Money & Success2w ago · 108 comments
Would you tell your closest friends exactly how much money you make?
Salary secrecy is so normal we never question it. But who does the silence actually protect — you, or the people paying you less?
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Add your comment- Iris1w ago
My dad always said never discuss money, religion, or politics at dinner. Followed that rule my whole life. Then at 38 I found out I'd been making $22k less than a male colleague doing identical work for six years. Dad's etiquette cost me $132,000.
- Theo1d ago
I literally just texted my best friend of 12 years because of this thread. She told me. I told her. We were within $3k of each other and both gasped because neither of us knew. We've been having financial anxiety in parallel for years and never said a word. I'm emotional about this honestly.
- Ravi L.1d ago
okay why did this actually make me feel something. the parallel anxiety thing is so real. everyone performing stability to everyone else and suffering alone.
- Nina1d ago
The older I get the more I realize that 'private' and 'secret' are doing completely different things and we keep using them interchangeably. Private means it's mine and I choose who gets it. Secret means I'm afraid of what happens if the wrong person finds out. Most salary 'privacy' is actually just fear with better branding.
- Reese2d ago
Hot take that I will die on: the fact that we'll tell our friends about our worst mental health spirals, our affairs, our childhood trauma — but NOT our salary — is one of the most successfully engineered cultural norms I've ever witnessed. They got us to protect THEIR secrecy and call it our privacy.
- Iris B.2w ago
I grew up broke. Like, genuinely food-insecure broke. Now I make six figures. Telling my childhood friends feels like bragging even when it isn't. There's grief in that gap that people who've always been comfortable don't understand.
- Liam5d ago
The $132k story upthread physically hurt me to read because I lived something almost identical. Not exactly the same numbers but close enough. I don't get those years back. I don't get that money back. And I stayed quiet because I was raised to think it was vulgar to discuss. Vulgar. Meanwhile I was being stolen from.
- Avery1d ago
I study behavioral economics. The single most documented finding in this space is that people consistently believe they are paid fairly compared to peers — and are almost always wrong in ways that benefit their employer. Salary secrecy isn't just a social norm. It's an information asymmetry with a very deliberate beneficiary. Talk to your friends.
- Zara _x2d ago
my friends and i have a spreadsheet. yes literally a shared google sheet. salaries, savings rate, debt. we update it every january. people think this is insane when i tell them. those same people are always broke and stressed about it. correlation? maybe.
- Feli2d ago
I would love to know what kind of friendships these are. Is this like four finance bros in their 20s, or is this actually a diverse group of people with genuinely different financial situations? Because I suspect the spreadsheet feels very different depending on which side of the numbers you're on.
- Leo _x2d ago
fair question. we're four women, ages 29-36. two of us make six figures, one is a teacher, one does freelance design. the teacher proposed the spreadsheet originally. so yes, diverse, and yes, she sees the gap every january. she says it helps her negotiate harder. i believe her.
- Quinn 922d ago
The teacher in that group is extraordinary. Most people would find a reason to exit that conversation every time.
- Nina6d ago
I work in HR and I can tell you with absolute certainty: the single biggest lever keeping wages suppressed is the cultural shame around discussing them. It's not accidental. It was engineered. You're not being polite when you stay quiet — you're being compliant.
- Yuki2w ago
this is why working class solidarity is basically impossible in america. we've been trained since birth to treat our salary like a social security number. it's genuinely embarrassing how well the conditioning works
- Casey2d ago
Yes. Immediately. Without hesitation. If you can't tell your closest friend what you earn, you don't have a closest friend, you have a well-curated acquaintance.
- Alex2d ago
That's an insane take. My best friend since kindergarten and I have never discussed salaries and we are genuinely the closest people in each other's lives. Intimacy is not a checklist.
- Sam1d ago
I work in HR. I have seen, firsthand, what happens when salary bands become public within a company. The chaos people imagine? Doesn't happen. What actually happens is that the lowest earners negotiate harder, the highest earners have to justify their numbers, and management suddenly has to be coherent about compensation. That's not chaos. That's accountability. The 'it causes drama' argument is doing a LOT of work to protect a very specific group of people.
- Iris1d ago
yeah but friends aren't coworkers. completely different stakes. if my coworker finds out i make more and resents me, i survive that. if my best friend of 20 years does? that's my person. not the same math.
- Yuki2w ago
The problem isn't the number. The problem is that we have no cultural framework for processing income differences between people we love. We've built zero emotional vocabulary for it. So the number drops into a vacuum and everyone fills it with their worst assumptions.
