I glanced at the clock. It was 9.30pm. I’d been writing for two hours. My wrist hurt.
Writing it all out like that – the cars, the holidays, the floating cash – I could see for the first time how extreme it all was.
Of course it was going to have an effect on me. How could it not?
I went to bed and watched Graham Norton on my laptop.
Bill Murray and Matt Damon were on. I found myself thinking that straight-old Matt was probably boringly good with money, while wild, wacky Bill would be a disaster. In my head all fun people had to be reckless with money. It was part of our charm.
Oh well, Happy Valentine’s Day to me.
When I got up the next morning, Rachel was still asleep. Her thigh-high boots lay like slugs by the sofa. I headed out to Bread and Bean, one of my local coffee shops. I ordered my coffee and scrambled eggs and took a quick scan of the papers – flood warnings, an NHS scandal, something about Simon Cowell – before remembering that ‘negative’ media was not allowed in my self-help life. Instead I depressed myself with another story – my own. I started scribbling down how I was with money as an adult. I used ‘adult’ in the loosest sense.
After graduating, I lived in London at the height of the Brit Pop era. It was the coolest city in the world but I was not cool, so I spent a lot of money trying to fix that by buying the latest Nike trainers, even though they looked ridiculous on me, and squeezing my beer-filled tummy into low-slung jeans. I was on a low salary and living beyond my means – shopping in Covent Garden for the first half of the month, living off cereal for the second.
When I was twenty-nine, I got my first big job, as features editor of a newspaper. My salary increased. Then the good times rolled! I used taxis like they were buses and ate out constantly. I bought designer clothes because I thought it was important that I looked the part now that I was a Hot Shot Newspaper Editor. I permanently looked as if I’d just stepped out of a salon. Because I had.
But underneath the bag and the hair and the dresses, I felt like a fraud. I was struggling to keep on top of my work so I quit the big job and the big salary to go freelance. My spending got even more erratic. As soon as I got a cheque I’d be out celebrating, living it up, but then a week later I was broke and stressed. Every year I’d vow to be better with money, to grow up – but I never did . . .
I looked up. The coffee shop was packed full of couples and friends chatting. I felt shaken. How had I not seen what a huge part of my life money was?
I’d always thought my main issue was that I didn’t have enough money but I could see now that, actually, no amount of money would ever be enough for me. I would be one of those people who ended up bankrupt four years after winning the lottery. ‘I don’t know where it all went,’ I’d tell the tabloids, who’d picture me in my ten-bedroom house with indoor pool, hair salon and gold kitchen taps.
I paid my £14.75 bill for eggs and two coffees.
Rachel was in the kitchen, opening post. She wasn’t afraid of brown envelopes like I was.
‘So how was it?’ I asked.
‘Someone made Turkish Delight martinis,’ she replied.
‘What the hell are they?’
‘I don’t know but they were strong. I couldn’t move my mouth for half the night. What about you – how was your hot date with your bank statements?’
‘OK,’ I lied. I felt too embarrassed to talk to her about money. She was so good with hers. She always knew what was going in and out. She was generous without being flash.
I went to my room and called Sheila.
I asked her what her first money memory was.
‘I remember Mum going mental if we left lights on, or the heating.’
‘And how does that connect with where you are now?’
‘I’m careful with bills. What was yours?’
‘That time Dad came into the living room and threw money around.’
‘Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about that. But was that memory even real? Sometimes I think we made that up.’
‘How would we both have made up a memory?’
‘I don’t know. So what does the memory mean for you?’
‘It means I throw money around.’
‘Who’d be a parent? Anything you do and your child can end up blaming you for ruining their life.’
But I didn’t blame anyone but me for the way I was. I was an adult. I had choices. I just kept making the wrong ones.
Kate suggests that we write down our patterns and beliefs around money so I got out my notebook again and as I scribbled I discovered dozens of beliefs and patterns that I had had no idea were there.
