The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
I accidentally lost £320k overnight
After saying goodbye to my savings, it’s time for me to take money seriously, says Lucy Cavendish
I’ve had a lifelong problem with money. I’m useless with it. I earn it. I spend it. I panic about it. I lose it. I use it to buy friends and relationships. I buy stuff I don’t need. And I’ve lost virtually everything. Three years ago, an investment I had made to the tune of £320,000, which was my life savings – mainly from an inheritance – disappeared, after the fund I had put all my money into went bust. I was partly to blame: I didn’t read the small print. I just signed up and then put my head in the sand.
Losing all that money meant that I had to sell my family home (a fivebedroom house in the Chilterns with a beautiful garden that I had tended for over 20 years) as I couldn’t afford to keep it. The ink, however, was barely dry on the contract of sale when, desperate to recoup some of the money I’d lost, I signed up to a crypto-pay scheme that turned out to be a scam. It was run by a now-defunct company and it promised bitcoin riches. I lost a further £23k.
Did I learn from all this? No. I proceeded to rent a house close by where I used to live that I couldn’t really afford. I spent a fortune on running it (it was too big and too old), and I could only watch as my funds leaked out of my account along with the heating out of the single-glazed windows. So finally, the time has come: I need to take a long, hard look at my relationship with money.
This is why I’m sitting in a conference hall in the Excel centre in London watching a very energetic American man called Robert G Allen leap around the stage. He is telling me and the other 2,000-plus attendees (and the thousand or so more on Zoom) how to make lots of cold, hard cash.
“If I asked you to raise £25k by this afternoon, could you?” he says to an audience paying from £200 for a ticket (an early-bird, non-VIP one). “Stand up if you can.”
Everyone around me – a mixed bag of corporate suits and men with buns – stands up. But not me. The chances of me raising that kind of mullah by tonight is not just remote, it’s impossible.
Welcome to the Financial Freedom Summit put on by Vishen Lakhiani (founder of the multi-million-dollar Mindvalley online learning platform), where, over the course of three days, I am signing up to have my money psyche raked-over by British hypnotist and author of I Can Make You Rich, Paul McKenna, property investor Allen, trading maestro Alfio Bardolla and computer whizz-kid Lakhiani himself.
But first, let’s rewind to the morning, which I spend with McKenna. He bombards us with his teachings. Apparently, it’s all about our psychology around money: how do we feel about it?
Do we think money is a good thing? (Me: not sure.) Do we think rich people are bad? (Kind of.) If we get money, do we try to get rid of it as soon as possible? (Yes.) How much do we think we are worth? (Not very much.)
McKenna asks these questions at breakneck speed. He also asks us to visualise loving money – to imagine ourselves bathing in it. He asks us what our beliefs are.
This stops me in my tracks. While McKenna is talking, I realise with a terrible jolt that I have used money to “buy” friends, even to “buy” relationships. I have never really asked for people to pay for me or expected anyone to pay for me. I have showered my partners with gifts and provided a lifestyle that was probably not possible to keep up – foreign travel, fast cars (hello, £24k Mercedes), skiing holidays, meals out at top restaurants – I’ve always been the main breadwinner.
“What does the way you treat money say about you?” asks McKenna. I look around at the people surrounding me. Everyone looks as if they’ve been hit by a thunderbolt. It’s as if we’re all having some collective experience but each in our own different way. The woman sitting next to me, who is from Kyoto in Japan, tells me she’s worked since she was 10-years-old. She looks very sorrowful when she says this. I think McKenna is on to something. Then he ups the ante.
He asks us to imagine ourselves quadrupling money around us, so that money is absolutely everywhere. As he does this every single person in the audience stands up and starts whooping and punching the air. The woman next to me on the other side, who’s from Boston and wants to break into real estate, is almost standing on her seat, she is so excited. “Isn’t it great?” she says to me enthusiastically.
During the break, I talk to the conference’s other attendees, including a man from Ireland who has a ponytail and a beard and has come to work out how to be an entrepreneurial success and launch his natural beer company. I meet a young guy from China who wants to buy up what sounds like most of Hong Kong and then market it in a price-effective way so that he can be a billionaire by the time he is 32. Then there’s the woman from Spain who has started an online community for women who are first-time mothers and wants to take her webinars to a wider audience.
“Your relationship with money isn’t just about money,” says Lakhiani, when I pin him down privately later.
“It also has a spiritual dimension to it and it’s about your beliefs. The biggest issue is your mindset.” So, for example, if you think wealth is bad you will not attract wealth. “Money is wonderful,” he says. “It amplifies who you are and what you can do, but so many of us have negative beliefs.” So the idea is that money isn’t just about money. It’s about how we look at life – do we want to value ourselves or not?
“Money is an energy really,” he says. “It has to flow but we also need to treat it with respect.” He himself asks his son to save money and to spend it in a responsible way. “He made 3k recently,” says Lakhiani, explaining that part of the rule is that he doesn’t spend it on himself. I ask him what his son did with it. “He took his grandparents out for dinner.”
It’s easy to raise an eyebrow at all of this – many people say they want to be millionaires and billionaires: but given that less than 2 per cent of the world’s population actually are millionaires or billionaires, the odds are stacked against most of the conference’s attendees hitting the jackpot. So I’ve managed my expectations. I’m not focusing on amounts: rather, I’ve learned to do proper due diligence around incomings and outgoings. I’m also focusing on how to make money work for me while I sleep. Investing in real estate, playing the stock market, becoming an entrepreneur and trading in FX is slightly beyond me, but I did find myself rather taken with the idea of somehow finding £240k and buying up four homes in commutable areas, renting them out room by room and suddenly overnight watching my money grow bigger and bigger.
Mainly, as McKenna says, I need to stop panicking and I need to grow up. Already, I’ve made changes. I have downsized to a little townhouse in a small town in Oxfordshire. I’ve stopped signing up to dodgy moneymaking schemes. I read the small print and I don’t just shop around to get the cheapest energy, for example, or house insurance, because I’m in denial about money in my life. Instead I spend time researching deals and making savings in every area of my life.
I have started working on a spreadsheet to track my incomings and outgoings. And I’ve taken a long hard
I had four mobile phone contracts that no longer existed and three Netflix accounts
look at what I spend my money on. By doing this, I have found out I was paying for three gym memberships for children who had actually left home. I had four mobile phone contracts that no longer existed and had three accounts for Netflix. I’d also signed up to all sorts of subscriptions that I don’t use and offers that I never really took advantage of.
Now I insist that friends split the bill with me – and it feels great not to be shelling out all the time. I also don’t tend to go out for dinner any more, and just go for a drink. It feels great to come away with a bill I can afford, one that comes out at about £10 rather than potentially over £50. It used to be hundreds. I have probably halved my monthly outgoings and I am now about to read books about money (starting with Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, by slick-looking, Canadian T Harv Eker) and do the Ken Honda money course. I update my spreadsheet and look at my bank accounts on a daily basis and track every single payment in and out. I am – quite unbelievably – actually finally having a relationship with money.
So now life is going to be different. And a part of me, just a little part of me, is still holding out that I’m going to buy these four properties, make money while I sleep and turn myself into a trading-property-entrepreneurial billionaire tycoon whose magic money tree just got real.