In the cab home I told the driver.
‘You didn’t,’ he said.
‘I did, I swear.’
‘Tell us a joke then.’
‘It wasn’t like that – I was just talking about my life,’ I said.
‘What, is your life that funny then?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
I told him about my month and we ended up having a conversation about things that frightened us and he told me he hated going to parties since he’d split up from his wife. ‘But it’s all in our heads, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Cos, if I make myself go, it’s all right and I wonder what I was worrying about.’
At the end of the journey he refused to take any money off me. ‘I think what you’re doing is great, love,’ he said.
The thing is, so did I.
I had never felt prouder of myself in my whole life.
Compared to the stand-up, nudity and chatting up strangers stuff, I figured jumping out of a plane – my last challenge – would be quite easy. There was nothing I could fail at or be embarrassed about – my two main fears. And I wasn’t going to be rejected – my other main fear. All I had to do was show up, strap myself to a stranger and fall through the sky. How hard was that?
The jump was at 7am in a Suffolk airfield, four hours away, so I drove up (more motorways, tick, tick, tick) and checked into a local guesthouse the night before.
As I lay in the bath, the madness of the last month flashed through my mind like a video montage of a soap opera’s best bits. The icy dip, the karaoke, the nudity . . . I’d done more crazy things in January than I’d done in a lifetime.
But had any of it helped me? Changed me?
Well, yes. I’d once read that our fear is not that life is short, it’s that we don’t feel alive when we live it. But during my fear-fighting, I felt alive. Exhaustingly alive. Every day felt like a day when something could and would happen.
I’d learned a lot too. By jumping in the pond, I saw that life begins the moment you decide to switch off the telly and get off your arse. With public speaking and the stand-up I learned that I was capable of way more than I’d realized. From karaoke I’d learned that life is much more fun if you just lighten up. And with the everyday things like parking, motorway driving and phone answering, I was surprised what a rush of confidence you can get just from doing the little things that you normally avoid. It was the opposite sensation to the energy-sapping worry and stagnation I normally lived with.
But I was aware there was stuff that I had not ticked off the list. I hadn’t done anything about my fear of confrontation, I hadn’t lost my temper or found out what people thought of me – but maybe the reality was that they were not thinking about me at all.
The next morning, I woke up at 6am and drove to the airfield. The sky was stony grey and the radio gave a storm warning but I was strangely calm as I signed the waiver saying that if I died it was not their fault. I was even calm when I got into the tiny aircraft that looked like it was made from tuna cans. I didn’t bat an eyelid when our instructor started telling us to scream as we jumped because it would help us to breathe.
It was only when I was hanging off the side of the plane, the wind blasting my face, my legs dangling into the clouds, that I stopped being calm. Then terror hit me like a punch to the guts, but before I could tell them this had been a terrible mistake, it was too late, I was falling through the sky attached to a man whose name I could not remember.
The cold air and wind were a shock the like of which I’d never experienced. They made Hampstead Ponds feel like a jacuzzi. We were told that the actual temperature was minus fifteen degrees Celsius but with the wind chill it would feel infinitely cooler.
It was only then that it hit me: I was dropping through the sky at thirteen thousand feet. That’s two and a half miles up in the sky.
No human body is designed to do this.
For forty seconds we fell. At 150 miles per hour.
It was like hell.
I honestly worried that I would have a heart attack. Surely people do have heart attacks doing this? But we kept falling, and I kept staying alive. Then we jolted upwards as our parachute opened. Our descent slowed. This was the part that most people enjoy, the peaceful bit where you look at the views around you and feel all at one with the beauty of the world. I looked at the muddy patchwork of fields and felt furious. I didn’t need to jump out of a plane to see grass! I’m from Ireland, for God’s sake. I was practically born in a field! Well, not really. I was born in Surrey near an A-road, but I’d spent every childhood summer knee-deep in cow dung.
Psychologists say that there are two sources to all our fears. The first involves our physical safety – so people are scared of heights, snakes and fire because they can kill us. The second source of fear is of social isolation, which is why we are so scared of looking stupid in front of people or of being rejected.
I realized while hurtling through the sky, that I got no reward from facing my physical fears. My fear of heights was a natural one and was not so extreme that it held me back in normal life – I didn’t need to conquer it.
The first words on landing hard on my arse in a muddy field? ‘I’m never doing that again.’
I didn’t realize then, driving home through hailstones, that falling out of the sky would seem like a walk in the park compared to what was coming next.
2
Money, a Love Story, by Kate Northrup
‘Our relationship to money is a direct reflection of how much we value ourselves.’
Pound notes are fluttering through the air and it’s my job to catch them before they reach the ground. What if I don’t get them before they hit the peach carpet? Or what if I drop them? What if I mess up this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?
Sheila is there too. She is jumping up and down trying to clap the notes between her hands. Even though she is a year younger, she is taller than me and therefore has the advantage. This is grossly unfair – as are the facts that she always wins at Snap!, has silky brown hair (instead of frizzy ginger hair) and managed to escape freckles.
