Why we need to talk about money

“The Money Hans? That just sounds crass!”

When I thinking about a name for my altar-ego last year, I ran a number of ideas past my friends. ‘Hans’ was easy - it's Sanskrit for swan, symbolising learning. The 'hamsa' is also said to have special powers to separate milk from water. Given my name and financial research background, I wanted the portal name to reflect my objectives to help investors learn and separate good investments from bad. But not all my friends liked the idea of including the word money. I went ahead with it anyway, but the question of why talking about money is considered so rude nagged me.

I don’t get why money is taboo in the first place. Just like why sex is taboo. In fact, you might even get by without sex (although in a country of 1.3 billion people, we are obviously having enough of it), but I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t have to handle money. I think it’s time we broke this taboo. Here are a few reasons why –

To learn the language of money

Like any other profession, the financial services industry uses its own language - full of jargon, abbreviations and acronyms, and phrases – that helps it communicate among its members more efficiently. As a layperson, you may not need to know most of it. But there are some basic concepts that everyone should understand. Examples are inflation, interest rates, taxes, neo-liberal and Keynesian economic theories etc.

Ideally, these basics of economics and finance should be taught in schools, but even if they are, we are likely to forget high school economics by the time we graduate. Do you remember your high school French? Probably not. To get fluent in any language, we need to practice it, indeed immerse ourselves in it. The language of money is no different – we need to learn the basics and practice it by using it in daily conversation.

To get fair pay

From Hollywood actresses to the World Economic Forum, the gender pay gap has had good airplay recently. Women get paid less than men for the same work because they don’t negotiate as well. How are women, or anyone for that matter, supposed to negotiate if they don’t know what the going-rate is? They not only need to be able to look up salary surveys but also discuss them with friends and colleagues more openly.

Of course, we also need to disclose our financial dealings and conflicts of interest, to pay our taxes and especially if we hold public office and fiduciary roles. Senior management and directors of listed companies face shareholder scrutiny over their pay anyway, so perhaps openly justifying it might help reduce outrage.

To get over the shame of failure

In his interview with Arnab Goswami last year, superstar Amitabh Bachchan admitted that he struggled to discuss the failure of his company, and the associated financial stress, with even his own family. He had not really discussed this topic for 20 years, and still looked uncomfortable. This wasn’t an issue of privacy – the whole country already knew the story. I believe this sense of shame of financial stress is common in Asian cultures, but I was shocked to find out recently about an Australian financial industry colleague committing suicide due to financial troubles. The heartbreaking part was that apparently his wife didn’t know about his financial stress.

As we nurture entrepreneurship, we have to learn to let go of this shame. We have to learn to embrace failure because it is likely to happen to us more often. Isn’t that why we are asking for a modern bankruptcy code? Embracing implies that we talk about financial highs and lows more openly, and be open to help and new beginnings.

To understand our own attitudes to money

We all have some ‘money scripts’ in our heads, usually the ones we’ve grown up with. Some of us grew up with ‘money is the root of all problems’ comments while others with the opposite ‘money is status’. It could be these attitudes to money that hold people back from becoming wealthy, according to some recent research. Indeed, a 2010 book suggests there are ‘money disorders’ - disorders are not one-off events but persistent, predictable, often rigid patters of self-destructive financial behaviours that cause significant stress and anxiety. The remedy to these disorders is becoming aware of these disorders by writing down earliest memories about money, and parents’ attitudes to money, which should help resolving any unfinished business and then re-writing the scripts.

In summary, I believe there are many reasons for talking about money openly – from financial education to social transparency to personal psychology. I am not suggesting that discussing money will make it more important, or change its status from means to an end to the end itself. If anything, I submit that perhaps managing it better will allow people to worry less about it and focus on the end goals.

I hope The Money Hans can help people in this journey.

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An edited version of this post appeared in ET Wealth dated 18 April 2016.

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