Pay Day
Come pay day, I log on to my internet account only to find I am still £200 in the red.
I go through all the motions. "How has this happened?" "There must be some mistake." "Somebody must owe me £500 that I've forgotten about." Then I scroll down the incomings and outgoings and all the month's guilty indulgences are there in black and white (or should that be black and red?) telling the truth for me.
I wish I could say it was a one off
This pattern of overspending, denial and then a panicked balance check has dogged me ever since I started uni and was introduced to that most tempting of mirages - the overdraft.
£2,000 of free money. I remember telling my mum in my first term. It felt as if there was no end to it. "You can always just go to the bank and get another tenner out," I used to say.
It must have seemed so alien to her. Her uni experience 30 years previously involved regular choices between buying a textbook and buying something to eat. In the days before credit, when the money ran out, the money ran out, so you found a way to make it last. She knew better when she said, "It will catch up with you one day."
And it did.
That credit card I got on a whim when walking through the student union during a particularly panicked nearly-the-end-of-term-but-loan-still-a-long-way-off moment? My parents paid that off… and another one… and my overdraft several times. Each time without reproach or judgment but with - and this is almost worse - something approaching resignation.
I wish I could say I felt terrible. Yes, part of me hated that they were bailing me out, but mainly I felt relieved, and, I am ashamed to say this part, a twinge of excitement at the prospect of a few weeks of guilt-free spending.
I have no answers.
My relationship with money is a mess. I can mount a partial defense by saying that I think I am generous, I give some (not enough, but some) away to worthier causes than my own consumerist existence, and by no means am I the worst out of all my friends at this.
I am an advertiser's dream. I buy in to a lifestyle which I cannot afford because I have somehow come to believe the idea that spending money makes everything better.
This is where the real problem lies. Sorting out my finances is going to take more than budgeting. It's definitely going to take more than another parental bail out. It's going to take a whole re-imagination of why I think I need to buy the things I do, of why I think that owning more stuff will really change things.
Until I understand that money is not a liberator but a trap, I don't think I'll ever be free. And that, if I ever get there, will be worth more than anything.
Take up the Cash for a month challenge
Written by Daisy Doonan. Posted on 2nd November.
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