So are we gays gaslighting ourselves with our standard of living?

That's what we're going to discuss here on Queer Money, episode 583.

So how are we feeling today, Mr.

David Alton Schneider?

Well, as our most needy puppy, Loki, would say, whenever Loki wants something, which.

Is always on a regular basis, he.

Looks at us and goes, hmm, well, there's a lot of fucking shit I want right now.

I want democracy back.

Obviously, that's not going to happen.

I want some financial security for the LGBT community.

As of the time of this recording, the stock market has been a roller coaster and mostly going downhill ever since.

Valentine's Day, which John and I are talking about February 14, 2025, being the new St.

Valentine's Day Massacre.

Because that's what's happening to our portfolios, our 401ks.

It's a massacre to what?

Happening to jobs all across America, Even for freedom, Liberty.

Right?

Those folks who donned their red hats and marched to the voting booth and said, I'm going to vote for eggs being cheaper.

I'm going to vote for more jobs.

I'm going to vote for lower interest rates.

And guess what?

You voted for the exact opposite.

Which brings us to today's episode about gaslighting.

Right?

What is gaslighting?

All right, so let's.

Let's lay a foundation of what gaslighting is.

So our particular definition of gaslighting is it's a psychological trick whereby someone convinces you that your reality is so incorrect that you start to question whether or not Cher actually ever went on a farewell tour.

And we know, spoiler alert, that she went on several farewell tours.

As Blanche would say, many, many, many.

Many, many, many tours.

But instead of serving looks, you're serving self doubt, and they're walking away, sashaying away with their.

With your sanity.

Right?

What's so interesting about gaslighting is as Radiohead saying, we do it to ourselves.

Yes, that's true.

We can actually do this to ourselves.

And for you baby gays, Radiohead is a band from way back in the 1900s.

All right, so how are we gaslighting ourselves, David?

Yeah, so I think probably one of the biggest ways that we gaslight ourselves is, is with this psychological game, this trick, this.

This magic trick we play with ourselves and the discussions that we have in our heads.

And probably one of the biggest ones is this Treat ourself or treat yourself culture.

Treat yourself because.

So the LGBT community, LGBTQ community, is known for spending on luxury, whether that's travel, fashion, nightlife.

We're Oftentimes in this space of feeling like we need to be extra fabulous, and John and I know we personal experience, we tried to live extra fabulous, to try to prove to everyone else that we were worthy, that we were good enough, that we were the people who deserved the love and respect and adoration of our friends, family, and especially folks in the gay community.

I think that this is one of the things that's happening and really kind of the question we need to ask ourselves is, is, are we actually crossing a line into self sabotaging?

Right.

As a matter of fact, Experian, in a study of theirs, showed that LGBTQ community, LGBTQ consumers have higher credit card debt than our heterosexual counterparts.

Now, we know there can be multiple counterparts to that or not reasons to that, but the reality is, is we are putting stuff on our credit cards.

We may need to ask ourselves why.

I think probably similar to our situation and because we've heard this from people that we've worked with over the years, is that there's this sort of sense of insecurity, there's an inferiority complex going on.

We don't feel worthy.

We're trying to be the best little boys in the world.

Finance is as much psychological as it is number crunching.

A lot of us are struggling mentally, even subconsciously.

We might not necessarily be able to articulate it, but a lot of us have some challenges.

And I'll say this, the Harris Poll was published not too long ago that showed that 71% of LGBTQ + adults say they feel pressured to keep up with social or lifestyle spending, more so than our straight peers.

So, you know, we get this all the time.

Why is it so expensive to be gay?

Exactly.

We get that question a couple times a year.

Why is it so expensive to be gay?

Well, in many cases, we're making it more expensive.

Obviously, you write healthcare is.

Is an exception, but we don't need to always have the designer everything.

We don't need to always have the fabulous vacation.

And it's fine to have those things, but if we can afford it, and many of us cannot afford it, I.

Also think that there's a huge amount of social pressure that on us from things like social media, Instagram, TikTok.

I mean, how many videos do you watch where it's somebody showing off their new outfit or some.

Somebody showing off how they're doing their makeup, and you need to buy this $700 worth of makeup so that you can do the same thing.

How many.

How many people in our community, if you were to pull Back the, the shower curtain or open the, the, the door to their shower, have hundreds of dollars worth of beauty products in their, in their shower.

While at the same time, these are individuals complaining about not earning enough, not being able to save for retirement, not having an emergency savings, feeling the pressure, the overall pressures.

Yeah.

And all of that is pressure that, that actually has a major impact on the way we think about ourselves and the way that we actually have conversations with ourselves.

I also think we'd lie to ourselves when we're at the checkout counter.

You know, I think when we're at.

The mall, I don't lie to myself.

The department store or when we're on Amazon or if you're going to switch over to Costco.

We lie to ourselves because we said, I think oftentimes we'll say like, well, I work so hard or my life is so hard, so I deserve X, Y, Z, whatever it is that I'm buying.

So we sort of rationalize it away and we don't necessarily think, okay, what are the downstream consequences of this purchase?

Yeah, you work hard, or maybe your life is hard.

Nobody's, nobody's arguing with that.

But then your life is going to be even harder if you're financially stressed, you know, 30 days to a year from now because you're not able to pay off your credit card debt or you're not able to actually pay for that purchase that you can't.

Never were able to afford to begin with.

I think another popular thing, and this is maybe made popular by Schitt's Creek, but a lot of us who own our own business, we will say, you know, oh, well, this is a business expense.

I'll just write it off.

Who's writing it off?

Who pays for the write off?

Who pays?

Where does it go?

Somebody's paying for it.

Right.

