It’s said sometimes of materialistic, unlikeable people:  “She knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”  She has, in other words, neither taste, nor class.

But then this is something I could say legitimately of myself, though my friends assure me I am reasonably likeable and, when I choose to be, entirely classy.  The problem is something other than my chronic flare-ups of materialism. It has to do more with my persistent tendency to worry about money – a tendency I believe I share with millions of other nice, classy women.

More to the point, I worry about what things cost.  It’s nothing new, and I probably inherited it from my Depression-reared, and Scottish to boot, mother.  But I’ve noticed this cost fixation rearing its hydra-heads more frequently this past year, as I wrote and published my first book.  There were so many services I had to buy in order to get this book done.  I had all the ideas I needed on what women should know about personal finance, but I did not have the graphic design or editorial skills to put a fine polish on those ideas.  Nor did I have the marketing skills to know how to get the right people in sufficient numbers reading, buying and talking about my book.   This meant most of the time I was not writing was spent interviewing experts and consultants to see how they could help me.

But after just a few minutes of their pitch I stopped listening to what they could do, and started fretting about what it would cost.  Sometimes, I would even interrupt them, in a hurry to know what the price would be.  I’d try to be casual and nonchalant, even though I was desperate to know, “So, I know you might not be able to give me a definite figure, but about how much are we talking here?”  When I actually caught myself saying yes to one consultant because the price was right without my having any real sense of exactly what her services entailed, I knew I was in trouble.  Time to step back and start thinking again about value, about what mattered to me.

A kinder aphorism than the one quoted above goes like this:  “A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he really wants, where a woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn’t really want.”  This I think sums up our female confusion with price and value.  If the price is good, then the service or item itself must be good.

In all fairness to us women, I think we are more apt to suffer value blindness when we are unfamiliar with the things we are pricing.  If you’ve never bought a car before, or a hi-def TV, or like me, are a first-time author, mother, business owner, it’s hard to understand the worth of what we are buying.  Over the last few decades, women are acquiring things, going places, taking on roles and responsibilities, that they never have before.

The enlargement of our lives is exhilarating but also overwhelming, and it is not surprising that we sometimes default to a familiar vantage point from which to take in all this newness.  What’s familiar but not at all enlarging, is what we have in our checking accounts.  “Can I afford it?” becomes much easier to answer than “Do I want or need it?”  But letting a “yes” to the first question become an automatic “yes” to the second is a dangerous habit for us.  As a matter of fact, just as harmful is denying your needs and wants because you don’t have the money.

As women, our first step toward financial confidence is to look at our ideal lives, leaving all considerations of cost completely out of our assessment.  What do we want our lives to look like, what would be included, what would be left out?  This picture shows us what we value most and what we should be willing to work and pay for, regardless of its dollar cost.  We do not have to wait until this ideal life goes “on sale” before we reach for it.

We do not have to settle for less.