Money lessons learned through experience

Higher income solved some money worries but also allowed work to occupy more of our evenings.

Co-signing puts the debt on your credit and your bank account, not just your goodwill - the bank calls you, not him, the moment a payment is late.

I honestly do not know if the kitchen was the real reason or just the thing that was easiest to say out loud. Maybe we were not quite ready. Maybe there was something about the house we did not like and could not name properly, and the kitchen was just there, concrete, something to point at. Hard to know. I was fine about it for years and then looking at that sale price I was briefly not fine and then I was fine again.

It didn't go away just because nobody said anything. It just went quiet. There's a difference and I learned that very slowly over a fairly embarrassing number of years.

The screenshots looked real. I've looked at them again since. They still look real. I don't actually know what I missed.

I think I knew even in that glass office that I was paying for a feeling and not a car. New cars are kind of a luxury that pretend to be sensible. Someone else already paid the depreciation on that three year old one. I was so busy trying to feel like I'd arrived somewhere that I let someone charge me for the privilege of that feeling.

A raise is only real if some of it doesn't immediately turn into something else. I think I knew that. I think I knew that before it happened and I just sort of... let it happen anyway. The brain does this thing where more money coming in feels like a problem solved even when you haven't actually solved anything, you've just raised the ceiling slightly so the mess has more room.

I think my assumption was always that saving required me to be consistently good at making a decision, like every week or every purchase. And I'm not. Nobody really is, I think, or at least I'm definitely not. Removing the decision just meant my worst days didn't matter as much. Tuesday when I'm tired and I've had a bad standup and I want to buy something dumb, none of that touches the savings because the savings already happened. I'm not sure that counts as discipline exactly. It might just be laziness pointing in the right direction.

I don't think I fully understood that a credit file is like a receipt you can't throw away. The debt is gone but the record of how it behaved stays there for six years. I knew that abstractly. I did not know it in any way that changed what I actually did. I'm honestly not sure it was a catastrophic mistake. The flat I didn't get, I've thought about it less and less. Maybe that's just how time works.

I'm not sure there's a big lesson. I think I thought money stuff was more shameful than it actually is. Nobody cared. Caz was relieved, not sympathetic, just relieved that she didn't have to keep making things up either. I still feel a bit of a pull sometimes, the old habit of reaching for an excuse instead. But mostly I just say the thing now.

I think I understood investing as a concept before this happened. Like I knew you weren't supposed to sell low. But knowing that and then sitting there watching your money disappear in real time are completely different things and I was not ready for the second one. The crash didn't really cost me that much. Me panicking cost me. Which is an annoying thing to have to admit.

I look at that island sometimes. I don't know. It's a nice island.

I don't think I was smarter than Dan. The money was small enough that I didn't notice it leaving. That might have been the whole thing, actually.

I dunno. Maybe you shouldn't put your whole life on one number. Maybe I got unlucky. Both feel true.

It wasn't a disaster. But it could have been nothing. Eighty quid a month into a separate account and it would have been nothing. That's the whole thing she was trying to tell me at that sticky table. Spend less than you earn. Keep something back for bad times. That's it. That is genuinely all of it and I needed thirty five years to believe it.

I think if I had just given him the money from the start. Told him it was a gift. Don't worry about it. Maybe things would have been different. Maybe not, I don't know. But the loan sat between us and it grew into something. Every time I didn't mention it, it was still there. Every time he saw my name come up on his phone he probably thought about it, and I think that kind of thing makes people shrink away from you, not because they are bad people but because debt is a specific kind of shame and some people cannot look at the person who knows about it. I do not blame him, exactly. I do understand it. But I also did not do anything wrong. That is the thing I keep coming back to on the drive home at six in the morning. I helped him when he asked. I was not sending weekly reminders. I was not aggressive. I just. Yeah. If you are going to lend money to someone you actually care about, write it off in your head first before you hand it over. Decide it is a gift and then give it. Because if there is any part of you, even a quiet part, that is expecting it back, it will change how you feel every month it does not arrive. Even if you say nothing. Even if you are very careful about how you say nothing. It changes something and I think they can feel that somehow. I think they really can.

I don't do it anymore. I put a bit aside each month into a separate account and when something breaks I use that. Most things don't break. And when they do the money is actually there, which is the whole point I was supposedly paying for all along. I don't know why it took me so long. The worry, I think, was the thing they were selling. Not the cover. The feeling of being covered.

The word 'percent' does something to your brain. Makes it sound small. But compounded over twenty or thirty years that 1.8 was going to cost me something close to six figures. I hadn't known that. Nobody told me and I hadn't asked.

I don't know if knowing is actually enough. like I know now and I'm still buying the same stuff so maybe ignorance wasn't even the problem.

Money sitting still isn't safe. I understand that now in a way I didn't then, or maybe didn't want to.

Pension contributions in your twenties are worth several times the same money contributed later. I knew this in theory. I teach it to junior staff now. I just never applied it to myself, which is a thing I have to sit with.

I thought being responsible meant paying on time and not fiddling anything. Turns out there's a third thing, which is checking that you're paying the right amount in the first place. Nobody sends you a letter that says hey by the way you're overpaying, cheers, best wishes, HMRC.

An emergency fund isn't the same decision as investing. I knew that sentence. I'd read it. But I think I filed it under 'obvious thing people say' instead of actually doing it. The brokerage account felt like it was there. Available. And it was, technically. But available at a loss during the worst ten weeks of your recent life is a different thing than having cash sitting somewhere boring doing nothing. I wasn't optimising for growth. I was just leaving out the part that would have let me wait.

The car depreciated. I did not look more successful. Nobody noticed, or if they did they didn't say.