Meet the woman who lives without money: ‘I feel more secure than when I was earning’

‘All through human history, true security has always come from living in community,’ says Jo Nemeth, who has lived without money for a decade. Photograph: Natalie Grono/The Guardian

Sharon Brodie clearly remembers her first Christmas with her good friend Jo Nemeth. It was 2016 and also her first Christmas without her husband, Monty, who had died suddenly a month earlier.

“I didn’t even want to be alive,” says Brodie from her home in Lismore, northern New South Wales. “I definitely didn’t want to go to the shops or buy presents or do anything. But Jo had come to stay with us [Brodie and her two teenage boys] to help out, and on Christmas Eve I told her my gift to her was that we could go dumpster diving, which I’d never done before – and we did, that night.