The world of the Gilmore Girls is sweet and wholesome, and while the characters aren't perfect, they are pretty realistic (most of the time). Lorelai and Rory's relationships (with each other, and with their romantic partners) have their ups and downs, everyone has moments of confusion about where their life is going, and there are as many fights as there are sweet scenes... but when it comes to realism, the show really falls apart when money gets involved.
Throughout the show, fans wondered how the characters' finances work - especially when money is such a huge part of the series. The first season begins with Lorelai having to go to her uber-rich parents to ask for a loan to send Rory to Chilton, after all. So given that finances are far from a taboo topic in Star's Hollow, what's going on with some of these confusing financial moments?
10 How Did They Afford That Much Takeout?
Lorelai is often talking about being 'broke', and regularly deals with financial problems, from taking care of her house to fixing her Jeep when it breaks, to the big ones - sending Rory to Chilton, and then to Yale. However, it may be that one of the reasons she is so broke is the sheer amount she and Rory spend on eating out and buying new clothes (not to mention travel). They can't afford to fix the termite problem in their house, but they plan a two-person, round-Europe trip. They eat out daily (usually more than once a day), buying huge amounts of takeout, and they are rarely seen in the same clothes twice, but they struggle to put money aside. This may just be that Lorelai is bad with money, but given that she's been on her own since she was a teen, this doesn't make the most sense.
9 How Does Rory Get By Without A Job?
Although many of her peers work part-time throughout the series, Rory is rarely seen with any kind of after-school job. As a teen, Dean is working at the market, and Lane is working (for free) in her mother's antique business, and even Jess has a job at Wal-Mart, but Rory spent all her free time watching TV with her mom (yet always had money to spend). In university, she is seen occasionally punching dining hall cards, and she gets her internship, but the need for an actual job is rarely mentioned - perhaps her grandparents gave her an allowance, but for someone as independent as Rory, it's surprising she didn't consistently have a job.
8 Where Did Jess's Money Go
Jess, despite his bad boy rep, actually turned out to be a pretty great employee when he worked at Wal-Mart... although everything blew up when it was revealed that he was working there essentially full-time, and it meant he was skipping too much school and wouldn't graduate.
However, fans wondered what, exactly, he was doing with the money. Jess ate for free at Luke's and didn't pay rent, Star's Hollow didn't exactly seem to have many opportunities to go out and spend money, and other than the car he bought, he wasn't shown to spend that much. So where did his full-time earnings go, and why did he end up broke and couch-surfing with his Dad?
7 The Amount of Food At The Inn
The scenes in the kitchens of both the Dragonfly and the Independence Inn always feature copious amounts of food all over the counters - and ignoring the absolutely shocking lack of food safety and appropriate storage requirements to meet health code, how did the Inns afford to buy so much, when they were not that huge? The Dragonfly, in particular, often only had a few guests at a time, yet the surfaces would be laden with bowls of fresh fruit and huge amounts of produce. Surely Sookie was a more capable kitchen manager than this would suggest?
6 Kirk's Finances
Kirk is a bit of an anomaly - he is shown to have a whole range of jobs, side hustles, and his own businesses, which is a big part of the joke of his character. However, when Luke is considering buying a big house for Lorelai, Kirk reveals that he has been carefully saving money from all these jobs for years, and is surprisingly wealthy. The issue with this, of course, is how having all these jobs would work - let alone allow him to save money. Many of them appear to be failed business ideas, more likely to cost him money than make him any (like the failed Ooober service), and others he presumably only had for a few weeks or months at a time, otherwise they would have clashed with other jobs. So if he was constantly quitting jobs (or being fired) and failing at business ideas, how could he save anything?
5 Rory's Revival Riches
Rory's storyline in the revival is largely hated by fans, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, either. Throughout the revival, which takes place over the course of a year, she is essentially jobless - yet seems to have money to burn.
She's constantly traveling, hanging out with her mother (and eating takeout, of course), has three different phones (for no real reason), and flies back and forth to London on a regular basis. How is she affording all this without a job, and seemingly after a longer stint as a not-particularly-successful freelance journalist?
4 Lorelai Affording The Dragonfly
Lorelai, despite constantly complaining about being broke, and being unable to fix her home or her car, is somehow able to buy an entire Inn, and completely renovate it from the ground up, and maintain a staff - how? She clearly has some money saved, as she briefly thought she would have to give up the Inn to pay for Rory's tuition, and Yale isn't cheap, but this just doesn't line up with the rest of her financial situation. She did manage to get a loan from Luke, which is essentially what saved her, but it still begs the question of how she managed the kind of massive renovation costs this would have taken - how much money did she have saved, and how much did Luke have to loan her?
3 How Did Lane Afford a Drumkit?
On a much smaller scale, there are some unanswered questions about how Lane afforded her life, too. As a teen, she did do some work at home, but it's assumed that her incredibly strict mother wouldn't have paid her for that - her work there was expected, like doing chores would be. Despite this, she managed to afford to buy a drumkit - although no one knows how. Perhaps she worked out a payment plan with Sophie, but it would have been nice to see how this happened.
2 Why Wasn't Rory Paid For The Star's Hollow Gazette?
Another frustrating storyline in the revival is that Rory takes over the editor position at the Star's Hollow Gazette, to stop the paper from folding... and yet tells Taylor that she assumed the job paid 'nothing' - and he agrees. It's no surprise that this wouldn't be a particularly well-paying job, but presumably the previous editor wasn't working for free, so why didn't she get that same salary? And how did she expect to afford to live while working entirely for free?
1 How Did Lorelai Afford That House?
The biggest question when it comes to money in the series is, of course, how on earth Lorelai managed to afford to own that massive house. She left home as a teenager with a baby, and lived for a while on the grounds of the Independence Inn, in a tiny space given to her by the owner, who was like a second mother to her. So far, that makes sense. However, it seems that after a few years there, she somehow upped and bought an entire massive house, that would have involved a down payment and fees of tens of thousands of dollars. Lorelai bought the house when Rory was eleven, and eleven years of supporting herself and her child, and living on the salary of a maid, before working up to manager, just doesn't line up with putting aside that much money. Not to mention that she's far from a good mortgage candidate... so how did that happen? Fans will never know.
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