The Money Group

It's not polite to talk about money. But for 18 years, that's what 3 other women and I have been doing - and talking about many other things, too, since money permeates every aspect of our lives.

In 1995, I attended a one-day conference at Smith College called Women & Money. There was a plenary session which included an exercise where we decided how we would spend $2 million. It's not that easy to do when you've never had anywhere near that much to spend. Then we broke out into different workshops which addressed money from a variety of perspectives from the very practical (like planning for retirement) to the more psychological (like writing about our feelings about money) to the more esoteric (like moving to the thought of money).

During the lunch break, different women shared what had occured in different workshops and everyone agreed that we wanted more of this sort of thing.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from a woman who lived in Greenfield (I was living in Greenfield at the time) that had also been sent to other women living in the area who had attended this same conference. The letter suggested we could meeting periodically and continue the discussions started at Smith College. After a few meetings, 4 of us agreed to meet monthy over a potluck supper and talk about money.

Those monthy meetings continued for over 2 years. During that time all of our lives changed dramatically and two of the women moved far away (one to Maine and the other to California). We continued our discussion via a Round Robin letter where one person writes a letter and sends it to the second person. Person #2 also writes and sends both letters to #3, who adds her letter and sends them to #4 who adds a letter to send back to Person #1. That person writes a new letter, removes her old letter and back around the 4 letters go.

In the meantime, we continued to meet once in a while when our California member returned to the east coast. The last time all 4 of us were together was about 12 years ago - until last week when we all met in York, Maine for an afternoon of catching up, walking, eating lunch, and talking about money: How financially secure we do or do not feel, how we are planning for the future, how our attitudes toward money have changed, and just about everything else we could think of.

It was a refreshing day, despite the long drive and I thank the women in my Money Group for being available to discuss so many important things that are not otherwise polite.