10 Money Questions - Sex Was Never This Hard!
Nina Smith puts Susie on the Queer Budget Hot Seat
I answer most sex questions, no matter how personal, without blinking a lash.
But no one ever asked me about money before— until I met a finance writer fourteen years ago named Nina Smith. She founded QueerCents in 2006, and propositioned me with an interview, which she called “10 Money Questions.”
I've never felt so undressed.
I took a 2025 look today at my sweet little 2006 money answers, and I’d like to make an update:
1. Susie, as a feminist archetype, what does money mean to you?
Do you mean as opposed to when I’m sitting in a bubble bath, smoking a joint, and dreaming about strawberry shortcake?
I would say my political views about money are informed by old-fashioned Marxist economics, with the feminist spin being that women are super-exploited by having their value as mothers, wives, housekeepers, and family caregivers completely undervalued. “Women’s work is never done,” and never paid for adequately. The feminization of any profession is its death knell economically.
Obviously, this isn’t my original thought!
But it sure pisses me off every day. And it annoys me that people think this state of affairs can be overcome by a perky entrepreneurial attitude. If we had feminist government and public policy, we would see a revolutionary turn in respect for women’s contribution.
2025 Update:
Every woman on the fuck-you side of menopause is a “feminist archetype.” The hormone blinders are OFF.
2. What is your most significant memory about money?
That’s easy: reflected fear. I saw my mother was fearful that we didn’t have enough money for groceries and rent. She was often worried, angry, scared. And this, too, was inherited: generations of working class Irish Catholics on the run.
I understood money through her and her relations/reactions.
I also liked “coins” as a child, as objects. I loved sorting them and looking at different kinds from different countries. I imagined designing my own coin and what sort of portraits I’d like to emboss on them. I guess you could say coins impressed me as design objects, powerful pieces that you could make art with.
2025 Update:
My fear of losing the basics has not relented, sad to say. It’s exacerbated by the current crash. I think a lot about how my parents and grandparents talked about getting through the Depression. Some things are possible to imitate today. Some aren’t.
I went to buy a can of beans today and I thought: Holy Shit. That is expensive. Need to grow my own beans. Need to collectivize beangrowing in my neighborhood.
Funny how my childhood pretend-coin daydreams are now the stuff of “pretend-economies” like NFTs and crypto-currency. “Turn your ego into a bank!”
3. What is your worst habit around finances?
Acting or not acting in fear. See above.
This is a bad habit, even when you’re six: “If I cover my eyes with my hands, will this go away?”
It’s tough to make a decision that may not be ideal. But it will at least be my plan rather than my reaction to others’ plans.
The fact that I can even tell you about this habit shows that I have made some psychological progress. I’m aware of it.
2025 Update:
I pried my hands off.
I found that manually tracking what goes in and what goes out — was a self-soother, not a panic attack. Those numbers are comforting to me, on a page, or spreadsheet, rather than lurking vaguely in my head. I feel like I’m looking at someone ELSE’s expenses when it’s in black and white.
I can make decisions like Solomon instead of the baby.
Bookkeeping is an indirect method of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You have the facts in front of you so you can’t “jump to conclusions” and other emotional biases.
4. Is sexual or financial compatibility more important in a partnership?
Ha! I assume you’re discussing a romantic partnership, a lover. If you want to survive more than a few walks around the park, you’re going to have to have both.
2025 Update:
At my advanced age now, I will say, that intimate, erotic compatibility wins. Because it’s rarer.
There’s plenty of people I could hook up with who’d agree with me on how to clip coupons for retirement. It’s not a very wide spread.
But being with someone(s) you can be naked with and cry with and come with, is really very special.
5. When you first started writing, did you ever feel like a starving artist? How did you cope during this period?
You can’t make art if you’re starving. When you’re living on the street, you spend most of the day just making it from one night to the next.
Someone who would seriously ask this question is contemptuous of what it takes to be an artist, in time, commitment, and materials.