- Casey1d ago
honestly the weirdest thing to me is that we'll tell friends we're in therapy, on antidepressants, getting divorced — but our salary feels too personal?? like at some point we have to notice that we only guard the information that would require structural accountability from other people
- Omar K.1w ago
okay genuine question: why is salary the line? we'll tell friends about health diagnoses, relationship problems, mental health struggles, debt — things WAY more intimate than a number — but income is somehow too personal? the logic has never added up to me
- Nina K.1w ago
Because health and heartbreak evoke empathy. Income evokes comparison. Very different emotional responses.
- Jordan2d ago
i make $34k a year. most of my friends make double or more. yes the silence 'protects' me from the particular humiliation of having that confirmed in real time. some of us aren't staying quiet to protect corporations. we're staying quiet to survive the lunch conversation.
- Riley2d ago
This comment should be at the top. Every time salary transparency gets discussed it turns into a comfortable conversation for people who aren't ashamed of their number. There's a whole dimension of this that the 'just share everything' crowd doesn't have to reckon with.
- Omar M.1d ago
I told my friend my salary once. She told her husband. Her husband told my coworker. My coworker used it to undermine me in a performance review. I will never do that again. Context and trust aren't abstractions — they have real consequences.
- Leo1d ago
That's a story about a husband and a coworker who behaved badly, not a story about why salary transparency is dangerous. Your friend's confidentiality failure is hers to own.
- Priya T.1d ago
Yeah but you can believe something is theoretically good and still not want to personally be the experiment that proves it. 'It should have worked' doesn't undo what actually happened.
- Reese1w ago
I told my best friend I make $120k. She makes $45k. We both knew there was a gap but the specific number made it concrete in a way that hurt her, and she was honest with me about that. We're closer now because we talked through it instead of pretending it didn't exist.
- Kofi S.4d ago
There's also a class dimension nobody's touching here. Rich people CONSTANTLY talk about money with each other — investments, properties, what schools cost, who got what in a divorce. The taboo is selectively enforced on working and middle class people who would benefit most from the information.
- Hana1d ago
My dad worked the same job for 27 years and never told my mom exactly what he made. Kept a separate account. She found out the real number when he died. I'm not saying that's common but I am saying financial secrecy in relationships has a very specific kind of damage it can do over time.
- Nina B.2w ago
Actually I think the real issue is that we tie self-worth to income so completely that any number becomes a verdict on the whole person. Fix THAT and the transparency question gets a lot simpler.
- Zara L.1w ago
The people saying 'it ruins friendships' are blaming the information instead of the insecurity it reveals. Your friendship wasn't ruined by a number. It was already cracked.
- Diego B.1w ago
Wow that's a really comfortable thing to say if you've never watched a friendship you valued fall apart in real time.
- Zara L.1d ago
there's something almost aristocratic about people who say money talk ruins friendships. like the problem isn't inequality, it's acknowledging the inequality. keep your eyes down and pretend we're all equal!! that's the solution!
- Quinn R.2w ago
I'm a nurse. I told a colleague what I make. She went to HR, negotiated up, and got it. Then she stopped talking to me because she resented that I'd known all along. So yeah. Transparency isn't automatically the magic fix people pretend it is.
- Elena S.2d ago
i make $31k. im not telling anyone. not because i'm ashamed exactly but because i don't want to be someone's charity case or have them quietly judge every financial decision i make. the transparency thing is a lot easier to preach when you're not the one with the smaller number
- Noah2d ago
This is literally the same argument people use to avoid telling partners their body count. 'I don't want judgment.' At some point you have to ask whether the friendship is strong enough to hold the truth.
- Casey1d ago
Body count and income are completely different categories of personal information. One has no structural consequence. The other determines your housing, healthcare, retirement, negotiating power. Conflating them to score a debate point is lazy.
- Maya1d ago
My dad worked a union job his whole life. Salary was posted on a board in the break room. Everyone knew everyone's rate. He always said it was the most dignified working arrangement he ever had — nobody could be played against anybody else. We somehow decided that arrangement was too primitive for modern professionals and I genuinely cannot figure out who convinced us of that or why we let them.
- Zara T.1w ago
there's a class dimension here people keep dancing around. middle class people treat salary secrecy as manners. working class people treat it as survival info. those are not the same thing
- Morgan1w ago
I asked my closest friend once and she deflected with a joke and changed the subject. I respected it. But six months later she confided she was broke and had been hiding it from everyone. Secrecy cuts both ways — it hides abundance AND struggle.
