The next day I felt disgusted with myself.
In my old life I would never ever have totted that up and would have had no idea that that was what I got through on one social Saturday. I thought about how many times I had spent money on clothes I didn’t like, just to try and feel good. I thought of all the nights trying to buy fun in pretentious bars that made me feel like crap.
I spent the day in bed watching people at their worst in House of Cards. A bit like Shoreditch House but with fewer coffee martinis.
‘What’s going on?’ Rachel looked alarmed. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, why? I’m fine!’ I snapped.
‘OK.’ She stood by my bedroom door looking in at the chaos within. Clothes in piles. Shoes angrily jutting out of Tesco bags.
‘What time did you get up?’
‘I don’t know. Early.’
I’d got up at 6 on Monday morning, on a mission to do penance for all my financial sins – starting with hand-washing every item of clothing languishing at the bottom of my laundry basket, followed up with a clear-out of my wardrobe. Kate says we must sell everything we don’t use because it’s a source of cash and also in Feng Shui clutter is bad because it blocks our capacity to get new things.
So I piled my old, unworn clothes on my bed.
When I say old, that’s not really true. There were dresses that still had labels on them, bought for occasions and never worn. There were a couple of Topshop jeans bought in a size too small, in the hope that I would slim into them and a pair of Marni heels I’d bought in a sale that were always too big and fell off every time I wore them.
I knew I could probably get more for them on eBay but I was too lazy so I took them to a local second-hand shop, feeling quietly confident that they’d be delighted with my collection. I envisioned them telling me what nice taste I had, that they couldn’t believe I was getting rid of such beautiful things.
It didn’t go that way.
‘We don’t do Topshop,’ said the shop assistant with straightened, bleached hair, when she picked up the jeans at the top of the Ikea bag full of clothes.
‘There’s a pull in this seam,’ she said, pulling at the hips of a spotty dress from LK Bennett.
‘This has a stain,’ she said, pointing to a hardly noticeable bit of foundation just by the neck on another dress.
Then she picked up a green silk evening dress which I’d worn to the IFTAs, the Irish equivalent of the Oscars. It was the most expensive thing I’d ever bought at £700.
‘It’s not the right time of year for black tie,’ she said, tossing it aside. ‘Bring it back in November if you want.’
‘This we can take,’ she said, of a peach-coloured dress I’d bought for a wedding and the too-big Marni shoes.
Shows what crap taste you have, I wanted to shout. That dress was horrible! I bought it out of desperation!
‘We’ll try the shoes at £50 and the dress the same. We keep them on sale for five weeks, if they haven’t sold after four, we put them on discount and if they don’t sell then, they go to charity. We take fifty per cent.’
So my designer life was worth £50. Tops.
I gathered up my rejected clothes and left with my cheeks burning.
By the time I got home, I was fuming.
‘Stupid stuck-up cows!’ I ranted.
‘Who are?’ asked Rachel.
‘In that shop. They didn’t want any of my clothes.’
‘So, put them on eBay or come do a car-boot sale with me. You’ll make more money that way.’
‘That’s not the point!’
‘What is the point? Why are you letting some woman you don’t know get you so angry?’
I thought about it and realized that the woman in the shop was not the problem. I was.
The truth was selling my old possessions felt beneath me and the fact that they didn’t even want them added insult to injury.
I felt demeaned and embarrassed, stripped of the status I usually had when entering a shop as a customer. And I hadn’t realized how much I liked that status, the status of going into a shop and buying a cashmere jumper while the assistant wraps it up nicely. The status of being able to flag a cab when it’s raining, instead of standing by the bus stop. The status of eating out instead of bringing in a packed lunch . . .
I didn’t like what any of this said about me.
‘I’ve made a mess of everything,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Rachel.
And for the first time ever, I shared my dirty money secret. I told her just how much I was in debt and how stupid I’d been. I told her about how much money we’d had growing up and how it had all gone. She made me a cup of tea and squeezed my hand.
‘Now you know the situation, you can fix it, can’t you?’
I nodded.
And Rachel was right. I could fix it. Things would change. Starting now.
I celebrated the end of my money month with something Kate calls a Financial Freedom Date.
Kate says it’s important to sit down weekly to track expenses and earnings – and that putting on nice music, a special outfit and lighting a candle will make the whole thing enjoyable. It becomes a ritual. A money love-in. She even has a play list for the occasion on Spotify – there’s a lot of country music on it, which didn’t make sense to me. Country music is so miserable it makes me want to go shopping. Mind you, I could say that of a lot of things.
I opted for Kanye West’s ‘Gold Digger’.
I didn’t burn a candle because after years of literally burning money with over-priced candles, I was going cold turkey. Also, I didn’t want to put the heating on (tick, tick!), so I was not wearing a little black dress – I was wearing two jumpers.