I had a “day” job, until 1986. Then I got a lucrative regular magazine writing gig, and then I gleefully quit my old job.
Before I was a professional writer/editor, I wasn’t starving; I was living communally, on the cheap. I had dopey part-time jobs so I could have as much free time as possible. I cleaned people’s houses, waited on tables, sold pot I grew from one plant on my windowsill for $20 a bag, worked in bookstores, and temped in offices.
2025 Update:
When you’re old, your aching joints call the shots. I couldn’t jump back to waitressing and scrubbing floors, that’s for sure. “Jump” is not happening. I will always have to work to pay the bills, and this newsletter is Exhibit A. As long as I have my sight, I can write.
I have a farmer friend, Andy Griffin, who has some grim but gripping predictions about the current economy.
“I may be wrong,” he said, “but I won’t be wrong, and go hungry.”
I think he’s got the right idea. Back to my bean co-op plan.
6. Have you ever paid, or been paid for sex?
I had to think about this one. It’s one of those “almost, but not quite” stories.
I’ve lived and worked in a cathouse, but I was the only one not doing pro sex. I’m a really good cook, though.
I wouldn’t be good at providing sex professionally. You can see everything I'm thinking on my face. I’m not charming enough. I’m impatient.
I’ve been paid to work professionally in sex films, but I didn’t actually have sex. I was background. I worked on my tax returns in the background of “The Grafenberg Spot.”
On the other hand, I’ve made sex movies with friends where I did have sex, but there was no money changing hands.
I’ve tipped erotic dancers profusely, and although we didn’t have “sex,” in a narrow sense, they certainly thrilled me to death.
By far the creepiest sexual situations involving money I’ve been in was with so-called “publishing investors.”
I used to publish a magazine, and on two occasions, I was asked to put out, to cement the deal. One couple who had made a fortune founding an organic grocery chain (!) flew me out to Florida. They initially appeared as “angels,” but turned out to be horny cokeheads with guns. I’m amazed I got out of there alive; they abandoned me in a Daytona Beach biker bar.
Another sleazebag was a prominent advertiser from Absolut Vodka who wanted “lesbians” to entertain him. I was so upset; I had thought they were sincere. (Youth!) I walked out, shakily, much to their anger.
7. I read that in the 1980s you worked at Good Vibrations, the feminist vibrator store. What was it like working retail for a living?
Retail is retail. It is no more fulfilling to count buttplugs in an inventory review than it is to count pencils.
Customers can be rude anywhere; the pay isn’t very good.
I loved the educational, “getting-to-know-you” part of my retail jobs. I made friends I have to this day! I liked that about bookselling, too. I enjoy teaching and listening and trying to understand where the customer is coming from. I was thought of, by my boss, as a remarkable sales person. Then she decided she couldn’t afford to pay me a commission.
2025 Update: Many of my friends work in retail and hospitality. What’s changed is the physical danger and mental illness factor. I never worried in the 80s that someone was going to lunge at me at the store, pull a gun, grab my hands, have a full-on psych meltdown. Everyone in our retail world today is expected to be a first-responder.
The idea that this goes along with real wages going DOWN, is outrageous.
8. What did your mother teach you about money?
Kind of a combo of “root of all evil,” and “Last paycheck here! Let’s go get ice-cream!”
2025 Update: I appreciated how my mom planned her death, and I’m sure to copy her in some respects. She lived in a state, Minnesota, where you could modestly fund a co-op share in cremation costs. Her papers were well-organized, the keys and passwords were in one place. She lived in an apartment building where everyone informally helped out whomever was the oldest, as they became frail. She lived on $13,000 a year as a top-tier librarian. Imagine that. Her insurance company fought tooth and nail to deny her last year of healthcare coverage, but I have her fighting spirit, and we didn’t let them get away with it.
9. Do you and your partner, see eye-to-eye on finances?
My partner Jon and I share practical values – there’s nothing he’d want to do with money that would shock me, and I bet he’d say the same.
