“Once you get on the underpaid treadmill, it’s very hard to get off.”

+ what I earned in 22/23 (not unrelated to the above quote)

Hi and welcome to The Ladybird Purse, my weekly newsletter about women and money. I’m not a financial advisor and am in no way qualified to give financial advice. I just love to talk about it.

One of my plans for this newsletter this year was a money book club. I thought I’d pick a money book to read each month, I would post about it and then we could discuss it in the comments and/or over in the chat (join us!).

But then I remembered that many of the money books I read I either give up on or end up scanning, and I really don’t want to be forced to finish a book I think is rubbish just so I can write about it here.

So instead I thought I could just pick out interesting/helpful bits from the money books I’m reading. And I do want to read more. I have a bunch on my TBR plus so many saved on an Amazon list going back years. There’s a least three about teaching your small children to be good with money. My small children are now 15 and almost 20. Bugger.

Anyway, first up was one of those long time list books, Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which I’m pretty sure I’ve been meaning to read for about fifteen years. There’s an updated edition now so I finally took the plunge.

The first step of the “9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence” is to find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime. “The sum total of your gross income, from the first penny you ever earned to your most recent paycheck.”

I’ve done this already after reading about it in another book…

Re-reading the above post now, I realise I missed off a couple of part-time jobs. I did book-keeping for “the world's Number One ABBA tribute band.” I had a weekend job in a bargain bookshop in London and, later, a weekend job in an estate agents in Manchester. Oh and a weekend job subtitling at Granada TV (that one paid well).

None of those jobs probably add much to my lifetime total, but still.

Since I’ve just done my tax return, I might as well stick my 22/23 earnings on too: £11,032.40.

Help me, Oprah

I think - she says, tentatively - I think I might have actually got to grips with how not great this is. I think my brain may have finally upgraded the income figure. Certainly I realise that in 22/23 I didn’t earn much more than I made in my first job in 1992/93 and that wasn’t even well paid! And also I may (finally) be comprehending that there’s thirty years between those dates. Two thirds of my life.

There’s been a big improvement in 23/24, but still not enough. I wondered, not for the first time, how much would be enough. Not for me personally, just generally - what would be a reasonable figure for someone like me to earn.

I’ve looked this up before too. There’s a website for it. The minimum income calculator:

How much do you need to live on?

I put the details in again before re-reading the original post above and fully gasped at the result: £56,439

In case you can’t or don’t want to click through, the figure it gave me just 18 months ago was £39,735. That is a hell of a jump. I hadn’t got my head around potentially earning over £30k and now I need to think £50k? Good luck. Bloody hell.

Anyway, I’m sorry to say I didn’t find the book particularly helpful. But that was actually a bit comforting too. I think it’s because I know all of this now. I’ve read enough and thought enough and now I’m just doing the thing I always do, looking for a magic key. There is no magic key. Bugger.

The book did have a couple of questions I liked:

If you had £1million right now, what would you do with your time?

If someone today erased all your debts, would you dig yourself into that hole again? How or how not?

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An interview with… Suw Charman-Anderson

I’m Suw Charman-Anderson, and I’m the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, an international celebration of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), which raises women’s profiles and creates new role models to encourage girls and women to study and pursue careers in STEM. Ada Lovelace Day is held every year on the second Tuesday of October and has been running for 15 years.

In 2005, I co-founded the Open Rights Group, a digital rights campaigning group. As its first Executive Director, I prepared our response to the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property and gave evidence on digital rights management to the All Party Parliamentary Internet Group.

In the past, I’ve worked as a web designer, freelance journalist, and technology consultant, and have been self-employed since 1998.

I currently write three newsletters on Substack:

Why Aren't I Writing?, which takes a look at all the various reasons we might find ourselves not writing when we'd rather be putting pen to paper with the aim of helping subscribers overcome (or find a way around) their blocks.

Word Count, a compilation of interesting stuff to do with writing, reading, TV and film, and which includes updates on my own writing journey plus an obligatory cat photo.

Ada Lovelace Day, our monthly round-up of news, plus weekly emails highlighting women in STEM, as well as interesting books, podcasts and some of our Ada Lovelace Day Live videos from past years.

My hopes for the future are to improve the funding for Ada Lovelace Day so that I can hire an admin assistant and to grow my income from writing.

What is your relationship with money currently?

Improving! As a ‘solopreneur’ running her own business, I’ve always struggled with earning enough money to see me through the year, often finding myself stuck in a feast-famine cycle that was hard to break out of.

That has been particularly the case over the last decade because my financial year revolves around one sponsor-funded event – Ada Lovelace Day – in October, so my finances have a yearly rhythm instead of a monthly rhythm.

