In early June, we paused Money Diaries to make room for urgent conversations about race, and our responsibility in addressing the anti-Black systems in our own workplaces. Refinery29 was called out for having a toxic work culture that disproportionately affected our Black and POC colleagues. We stand with our current and former coworkers who spoke out, and we are advocating for the resources and support to make things more just for our fellow employees and for you as contributors and readers as well. (You can read the company’s statement and commitments here.)
Money Diaries is coming back on July 20, and we’re making some crucial updates to how we run the series. First of all, thank you for your patience. We appreciate you as an audience, as contributors, and as proponents of our work towards encouraging financial transparency to collectively become more comfortable talking about and navigating our own money issues. Going forward, we plan to put new thought, effort, and resources into creating a series that is as diverse as you, our readers, are.
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The first change we will be making is that all future published Money Diarists will be paid $150 (in local currency) after publication. The submission process will be the same and you will be contacted directly if we plan to publish your Money Diary. Though all published diarists will be given the opportunity to receive compensation, we will encourage higher earners to donate their earned wages to a provided list of Black-owned financial literacy organizations. While we will not be back-paying previous diarists, past diarists can submit new diaries for paid consideration. If you have questions about the submission process, please email us at moneydiary@refinery29.com.
To accommodate paying our future Money Diarists, we will, for the time being, be moving to a three-day-a-week schedule. That means you’ll get Money Diaries on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with NYC diaries on Mondays. We know this is a big change, and we anticipate some road bumps as we switch over.
Beyond a new schedule, we are removing millennial messaging and welcome diarists of all ages (18+) to submit. We are also refreshing the submission form, which will now include a space to explain your background with finances as well as how money influenced your upbringing. These additional changes will allow us to share a fuller picture of each diarist’s financial situation with our audience and create a deeper understanding of how money works.
Finally, we will be bringing you a monthly series that will feature additional Money Diaries content, including diarist interviews, follow-up diaries, themed diaries, and more. If you love a certain diarist or would like to see certain Money Diary content, we’re always open to suggestions so shoot us an email or comment below.
And that’s it. We are so excited for this next chapter, and thank you for sticking with us. Submissions are open here.