To start I had to go through my bills, which Kate refers to as ‘Invoices for Blessings Already Received’. Kate says that instead of focusing on the money going out, we should give thanks for the service we got for that money. So I looked at my last crazy phone bill and thanked it for the lovely conversations I had with wonderful friends.
My most sincere gratitude and all-out love went to Netflix. For just £5.99 a month I got hours of entertainment (more hours than I’d care to admit), not to mention a faithful bedtime companion. I sensed it was a love that would last.
Next I counted my earnings. This was a short task. I’d written one article that month. Usually I’d be writing two articles a week. Self-help was taking up too much of my time.
Finally, I did some financial housekeeping. I phoned up the magazine company I had been paying money to every month. It was a Vogue subscription from three years ago, sent to a flat I hadn’t lived in for two years. Instead of beating myself up – I let it go. I phoned The Times, to whom I was sending £17.99 a month for, it transpires, the uber de luxe iPad package. I did not have an iPad.
I called my phone company and asked them why my bills were so high. Turned out that every time I called Gemma in Dublin, to discuss something major like whether she’d watched X Factor, it was costing me about £20. I was informed that there was a £5 a month package I could buy that would allow me unlimited minutes to Irish phones.
‘Why didn’t you notice this sooner?’ asked the guy on the phone.
‘Because I’m an idiot,’ I said.
‘I’m as bad: it’s in one pocket, out the other,’ he said.
It struck me, as The Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Mo Money Mo Problems’ came on my playlist, that so many of us have money issues that we never talk about.
That night Rachel had friends around for dinner. One told me she’d knocked up £40,000 of credit card debt in her thirties.
She’d broken up with the man she thought she was going to marry and went into a spiral. ‘I’d stay at home, order takeaway, drink wine and buy clothes online. I didn’t even open the packets half the time – the clothes would arrive and I’d throw them in the bottom of the wardrobe.’
And that’s the thing. Kate says that any time we are out of control with our finances, wh
atever it might look like, we are not having fun; we are actually self-destructing. And that self-destruction can be because of different demons, but in her world all those things come down to one thing: not loving yourself enough.
I found it hard to get on board with the whole ‘love yourself’ stuff because it’s so abstract but there’s some truth in it. I grew up with extreme habits around money, which I replicated. But my sisters were not in the same financial state that I was, which meant there was something else going on. As clichéd as it might sound, I thought it came down to this: I never felt good enough.
I never felt pretty enough, so I’d spend on clothes. Despite all the promotions, I never felt I was good at my job so I squandered my earnings instead of taking pride in them. I didn’t really see why people liked me, so I’d try to buy them things. When I didn’t know what else to do, I would go out and spend to find happiness. But all I found was a bigger overdraft. I then used my debt as another reason to beat myself up and hate myself more – the spiral continued.
Kate says that if we’re worrying about our money we are not ‘fully present’ in other areas of our life. If you wake up at 2am worrying about money (as I did), you are not going to think creatively or work effectively. Those niggles in the back of your mind mean that you can’t enjoy anything properly. It’s so true. I thought worrying about money was the norm. I didn’t realize there was an alternative.
But there was. Kate’s book had helped me see that. It had also made me understand that it was going to take a lot longer than a couple of weeks to sort out my money problems. It would, I suspect, take years.
A part of me wondered whether I should stick with the book for another month, just to follow through on what I’d learned. I could spend March really getting on top of things. I would sell that stuff on eBay, maybe even draw up a budget . . .
3
The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne
‘Whatever you dream of can be yours’
Except I didn’t. Sell the clothes on eBay, that is. Or create a budget. Instead I picked up a book that told me I didn’t need to sell my dresses, I had to buy new ones. A book that suggested only losers cry over bank statements, winners write themselves pretend cheques and imagine money flying through the letter box. A book that told me I could have anything I wanted, and more, without doing anything at all . . .
This book argues that there is a ‘Great Secret’ that has been passed down between the best minds in history – people such as Plato, da Vinci, Einstein . . . and, er, Australian daytime-TV producer, Rhonda Byrne. What is this secret?
You can have anything you want in life if you just believe.
The man of your dreams, the house of your dreams, the job of your dreams, millions of pounds . . . all yours, if you just think positively enough. No need to work, study or do anything, really – just wish for it.
I know, wonderful, isn’t it? What the hell have we been making life so complicated for?
And in case you are sceptical (you cynic!), according to The Secret, it’s all down to something called the ‘law of attraction’, which states that ‘thoughts become things’. So, if you think about money, you’re going to get lots of money. Think about debt and that’s what you’ll get more of.
‘Thoughts are magnetic and thoughts have a frequency,’ says Byrne. ‘As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency.’
Hmmmm.
I’d had a flatmate who was obsessed with The Secret. She used to fall asleep watching the DVD (it started life as a film) and gave copies of the book to all her friends, including me. I’d never got past the first few pages; I objected on aesthetic grounds. I hated the stupid brown pages, which looked like they’d had coffee spilt on them and I hated the stupid scrolly font that’s trying to make everything look old and scholarly but actually makes everything look naff and crap.
