I’m a university student with a good part-time job. I make about $250 a fortnight and I have always been taught how to look after my money and save responsibly. My two closest friends are both unemployed, but by choice. No matter how much I help them apply for jobs, they never do.
I often go out on the weekends drinking or partying, where naturally I spend money on alcohol, maybe some food and an Uber ride home.
My friends almost always depend on me to pay for things, swearing that they will pay me back, but they never do. If we are stuck in the city with no way to get home at 2am, they know they can rely on me. But this just isn’t fair any more and it’s grown frustrating.
One of my friends comes from a wealthy family, where money is given to her instead of her having to work for it, and the other friend comes from a family which is quite financially unstable.
As much as I like my friends, I can’t feel that I’m always the one who has to spend my hard-earned money on them. I wouldn’t mind doing this every now and then, or if they could return the favour, but this isn’t the case right now – especially as a uni student living in a cost-of-living crisis – my hard-earned money is rightfully mine. What can I do about this?
Eleanor says: Money means so many different things to different people. You see your hard-earned property, one of your friends hardly sees it, and the other might just see something you have more of than them. No wonder you have such different attitudes to what’s fair to do with it: you could all be seeing different things.
But this might be a good old-fashioned case of: if you want someone to know something they don’t currently know, you have to find a way to communicate it.
That needn’t mean explicitly saying: “I’m tired of spending my money when you don’t pay me back.” It doesn’t need to be an accusation. You can just make the change. Maybe you don’t pull your phone out to get the Uber. Maybe, on the next night out, you bring enough cash to cover only you, then wait. Or you could say you don’t have your card, but if someone else can pay the bill you can transfer them money right now. Money is quite a good site for non-verbal communication, because as long as you don’t hand over the card you don’t spend the money. You can do quite a lot to change the assumption that you’ll pay by simply not paying, then being willing to sit silent in the resulting pause, not filling it with explanations or solutions.
If they make things explicit by asking you to pay, you might have to be explicit back. But again, that needn’t be an accusation. You could choose a refrain, something like: “I can’t get this, I’m really saving at the moment”, then stay there like a broken record. No matter what comes next – “I’ll pay you back,” “last time, honest” – you say some variation on, “I can’t get this, I’m really saving at the moment”. That’s the difference between deciding what happens to your money and entering into a negotiation about it.
I know that when it comes to awkward topics like this, we hope there’ll be some way to trigger a spontaneous revelation, so we can get other people to realise the truth without us pointing it out. But that’s pretty rare. People don’t often happen to realise exactly the thing we’re hoping they’ll notice. You might face a forced choice. What’s more important: that your friends realise you don’t want to keep paying for them, or that you get to carry on not having an uncomfortable interaction? In fact, you can put an exact price on how important avoiding this conversation is to you; it’s exactly as much money as you’ll spend on your friends to avoid having it. It sounds like that amount is already too high for comfort.
Money conflicts can really fester, precisely because money means different things to different people. It’s wrapped up in lots of different ideas of independence, generosity, fairness, responsibility. You can lose friendships over money before you’ve even realised how differently you see it. But just like anything else you want someone else to know, it might be that your only strategy is to tell them.
