I breached the $100,000 mark, I’d feel enough satisfaction and relief to slow down a little bit – instead, it had the opposite effect. I remember calling my mom to tell her and asking, “So do you think $250,000 by 30 should be my next goal?” In what could’ve been a satirical portrayal of the way humans respond to reaching goals, I hardly savored the moment I had been working toward for years and instead immediately moved the goalpost more than twice as far away again.

So when is enough, enough? Does everyone feel this behind?

Because money and worth can coagulate so effortlessly, it’s hard to distinguish between a desire for safety and security and the freedom of sitting atop a mountain of investments, and outsourcing your sense of value to a number.

I never used to feel like I was “behind” – even when I just had one job and was a personal finance novice with a neglected Robinhood account, I didn’t often find myself looking around at everyone else thinking, “I gotta catch up!”

There is great irony in the fact that as my list of obligations has grown and the number in my bank account has risen, I’ve only become more aware of the women who seem to be wiping the floor with me both in career and income.

I used to joke that it was greed that fueled my love of taking on side projects, increasing monthly auto-transfers, and accumulating wealth at a steady clip – but I realize now that was a front. A GPA-enamored, extracurricular-obsessed, résumé-hocking student does not simply become a contented adult after she walks across the stage at graduation. Instead, she just morphs into a grown-up with a full-time job who layers side hustles into an already-lean schedule because somewhere along the line, she decided output was a pretty good proxy for worth.

While I know this all sounds intense, it’s mostly meant in good humor – to recognize and acknowledge that most of us who become obsessed with something tangible post-grad (like earning and producing) are just transferring one type-A habit to another. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that I didn’t used to give a shit about money – I was too focused on my grades, and grades didn’t really have anything to do with money. If they had, Money with Katie would’ve had a much earlier origin.

And as far as bad habits go, there are worse addictions than being a glutton for work – but it’s something I’m learning to watch for when I feel my compulsion to overextend myself flare up. I’m beginning to recognize that there comes a point where it’s no longer me being a “go-getter” or a “hard worker,” it’s just me reaching for the ever-elusive mile marker that says, “Congratulations! You’re doing enough. You are enough.” Unfortunately, you can’t achieve your way to fulfillment.

But I’ll probably keep trying – only this time with the nagging awareness that it’s an unachievable goal. A misguided effort. That I’m looking for love in all the wrong places.

Ah, adulthood.