- Ravi3d ago
My close friend circle just... does this openly? Like we know each other's rough numbers, bonuses, debts. We've helped each other draft salary negotiation emails. One friend found out her company was paying her $30k less than the industry average because we benchmarked together. This is what community is supposed to look like.
- Jordan3d ago
This sounds nice in theory but friendship groups are rarely perfectly sealed. Information travels. 'Close friend' tells their partner, partner mentions it at a dinner, it gets back to someone's boss. I've watched this exact chain of events create a genuinely hostile work environment. It's not paranoia, it's pattern recognition.
- Zara1d ago
I've been unemployed for eight months. I couldn't tell you what I 'make' because I don't make anything right now. This whole conversation assumes stable employment as the baseline and I'm sitting here like — yeah I'd love to have a salary to be private about.
- Reese1d ago
This. The debate itself is a privilege marker. The anxiety isn't 'should I share my number' it's 'what do I say when they ask and I have nothing.'
- Priya 212d ago
I've been a hiring manager for 11 years. Pay transparency within teams destroys morale more often than it fixes it. Not because anyone did anything wrong — but because two people can do the same job title for completely legitimate reasons at different pay rates, and there is no three-minute conversation that explains that satisfactorily. The resentment that follows isn't irrational. It's just very expensive.
- Hana2d ago
With respect, you're describing a management failure and blaming the transparency. If the pay difference can't survive a conversation, the pay difference probably shouldn't exist.
- Nina2w ago
counterpoint: what if you're the one making less? suddenly the transparency argument sounds a lot more attractive, doesn't it? funny how people who earn more are the loudest about 'keeping money private'
- Omar M.1d ago
hard disagree with the whole premise tbh. some of my closest friendships are close BECAUSE we don't mix money into them. i have a friend i've known since second grade. we talk every week. i know his fears, his regrets, the name of every woman who ever broke his heart. i don't know what he makes and i don't want to. that information would change the texture of how i see him and i refuse to let it. intimacy isn't the same as total disclosure.
- Casey 921w ago
Europeans reading this thread must be baffled. In many Nordic countries salary is literally public record. The cultural hysteria around this number is a specifically American pathology.
- Liam1w ago
Norway's public salary records exist and they are NOT the utopia people claim. Studies show it actually *increased* status anxiety because now everyone knows exactly where they rank. Just because something is transparent doesn't mean it makes people happy.
- Alex1w ago
happiness and fairness are different goals. we keep conflating them in this conversation.
- Feli K.4d ago
honestly the fact that we're all debating whether to tell our CLOSEST FRIENDS our salary while we'll happily post our brunch and our vacation on instagram for 800 acquaintances to see says everything about how warped our relationship with money shame is
- Iris M.1d ago
I think the question should be flipped. Instead of 'would you tell them what you make,' ask 'would you want to know what THEY make?' Almost everyone answers yes to that version. Then ask yourself what you're waiting for.
- Taylor T.1d ago
I did tell my closest friend. He responded by listing every expensive thing I'd ever done around him and re-narrating it through the new information. 'Oh THAT'S why you always picked up the bill.' 'THAT'S why you never stressed about the trip.' It wasn't malicious, he was just... recalibrating. But watching someone rewrite your entire shared history in real time because of a number is a uniquely strange experience. We're fine now. But it took a minute.
- Omar1w ago
Fun fact: talking about your salary with coworkers is protected activity under the National Labor Relations Act in the US. Has been since 1935. Most people have no idea. Companies have spent nearly a century pretending otherwise.
- Zara _x1w ago
This isn't actually a fun fact if it doesn't protect at-will employment. Your boss can find a hundred other reasons to let you go. Legal protection on paper means almost nothing for most workers.
- Taylor B.2d ago
Challenge for everyone in this thread: before you decide whether YOU would share, ask yourself — would you want YOUR close friend to tell YOU? If yes, what exactly is stopping you from going first?
- Casey1d ago
The real test isn't whether you'd tell them. It's whether THEY ask. Has your closest friend ever directly asked what you make? And if not — why not? What does the fact that nobody asks tell us about what we actually want from each other?
- Iris2w ago
Hard no. Money changes everything between people. Once they know the number, every dinner, every gift, every favor gets calculated through that lens. Some information just poisons the well.
- Maya2w ago
lmao my friend group literally made a shared spreadsheet with all our salaries years ago. updated every year. best decision we ever made. three people have used it to negotiate raises. zero drama. you just have to be adults about it
- Avery 212w ago
A spreadsheet?? That sounds absolutely exhausting. Not every friend group is a labor union meeting.
