Credit where credit’s due

This morning I paid off the last of a lingering and pernicious credit card bill and was delighted to see my current account, savings account and tax account all healthily in the black. I’ve also made significant steps towards paying back my professional trainee loan in recent months and have taken the hitherto unthinkable steps of taking out a pension and enquiring about getting a mortgage.

Why is any of this tedious detail worth blogging about? It isn’t, in and of itself. But, after working for a company that didn’t pay my salary for several months in 2008, and the unpleasant money problems that ensued, it feels like a substantial victory to be back on my feet and making progress financially. Although I’ve never been well off it wasn’t until I encountered that unscrupulous employer that I understood the very strong link between financial stability and mental health/happiness. Unless you are this girl, I imagine that having no money and no certainty about your income can only be a stressful and depressing experience.

That said, I did live in a similar way to Katherine Hibbert last winter. After I walked away from the job that didn’t pay I had no choice but to move out of my lovely two-bedroomed flat in the Hampshire countryside and take the cheapest room I could find in a tiny underheated flat in Edinburgh, living with a friend who puts Scrooge to shame with his miserly ways. I was returning to Edinburgh with my tail well and truly between my legs, having left barely five months earlier to start a new life with a well paid job, lovely flat and excellent prospects. I was angry, skint and embarrassed, and can’t have been much fun to be around.

However, once I’d accepted my situation and managed to claw back the freelance clients I’d said goodbye to at the beginning of the year, I began to take some interest in my new straitened circumstances. My flatmate had been what is known as a ‘freegan’ for some years, and I enthusiastically adopted this practice as a means of eliminating my food bills. A freegan is someone who eats food discarded by others, usually large supermarket chains. We would head out around 2 or 3 in the morning and drive out to one of the Marks and Spencers’ stores at the edge of the city. After checking for security guards we’d park the car and head over to the bins. Often these were filled with rotting bread, flowers and other inedible items, but there would generally be one that was filled with food that had either gone past its sell by date that day or was still just in date. Once we’d hit the jackpot, flatmate would climb into the bin, root about and chuck selected items at me to put into a sack. We’d take away as much as we could safely store in our fridge and freezer and then drive home, where we’d unload our goods and spend several hours sorting, cleaning, storing and then eating a celebratory meal. (M & S are good enough not to lock their bins, but they have a bizarre habit of spraying blue dye over the packets of food, which meant we often arrived home ‘blue handed’).

I felt a slight embarrassment about what I was doing, mostly because I knew my mother wouldn’t like it. But the savings I made, the improved quality of the food I ate, plus the general fun I had doing it, completely changed my attitude to scavenging, and made me see some advantages to living on a reduced income. Additionally, instead of living on my own in a flat that was much too big for me I was staying with lots of people – young, fun, foreign, enjoying their lives and making do with not much except each other. Although I was miserable and bitter about my experience I had companionship and laughter in my life. I stayed in that flat for five months, by which time I’d rebuilt my business and accumulated enough savings to allow me to take time off work to study for my exams and have a vacation for the first time in six years. I found the thin walls, constant noise and appalling levels of cleanliness in the flat quite trying, but being surrounded by young happy people who weren’t constantly moaning about money, work and mortgages was a better cure for me than a handout from a rich relative would have been.

I enjoy making money and buying things with the money I have earned, but I suspect I only do so because I am painfully aware of what it takes to make any money in the first place. Life shouldn’t be unbearably hard but nor should it be too easy. If I hadn’t nearly lost everything two years ago the current healthy state of my finances wouldn’t be giving me so much joy now.