First up was guilt. I felt guilty about having more than other people, so whenever I had money I gave it away – which is to say that I bought endless rounds of drinks and always shouted dinner. But there was something else going on: I could see that I’d bought people things as a way of making them like me. If I was paying, they were more likely to hang around. I wasn’t the funniest or best-looking but I could be generous.
Philosophically, I considered meanness to be one of the most unattractive traits in a person. I thought it was boring, self-serving and greedy to be concerned by money. I was better than that! Sitting on my bed, scribbling, I had an unsettling realization: I treated money as if it was beneath me.
I also hadn’t grown up when it came to money. I was scared of it. Kate says that a lot of women are waiting for a man (in the form of a husband) to come and fix their situation; she calls it the Prince Charming Effect – was that what I was doing? It made me cringe to think that might be the case but I’d definitely spent my life playing the victim when it came to cash. I didn’t look after it, then I played ‘poor me’ when I was ‘broke’ and suddenly couldn’t afford the bus fare. I’d lost count of how many times Sheila had had to bail me out.
Finally, to tie in with my first money memory, I believed that money comes and goes, so I don’t get attached to it, look after it, or make plans with it.
Kate says to think of ways of looking at your story and understanding (as Susan Jeffers says in Feel the Fear) that it all happened perfectly. This is the ‘love’ bit in which you learn to love yourself and the lessons you’ve learned.
I wrote about the fact that I might have blown a lot of money but I’d had fun. I was glad I’d had that experience of going on fancy trips to New York, buying designer handbags and eating in fancy restaurants. It was a moment in time and I’d made the most of it. I’d also come out the other side and realized, as clichéd as it sounds, that stuff doesn’t make you happy – it just makes you look better as you paper over the cracks of your life.
Kate says nothing is as bad as the insidious fear that comes with keeping yourself in the dark about your finances and so my next task was to gather six months of bank statements in order to get what Kate calls ‘cash clarity’. She warns that it’s going to be hard. She was right.
The next day was the kind of miserable Sunday designed for the sofa but instead of slobbing out I got the train to my mum’s to go through my financial paperwork.
Looking at the numbers was horrific.
Four hours after I started, the reality of how much debt I was in began to emerge.
I added it all up for the first time and realized that I was £15,109.60 in debt. There was £6,000 owed to Sheila, a £7,000 overdraft on my business account and £2,109.60 on my current. I felt physically sick to see the figures. How had I been so irresponsible? How had I not known I was in this deep?
Fifteen thousand pounds in debt. And that’s with no mortgage, no kids. It was inexcusable. Fifteen thousand. The number kept going around and around in my head.
Kate says that you can’t beat yourself up for what you’ve done – that it doesn’t help. But I was beating myself up. I felt so angry with myself. And ashamed.
I could no longer see the upside in my spending or the philosophical lessons. Looking at my finances was like looking through a massive magnifying glass. I could see all that
was bad about me: I was reckless, stupid, vain, careless, deluded. A spoilt brat.
I locked myself in the bathroom and cried on the loo. Then I ran a bath. I poured in the oil I’d bought Mum for Christmas – Pomegranate Noir, Jo Malone, £40 – and cried some more. That bath probably cost me £5.
Monday 17th. Still pissing down outside and teary inside. More than anything I wanted to stick my head back in the sand. But I couldn’t. I had to see this through – rip the Band-Aid right off.
Kate suggests looking through your statements to find the sources of what she calls ‘financial energy leaks’ – spending that makes you feel bad rather than good. The aim is to cut down on these leaks.
Looking through my statements, it was clear that I may as well have had no kitchen. Or even a kettle. About fifty per cent of it was Starbucks, Costa, Caffè Nero, Strada, Wagamama, some pub or other, another pub or other . . .