He’s more frugal than me. He’s more ambivalent about purchasing things for his pleasure. He can make his own fun out of a ball of string, anytime.
On the other hand, one time he bought a used sailboat.
He’s reticent to put his stuff out there to the public; I’m the go-getter type. He’d rather build something himself than ask anyone for help. I love to talk to strangers; I always imagine the happy connection.
He’s also the sort of person who can read the news about global finance and quickly translate that into how that’s going to affect us, next year. I’ve learned a lot from him that way.
He’s also quick to sing the John Prine song, “We’re not the jet-set, we’re the old Chevrolet set, but ain’t we got love…”
I would say I’ve changed more than Jon has about money, over the years. I used to find shopping relaxing; now it annoys me. I’m all too aware of its fleeting thrill. I’d rather have our housing paid for.
2025 Update:
Jon predicted the market crash long ago, but I was the one who said, “We are getting out TODAY.” We are too old to wait for the other side of this nuthouse. It was always a mirage.
We do not know what the “secret plan” is, to weather what’s about to happen. So we are alike in our lack of hubris. I am the more pessimistic of the two of us. We shall see!
10. What are your plans for retirement?
Yeah, WHAT ARE THEY?
I’m dying to find out.
I am not prepared in the fashion that money experts would advise. When I look at the questionnaires in financial advice magazines that ask, “Do you have this? Are you all set for that?” I sadly shake my head.
If you’re not upper middle class with dyed-in-the-wool security, much of their advice seems pointless. Of course I’d love to have a bulging IRA and my housing secure . . . who wouldn’t? But you can’t do these things without a healthy foundation and thriving income, not to mention an absence of debt. America does not afford those opportunities for many people; fewer all the time.
The best practical money habit I changed, that impacted my future, was to get rid of my consumer debt. I don’t carry it anymore. That was huge.
My crippling expenses are health care, and this isn’t something I can solve by abstaining from getting a coffee out. The Netflix budget won’t buy me a trip to the emergency room on a Saturday night.
If I could kick myself into doing one thing consistently now, it would be to take care of my body. Whatever I might spend on keeping moving, and well-oiled now is nothing compared to the costs of illness and infirmity. You’ve heard the pep talk; now let’s see if I do something about it!
One last thing: you can’t say enough about good friends, good will, and integrity. When I got pregnant at 31, people asked me if I’d worked out the finances, and I said, “No!”
But I knew my family and friends were devoted to me, they feel well-cared for by me, and they would adore this baby so much, that we weren’t going to just sink down a drain. “Ain’t we got love!”
2025 Update:
Everything is topsy-turvy. Whatever you thought you were doing in 2024, it’s something else now. Infectious disease, late-stage cap, climate refugee-status— the fates are in flux.
I applied for Social Security two years ago when I turned 65, which some friends advised was too early.
Today, 2025, we’re seeing that no one can even FILE a Social Security claim, because Elon Musk closed the SSA offices and broke the web site.
I’m glad I inadvertently turned on my small spigot when I did. It wasn’t because I was so smart; I just needed the money. Same with Medicare. Health is no longer my biggest expense. Now it’s fuel, housing, food.
Our family will always work. We’ll share things with our kin, our neighbors. We’ll eat all that Spam I bought during Covid 2020. We’ll get tricky and we’ll get adventurous, even if we move slower. We’ll dig in. We know too much, right? I’ll see you in the lovers’ army underground!
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The Iconoclast's Money-Honey Bookshelf
Books that offer squirm-worthy truths and practical alternatives for navigating our current late-cap scenario:
What Your Financial Advisor Won't Recommend
"The Deficit Myth" by Stephanie Kelton - Demolishes conventional wisdom about government spending and national debt that shapes mainstream financial advice.
"The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel - Reveals how financial decisions have far less to do with spreadsheets and far more to do with our personal histories, traumas, and cognitive biases.
