A few years ago; I graduated with an arts degree, a humongous student loan and no knowledge whatsoever about economics. I realized I might want to learn something about money, seeing as how I’d like to have some. And so I began to research. I read books and articles and discovered it was much more fascinating than I’d imagined. Since then I have kept up with economic literature and my own situation has improved moderately (I’m still an artist after all).

It’s because of the knowledge I picked up that the economic crisis of last year did not come as a shock to me. I noticed that while the price of housing, good and services were ballooning and corporate profit was going stratospheric; the wages of middle-class people had stagnated. Not only that, full-time jobs with benefits were slowly being replaced by freelance and contractual work. You don’t need to be a math genius to realize that the numbers weren’t adding up. The past year has been a very interesting time. And I can use the word “interesting” instead of “tragic” because I personally did not lose any money.

I’ve learned that when it comes to money; knowledge truly is power. Women and artists are especially vulnerable to poverty because of societal myths that we shouldn’t or wouldn’t be interested in money. Both women and artists often work for altruistic reasons thus aren’t adequately compensated. With the money we do earn; we don’t know always know how to invest it wisely.

The myth that artists are terrible with money and exist outside of the mainstream economy, has, unfortunately, self-perpetuated to the detriment of artists and culture. The modernist ideal of the Artist who works solely for self-expression and not for personal gain has only served to keep working artists poor and lower the quality of our creative production. Even commercial artists bear the brunt of this stigma; with low pay, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits. The truth is that the arts generate a lot of revenue for this country and artists should be empowered to ask for adequate compensation for what we do.

North American women have come a long way in gaining education and career options. However, we still have financial obstacles to deal with. Women still make less money than men. Our work culture has a problem with pink collar ghetto-ization; where industries that women gravitate to (like teaching and publishing) pay employees less than more male-dominated industries. Women who have children often take a break from their careers, and if they divorce their finances take another beating.

Statistics, if one would bother to look them up, support these points (since I’m an unpaid blogger not a journalist you’ll have to look them up yourself at StatsCan). Beyond facts, a psychological gender divide exists when it comes to wealth. There’s a strange paradox in our culture. Women are expected to covet luxury and look like a million bucks, but we’re not expected to aggressively make and invest money. In fact, a willful ignorance is encouraged. And this ignorance is just as harmful as a Madoff investment.

If you’ve made it this far and would like some advice on personal finance, here are my recommendations. There’s loads of money books on the market, but most of them are repetitive. Borrow a copy of “The Wealthy Barber” from your library. Its short, its Canadian, and its easy to read. Read the business section of the paper occasionally, check out The Economist magazine for a global perspective, and two blogs I like are Get Rich Slowly and Mint.

 

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