Then there were the beauty-maintenance transactions. Blow-dries at £25 a pop, nails another £25, £42 at Boots for God knows what, £22 in Holland and Barrett for stupid vitamins, £70 facials, £60 waxes. I was a classic example of the ‘I’m worth it even if I can’t afford it’ generation. At the time I’d told myself that these were investments; I thought that if I looked good, I’d feel good and then . . . and then what? I’d meet the man of my dreams? Get promoted?
And I hadn’t even got to clothes yet. I didn’t buy lots but when I did, I didn’t buy cheap. £150 on a jumper which I’d end up being too lazy to hand-wash, so it would spend its life lurking at the bottom of my laundry basket.
Looking through the statements, I also discovered that my average phone bill was £143 a month. £143. I didn’t even like talking on the phone!
Then there was £14 a month for a magazine subscription I wasn’t getting, a couple of direct debits that I couldn’t identify and which had probably been coming out of my account for years, and finally the mystery cash withdrawals: £100 here, another £100 there – I had no idea what it got spent on. It may as well have vanished into thin air.
After years of earning good money, I’d blown it all on high heels, hangovers and endless stupid coffees. It made me feel sick, embarrassed and ashamed. What a fucking idiot.
The whole time I was going through my bank statements I had Mum on my mind. She didn’t spend £150 on cashmere jumpers she was too lazy to wash. She managed to look a million dollars shopping at TK Maxx. She knew the price of everything. ‘Do you like my top?’ she’d ask. ‘It’s a hundred per cent silk – £20, down from £60! And the trousers? Pure linen – £15, down from £45!’
She didn’t go out and spend £2.50 on coffee she could make for pennies at home. She only bought food at the end of the day when it was discounted. She probably ate for a week on what I’d spend on stupid avocado on toast in some stupid hipster coffee shop . . .
That night, she knocked on the door of the spare bedroom I was in, surrounded by papers.
‘Are you OK? Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked.
‘No, thank you.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Not good.’ My voice cracked. I started crying. ‘I’ve been an idiot.’
‘How bad is it?’
‘I’m not telling you. But it’s bad.’
‘You’ve been living a life you can’t afford, Marianne,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I cried.
‘You always say, “I know,” but you do the same thing time and time again.’
‘I know.’
‘You’ll feel so much better if you cut down your spending. I get more of a kick out of saving now than I do shopping. Security is a nice feeling. You have to take control.’
‘I know,’ I said. But actually I didn’t know. I had never felt secure when it came to money and I had never learned how to take control of anything.
Gemma called.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Don’t give me nothing,’ she said. ‘I can hear it in your voice.’
I gave her the short version – without the numbers.
‘I feel like a bad person,’ I told her.
‘You’re not a bad person, you’re a generous person and that’s a good thing but maybe cut back a bit now,’ she said.
I could hear baby James crying in the background and I felt ashamed to be taking up her time when she had a newborn to look after.
For the second night in a row, I cried myself to sleep.
The next day I felt calmer – the kind of calm that only comes when you no longer have the energy to feel sorry for yourself. And I had to give myself some credit for facing the monster in the attic. The important thing now was to keep going.
Kate says it’s important to organize your finances into ‘strong containers’.
She recommends red folders – according to Feng Shui red is the colour of affluence – and labelling everything prettily with a ‘label maker’. She also suggests ‘bedazzling’ your folders with sequins.
I skipped the sequins but I went to Paperchase to buy four clean white ring binders. £4.50 each.
‘Can you not just use some of the folders you already have?’ asked Mum.
‘They have to match and look good so that I feel good about them and will use them every day,’ I replied.
She said nothing.
I got home and put all my Barclays statements into one folder labelled ‘Beautiful Barclays’. I got another folder for HSBC statements – and labelled it ‘Happy HSBC’ – and put all my tax documents into a folder with little hearts drawn around the letters HMRC. I felt like I was in a remedial art class but it was oddly therapeutic.
