It might not have been the worst phone call I’ve ever made, but I certainly was squirming in shame throughout. I was 31, on my first proper holiday with a new partner, and I’d snuck out of our romantic Cornish cottage first thing to ask my mum for money. The life-saving amount? £100.
I was embarrassed about tapping up the Bank of Mum and Dad, no question. But not so ashamed that I’d ask my new boyfriend for the money, especially while we were on holiday. Obviously the £100 wouldn’t solve all my money problems, but it would bridge the day or two before I – hopefully – got paid by one of the various clients who kept promising to fulfil their obligations.
Later, on a windy clifftop walk, Ben, unaware of the extent of my debt but with a few thousand of his own to shift, wondered what it might look like if we both began to pay off our credit cards. Immediately, I thought of freedom. The state of being debt-free buys you your freedom! And then, pitifully, I remembered that I couldn’t. I simply could not afford to ever pay off all of this evil debt. Freedom was getting to say yes to cocktails and brunch, not turning into a couple who only stayed at home and ate baked beans.
Ben and I discovered early on that we’d come to the relationship with different attitudes to money. He was frugal and considered every outgoing, except for occasional “to-hell-with-it” sprees. I was someone who never considered the future or what it might cost, and didn’t want a pesky thing like money to get in the way of life. Though I didn’t buy much actual “stuff”, like clothes or tech, I rarely turned down an invitation, be it a meal out or a weekend in Spain. When people talked about credit cards, I had always understood this as a sign that they had plenty of money. How lucky was I, when banks kept offering me new cards, with more expansive limits?
I don’t think my spending was ever out of control. I never used it to plug gaping emotional wounds, the way compulsive shoppers say they do. But while I was making my way in journalism, my friends were making big TV shows, running funds, and talking about “making partner” in law firms. I never spent just to keep up with them, or went to flashy places, but in retrospect I should have said no to a night out every so often.
I was always at the end point of my £4,000 overdraft, which I’d had hanging over me since university. Somehow, by the time of that otherwise blissful Cornish holiday à deux, across five credit cards from Barclaycard, MBNA, RBS, Natwest and Halifax, I had won myself £8,697.09 worth of debt. Part of the problem was my spending. But my earnings had also plummeted – a freelance writer, I had lost a regular client – and I hadn’t made any cutbacks to accommodate this.
Once we were home from our holiday, I confessed the extent of my credit card debt. Ben and I went for the pruning approach to cutting back on our spending, rather than hacking our way into misery (via baked beans). First of all we consolidated our debts on to interest-free payment plans with clear monthly payments and an actual, real, date in the future when these frustrating payments – up to £600 a month – would be over with and we could roll around in all our extra money. But it was a long ol’ stretch, from summer 2012 to early 2015.
It wasn’t a hugely exciting way to live. In the flush of first love, we weren’t running away to Paris on a whim, or dropping cash on expensive gifts. But it showed me not only that Ben could plan and budget and imagine a future, but that we could do it together.
We even ended up with a spending “safe word” along the way, which one of us is supposed to remember to say if the other is being unreasonably tightfisted about buying something that won’t break the bank, or our future financial health. Let’s just say it’s a pricey, but not all-out luxurious, food product. In other words, while we relished paying down the debt, we also wanted to enjoy life with some of that spending freedom I lusted after.
Funny story: almost immediately after we paid down the debt, the entire heft of it, we saddled ourselves with a wedding to pay for, and began saving for that. Two days before said wedding, we discovered we would soon be a family of three, and began saving for that. But this time the numbers were running up, not down. We felt not in control exactly, but better about where our fortunes were headed.
We were both disappointed when, a few years ago, our house renovation ran wildly over budget and we had to take out a new chunk of credit card debt amid remortgaging. But it was a specific outgoing and we knew why. It added up to £10,500 between 2020 and 2022 and will be paid off in early 2025.
On opening the debt spreadsheets now, a decade later, I’m amused to see the “F**k you credit card bastards!” note that I have left in my own private document. Because yeah, that’ll show them.
I have cancelled all my cards apart from one, the Barclaycard, which regularly increases my spending limit, although it is hardly used. Whenever I see Klarna offering to split my payments when I am buying something online, I feel so lucky that it wasn’t around when I was attending all those weddings.
Does talking openly about money – specifically about debt – reduce the stigma? The experts seem to agree that talking about something will wash away the shame. I’m afraid that writing this piece doesn’t make me feel one jot less ashamed of my paltry earning power or of running up debt, especially as my earnings are even more out of step with the cost of living than a decade ago. All the same, it felt both important and useful to me to write about it – because I need the money.