‘Money diaries’ bring social media into the real world
Anonymous accounts of weekly spending are far more relatable than celebs’ lifestyle routines, writes Sophie Donaldson
OF all the negligible snippets of information available on the internet, personal money diaries are one of the more satisfying ways to while away a lunch break.
For the unfamiliar, money diaries are written anonymously over the course of one week, often by women for a mostly female readership.
They can be found on various websites, but their popularity is really down to women’s lifestyle and culture site Refinery 29. Their viral series has garnered a hardcore following, as well as a podcast and book. Money diaries detail every single transaction made over the seven-day period, as well as giving details on income, debt, loan repayments and monthly expenses — and they make for truly captivating reading.
More than learning about other people’s finances — a topic still taboo even among close friends — money diaries are an intimate glimpse into an individual’s world. By de- tailing their spending, diarists also divulge their living situation, career, exercise, diet, social life, relationship status, the Netflix programmes they binge on and how they spend their nights.
It is these details that make the diaries so relatable. You learn you are not alone in ditching your after-work gym session three days in a row and feeling guilty about the membership fees, or staying awake until 2am watching the entire boxset of Black Mirror. Somebody else, somewhere in the world, shares your habit of eating an entire packet of spicy Doritos whilst listening to true crime podcasts.
The reassurance and realism that money diaries provide are scarce commodities elsewhere on the internet. Social media has us committed to peddling a false sense of reality, in which everybody wants to share everything about themselves, except the things that are actually true.
Funnily enough, it is brute honesty that makes money diaries so wry and appealing; they are a breath of fresh air among an unrelenting stream of insouciantly captioned photos that have in fact been painstakingly drafted before being published online. Money diaries make you feel OK for all the bad habits you would only divulge under the cloak of anonymity.
They are in stark contrast to the personal athome routines detailed by various public figures of late. Back in September, Mark Wahlberg sparked both scorn and alarm for his daily schedule, which was posted to his Instagram. According to the schedule, Wahlberg rises at 2.30am each morning and his day includes golf, two workout sessions, a session in his cryo chamber and a bedtime of 7.30pm. His early wake-up call made Richard Branson’s 5am start, detailed in a 2017 blog post, seem positively slovenly.
Last week, supermodel Elle Macpherson gave readers of her Get The Gloss column a peek into the night-time routine she conducts each evening. The 54-yearold mother-of-two always eats dinner before 6pm, while her before-bed routine includes brewing a pot of calming tea and spritzing her pillows with lavender-scented mist. Unsurprisingly, Gwyneth Paltrow has waded in, with a video posted recently to her lifestyle website Goop that details a morning skincare routine that uses four Goop-branded products. Despite the fact the combined cost of her routine is $385, Paltrow still manages to be more low-key than US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 29-year-old darling of the Democrats took to Instagram last week to divulge to her 2.2m followers the six-step skincare routine she abides by each night. While these seemingly intimate disclosures about their personal habits may be designed to endear these public figures to their fans, they are about as relatable as Linda Evangelista’s five-figure wake-up call. When you are a celebrity or lifestyle blogger trying to cultivate a public persona, there is no mention of trying to wrangle wailing children into bed when all you want to do is flop on to the couch with a sippy cup of merlot. Nobody is willing to admit falling asleep on to the keyboard of their laptop while watching K-Pop videos on YouTube, or conking out after a late night with both eyeliner and trousers still on.
It seems that no moment is too personal to publicise; what we cook, eat, wear and even how we tidy is fair game for Instagram. Now, that precious allotment of time just after we rise or before we fall into bed, that glorious in-between zone when the day is either beginning or ending, is starting to look rather labour-intensive. Moreover, it now has the potential to make us feel guilty for the spritzing of pillows we haven’t done, for all the serums we haven’t applied and the few too many hours of sleep we’ ll manage once we finally put our phones down.
Let’s not allow these blissful moments of “me-time” see the same fate as brunch — a meal that has been reduced to a staged photo op over rapidly cooling eggs. Even if you do rise with the dawn for some yoga and a serve of home brewed kombucha, or end the day with a 60-minute gratitude chant and an eight-step cleansing routine, best keep that to yourself — the rest of us have some Netflix to catch up on, thanks.