“Redundancy was the best thing that ever happened for my finances!”

+ Can you describe your relationship with money in one sentence?

Hi and welcome to The Ladybird Purse, my weekly newsletter about women and money. I’m not a financial advisor and not qualified to give financial advice.

I am full of cold and also woke up at 4am so this week I’ll be hopping - or rather staggering - straight to the interview.

Well, after this, which I heard on Ramit Sethi’s podcast, and thought was interesting:

Describe your relationship with money in one sentence.

If you can’t do it in a sentence, how about a song title?

(Points off if it’s by Simply Red!)

Oh also, I asked a couple of weeks ago if you’d be interested in webinars and quite a lot of you said yes. So once my brain unfogs, I will learn how to do webinars. Watch this space!

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An interview with Nicole Burstein

Nicole is a Customer Support Manager by day, author by night. She writes romance novels under the name Amber Crewe, and in the spare time she manages to scrape together, enjoys long walks, embroidery, and getting dangerously obsessed with South Korean romance dramas. She lives alone in North-West London.

What is your relationship with money currently?

I’d say it’s pretty healthy. I have a comfortable disposable income, and am very organised with my monthly budgeting.

I do end up putting a fair amount on credit card each month, which I’d rather not do, but I always pay it off within 2-3 months at most, so it doesn’t stress me out.

What’s your earliest money memory?

Apart from getting pocket money when I was younger, I’d say turning 13 and starting to babysit.

I really wanted to buy a telescope more than anything. The one I wanted cost £250, and I worked out that if I earned £10-£15 a night from babysitting, I could afford the telescope in about two years. I worked almost every Saturday night, and I did it!

I’ve just realised that I’ve actually followed the exact same pattern really recently, putting a bit of money aside each month for 18 months in order to afford my most expensive holiday ever this summer.

What advice would you give your younger self about money?

There’s a thing called ‘stupid tax.’ Every now and again you will mis-calculate, make a mistake, or end up having to pay for something you weren’t expecting (it happened to me very recently). Prepare for this.

Whether it’s fixing a broken phone screen, covering a parking fine or breaking something you need to replace, expect the unexpected and expect it to cost you money.

Having to deal with these becomes a lot less stressful if you have a small pot put aside (I actually call it the ‘contingency fund’ in my Monzo account).

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

The thing I very recently had to dig into the contingency fund for… I didn’t read the small print in my workplace’s health insurance policy and ran out of budget for a bunch of private hospital tests I was having.

I had to lay out £725 to find out that I am perfectly healthy! If you have private health insurance, check what your policy covers folks, otherwise face the ‘stupid tax.’

I remember you telling me about someone at, I think, a job interview advising you to ask for more money. Could you tell me about that?

I only found out that I was being underpaid when I was made redundant in early 2024 and had to find a new job. Everything I was applying for seemed to have a salary of 50%-75% more than the role I was leaving, which I found strange. In fact, I automatically assumed I was applying for jobs that were too senior for me.

I had a chat with my line manager (who is also my mentor) and she admitted that those were the right jobs, but that I was currently on the very low end of my pay bracket (and if I was anywhere else I would indeed be getting paid much more).

She explained that this was partly due to the nature of working in tech and having to work through some pay freezes both during and after the pandemic, which limited my raises, plus I had ‘risen through the ranks’ in that company, so the pay jumps would never compare to someone who was coming into the same role from somewhere else.

I learned that if you want a significant pay rise, don’t rely on the place you’re currently working. It’s always going to work out better to move somewhere else so you can negotiate something higher.

The best bit of advice I had for discussing salaries in job interviews was to never reveal what you were looking for. Always switch the question around and ask what the budget for the role is. They’ll give you a range, and then you can let them know if it suits, or if that’s not where you want to be.

Women especially have a tendency to undercut themselves in those conversations. If you go in with an expected number and it’s lower than the company’s budget, they’re more likely just going to give you what you’re asking for rather than what they can really afford.

The proof in the pudding: my salary for my current job is nearly double what I was earning before. Redundancy was the best thing that ever happened for my finances!

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

I don’t know if it counts as the best, but two years ago I had to furnish my new flat from scratch having just moved out of my parents’ place.

I went budget (IKEA, Dunelm) for pretty much everything, apart from the curtains. They remain the most expensive thing I bought for my place, and I’m so happy I did it. Made to measure, expertly fitted, and they look gorgeous.

I deliberated a long time on whether I should go in that direction and looked into a few more budget friendly options, but a family member pointed out that this is something I’ll be looking at every single day, so I’d notice every day if they weren’t quite right. They were correct, and my flat really feels like a home because of my lovely perfect curtains.

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

I hate this question, because it’s probably the thing that I worry about the most when it comes to finances.

I contribute a high percentage to my work pension, and I’ve been meaning to set up a private one for years now, but I’ve never got around to it. Every time I start to make enquiries I realise I’ve probably left it far too late to give myself a secure, comfortable retirement, and so I back away again, which I know is the opposite of what I should be doing, but it’s just hard to confront and deal with.

Then again, I know this isn’t all my fault. It was only about four or five years ago that I even started to earn above the London living wage, so I never would have been able to put anything significant into a pension anyway.

Do I have a plan? I get anxiety just thinking about sorting a plan out. I guess I just kind of hope that one day one of my novels will break out and I won’t have to worry about it any more! Oh, are those hives breaking out on my arms?

What would you do with £10,000?

Pension. LOL.

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

As someone who has really upped their spend on beauty/fashion over the last year or two (manicures, hair care, skin care), working out what’s a necessity and what’s not has become increasingly more difficult. How do other women balance this, especially in a culture that’s constantly pushing newer and more expensive health and beauty trends?

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