Kate also says that you have to look after your physical money – no shoving it in pockets or throwing loose change at the bottom of bags, as I had always done. She keeps all her notes in order of value, facing forward in her wallet. I thought that was a bit much, but I looked through pockets, drawers and the bottom of bags and managed to source £22.53. I arranged this money carefully in my wallet. Money for nothing.
I headed back to London feeling shaken but stronger. During Feel the Fear it had never occurred to me that money was one of my fears – but it was a big one and, just as Susan said, facing the fear felt empowering. Now I had to keep facing it.
Kate says that there are two things I had to do every day to keep my finances on track. First I had to check my bank balance every morning and then I had to think of three things I was grateful for. Kate reckons that what you focus on expands. So if you focus on your debt you’ll get more debt, if you focus on all the great things you do have – a cheque on its way, kind friends, a good cup of coffee, etc. – you’ll get more great things. I didn’t really understand how this worked but I was prepared to try.
She also says thinking nice thoughts every time you look at your bank balances creates a kind of Pavlov’s dog thing – you associate your bank with happiness. Even when your Barclays account is minus £2,211.03. For example.
So when I got back to Rachel’s, I looked at my balances – all in negative – but gave thanks for the fact that I had biscuits with my tea and there was heat coming out of the radiator. And just that simple act felt big. I never checked my bank balances. Ever. But seeing the number felt good. At least I knew where I was.
The next day my editor emailed asking me to write about a £100 ‘super-vitamin’ supplement that Elle Macpherson had just launched, containing forty-five ingredients designed to ‘support nutrition at a cellular level and optimize the functioning of all eleven systems of the body’. Buy this and you too could look like a supermodel. The old me would have bought two packets. The new me was just grateful to earn money writing about it.
On 22nd February I had a major blip. It was Sarah’s birthday and after all my good behaviour, I figured I was allowed a night out. The only problem was that it wasn’t just a night – it was an eighteen-hour spending spree.
A bunch of us met for brunch in King’s Cross. Price for
coffee, eggs and bubbles? £22.50. Then Sarah wanted to go to Oxford Street to buy something to wear that night. She found a top in Topshop that cost £29 and looked fantastic on her. I bought a stupid leopard-print jumper in Whistles which cost almost three times as much at £85. I didn’t even like it that much, but I felt fusty in my boring grey jumper. I could see all the clever ways my mind justified the spending. It’s important to look good. You never know who’ll you meet. And it’s Sarah’s birthday – it’s nice to make her day fun – don’t be a spoilsport.
I felt guilty instantly but I drowned that feeling with red wine over late lunch in Cote.
‘Come on, let me get this,’ said Sarah when the bill arrived. I refused.
‘It’s your birthday,’ I insisted. ‘I’ll get it.’
‘Yeah, but you don’t have it, it’s OK.’
‘No, I’ve got money coming in,’ I lied. ‘Please, I want to, it’s my treat.’ And even as I handed over my card for £50, I worried that it would get declined.
Why did I do that? Insist on paying? Kate says that if you want money in your life you have to learn to receive as well as to give. She says that if you refuse things such as compliments, or letting your friend treat you to dinner, you are ‘blocking the flow of abundance’. That language made me cringe but maybe there was something in it. I always refused compliments and wanted to pay for things.
Then we got our nails done, £25, went home, got changed and met the gang at Shoreditch House.
I hate Shoreditch House. It’s a stuck-up pretentious members’ bar designed to make anyone who steps inside feel inferior. A feeling that can only be alleviated by: a) acting like a stuck-up twat, or b) spending lots of money. I opted for b). Crumpled receipts in my pocket showed me that I’d spent £79.85 on four coffee martinis and a bottle of prosecco – drinks I have little memory of ordering. What I do recall is feeling fat and ugly in my stupid leopard-print top and hating everyone at the bar. I remember thinking, ‘Just go home now, call it a night and go,’ but I didn’t. I threw good money after bad, hoping to make the night a success. Then I spent £25 on a taxi home. Grand total spent in one day: £246.35.
Help Me! Page 6