What We Talk About When We Talk About Money

"Every charge on my credit card was because I needed it. I couldn't start living until I furnished my new apartment, I couldn't start working until I bought a faster computer, I couldn't interview for this job until I got a professional outfit. I couldn't possibly go on with the day until I had a latte and a chocolate croissant. Getting rid of my credit cards has put a stop to day-to-day justification of need."

—From The Billfold, "How I Stopped Hating My Apartment (And Maybe Also Myself )" Aug. 30, 2012

Logan Sachon (Col '05) is not afraid to talk about money, nor is she afraid to confess her own financial woes. In a time when the Internet is saturated with whimsical Instagram photos and chirpy Facebook updates, Sachon writes daily about her struggles with spending and debt on the website The Billfold, which she began with her friend Mike Dang last year.

Sachon, 28, and Dang, 29, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, met when they were both blog writing for Bundle, a personal finance startup backed by Microsoft and Citigroup. "We had a fair amount of independence in what we wrote, but it wasn't ours," Sachon says "Mike and I had all these conversations about what we'd do if it were our site."

Sachon had noticed that interviewing people about their financial portfolios for Bundle was stirring anxiety within herself. "I was in a ton of debt—I still am—and I wouldn't have wanted anybody to ask me those questions," she says. She started writing about her own spending habits. "I slowly got used to it and realized: Wow. I feel a lot better, being open about everything. There is value in this."

She and Dang envisioned The Billfold as "a site about money," although not a personal finance site. "Neither of us is a personal finance expert at all," Sachon says. "Our own stories and other people's stories are really all we have to share."

The two also knew that their stories would balance each other well. Dang budgets, saves for retirement and sets aside money from his paycheck every month to help his parents pay their mortgage. Sachon, meanwhile, readily admits she has a "spending problem."

"I've known Logan for a few years, and she has always had a significant amount of credit card debt," Dang says. "We've never had a problem talking about money with each other." Those conversations were to become the basis for The Billfold.

Sachon and Dang decided to pitch their idea of a money site to The Awl, a New York-based network of websites devoted to long-form essays and shorter musings on "the issues of the day." Sachon had already freelanced for the site, interviewing comedians, novelists and entrepreneurs about their daily lives and big ideas—displaying the same curiosity about how people "make it" that now propels her own website. "Mike and Logan had a great idea for a website and they presented it to us, and the rest is history," says John Shankman, The Awl's publisher. The Billfold launched in April 2012.

With its tagline "everything about money you were too polite to ask," The Billfold taps into the anxiety many young people feel about the economy and serves as a place to talk openly about those fears. The Billfold's insistence on the value of individual stories may be the key to its success. Its audience has steadily grown since its launch—the site currently averages 200,000 unique views and one million pageviews a month. More than 150 people have written for the site. Some are known writers; others are getting their first break. All currently write for the site for free.

"The Billfold addresses money anxiety in a concrete and necessary way. Both Mike and Logan are always linking to news stories that are ethically and informatively crucial if young people really want to understand the financial underpinnings of the world we are set to inherit," says Jia Tolentino (Col '09), a writer for the site. 

Now pursuing her M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Michigan, Tolentino first noticed The Billfold when she was just out of the Peace Corps and writing corporate ad copy to pay the bills. "I'd never written about money before," she says. "Actually, I'd never really published anything creative before." She sent in her first essay, about potentially buying a house, to Sachon and mentioned their UVA connection.

Heidi N. Moore, the U.S. finance and economics editor for the Guardian and former correspondent for NPR's Marketplace, is also a Billfold contributor—Sachon interviewed Moore about her own financial habits and has asked her to break down complicated economics issues for the average reader.

"A lot of personal finance coverage is not fully accessible; it's a lot of numbers and it's usually written by people who have it all figured out, or act like they do. What I liked about The Billfold right away was its honesty. It tackles the way money makes us crazy—what it does to our emotions, our self-worth, our identity. No other website will tackle that," Moore says. "To borrow a phrase from [HBO's] Girls, I think The Billfold is also the voice of a generation."