I jump onto the cream sofa to level the playing field. I try not to worry about what Mum will do if I leave a dirty footprint on it. My nine-, going on ten-year-old, mind knows that this matters more than getting into trouble.
I feel like I’m in a film or an episode of the Crystal Maze – remember that show where the contestants were stuck in a glass dome with a wind machine and they have to catch as many gold notes as they can while the clock is ticking?
Well, this is exactly the same, except it’s happening in our living room, at 5pm on a school day.
Byker Grove or Grange Hill is probably flickering on the telly and we’ve most likely had spaghetti bolognese for tea, but I don’t remember that. Nor do I remember if Helen, our youngest sister, was in the room. What I do remember is dad swooshing open the patio door, opening his wallet and throwing all the cash in it up into the air.
‘You can keep whatever you catch – but as soon as it touches the floor it’s gone,’ he said.
Oh my God! The pressure of it all! There seemed to be millions of pounds flying around our living room, maybe even a trillion or a gazillion. Or at the very least fifty.
We sprang into action, grabbing and clutching and grasping for the green notes.
It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds – but it felt like forever.
I have no memory of how many notes I was clutching in my little hands when the fun was over. All I do recall, nearly three decades later, is the end of the story. Dad announced that he was only joking, we couldn’t really keep the money. We had to hand it back.
I remember a feeling of disappointment, then fury. Fury at the injustice of it all. Fury with myself for falling for it. Of course we were never going to get to keep the money! How stupid we were for thinking we would!
According to my self-help bible for February – Money, a Love Story – this memory was the key to understanding why I wa
s the way I was with money. Namely: a total bloody disaster.
Overdrafts, credit cards – I had them all. Not only did I not take financial responsibility, I actively threw money away. You could have given me £100 and I would have found a way to spend it, lose it, drink it within the hour.
You know those couples who say they keep the romance alive by not seeing each other on the toilet – well, I was like that with my bank balance. I never looked. The only time I knew how much was in my account was when my card was declined. This meant I’d hit the bottom of my £3,000 overdraft limit.
So what did this have to do with the Crystal Maze memory?
Kate Northrup, my financial guru for the month, asks three questions in the first chapter of her book:
1) What’s your first money memory?
2) What’s your number-one financial frustration today?
3) Can you see a connection between your first memory and the financial situation you’re in now?
Despite the fact that I had not thought about that moment since it happened, I realized that it had a profound effect on the way I’d approached money all my life.
I thought that money was: a) to be thrown around, and b) that you never get to keep it. Also anything to do with money, either having it or not having it, stressed me out. It made me feel the same tightness in my chest that I felt that day in the living room – which was why I was heading to forty with no house, no savings, no pension.
Kate was on to something. I read on.
I had procrastinated for two weeks before I finally opened Money, a Love Story on 14th February. In self-help land I believe they call this ‘resistance’.
I knew I wanted to do a money book – well, wanted was the wrong word, ‘needed’ more like – but it was hard to decide which one.
When I typed ‘money’ into the self-help section of Amazon, 3,125 entries came up. There were books that promised to make me rich such as the snappily named Get Rich, Lucky Bitch! by Denise Duffield Thomas. Then there were books on how to budget, including The Money Diet – The Ultimate Guide to Shedding Pounds off your Bills (thank you, Martin Lewis for combining two reasons for most women’s self-loathing – debt and the size of their bum). There were even religious get-rich-quick books such as Pennies from Heaven. Amen.
In this sea of fiscal wisdom and big promises there were a few classics that have stood the test of time. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill was published in 1937 and remains one of the most definitive books on wealth and success.
I put it on my Kindle but only got halfway through.
It was inspiring but not practical enough.
I also started a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, which argues that the idea of working hard, saving money and retiring is a load of rubbish. Instead your aim should be to use your money to invest and to live off the interest. Seeing as I was in minus funds, this was a case of putting the cart before the horse.
Instead I opted for Money, A Love Story, by Kate Northrup, which was the bestselling ‘personal finance book’ that month. About my age, she was drawing on personal experienee of how she got into – and out of! – $20,000 of credit card debt in her twenties.
Kate says that we all think that if we just had more money then we’d be OK, but you only need to look at all the lottery winners who are penniless within a couple of years to see that that’s not the case.
She argues that just as crash diets won’t work unless you understand why you overeat, no attempts at saving and budgeting will work unless you understand why you are the way you are with money and that understanding usually comes from looking at your childhood.
So if you grew up in a family that said, ‘money is the root of all evil,’ that’s going to play out your whole life. And if you grew up in a house where money was being thrown around – in my case, literally – then that’s going to have an effect too.
More importantly, Kate says that our relationship with money is a ‘microcosm of the relationship we have with ourselves’.
She argues that if you love yourself you look after your money. People who don’t look after their money – either by spending too much, getting into debt, or keeping themselves in the dark about how much they have – are not ‘free spirits’; they are actually self-sabotaging.
