Lessons in Money Management from My Mom

Recently, I was invited to give a speech on the economic empowerment of women. I’m usually pretty relaxed about public speaking, but this was a heavy duty group of mostly female politicians, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, executives, and internationally renowned women’s rights activists, including Kerry Kennedy Cuomo and Naomi Tutu.

The assigned topic was fodder for tons of statistics, some encouraging and others deeply disturbing. The speech had the potential to be very heavy, which I wanted to avoid. So, along with all the sober economic news and calls for ongoing vigilance in the fight for gender equality, I talked a lot about my mom.

Vera Clarke has always been a walking testimony to women’s financial independence. Most of her lessons in economic empowerment were stated explicitly and often. Others were self-evident but never lost on me, her only child.

First and foremost, she urged me to always have my own job and my own money, including a secret account–as in secret from my husband. A Depression-era child whose father worked several jobs while her mom raised five kids, she loved her own mother deeply but didn’t want her life. So, she became the first in her family to graduate from college, she got a master’s degree and began a career in education, a field that she knew would allow her to balance the work-mother scales well.

My mom insisted that any woman who works outside the home should pay someone else to clean the inside of her home. I know cleaning is therapeutic for some people but my mother is not one of them, and I’m here to testify that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! She made it clear that hiring other women to help with the house or my after-school care wasn’t just helpful to her, it was helpful to them, enabling them to do for their families and pursue their dreams as well.

“Money is freedom,” she always said. “If you have it, you can go where you want, buy what you want, and do what you want. If you don’t, you will always be trying to get someone’s permission.”

The amount of money one made was never her preoccupation. “Don’t measure yourself by what you have,” she’d say. “Measure yourself by what you have accomplished.”

The handling of whatever amount you had was what counted. As a New York City public school teacher, she never made a killing and, in 50 years of marriage, she never earned as

much as my father did. But she had an equal say in the family’s financial decisions and she made the most of what she had on her own terms, treating herself to cultural events my dad had no interest in, trips he couldn’t get away for, and generally buying whatever she damn well pleased (which often meant surprise gifts for him or me).

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Don’t get me wrong: She lived well within her means. In fact, she lived below her means (another great lesson I wish I’d learned better). But my parents often disagreed about what those means were. My dad was more financially conservative (some might say cheap) than my mom was. She wasn’t a big spender, but she was a big giver and a big believer in indulging a fantasy from time to time. She often took the life’s-too-short approach to financial decisions (as in life’s too short not to get those shoes, go on that vacation or spring for those really good concert tickets)–something my dad never did.

Whenever my parents reached an especially tense impasse over financial issues, she’d end the argument by channeling her best Billie Holiday and belting out, “God Bless the Child That’s Got It’s Own.”

This drove my father crazy, but he never figured out how to override her message, which was clear: “I’ve got mine, and I’ll decide what to do with it.” That, even to my child’s eye, was clearly a form of power and she wielded it well.

My mom’s other lessons in economic empowerment were gleaned less directly. She and my dad had a joint bank account, joint ownership of their home, they paid joint taxes and made all significant purchases jointly. But, in addition to their shared holdings, she made sure she had her own credit card accounts, her own investments, and her own credit rating. She was mindful of finding bargains but she understood quality and she never sacrificed one for the other.

“It’s not a steal if it’s garbage,” she’d say, whenever I spotted something she deemed unworthy of any price tag. “Unless they’re paying you to take it home, you’re getting taken.”

In a pinch, my mom could always “find” money in the house–and not just pocket change, but significant amounts tucked away in unused coffee cups, between the pages of books, or inside old boxes kept on high shelves. She never said a word about this, but I knew that if the world fell apart, she could buy enough food or gas or water to keep us afloat until somebody figured out how to put it back together.

When New York offered its most experienced teachers an early buyout package, she took it, maxing out her pension and benefits without putting in the extra time. Now widowed, she’s still stubbornly independent on every front and still as generous as the day is long.

She takes pleasure in giving to the causes she deems worthy and to her grandchildren often for no reason at all. Every once in a while, she asks them to lift an old coffee or juice jar for her, claiming to be testing their strength. Filled to the brim with coins, the jars weigh a ton, but if the kids can lift one, she says, they get to keep it. The record, so far, is held by my daughter, who emptied her jar into the CoinStar once and got back more than $100. That’s not a bad haul for picking up an old jar of loose change. And it’s not a bad lesson to learn young: Every little bit counts. It’s a lesson, like the ones my mother taught me, that will last a lifetime.