COVER STORY Things you only know if… your net worth is affected by your self-worth

THINGS YOU ONLY KNOW IF...

‘it was so inevitable,’ I thought as I cried beside the recycling bin. A series of bad decisions, all my own, had brought me to an upsetting realisation. First mistake, I’d tried to cheer my lockdown-self up with an expensive purchase. An entire month’s food budget blown on a white silk shirt from an American website. A shirt. While I’m at home and unemployed with no imperative to get dressed at all, let alone smartly. And white? Unnecessary and impractical. Wow Sara, you must really hate money.

Well, listen up – second mistake. The Post Office sent me a ransom note: I had to pay them £200 in tax. For £200 I could have smuggled in drugs or a person, I could have contributed to a protester’s bail fund, but instead I released a silky top from immigration. The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought was now free. The shirt arrived the next day and I tried it on. Mistake three was deciding that something so new and pale needed showing off. With nowhere to go, I decided I’d take the recycling out. And minutes later, as the red wine bottle span above me, raining its damson drops on to the most expensive thing I’ve ever ruined, I was forced to confront the obvious: ‘What is wrong with me and money?’

I used to think I was bad with money because I didn’t have any. For me, the cruelest aspect of it was that when I did have a little coin, rather than secreting it away or eking it out I would panic about its inevitable disappearance – and that panic would speed up the process. As a teenager I worked in a newsagent’s. I got £20 for my Saturday shift, paid in cash at 6pm. As I changed out of my uniform, I kept the note folded in my palm, where it tingled with potential and possibility. I wanted what it had to offer so desperately that it was always spent by the time I’d got home. Sometimes before I’d left the shop. Magazines, sweets, ice-cream cones, cigarettes, gone.

This routine of throwing away the money I needed got worse through my next working years, spending all my wages on payday then borrowing money from friends all month. This peaked at university, where the termly loan check designated for fees found its way elsewhere by the second day of term. I didn’t graduate with the degree I studied for because I hadn’t paid for it. What had I paid for? One bike that I immediately lost and lots and lots and lots of rounds in the pub, which I know makes me sound generous, but it didn’t come from a good place. Where money had used to tingle, it now scalded, demanding to be extinguished. Couldn’t I have got rid of it by paying for university?’ Well, it’s easy with hindsight.

Something I learned (for free! I didn’t pay them!) in my English degree was that a true tragedy is caused by the personality of the protagonist. The Oedipuses and Othellos, something in them makes everything going wrong inevitable and unavoidable. I felt personal affinity with the pre-beanstalk Jack (I must add this wasn’t a text we studied). He sold his cow and immediately spunked the profits on magic beans. Turned up home and everyone is like, ‘HOW ARE YOU GOING TO EAT? WHO WILL PAY THE RENT?’ Ditto my panicked inner monologue for many years. At least Jack had beans and hope; I only had boozy memories of buying drinks for strangers and, thanks to one payday insanity, a square foot of the moon named after me.

I lived in fear of how it felt to have nothing, yet I was doomed to keep recreating it. The protagonist of my own life, messing it up. Then, in my thirties, through stupendous good fortune, my job – Talking About Myself on Stage (stand-up comedy) – started paying me really well. No longer impoverished, I have waited to turn into someone who’s secure and sensible with cash. Fast-forward to Sarapus Rex and The Marinated Silk Shirt and I’m finally asking, what is in me?

A ‘money psychologist’ (if you google you can find anything) claims that how we feel about ourselves will affect how we behave with our earnings. Low self-esteem – literally believing we have no worth – will lead to bad decision-making, especially in terms of our future.

This makes sense to me. I bought a patch of the moon instead of education because I don’t like myself very much and, by doing so, liked myself even less. It’s why being in debt is simultaneously so crushing and so difficult to inch your way out of. The truth is that having no food in the fridge, having to walk because you can’t afford the bus, living in the dark because you didn’t pay the electricity bill, is acutely miserable – and even more so if it could have been avoided with better budgeting. Hating yourself and hating your circumstances can go hand in hand, causal rather than correlation.

But the big positive here is that while you can’t magic a beanstalk to change your financial situation, the beans (available gratis) are self-belief. You are a sweet and lovely person who deserves a safe and pleasurable life. The best thing you can do for your bank balance is invest in your confidence.

‘Sex Power Money’ by Sara Pascoe is out in paperback on 6 August (Faber & Faber)

I have waited to turn into someone who’s secure and sensible with cash