What I understand about money could be scratched on the edge of a 2p piece. With a stick. As the self-assessment deadline rolls towards me like a driverless logging truck of administrative horror along the icy motorway of financial woe, I have been reminded once again just how poor my financial education has been.
I have never met, let alone talked to, a financial advisor. I don’t really understand how mortgages work. I don’t have a pension. I’m terrified of my tax return. I don’t know what other women doing comparable jobs earn. I didn’t claim statutory maternity pay because, as a freelancer, I did not have any maternity leave. Until a few months ago, my mobile phone contract was still in my ex-boyfriend’s name and coming out of his account despite the fact that we broke up more than 10 years ago and are both now married to other people (I was paying him back for it, but still). Two days before my 39th birthday I opened something called a lifetime Isa just because my friend Yasmin happened to tell me I should while I was peeling some potatoes, but I haven’t managed to transfer any money into it because the website turns my brain into spat-out toothpaste.
Some of this is, of course, the product of a certain level of privilege: I have never been bankrupt, I have been broadly employed since the age of 16, my parents had mortgages rather than rent books, I had access to the sorts of things that make cheap living possible (a kitchen, good health, a bike etc) and within my wider family there was enough of a safety net that I could sometimes be more casual about money than someone making a subsistence income. But a large part of it is, I believe, because I grew up in a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell culture when it comes to money. I was not taught about finances or tax or pensions at school; I don’t remember any advice arriving with my national insurance card at 16; this wasn’t talked about when I got my first full-time job contract.
Although I was lucky enough to go to university and get a job, it wasn’t until I read Pregnant Then Screwed by Joeli Brearley that I realised that maternity pay comes out of your national insurance contributions and so is, effectively, your own money coming back to you rather than being paid out by your boss. Or that pensions aren’t just a pot of money you’ve managed to save over your working life and so won’t simply run out if you accidentally live to 103. I still don’t know what interest rates are or what they do.
Of course, I am responsible for not signing up to Martin Lewis’ Money Saving Expert newsletter, or booking myself a session with Citizens Advice. But that is probably out of a generalised sense of fear whenever the subject of money comes up because it wasn’t taught to me in an age-appropriate, staggered way like, say, how to cook, and so fear sprouted under my denial like mould. And while I may like to think of myself as a rare and interesting person, in this respect I think I am pretty bang average. Especially among people in creative industries or working for themselves. According to a government press release from this week, 3.8m self-assessments are still to be filed with just seven days until the deadline. That’s a lot of people chewing a lot of skin around a lot of fingernails, because they feel out of their depth.
Talking of depth, this weekend I went swimming with a group of women. You know the type: Thermoses, loud voices, weeks between depilation. We were all roughly the same age, five of us were parents, all of us were working and yet, after a single mention of someone’s pension, it transpired that we collectively understood a small sliver of bugger all about finances. We’d never been told whether to pay off our student loans, to try to save for a deposit or get a pension (because you sure as hell can’t do all three). We had all, at times in our lives, stressed ourselves to the point of insomnia to save £5 on a train ticket and then accidentally lost hundreds of pounds by not cancelling some subscriptions we didn’t understand, or missing application details for government grants we’d not heard about.
Every year I hand over £350 to an accountant to fill in my self-assessment form for me because trying to get to grips with that level of financial logistics is like trying to grow a third leg: confusing, painful and, I suspect, impossible. It’s pathetic and craven and may even read as smug. But also, as my eyes plough across the incomprehensible pages of the HMRC website and I sit numbly through another episode of Money Box, I can’t help but want to shout: if you are never taught this stuff, how on earth are you meant to know what you’re doing?
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
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