Sachon and Dang do seem to have an uncanny ability to connect to their readers. While Dang often serves as the site's kindly sage, advising readers about budgeting, investing, careers and housing, Sachon's posts can seem irreverent at first glance, full of caps-locked words for emphasis, and written in a wry, deadpan tone that barely covers the churning worry beneath.

Sachon's interest in writing stems in part from her time at UVA, when she worked on the staff of The Declaration, or "the Dec," a weekly student newsmagazine known for its arts coverage, long think pieces and "Poodah Corner," its cheeky humor column. "I showed up [to the Dec] my first semester and was terrified the whole time because everyone was smarter and funnier than I was, but for some reason, I kept coming back," Sachon says. "I learned how to put together a publication, and think about vision and writing. I never took any writing or media studies classes at UVA. My interest in approaching the world in a way that's personal and funny comes from the Dec."

While at UVA, thinking about money wasn't really on Sachon's radar. She did work a part-time job her fourth year at the Rotunda information desk. "We opened the building in the morning and closed it at night," she says. "If there weren't tours going on, we'd tell visitors some anecdotes. I had a good spiel about the [1895] fire." Still, her parents paid for her tuition and room and board. "I knew it was generous, but it wasn't until after I graduated and met people who had student loans or hadn't been able to go to college at all that I realized how lucky I really was," she says.

Sachon graduated from UVA before the recession struck. She toyed with the idea of graduate school, envisioning paying for it with student loans. "It was just sort of assumed that you'd take on this debt," she says. "The mentality seemed to be: Student loans! Everyone's doing it!" At that time, Sachon says, she and many of her friends thought that they would have well-paying jobs right after graduation. "It just seemed inevitable—but it was a delusion of grandeur."

In the year after she graduated, Sachon says she quickly ran up $7,000 in credit card debt, although she had a steady job in Southern California. "I never stopped to figure out what that salary meant, what I had to spend each month. The debt came from just living above my means the entire year. I was so sure that very soon I'd get a better job and that $7,000 would be nothing, something I'd pay off in a lump sum," she says.

Instead, she was laid off from her job and began working as a freelance writer, living paycheck-to-paycheck and, as she describes, using her credit cards as "stop gaps" so that she could still do "almost whatever" she wanted. She stopped keeping track of her finances. Last year she added up her debt and discovered she owed about $20,000, much more than she thought she did.

"That was a huge deal for her—having one number in your head, and then discovering that the real number was double what you originally thought," Dang says. "When she told me about her actual credit card debt number, my reaction was, 'Wow.' And then: 'So what are you going to do now?'"

Sachon decided to be open about her spending problem and debt on The Billfold and to hand over her credit cards to Dang so she would stop using them. Additionally, Sachon and Dang discuss how much debt they've paid off each month in their "Let's All Throw Some Money at Our Problems" column on their website. "It's a way of keeping ourselves publicly accountable for paying off our debt," Dang says. They invite readers to join in—the column's comments sections are full of readers' personal lists of student loan, car loan, mortgage and credit card debt balances, slowly whittled down each month.

"It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like Logan has with her debt," Dang says. "This last year was the first time I saw Logan making a real decision to deal with her debt rather than wish for a windfall to solve all her problems. Money is so personal, and you can't help but make emotional changes when you're doing something like getting in control of your credit card debt."

As she has started to tackle her debt, Sachon's writing has become less wry and more honest—in January she started a popular new Billfold column on depression and money problems and how the two are often intertwined. The reader comments rolled in quickly:

The best thing about The Billfold is the candidness/humanness of it—our fallibility and nuance in the face of what should be straightforward, two sides of a ledger book.

Words can't adequately explain how much this meant to me and probably a lot of other people. Thank you for doing this.

If all the praise from readers weren't proof enough that The Billfold is succeeding, there is another metric to consider. The Billfold's advertising sales are based on how many people the site reaches. In December, the site turned its first profit. Dang and Sachon hope that that money will allow them to start paying their writers and commissioning longer pieces of reporting.

"The Internet is a changing beast, so who knows how long this model will work," says Sachon. "It's a funny business, but we're in a good place—we're growing each month. We like our site and we think it's helping people. We know it is, actually."