Writer Neal Gabler broke the don’t-talk-about-money taboo this spring with an Atlantic article, “The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans.” Now he wants everyone to start talking.
“The idea of not being successful financially in America is such a stigma,” says Gabler, who revealed in the article that he was among the millions of adults who didn’t have savings to cover a $400 emergency. “That’s the reason people don’t talk about it, because they take their failure personally.”
Yet financial stress is epidemic. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults admitted feeling stressed about money, and 22 percent reported extreme stress in a 2015 study commissioned by the American Psychological Association, “Stress in America: Paying With Our Health .”
In my latest for the Associated Press, what that study revealed about our inner financial turmoil.