Kim Gordon: You don’t always need the things you want

Kim Gordon’s memoir, “Girl in a Band,” a New York Times best seller, details her life as a founding member of Sonic Youth and her marriage to her band mate Thurston Moore.

Here, Gordon tells us about one of her biggest financial lessons: You don’t have to spend a lot. She shares with us what she learned from her mother, who was raised during the Depression, and from the small allowance her parents gave her as a teenager. Gordon says her mother either made clothes or shopped at thrift stores.

“It made me a little neurotic about buying clothes actually,” she said. And although Gordon now has money, she says she still feels a little weird about buying expensive things, like designer bags. She says that playing in a band makes your income a little unpredictable.

“You just get money in kind of lumps, you know when you go on tour or something like that,” she says. One of her credos: If you wait long enough, you may find that the thing you really want, you don’t really need.