“Money is not just money, it is a representation of time, of opportunity.”
—Cara Nicole
While I was finishing up my recent rewatch of “Sex and the City” and finally embarking on my first watch of the reboot “And Just Like That,” the algorithm plucked the perfect video out of the abyss and presented it to me: “Financially Auditing Carrie Bradshaw” by Cara Nicole on YouTube.
Much like my first Carrie Finances post back in 2021, Cara’s analysis was spurred by the episode in which Carrie goes to the bank and is denied a loan for being an “unattractive candidate.” After spending $40,000 on shoes alone, she only has $700 in her checking account and $957 in her savings account! (About $1,250 and $1,720, respectively, indexed to inflation from 2001 to 2024.)
In Cara’s video, she notes that Carrie’s shopping addiction laid the groundwork for today’s influencers who have normalized overconsumption. The root of that is having an emotional relationship with money. When Carrie slips and falls in a Dior store in Paris in season six and returns to her Russian boyfriend with multiple bags of merchandise, she says it’s because she was too embarrassed not to. If I slipped in a fancy store, I would simply remove myself from the entire block and never show my face again—and definitely not spend thousands of dollars because I felt bad! (One cookie could probably solve that problem, let’s be honest.)
I’m so glad Carrie is fictional so we can drag her. As Cara notes, “judging fictional characters? That seems like fair game.” In one scene, Carrie says, “When I first moved to New York and I was totally broke, sometimes I would buy Vogue instead of dinner. I just felt it fed me more.” Of course, Carrie is romanticizing her past, but let’s not sugarcoat poverty here. What she’s really nostalgic for is the beginning of her independence when there weren’t complicated relationships and a whole messy life to think about. Scarcity made her decisions simple: food or fashion?
It reminds me of the White Stripes’ song “Little Room”: “Well, you’re in your little room / And you’re working on something good / But if it’s really good / You’re gonna need a bigger room. / And when you’re in the bigger room / You might not know what to do / You might have to think of how you got started / Sitting in your little room.”
The White Stripes was a band that limited themselves to the point of liberation. By setting restrictions on the art they could make as a two-piece band, they created something entirely new. As Jack White’s solo career took off, he had more and more resources available to him, including an entire record label to manage. Without limitations, the music wasn’t grabbing fans as much anymore, and many of my friends eschewed his solo career altogether. I don’t think he’s ever been able to get back into that little room.
Cara also pushes the importance of having an emergency savings fund of three to six months of living expenses, which Carrie clearly doesn’t have. The closest she gets to investing is in the first episode of season six. She is invited to ring the bell for the start of trading at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on the first day that the New York Star newspaper, in which her column is published, begins publicly trading on the exchange.
Afterward, Carrie says to her friends, “It was so exciting, it almost made me want to invest in something!” Miranda chimes in, saying that she doesn’t invest anymore because it’s “too volatile” (even though she’s a lawyer?) and Carrie spits back, “Exactly, I like my money right where I can see it: hanging in my closet.”
I cringed watching this scene of four educated women deny that they needed to invest simply because it’s something men do. Yes, this was the early 2000s, but even Lois Frankel’s book “Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich” from 2005 had better lessons than don’t save and “just invest in clothes.”
Though this is fiction, we consume it—that’s the operative word. We consume this art and expect our lives to mirror it. This also goes for what we see on social media, what we overconsume because we see people constantly buying things that we believe are improving their lives. There’s more value in what you do with your life than what you have. The true cost of spending is what you’re not saving it for, what you won’t have in the future because you want to build up your life now. It’s a trade-off, but do you want to start strong, or end strong? I’m going to try for a balance of both!
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