Am I as Bad With Money as Carrie Bradshaw?

In all my two decades’ worth of Sex and the City fandom (yes, I started secretly watching at nine years old; sorry, Mom!), I have never felt much of a kinship with Carrie Bradshaw—except, that is, when she got dumped on a Post-It, smoked weed, got a ticket from a cop, and ate an ice cream sundae, all in rapid succession…but that was a one-time occurrence. Sure, I love Carrie when she’s a flop, but most of the time I’m a hardcore Miranda, and not just because I would definitely try to date Che Diaz if they were an actual person.

As I rewatched the SATC episode in which Miranda buys her first apartment the other day, though, I realized that I wasn’t a Miranda at all—at least not when it comes to personal finances. I really, really hate to say it, but I—to borrow a phrase—couldn’t help but wonder…am I a financial Carrie? Let’s review the evidence for a minute: Carrie seems to have a healthy income stream from her New York Star column for most of the series, plus she famously makes $4 a word at Vogue (okay, babe), yet she’s constantly broke from spending money on fancy shoes and dinners out. She seems incapable of saving, she’d rather ask Charlotte for money to buy her apartment than figure it out herself, and while she ends up marrying the richest of rich guys and thus glowing up into “fancy widow” territory in And Just Like That…, for most of the run of the original show, she’s at the mercy of her own bad financial decisions.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve never asked a friend to pawn her engagement ring in order to help me afford my rent (a real low moment for Carrie), but unfortunately, as I approach 30 and desperately try to sort out my own finances in order to someday afford the things I want—travel, a wedding, a house, kids, enough Tatcha moisturizer to last me the rest of my life—I can sort of understand where Carrie was coming from. It’s pretty clear that she’s regularly suffering from what financial expert Tori Dunlap calls “the ostrich effect,” and sadly, I can relate: Sometimes, when you’re in a financial hole, it’s easier to bury your head in the sand and keep blithely buying Manolos (or, in my case, takeout ramen) rather than sort out where you’re going wrong.

Unlike Carrie, I don’t spend the majority of my money on clothes and accessories; in fact, I’ve been keeping a log of all my fashion-y indulgences this year in an attempt to get a better sense of where my money is going, and a quick review of it shows that I’ve only made four or five silly discretionary purchases since January (which, trust me, is a huge step up from the previous year). Still, a common issue within the world of personal finance is telling yourself, Well, I don’t do [x] or buy [y], therefore I can’t possibly be as bad off as this other person, therefore I don’t need to change anything. In reality, though, I might be spending as big a percentage of my budget on edibles (they’re expensive, y’all!) as Carrie does on Dior.