- Hana 922w ago
Why is it exhausting to have information? You track your calories, your steps, your Netflix queue. But knowing what your friends earn is too much data to handle?
- Reese B.1d ago
I told my closest friend. She immediately — within 48 hours — started making comments about my spending that she never made before. 'Oh you can afford that.' 'Must be nice.' Just tiny little jabs. I don't regret telling her but I also never unsee what the information did to her. Some friendships have a load-bearing fantasy about equality.
- Noah L.1d ago
Both things can be true. She responded badly AND the friendship deserved honesty. The choice isn't 'share or protect the friendship.' It's 'do we both want to be the kinds of people who can handle reality together.' Sounds like you found out where she stands.
- Sam1d ago
The 'must be nice' response is so telling. That's not about you. That's about her unprocessed feelings about her own situation. The question is whether a real friendship gets to work through that or whether you have to keep each other comfortable with ignorance forever.
- Liam6d ago
at the end of the day if your friendship can't survive the truth of who you both actually are — including financially — what exactly are you protecting?
- Drew6d ago
told my two best friends last year. one was making more than me, one less. the one making less got weird and distant for a few weeks then came back and said it actually motivated her to negotiate. the one making more felt guilty for a while. both friendships survived. people are more resilient than we give them credit for.
- Jamie2w ago
Salaries are secret because companies benefit, not you. The second coworkers talk numbers, somebody finds out they're underpaid.
- Zara3d ago
I asked my best friend of 15 years what he made. He got visibly uncomfortable, deflected twice, and then said 'I'd rather not.' We've been through divorces, deaths, addiction together and THAT was the line. I'm still baffled. What exactly does he think happens if I know?
- Omar T.3d ago
He probably thinks you'll judge his life choices differently. Either 'wow he makes that much and still drives that car' or 'he makes that much and I make less and now something shifts.' Shame runs in both directions — up and down the scale.
- Feli1d ago
Nobody is asking you to post your W-2 on Instagram. The question is about your CLOSEST friends. If your answer is still no, you might want to sit with what that 'no' is actually protecting, because it sure isn't the friendship.
- Nina1w ago
I think there's a difference between proactively announcing your salary and being honest when directly asked. I'd never lead with 'hey I make X' — that's weird. But if a close friend genuinely asked me, I'd tell them without hesitation.
- Elena1d ago
The fact that this is even a debate in 2025 tells you everything. In countries with published salary bands or pay transparency laws, this conversation essentially doesn't exist. The awkwardness is manufactured. We exported it to our friendships to keep it alive.
- Jordan1d ago
Countries with pay transparency laws are not the universal panacea you're implying. Nordic labor markets have structural features that make transparency less explosive. Transplant the same policy into different economic and cultural conditions and you get different results. Policy context isn't transferable by vibes.
- Avery2w ago
My husband and I come from very different income backgrounds. When we first got serious I told him exactly what I made. He told me what he made. It wasn't romantic, it wasn't awkward — it was just necessary. Closest friendship I have. Why would it be different?
- Alex T.2w ago
The premise of this question assumes your friends' reactions are the variable to worry about. What about the fact that in most US states it's literally illegal for your employer to punish you for discussing wages? That right exists for a reason.
- Sam1d ago
ok but can we talk about the specific terror of being the HIGH earner who tells? if you make less you get sympathy. if you make more you get suspicion. 'how did YOU get that.' 'did you negotiate harder or just get lucky.' 'must be nice.' the social cost is wildly asymmetric and everyone acts like its the same conversation regardless of who's earning what
- Quinn1w ago
My two closest friends and I have been transparent about money since college. It means we don't do awkward dances when someone can't afford something. We just say it plainly and nobody makes a face. More friendships should work this way.
- Kofi1d ago
I think there's a version of this that's healthy and a version that's a different kind of performance. Some people want to share their salary the same way they want to share their marathon time — it's not vulnerability, it's flex wrapped in the language of openness. Know the difference.
- Taylor1d ago
Sure, but 'someone might share for impure reasons' isn't an argument against sharing. People do kind things for complicated reasons all the time. The outcome — less financial secrecy, more actual support — matters more than motive policing.
- Drew5d ago
No. Absolutely not. Money changes everything in a relationship. People start calculating, consciously or not. Who pays for dinner, whose problems are allowed to be 'real' problems, whose life choices get judged. Keeping it private is emotional self-protection, full stop.
- Jordan5d ago
The 'it ruins friendships' argument is doing a lot of heavy lifting to justify keeping workers in the dark about their own market value. Sorry your friend got weird about it. That's still not a sufficient reason to preserve a system that systematically underpays people.