And, even though I hadn’t bought it, it really bothered me that the price of this small, ugly book was £14.99. Rhonda Byrne had clearly uncovered the secret to getting rich. In fact, her bestselling book is reported to have grossed around $300 million internationally, selling to 19 million people and sprouting a series of sequels called The Power and The Magic. Which begs the question: if The Secret answers the mysteries of our time – why do people need to buy the other books?
And it wasn’t just me who had an allergic reaction. Concerns were raised about the materialistic message in these books – in which happiness always comes in the form of money and cars. Greater criticism was levelled at the idea that, according to the law of attraction, anything bad that happens is your fault.
Then Byrne fell out with two of the main contributors, Esther and Jerry Hicks, and in 2011 one of the so-called experts in the book, James Arthur Ray, was charged with ‘negligent homicide’ after three people died in a sweat lodge at one of his retreats.
It was all deluded and dangerous nonsense – the very worst of self-help.
So why was I doing it?
Because ever since I’d started the project people had one of two reactions: either they looked at me blankly or their eyes got bigger and they asked me if I’d read The Secret, before telling me how their life had changed since reading it.
One friend reckoned The Secret got her pregnant. She’d been trying for five years with no luck. They were just about to go through their third and final round of IVF treatment when her mum gave her the book. She went on to have twins nine months later.
‘Something just clicked,’ she said. ‘I had total faith that it was going to happen – and it did.’
Another swore blind that the flat she was living in was one that she visualized, to the inch, five years earlier. ‘I used to draw out plans for my ideal home – the size I’d like the living room to be, the kind of bedroom I wanted with a window overlooking a garden. It was The Secret – absolutely,’ she said.
A former colleague believed that she got proposed to because of The Secret. She had been single for years when one New Year’s Eve, at home alone, having been given the book for Christmas, she wrote a list of everything she wanted in her life. Top of that list was ‘Be engaged by the end of the year’. It happened sooner than that. She met a guy the weekend after and he proposed within two months. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out. ‘Next time I’m going to specify the kind of guy I want to be engaged to – so not an alcoholic head case,’ she said.
I scoffed when I heard these stories. There was always a more realistic explanation. I think Jo got pregnant because she was more relaxed and therefore everything worked better. Or maybe it was just her time. Lucy got the flat not because of the powers of the Universe but because her grandmother died and she inherited enough for the deposit. As for Sam, she met someone because she was looking.
But, believe it or not, the idea of the law of attraction has been around for more than a century – featuring in The Science of Getting Rich written by Wallace Wattles in 1911 as well as Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, published in the 1950s.
It’s even backed up by science, according to Byrne, who argues that the law of attraction is ‘a law of nature’ and supported by quantum physics.
‘The discoveries of quantum physics and new science are in total harmony with the teachings of The Secret,’ she explains. ‘I never studied science or physics at school and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics, I understood them perfectly . . .’ I didn’t do physics at school either, Rhonda, so I’ll have to take your word for it.
But as far-fetched as it all sounded, a little tiny part of me couldn’t help but wonder . . . What if we really could have anything we wanted just by changing our thoughts? What if there are forces at work that I don’t understand?
For all my cynicism, deep down I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe that all my problems could vanish in an instant. That I could get everything I wanted, and more. I wanted to be
lieve in the magic.
I also needed a bit of light relief.
It had been a high-octane start to the year, followed by the tears and shame of money month. That phrase, ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ kept going around in my head. Too bloody right I couldn’t. I didn’t turn to self-help looking for the truth.
So at the start of March, given the choice between continuing to face financial reality or sticking my head back in the sand . . . I chose sand. Lots and lots of sand.
I picked up my old copy of The Secret.
I once read an article that argued that all self-help books promise to tell you one of three things: how to get laid, how to get rich, or how to lose twenty pounds. A book that could combine all of those – well, it was guaranteed to be a bestseller. Cue The Secret.
The book’s basic formula is this: Ask, Believe and Receive.
First you should ‘Ask’ for what you want. Then you must absolutely ‘Believe’ that it is on its way to you. And hey presto! Before long you are ‘Receiving’ untold men, money and a supermodel body.
Having spent the last month in tears over my finances – my ambition for March was simple: it was time to get stinking rich. Apparently this is really very easy.
The book tells the story of a guy who used to get lots of bills in the post until, one day, he decided to imagine cheques coming through the letter box instead. Then, what do you know, within a month the cheques came flying in.
So on Monday 10th March, instead of writing an article I’d been asked to write about the magic power of goji berries, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine cheques flying through my letter box rather than bills and takeaway pizza leaflets. I pictured them shooting onto the doormat, like coins coming out of a slot machine. There were so many of them they formed a little paper mountain.
Help Me! Page 7