So we just kind of, you know, we're kind of a little bit flippant about our expenses.

So, you know, we either feel like we need it or somebody else is going to in some way, shape or form take care of it.

We're not all Donald Trump.

We can't file for bankruptcy six times in our life.

The old saying, when you're pointing a finger at somebody, there's four pointing back at you.

Actually, usually there's three pointing back at you.

Usually it's just because the thumb kind of goes diagonal.

Right.

So John and I, part of the reason we're talking about this whole thing about writing business expenses off is we did a lot of travel in 2024 for work we went to New York regularly to record our other show, Living not so Fabulously.

We did our Queer Money live tour, and our accountant showed us how much money we spent on dining out coffee shops.

All of these different things while we were traveling that we needed.

And the reality is you only get to expense 50% of that.

The other 50% actually is treated as income for yourself.

So John and I are a little worried about our tax bill this year, in part because we got into the habit of writing stuff off when it couldn't.

Can't be written off.

You still have to pay for it.

You still have to have the income to be able to pay for that stuff.

And then on the other side of that, I think, you know, we know that there's a sexual orientation and gender identity wage gap.

Right.

So there's the queer money earning trap.

Right.

Studies show that LGBTQ professionals often earn higher incomes but have lower net worth due to lifestyle inflation.

Or we simply don't earn as much as our peers.

There are a subset of our community who earns a lot of money is we.

All.

We.

Our community has a 1% just like the Right.

And they set the standard of what it means to be living fabulous.

So many of us are trying to sort of keep up with that.

Yeah, you know, I.

And I know we've talked about this before.

We've actually shared this on social media.

We literally had somebody in our community who works in the public service space connected to all sorts of LGBTQ charities.

And he literally said to us, our community is doing just fine.

Everybody seems to be doing okay.

We're all employed.

We're like, you're in a bubble.

And I think that bubble got popped just in 2025.

That bubble got popped because a lot of those individuals who felt like they were living our community was doing just fine are now finding out how many people in our community are losing their jobs because of doge.

How many people are losing their jobs because companies are pulling back from wanting to work with the LGBT community in part because of the political climate.

I mean, that's something that we're experiencing.

You know, I think that.

But then we've talked about the wealth illusion.

So oftentimes it looks like folks in the community are doing amazing, but many of us are sort of subsidizing that amazingness on our credit cards.

The Federal Reserve found recently that the average credit card balance in the US is $6,500.

But LGBTQ plus individuals report having even higher balances due to social spending.

To an American holding credit card balances month to month according to ARP.

Get this.

Between the ages of 50 and 64 years of age, people who be these.

Are people who should be preparing diligently for retirement.

52% of us are carrying credit card debt, which is the most expensive debt to have.

For those between the ages of 65 and 74, 42% are carrying credit card debt.

To the extent that's possible, you do not want to go into retirement with any debt, but especially credit card debt.

Right.

And that just means that you can't save.

You can't save for emergencies, you can't save for retirement, you can't save for the things that you want and will enjoy.

You've decided to have it all right now and we're not judging you for doing this because we did it ourselves.

What we're saying is that there's a better option and we do this to ourselves and we spend this money in the now, but we end up having to pay more for it over time.

We get something and we buy something and ends up costing us 20, 40, 60% more depending on how long we leave it on our credit cards.

So what are some tools that you can arrows you can put in your quiver to help fight against this gaslighting yourself?

Well, the first thing is, you know, pause and justify the spending.

There's a favorite question that David and I like to ask ourselves.

Would we rather have a margarita now or would we rather have that margarita down the road in Puerto Vallarta?

And it's always important.

So just sort of align your spending with your values.

What is it you truly want and postpone buying the things that aren't actually going to provide you the return on happiness in today that you it might feel like you want.

I mean I desperately need some tequila right now, but I should probably wait.

So make sure that you're spending every transaction is aligning with your financial goals.

It doesn't mean you can't fall off the horse once in a while.

That's or the wagon.

We're all prone to that.

It doesn't mean you always have to sacrifice, but it just makes be more conscientious about what you're doing and how it's going to affect you.

Yeah.

And I think the important thing there is you don't know whether or not your spending is aligning with your financial goals.

If you don't have any financial goals.

So take the time to think about what are the my short term, medium term and long term financial goals.

We talked about the this in several episodes at the very beginning of the year of how do you create these short, medium and long term financial plans for yourself?

The other important thing is it is so easy to pitch those goals when nobody knows that you have them.

So it's really important to find an accountability buddy or accountability partner.

That was one of the benefits that John and I had when we were paying off our debt, was that we had each other to say sometimes, do we really need that?

Or is that aligning with our financial goals?

Or is there a better way for us to have fun and not spend as much money?

You have to be careful though, because sometimes you can both bring each other down pretty fast.

Right?

Right.

And I think one of the other things is it's really important for us to to ask ourselves, what's our real flex?

How about having a delayed gratification flex rather than bragging about, and I will say this, go to most lgbt, especially gay themed cocktail parties or networking events or anytime we gather together, especially where there's drinking.

It seems like we brag about what we've recently spent our money on.

Whether that's showing people our outfits or our new car, the home we've purchased, or the vacations that we're taking.

We're flexing what we've spent our money on.

And maybe the real flex is talking about how we can actually get closer to our financial goals, which may include a home, a new car, that fabulous vacation.

Or what about the flex being retiring early?

One of the things that we're having a lot of fun is the conversations that people are having now around this whole idea of retiring early.

And for some of those folks, the reason they want to retire early is because they want to get the fuck out of this country.

Exactly.

So thank you for joining us for another episode.

Get your queer money takeaway and resources mentioned in this episode episode from this week's newsletter and until next time, stay fabulous.