Money

"People are funny about money"

I'm not rich by any means, but I am not poor either.  I don't have enough money that I can buy things without looking at the price tag, but I can afford more than just the basics in life.  I'm somewhere in the middle when it comes to the UK.  However the fact I was born in the UK to begin with already puts me quite high up the ladder compared to most of the world.  There are only a handful of nations that are developed and have a quality of life above what I have simply because of where I was born.  That's not to say the UK isn't without it's problems, our economy is by no means top of the class and there are a lot of domestic issues that impact me and everyone else who lives here.  Still, in the grand scheme of things we're quite well off as a nation and I think many people tend to forget that.

The thing about wealth is that it's a game of follow the leader, where you are encouraged to constantly look forward and look to whoever is doing the best and compare yourself to them, rather than look back and see how many people in the queue you're actually ahead of with what you already have.

I've gone through periods in my life where my wealth has fluctuated in the extremes.  I've been homeless before and had to live in a caravan for a time as temporary accommodation.  I've been so poor I couldn't afford to buy food, pay for utilities, and even for a time had to live without electricity or running water - that was perhaps the lowest point.  In the extreme opposite I've also experienced the life I alluded to above, the amount of wealth to the point where I could walk into a shop pick whatever I wanted, go and pay for it without ever looking at the price and knew I'd not have to worry about having enough money to afford it.  That was liberating to say the least having experienced the days walking around Sainsbury's with a calculator on my phone adding up everything as I went to make sure I got as much as I could for what little I had.

One thing I have learned from moving back and forward between the extremes - more than once I might add - is that through it all money never made me happy.  It's true to say that having more of it certainly made some parts of my life easier and took certain worries away, but in their absence other concerns filled their place.  The only thing that changed really was what you focus on in life.  This made me realise that if you have the mentality of someone who worries about things a lot, no matter what they are, that is the mentality you will always have.  Take those worries away and you'll fill their place with something else.  In contrast if you are a person who never worries about anything, even if you lose it all and find yourself at the bottom, you're not likely to change your mentality, you're still as likely to continue wilfully ignorant of everything in life that you should be tending to - the problem with that, is that the things we use to drowned out the world, it has to be said are more dangerous the cheaper they are.  We can argue about value for money another time but we can at least agree that the cheaper something is, the more likely it is to be poor quality - whether that be junk food, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else you try to use to escape the reality of your life.

Coco Chanel once said "The best things in life are free" - a quote many people know quite well, the thing is that's only half the quote, she actually said: "The best things in life are free.  The second best things are very, very expensive" - that's the reality of the world we live in, only a handful of things are free that won't negatively impact your life, the rest you'll have to fork out for if you want it.

I've come to a point in my life where budgeting plays the biggest part of my finances.  I have separated my money across three accounts, one for bills, one for savings, and one for disposable income.  Over time I've managed to slowly but surely build up the account I pay my bills from and managed to give myself breathing space.  Whenever I get any money the first thing I do is put some in there and mark off which bills it covers.  Everything is paid by direct debit and I have a set amount for each bill budgeted, if ever a bill comes in that's higher than I expected I need only add in the difference, and any time a bill is lower I transfer out the difference.  Over time I've managed to bank a few months ahead.  Any time I add money to that account I forget about it afterwards and just pretend that account doesn't exist so I am not tempted to spend it.

The savings account I make it a point to put something into it every time I get money, no matter how big or how small as long as I move something into it.  The rest stays in the main current account as disposable income and I can be safe in the knowledge that I can spend whatever is in that account without impacting my bills or savings.  There have only been a few times in the last few years now that I've had to dip into my savings and those were mostly due to my health impacting my income and disrupting my budget.

I'm lucky to live in a country where I don't have to pay a penny for healthcare, but health can still impact your finances when it stops you from earning as you would have before.  Given how adversely I've been affected in the past year and a half now with my health I am somewhat grateful I got a handle on my finances when I did, things could easily have turned out a lot worse for me financially right now if I hadn't.

The thing I find infuriating about finance in general however is that you are never taught these things - or I wasn't at least - in school or anywhere else really.  We're expected to learn it for ourselves or from our parents.  Neither of my parents were savers when I was a kid however and when it came to finance that was never really discussed with me.  I never asked about my parents financial "health" as it were.  I was a teenager before I got a glimpse at anything relating to it when I had to start managing my own.  It was only really when applying to college that I first saw details of my parents finances when I had to fill out forms relating to it, my Dad had started a business several years earlier and by that point most of his finances were managed by an accountant - that was when, for the first time, I started to hear professional advice about managing money.  A few years later applying to University I had another glimpse, at that point through a different accountant as my Dad's business had been growing.  A few years later things took a turn for the worse around the time of the great recession, Dad lost his business and everything hit a new low.

Through all of this though, one thing remained - there was no guide, no handbook, no preparation.  My parents didn't come from families that had a lot of money, they didn't know that much about money and finance.  My Dad was the first in his family to start a business and Mum was the first in hers to even go through further and higher education.  None of my schools despite being private actually covered money or finance in any depth, the closest thing to it was how to calculate tax and insurance in Maths class as well as learning about compound interest but that's about all I recall.  As a nation with a population of about 66 million we collectively owe £1.6 trillion with no formal education in managing money or finance effectively, it's not hard to see why.  Even the topic of money in general is something we're discouraged from talking to one another about. We live in a society where it's still considered a taboo to talk openly about wealth other than our aspirations to have more - the second you ask about what people actually have, the conversation runs dry.  People don't like talking about money, and without talking about it you'll never learn how to manage it more effectively or how little things can change your life.