Money, Saving and Spending

Story · all 20 words

Four Hundred Pounds

In the second year after university I earned nine thousand pounds. Not as a joke, and not part-time – that was the year, all of it, from an office job I was extremely grateful to have.

It was a wage, paid weekly, rather than a salary – I did not know then that there was a difference, and there is. It was just above the minimum, and the cost of living in that city was not. I have a very specific memory of the arithmetic: rent went out on the 1st, the phone on the 3rd, and from about the 24th of each month I would reliably run out of money and eat whatever was in the cupboard from before.

I could get by. That is the honest word. Not struggling in any way that would have looked dramatic from outside – I was never cold and never genuinely hungry – but there was no version of that month with a spare fifty pounds in it.

I had a budget, in the sense that I had a piece of paper. Rent, bus fares and the phone were the only expenses written on it. It worked until anything at all happened.

What happened was a tooth.

It was an emergency appointment, then a second one, then a crown, and the total was four hundred and ten pounds. I had thirty-eight pounds and a credit card I had already decided I was never going to use, because the interest rate was somewhere near thirty per cent and I had watched a friend go quietly under with one of those the year before, several thousand pounds in debt before he told anybody.

So I sat on it for nine days with a temporary filling and a growing sense of doom, and told nobody, because I had been raised to believe that needing money was a moral failure rather than an arithmetic one.

My aunt found out from my mother, who found out because I cancelled a visit twice.

She rang and offered to lend me the money – a loan, although neither of us used that word at the time. I said no. She asked me, quite reasonably, what my plan was, and I did not have one, and she waited through a fairly long silence and then said the thing that changed it: “I am not giving it to you. I am not going to be nice about it. You will pay me back and I will remind you.”

That is why I was able to borrow it. If she had offered it as a gift I would have refused and lost the tooth.

I paid her twenty-five pounds a month for sixteen months. She never once reminded me, which I noticed. It took until the following autumn to pay off, and on the last transfer I wrote a message that was too long and slightly emotional and she replied with a single thumbs up.

What that year taught me is not that I should have worked harder. I was working. It taught me that the difference between managing and drowning is often about four hundred pounds, and that the people who never learn this are simply the people who have always had four hundred pounds.

I began to put aside money the following year – fifteen pounds a week, which was pointless in every way except that it was not. It took two years to build something I could actually call savings, and I have never since been in a position where a tooth could do that to me.

I am not well off now, but I am not broke either, and my income is roughly four times what it was in that flat. I still cannot bring myself to spend money on furniture.

I did splash out once, in 2022, on a bed that cost more than my aunt lent me, and I felt sick for a week and I sleep beautifully. She came to visit and I told her exactly what it cost, which is a thing I could not have done at twenty-three, and she said, “Good.”

I still owe her, in the way that has nothing to do with money, and she knows it, and she would be appalled to hear me say so. She would have to save up a great deal of patience to sit through this paragraph.