Bankruptcy, starting over, and magical money thinking

A couple of days ago, I was in bed, reading on my phone, and it pinged with an alert from my bank. Almost £200 had gone out for the annual renewal of one of my websites.

I thought I’d set it to monthly renewal. I thought I had until later in the month to double check. I’d seen an email about the renewal and knew I should read it, but I’m busy and it’s boring and the website isn’t earning its keep anyway and I just didn’t want to deal with it so I didn’t. Turns out the email said that even though the site doesn’t renew til the 27th, they’d be taking payment on the 12th. Bugger.

Aside from the panic of being £200 down when I’m already deep in my overdraft, I was just so annoyed at myself. How many times have I had *just enough* money to last me to payday and then suddenly - SURPRISE - not enough. Nowhere near.

It was stressful and annoying at 25. It’s absolute bullshit at 50.

I went straight onto the web chat and begged them to refund. And they did. I was astonished. And my first thought, as my phone chimed the £172 back into my account was “Yay! Free money!” I am an idiot.

My second thought was that they’d refunded because I’d posted the above on Instagram while I was on hold. That the fact of me being open and honest about money somehow cosmically led to them refunding me instantly.

Magical money thinking. Totally my thing.

In this issue (edition? post? I don’t know what to call it) I’m talking to the author Anna Mansell. I picked our chat for the first post (?) proper because she hit on so many of the things I want to address in this newsletter. I hope some of it resonates with you too.

It didn’t take long for everything to unravel. We couldn’t extend the mortgage break, our house was in severe negative equity and we were, quite simply, within the space of three months, fucked.

Why do you think women are often reluctant to talk about money?

I think there is an assumption that to have money demonstrates success and therefore not having it feels like you’ve failed somehow. I talk about money all the time. Usually complaining at the lack of it. I think maybe I’m more explicit since my husband and I went bankrupt in 2009 though. It rather shifts your relationship to money! 

Did your parents talk to you about money growing up? Did you learn anything about managing money before you left home? 

No. Absolutely not. Talking about money was crass. I bought a house when I was 18 and promptly got into some debt by the time I was 21 because I had NO idea about how to run a home. At the time, I was earning good money, had a company car, I should have been totally fine, but I was rubbish. In fact, the debt I had wasn’t that bad, only a few grand, but I couldn’t work out how to fix it, other than to sell my house.

Nobody even talked about money at that stage. Nobody said, ‘don’t sell your home, Anna. You could just use some of the equity in your home to pay off your debt, and then we can help you learn how to manage your finances.’ No. Instead, I sold the first home that gave me total safety and security. Pretty devastating, to be honest. 

What is your relationship with money currently?

Part of me believes that we’ll always have what we need, and therefore I don’t worry about it too much. Another part of me gets stressed about it because I don’t earn much and that means that a. All the responsibility to cover the bills and monthly costs falls to my husband, and b. I feel quite severely disempowered by the lack of it. I feel like I have to second guess what I do all the time, and like I can’t buy a friend coffee or lunch because I’m basically spending my husband’s cash.

Now, I know, intellectually, that this is not the case. We’ve been together 20 years, we have two kids and a home, all our money goes into one account — but I still feel guilt at how little I am earning. I would say that philosophically, my relationship to it is fine, but in practice, it’s wobbly! 

The word “disempowered” leapt out at me because I’ve heard this from a lot of female friends and it’s absolutely how I felt once my marriage ended. Is this something you would like to address? 

I’d love to address it. And I guess I could try and get a job in the same field I used to work in, (I’ve applied for several in recent years and not even been shortlisted for interview), but if I’m honest, and this is going to sound horribly privileged, but the idea of that makes me feel really sad. I am an all or nothing person, if I worked full time like I used to, in a creative job like I had, I simply wouldn’t have a big enough creative well to write too. So then, I’d feel like a massive failure. Like I’ve just wasted the last 9 years of my life trying to make a go of something I (only recently) believe I am good at, if I could just get that break.

Honestly, even just writing this, albeit after a ‘run in’ conversation about money, it makes me want to cry a bit. I can’t see how else I could earn enough, despite having multiple writing projects on the go, having diversified into theatre and screen as well as books, all in a desperate bid to really make things happen…. I’m still broke. 

What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve made?

Spending it like our situation would never change. Prior to 2009, my husband and I earned good money between us. A lot more than we earn now. And we spent every last bit. We would change cars whenever we felt like it, we were encouraged to mortgage up to our eyeballs because it was good to stretch yourself. We took out consolidation loans when things got a bit tight and then carried on spending like we had before. We were reckless.

Then I fell pregnant for the second time, my husband was made redundant twice in 6 months, and we went from earning over 100k a year to my statutory maternity pay — about £116 a week.  

It didn’t take long for everything to unravel. We couldn’t extend the mortgage break, our house was in severe negative equity and we were, quite simply, within the space of three months, fucked.

We filed for bankruptcy and our house was repossessed. It was not an easy time. And we felt a lot of guilt about how much of it could have been avoided, had we not been so short-sighted.

I really appreciate your honesty about bankruptcy. One of the things I want to talk about is shame around money problems. Did you feel shame? Or relief? Were you embarrassed telling people? How did people react? 

I didn’t feel shame initially, I’ve never been embarrassed to talk about it. I know some family members were embarrassed for us, but I didn’t share that view. We were in a situation that couldn’t be solved any other way and we decided to use the experience to make big changes in our life. We moved to Cornwall and started again.

I think because we just got on with it, people assumed we weren’t bothered by what had happened. We weren’t embarrassed, but we were bothered! It was stressful, unpleasant, unsettling, exhausting, frightening, and profoundly life-changing. I wouldn’t want to go through it again! 

What’s the best thing you’ve ever spent money on? 

I suppose it would be the home that we were able to buy down in Cornwall in 2016. Which was only made possible through sad circumstances, there’s no way we could have bought it on our own, we just wouldn’t have been able to save up the deposit. Especially given that by then I was writing and, well, it’s not exactly the most lucrative of careers! 

What would you do with £10,000? 

I’d pay myself a salary of £500 a month for twenty months, in the hopes that by the time I got to the end of that timescale, I might finally have got that big book deal, or TV show, or film off the ground. Ever the optimist!

This is so me. I call it magical money thinking. I know it's common with authors - you just need that one big book! - but I think it's probably quite common in general. I don't know that I even have a question... maybe what will you do if that doesn't happen? Do you have a pension? Do you have a plan?

It can’t not happen. I have no pension. I have no plan. I just have the fire in my belly that says if I don’t give up, something, somewhere, will come good. Naive? Possibly. But we are where we are. I can’t say it’s a great situation to be in, but the second I stop believing in myself is the moment it all ends. And I’m still not quite ready to give up.

You can find Anna on Instagram and Twitter and her books on Amazon.

This newsletter is free, but if you’d like to support me you could buy me a coffee or buy one of my books. (I think we’ve established that I need the money.)