Your friend has more money than you do. How can your relationship survive?

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Natalie Vallot struggled financially to get through nursing school. At the same time, her friend started making more money. Photo / Ilana Panich-Linsman, The New York Times
Financial disparities in friendships can create conflict where it shouldn’t exist. Here’s how two friends navigated a growing wealth gap.
Adult friendships aren’t easy to maintain. Busy schedules and competing demands interfere with making time for friends. And when money is involved, friendships can become even more complicated.

Simple activities,
like going out to dinner or getting drinks, can quickly turn awkward. Bigger decisions, such as sharing an apartment or taking a joint vacation, are even more fraught, especially when one friend has deeper pockets than the other.

“Money brings up a lot,” said Aja Evans, a financial therapist and the author of Feel-Good Finance. “It brings up a fear of being misunderstood, rejected and judged.”
Financial disparities in friendships can create an unease where one shouldn’t exist, especially when people conflate their net worth with their self-worth.
“That’s why it’s so uncomfortable,” said Anna Goldfarb, the author of Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. “You might be OK with your parents paying for something, but a friend paying for you can feel strange because the power dynamic will feel off.”
The relationship between power and money can also highlight broader social issues and disparities. “It can call attention to differences in privilege and issues with bias and discrimination,” Evans said, “and this may strain the friendship further”.
However, not all financially disparate friendships are doomed. Natalie Vallot, 49, and Hilah Johnson, 44, have been friends for more than two decades. In 2010, Johnson started a YouTube cooking show, Hilah Cooking. When the show took off, so did her income. As Vallot struggled financially to get through nursing school, the two had to navigate a growing wealth gap. Here’s how they did it.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: What were your finances like when you met?
Hilah Johnson: Natalie, I feel like you were the rich one when we first met.
Natalie Vallot: I was making US$18 ($28) an hour.
Johnson: You were making more per hour than any of us. You would always float us at the bar. You were the rich one for the first 13 years of our friendship. I was really good at being frugal, though.
Q: Were there hard feelings over your income disparity?
Johnson: Not really. Nat was always very generous. If I couldn’t afford to go out, she’d be like, ‘Come out, I’ll cover you.’ So I didn’t ever feel like I was being a burden. I mean, it’s not like I was ordering top shelf or anything. I wasn’t going to take advantage.
Q: When did finances start to shift for you?
Vallot: Around 2010, I quit being a nanny and went back to school for nursing. So it was a struggle for a while. Me and my husband, Billy, were definitely at our poorest at that point.
Johnson: And right when you went back to school, that’s when my YouTube channel began taking off. In 2011, I was making enough to quit my day job.
Q: When did you realise you didn’t have to worry about money anymore?
Johnson: My partner and producer Chris and I wanted to buy furniture as a backdrop for some food photography. So we went to Ikea and spent US$300 ($480) on a chest. It wasn’t cheap. It was the good Ikea stuff. We put it on a business credit card because it was a business expense, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I do have some money now.’ And that was weird.
Q: Around this time, you two were in very different financial circumstances. Did this disparity lead to any awkward situations?
Vallot: When I turned 40, all our friends wanted me and my husband to celebrate in Hawaii. And we couldn’t afford it, so our friends bankrolled us. I remember a friend saying, ‘How much can you all afford?’ and I told her my number, and she said, ‘OK, that’s how much you’re paying.’ That was nice. But my friends just subsidised and subsidised.
Johnson: My approach to money is I feel like it’s all going to come out in the wash, as long as nobody feels like they’re getting taken advantage of. For the Hawaii trip, I remember thinking, this is what we have to do for Natalie. I was happy to pitch in because I wanted y’all to go. And it was your 40th birthday, and we had so much fun. It would be dumb if you weren’t allowed to go because you couldn’t afford it.
Q: Did you feel weird about it?
Vallot: I did at first. I think it does make you try to behave yourself. Like, we all went to the grocery store to pick out the food we wanted for the trip, and I was like, ‘I’ll eat whatever.’ I didn’t feel like I had a say because everyone else was paying for it. But I’m kind of like that, anyway, I’m flexible. Once we got there I realised, we’re all here, and these are my sisters.
Q: I wonder if it helps that you seem to have shared values when it comes to money?
Johnson: I just don’t think that the amount of money you have is inherently tied to who you are as a person or your value as a person. That’s a completely ridiculous idea. And maybe the fact that everyone in our friend group feels that way is what makes it easier to share it and not worry about it.
Q: What advice do you have for other friends dealing with financial issues?
Vallot: Give what you want to get back. I totally forgot that I was the moneybags when I was a nanny.
Johnson: I think, also, to be honest about what you can afford. Just say, ‘I can’t afford that. Can we pick something cheaper? Here’s my budget, can you all work within that?’ If your friends want to spend time with you, nobody’s going to object. Don’t be afraid to say, ‘That’s a little too pricey for me.’
Q: Have you ever argued about money?
Johnson: No, and I think there might be two more reasons we’ve never argued over money. One is that we’ve never lived together or had a relationship where one person’s money choices affected the other person’s life.
And the second is that we’ve never borrowed or lent money between us. Everything has been given freely, with no expectations or strings attached. What’s that old axiom about not lending money you can’t afford to lose? I think we’ve always followed that, too.
Vallot: I absolutely agree. I think respect is required to pull friendships through challenges, but having similar values is what grounds us.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kristin Wong
Photographs by: Ilana Panich-Linsman, Philip Cheung
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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