Beyond "Just Save More"
"The Great Depression: A Diary" by Benjamin Roth - Written by a lawyer who documented economic collapse in real-time, this firsthand account shows how ordinary people actually survived when the system failed. The parallels to today are eerie.
"Nomadland" by Jessica Bruder - Chronicles how older Americans abandoned by our retirement system created alternative economies and nomadic communities. Read before you resign yourself to working to death.
The Anti-Wall Street Journal Reading List
"For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America" by John Curl - Traces America's long history of cooperative economics that Wall Street would prefer you forget.
"How to Retire with Enough Money" by Teresa Ghilarducci - This is a manual for someone in their 20s and 30s, and I wish I had seen it when I was young. It imagines a more stable stock market than we have today. To say the least. American hubris. It imagines a point in “saving” anything. So maybe it just seems ludicrous at this point. But. Her basic politics about becoming an activist for progressive policy, as well as saving your nut, are sound. Some solid grandparent advice.
Radical Feminist Economics
"The Sexual Contract" by Carole Pateman - Exposes how the entire modern economic system is built on an unacknowledged sexual contract that exploits women's unpaid labor. It’s a classic for a reason.
"Caliban and the Witch" by Silvia Federici - A revolutionary feminist history that connects the origins of capitalism to the witch hunts and control of women's bodies. GET ME MY BROOM.
Guerrilla Gardening & Urban Food Sovereignty
"Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement" by Monica M. White - Chronicles how Black agricultural cooperatives created food independence as resistance against economic oppression. Concrete models for community food sovereignty.
"Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" by Novella Carpenter - A hands-on account of transforming a vacant lot in Oakland into a productive mini-farm.
"Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto" by David Tracey - Reclaiming urban spaces for food production.
Underground Economies & Barter Systems
"Debt: The First 5,000 Years" by David Graeber - This anarchist anthropologist's masterwork reveals how money and debt are social constructions, offering historical examples of societies that functioned with different economic relationships than ours today.
"The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living" by Mark Boyle - A chronicle of living entirely outside the money economy. When he wrote it, it was like, “how bizarre” but now it’s time to take a second look.
Anarchist's Guide to Growing Old in America
"Paradise Built in Hell" by Rebecca Solnit - Documents how disaster communities often create spontaneous mutual aid networks more effective than official channels. Offers a model for creating elder support networks when institutional support fails.
"Our Bodies, Our Shelves: A Collection of Library Humor" by Roz Warren - Public libraries serve as unofficial social service agencies for marginalized elders. Also, Roz is a hoot.
"The Revolution Will Not Be Funded" edited by INCITE! - A critique of the nonprofit industrial complex, as well as the rescue industry, with alternatives for community care models not dependent on grants or government funding. Now that there are no grants to apply for, it couldn’t be more timely.
"Elder Care Journey: A View from the Front Lines" by Laura Katz Olson - A radical account of navigating broken elder care systems, and providing tactical workarounds.
Historical & Intergenerational Perspectives
"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn - How does the American working-class historically respond to economic crises? It’s all here.
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich - I miss Barbara so much. I too was nickel and dimed for most of my work life, and no one gets it, like Barb.
Class-Conscious Financial Approaches to Health and Ageing
"Broke: Patients Talk about Money with Their Doctor" by Michael Stein - Examines the healthcare crisis from a family financial perspective and what it means for aging Americans.
Once you're done with this reading list, you'll never look at a “financial advice column“ the same way again. Who needs a “portfolio” when you have clarity about what really matters?
In Case You Missed It:
Below is a real “mess tray.” This is a real meal from yesterday, not yester-year. This is Willow Pennell’s unrepentant meatloaf. You can’t prove it cured her teenager’s COVID. But you can’t prove it didn’t.
This comment is SO good: “Every woman on the fuck you side of menopause is a ‘feminist archetype’. The hormone blinders are off.”
You nailed it. I think the pix of the $20 summed it up nicely.