Oh.
‘You sure you don’t want to come?’ Rachel was applying lip gloss in the downstairs loo. It was Valentine’s Day and she was going to a ‘Trash and Treasure’ party, where you each bring a single friend of the opposite sex that you don’t find attractive – but who might be someone else’s treasure.
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘You might meet the man of your dreams.’
‘Highly unlikely.’
I walked into the kitchen, poured a glass of wine and opened my book.
Kate starts with a quiz to ‘learn what’s holding you back from the abundance you desire and what your current relationship with money says about you’. Self-help gurus love a quiz. They also love the word ‘abundance’. Old-school self-help promised to help you get rich quick, the new self-help talks about ‘abundance’ and ‘prosperity mindsets’. That way you’re not greedy by wanting more money – you’re spiritual.
There are thirty-nine questions in Kate’s book, so I started with the first one and worked my way through:
1) Do you know how much you spent last month and on what within about $100.
No, I do not. I couldn’t tell you in pounds either.
2) Do you know how much you made last month within about $100?
Yes, next to nothing. I have been too busy engaging in full-time self-help.
3) Do you have more than $1,000 in savings?
Very funny.
4) Do you have at least one retirement account?
Oh, Kate, you’re cracking me up!
And on and on it went, asking about real estates and stocks and shares . . . before I could finally answer some of Kate’s questions in the affirmative:
Do you feel anxious when you think or talk about money?
Yes.
Do you lie awake in bed at night or wake up early worrying about money?
Yes.
Do you find yourself using the phrase ‘I can’t afford that’ at least once a week?
Yes.
Do you avoid bank statements, credit card bills and other financial paperwork?
Yes, yes, yes.
At the end, I totted up the various yeses and nos and got a score of six out of a possible thirty-nine.
Kate’s assessment: ‘Your relationship with money has been tumultuous. It’s not been a love affair in the past and you may be scarred. But that can change starting today.’ I liked the word ‘tumultuous’. It made me feel exciting. Perhaps this was part of the problem.
The next step for me and my six out of thirty-nine score was to write my ‘Money Love Story’, which meant writing out absolutely everything I’d ever done, felt and said about money.
This was the bit in a book I would usually skip but Kate says writing it out is crucial. So I dug out a notebook and started my secret teenage financial diary, by Marianne Power, aged thirty-six and a half.
I began with the floating cash memory and worked from there.
I grew up in a house of extremes. My Irish dad came to London with nothing when he was sixteen. By the time we came along he’d made a fortune in property. As children there were trips to Harrods and Hamleys. Holidays to Disneyland and Europe.
For my ninth birthday I was taken to the Ritz for tea. My first alcoholic drink was a swig taken from a crystal decanter in the back of my dad’s black Bentley. Always braver than me, Sheila preferred to actually drive the cars, starting at the age of fourteen.
Next thing we knew, there was an almighty bang and our gleaming green Jaguar was parked in our front hall. Sheila had mistaken the accelerator for the brake – and reversed into the house. Actually into the house.
Dad’s response, upon seeing the relatively unscathed Jag? �
��Good cars, aren’t they?’
So in short – we were rich.
The kind of rich that can bounce back from a Jag being parked inside the hallway.
But as every poor little rich girl will tell you, it wasn’t all perfect. Even as a young child I realized a few things about money (and flash cars):
People don’t like people with money (and flash cars). When I was about nine we were in London traffic in Dad’s Bentley and guys on the street were screaming ‘Yuppie’ at us. They banged on the bonnet. I didn’t know what a Yuppie was but I could see the hate in their eyes. I asked Dad what it meant and he said, ‘Young person,’ but I knew that wasn’t it. Dad was ancient.
Money (and flash cars) make you different. As a child all I wanted was to be normal. My greatest dream was to be called Sarah, have brown hair and to have a dad who drove a Ford.
Finally, having money (and flash cars) make you a spoiled brat. The world we were being brought up in was a world away from the world my parents came from. Dad grew up with nothing and was determined to give us everything we wanted. Mum, on the other hand, hated the level of excess we were growing up with and made sure we knew it.
I learned to feel guilty about the money we had and bad about the kind of people we were. Rich people.
So maybe it was just as well that soon enough we learned another lesson: that money doesn’t last.
When I was in my late teens, Dad’s failing health combined with the 1990s recession meant that the money started to dry up quite spectacularly. When I was seventeen Mum cancelled Christmas. By the time we were in our twenties everything was gone – the house, the cars, the money.
Here’s what I learned about NOT having money:
First of all, anyone who’s been there knows that not being able to pay bills and facing the prospect of losing your home is terrifying. Money might not buy you happiness but it buys you security and a roof over your head. When that goes, well, so does everything. But somehow, you get through it. Life goes on. And there are upsides. Mum says that we wouldn’t have worked so hard or done so well in our careers if they’d kept their money. She also says that we’ve turned out nicer people for it.
Help Me! Page 5