AM: How much is your rent?!

SF: Generally it’s about five hundred and fifty a month, including utilities but not including personal utilities.

AM: Right like phone and stuff?

SF: Exactly.

AM: Ok, twelve hundred a month is very, very, very low to live on. That’s amazing. Cause I think the poverty line is not double that but it’s a good, you know, fourty percent over that.

SF: You mentioned before that I had written something about it being unfair the way that money is doled out. And I think part of that is also me thinking, um, the way that I use money, I think is really productive, and so the idea of other people making more money than me and me seeing the way that people spend money, which is often on products that support unethical labour practices and are environmentally unsustainable, and often contribute to people having mental and emotional health issues, like, increasing that dependency on television or media that separates people from themselves, and I think 'if I had that money I would be spend it on community projects!' And so, I should be paid more because I would invest it in the lives of the people around me. I wouldn’t hold onto that money. (laughs)

AM: I agree, I think you should be paid more. What I don’t agree with is, it’s not doled, there is no doling. It’s all about 'go for it' like you talked about that men get more money than women, and they do get more money wage wise than we do, women, totally, but it isn’t because people choose to pay men more. Although there is an element of trusting men more as authorities and leaders and those things but men typically ask for raises, and women don’t!

So again it’s not a doling thing. Like, when I'm working with, uh, I do a lot of workshops with women and money, I really think one of the biggest differences between men and women is that women deflect praise and men deflect blame. Cuz right there, you deflect praise, praise usually comes with dollar figures eventually attached. So there's like a million little reasons why women in the workforce really get paid much worse than men. And it’s right as soon as women enter a field the income for that field usually decreases rapidly. Like lawyers I think are paid like 60% of what they were twenty years ago because there are so many women in the field now. So again it is not a doling, it's about going after what you want and I would love to see you have enough money to do all that stuff but nobody gonna give it to you you got to find it! (laughs)

SF: Do you think that there's a certain amount of money that it’s dangerous to have in debt even if it is good debt? Like is there a certain, if you’re a person like me who right now is earning twenty thousand dollars a year...ummm.

AM: You see, to me the debt is your big issue. Your earning is your big issue.

SF: Right.