That means that it’s functionally impossible to plan ahead, because I never know whether I’m going to have a good year or a bad year. I have to be very frugal through the winter and spring until I know what state my finances are going to be during the summer and autumn, let alone year-to-year.

That makes it difficult to invest in anything long-term, so I feel that I can’t, for example, commit to hiring part-time help, because I don’t know how much money I’m going to be able to commit to their salary. That means I have ended up stuck in a financial rut and find it difficult to increase my earnings.

What’s your earliest money memory?

My Mum teaching me how to balance my Post Office Savings books as she did her cheque books. On the one hand, I learnt very early on how important it is to know how much money you have and where it’s coming from, but on the other hand, I saw my Mum having to rob Peter to pay Paul.

Growing up, there were long stretches when my Dad was unemployed and my Mum was working three jobs to make ends meet, and there was a lot of juggling of bank accounts and credit cards to make sure that bills got paid.

I think I internalised very early on that I didn’t really deserve to be paid enough to live and that it was normal and expected to constantly live without enough money. I sometimes think that I subconsciously engineered such situations because, although the stress could be crippling, there was something comfortingly familiar about them.

My Dad hated being employed and did eventually become his own boss, whereas my Mum was self-employed all her life, so I certainly internalised the idea that jobs were bad and that the only route to happiness was to run my own business. That turned out to not be entirely true.

What advice would you give your younger self about money?

Don’t get into debt if you can possibly avoid it, because any little scraps of disposable income will get eaten up by that debt, and that will stop you developing your savings.

This advice really follows on from the next question’s answer, but because my first job out of university was so badly paid, I started racking up debt fairly rapidly, just to live.

Then, when I started working for myself in 1998, that debt slowly grew, but when I started a new business in 2001, it ballooned as I took out a business loan and accepted financial support from my parents. When that business failed, I was left with £70k of debt, and every scrap of spare income went to servicing that debt. I didn’t get it all paid off until 2015.

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

There are so many to choose from, but I think the foundational mistake, the one that caused all the others, was to accept a job that didn’t pay enough.

It took me a year to find a job after university, and I got so desperate I took the first one I was offered, which was in science publishing. It was horribly underpaid – I think I was earning a little over half the median pay for a graduate – but I had no idea at the time. I didn’t know what a reasonable salary was and I actually only found out a few years ago just how badly underpaid I had been.

When I quit that job, I went on to another underpaid job, and when I quit that one, I started working as a freelance music journalist which was even more underpaid. Then I went on to start a business and, guess what! I was still underpaying myself!

Once you get on the underpaid treadmill, it’s very hard to get off. Indeed, I’m still trying to solve that problem.

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

Back in January 2020, I started a mentoring network for women in science, technology, engineering and maths. The software that I used to run the program cost my business a hefty sum over three years and ultimately, although the program was extremely successful and really helped the participants, it didn’t make enough money to continue.

It was, however, a great investment for me personally. It forced me to become a mentor and to find a mentor, and that has been an amazing experience. It’s improved my confidence, helped me to understand my worth a little better, and encouraged me to think more expansively about my capabilities and ambitions.

Do you have a pension? If not, do you have a plan?

I do not. And I worry about this a lot.

When I started my own business, I was advised to pay myself the minimum amount of pay and supplement that with dividends. No one ever sat me down and said, “OK, it’s going to hurt, but you have to get a pension”. So now I have no state pension and no private pension. I have to meet my goal of increasing my income so that I can get a pension and turbocharge it for a few years.

I’m very lucky in that I married a man who learnt very different lessons about money when he was young and has been saving since he was 16, but I feel pretty awful that I can’t currently pay my own way into retirement.

What would you do with £10,000?

I could spend £10k a dozen times over, but at the moment I’d use it to have a health-related procedure that isn’t covered by the NHS, but which will be an investment in my future. If this particular problem isn’t fixed within the next 2-3 years, it bodes ill for my long-term health and I do not want to end up in chronic pain for want of a few grand.

If you were me, what would you want to ask women about money?

I think that a lot of women have been taught to fear money and, worse, taught that we don’t deserve to earn a comfortable living. I’m 52, and only just starting to unpick all the awful lessons I learnt as a child about money, how it works, and whether or not I deserve to have some.

My energy bill went up by £30 pcm and my pet insurance by £20 pcm this week, and despite the fact that I can afford that increase, I still got that sensation of tightness in my chest when those emails arrived. I still feel a deep-rooted fear about money, which has meant that talking about it with my husband is really hard. My instincts are to run away from any conversation about money, because I don’t pay my way in our relationship and that makes me feel terrible. But the only way through is to steel oneself and have those conversations, no matter how painful or upsetting they are. Running away just makes it all so much worse.

So I would ask women how they handle conversations about money, not just with their partners or family, but with themselves? What do they do to help themselves cope when the very stressful topic of money comes up?