- Taylor 215d ago
Cool, so people's actual lived experiences with real emotional consequences are just acceptable collateral damage for your ideological project? I'm sure that's very comforting to the people who lost friendships.
- Kofi T.2d ago
I grew up in a culture where discussing money was considered deeply rude — not corporate policy, actual cultural value. Not embarrassment, not secrecy for advantage. Genuine belief that it invited envy, comparison, reduced a person to a number. I'm still unpacking whether that was wisdom or conditioning. Probably both.
- Casey1w ago
I make significantly more than most of my friends and I don't tell them because I genuinely enjoy being treated like a normal person. Is that selfish? Maybe. But I'm not apologizing for it.
- Jamie S.1w ago
That's not selfish, that's just smart. You're not obligated to hand people ammunition.
- Quinn1w ago
'Ammunition' is a really telling word choice. If your friends would use your income against you, they're not your friends. They're competitors wearing friend costumes.
- Diego2w ago
closest friends? absolutely yes. anyone who would treat me differently because i earn more or less is someone i needed to re-evaluate anyway
- Feli2w ago
Nope. Hard disagree. 'True friends won't judge you' is naive nonsense. Humans are wired to compare. It's not a character flaw, it's biology.
- Jamie K.4d ago
Hot take that I know will be unpopular: people who refuse to discuss salary are actively perpetuating wage inequality whether they mean to or not. Intentions don't matter. Effect does. The silence works in one direction only.
- Nina4d ago
That's an unfair framing. By that logic, a single mom working two jobs who doesn't have time to become a labor activist is 'perpetuating inequality.' Not everyone has the social safety net to absorb the fallout from workplace drama that often follows when salary talk leaks beyond the friend group.
- Avery1d ago
This. The vulnerability isn't the same from both sides. I've been on both ends of this conversation at different points in my career and they feel completely different. Telling a wealthier friend your number requires courage. Telling a less wealthy friend your number requires... grace? Tact? Something I don't have a clean word for but it's definitely not the same thing.
- Theo1d ago
ok but what if your 'closest friend' is also your direct colleague. this whole conversation assumes a clean separation between work life and personal life that a lot of people — especially in small fields — simply do not have. sometimes the one person you'd trust with everything is the one person the information would most directly affect.
- Leo L.2w ago
I told my friend group and it ruined two friendships within a month. Some people can't hear your number without rewriting how they see you.
- Zara1w ago
I'm sorry but this framing of 'salary secrecy protects the bosses' is oversimplified. Plenty of people keep it private because they've personally seen the social fallout, not because they're doing corporations a favor. Both things can be true.
- Kofi L.1w ago
You can acknowledge the social cost AND still recognize that the norm was deliberately cultivated by ownership class interests. Acknowledging both doesn't make either point wrong.
- Nina _x2w ago
I once mentioned my freelance income at a dinner party and the entire vibe shifted. People I'd known for years started treating me like I owed them something. Never again.
- Nina4d ago
okay but what about when you're the one making more and you genuinely don't want your friend to feel bad? like i'm not protecting my employer, i'm protecting my friend's self-esteem. is that not allowed?
- Casey M.4d ago
I'd gently push back on that — you deciding your friend can't handle the information is its own kind of condescension. Adults can process hard things. Your friend probably deserves the chance to negotiate a better salary more than they deserve to be shielded.
- Diego _x1d ago
The recalibrating thing is so real. People don't realize they've been constructing a story about who you are, and a number just blows up the set. The friendship doesn't end — it reboots. Some people can't handle the reboot.
- Quinn2d ago
Nope. And I'll tell you exactly why. I watched a friendship between my two closest friends implode the second one got promoted and their salaries diverged by $40k. Nothing else changed. Same people. Same values. The NUMBER did something to the dynamic that couldn't be undone. I won't risk it.
- Reese1d ago
Or... their friendship was less solid than it appeared, and the salary difference just revealed it? I keep seeing people describe how a number 'ruined' something without asking what was already fragile.
- Kofi2w ago
Knowing my best friend's salary made me ask for a raise I'd never have dared to. Transparency literally paid my rent.
- Taylor S.3d ago
The framing of this question assumes 'closest friends' is a stable category with clear boundaries. My reality: I have a work best friend, a childhood best friend, a neighbor I'm weirdly close to. I'd tell exactly one of them. Context matters more than category.
- Casey R.2w ago
Everyone says 'money is private' until you realize that rule was written by the people signing the checks.
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