(Picture: Erin Aniker/Metro.co.uk)

It’s a touchy subject, money.

While I’d happily unleash my mental health diagnoses on the timeline, I’d dive for my phone if someone were about to log into my online banking and see how much (or how little, rather) money I actually have saved.

As a society we’re notoriously cagey around our own money.

Talking about your salary is considered the height of rudeness, while a question about our savings would make us shrivel up in pure discomfort and horror. How dare someone ask how much money we have?


But when someone does speak about their cash flow, we don’t hold back in viciously tearing them apart.



Look at the woman who admitted that she struggles with her finances despite living at home and earning 40K a year. People on Twitter raged at the woman’s audacity of having the privilege of a good salary and supportive parents, yet still finding herself needing cash. They questioned what on earth she could be spending her money on, accusing her of covering up a secret coke habit or lying about what she spent on clothes.

She was called ‘disgusting’ and a ‘disgrace’, told to ‘get in the bin’ and ‘learn to live within her means’.

There was a real sense of shame in Sian’s coming clean about her financial situation; a knowledge that she wasn’t doing things ‘right’ and definitely wasn’t proud of how she was living.

‘It’s embarrassing,’ she wrote. ‘I feel demoralised to be working full-time in a good job and still unable to support myself.’

Surely that’s a feeling a lot of us can relate to – the enduring guilt and shame of being an adult and still not having your financial shit together.

But rather than taking in that feeling of empathy and offering understanding or a simple ‘I feel that way, too’, the online hoardes tore Sian apart.

There’s something defensive about that, right?

(Picture: Ella Byworth/ Shutterstock)

We know that we’re terrible with money. We struggle too. We feel so guilty and ashamed of it that when someone else’s situation reminds us a bit of ourselves (even if they do have a higher paycheck and the luxury of living at home), we need to berate them to exorcise some of our own self-hate.

It happens every time there’s a Refinery29 Money Diary with someone who has a good salary and still isn’t getting their spending and saving balance right.

We love to criticise other people’s spending choices because it means we can vicariously be sh*tty to ourselves.

We’ve already exhausted the nights of anxiety worrying about affording lunch at work when we’re deep in our overdraft, the mental self-flaggelation that comes after casually spending £30 on a takeout again when we know full well that for us, dropping £30 on food rather than making something basic is a big deal.

So when the opportunity arises to bash someone else’s spending habits, people take it.



Oh, those silly people mindlessly spending in the Black Friday sales. Don’t they know that the deals aren’t that great? Don’t they realise they’re buying into consumerism?

Ugh, she complains about debt but I’ve seen her ordering Ubers home and buying Pret for lunch. What an idiot.

It’s easy to judge and criticise, and what we’re saying is sort of accurate.

It isn’t financially responsible to spend a tonne of money just because it’s 20% off for the day. We really do need to stop buying and buying instead of being happy with what we have. The environmental impact of fast fashion is a valid concern. It is silly to buy Pret for lunch every day instead of making our own sandwiches with a loaf of bread that’d cost us a penny per slice.

But when we do this, we’re overlooking something major.

The way we spend our money isn’t logical, it’s emotional, and there’s a whole load of other stuff going on that makes us spend in reckless ways.

Were you taught about finances at school? I certainly wasn’t, and arrived into adulthood with a fear of credit cards and a budget plan I found on the internet.

Finances, the way we spend, are such a crucial part of our lives, and yet they’re not treated as a vital part of education. It’s assumed your parents will show you the ropes… but what if they don’t bother, or they have their own unhealthy relationships with money?


Patterns of debt get passed down and the way you see your parents act around money filters through.

My mum would panic around money and pass financial questions on to my dad, who would get caught up in general economics if you asked him a simple question about cash. They’d give me lunch money each week without considering if it was the most cost-effective option (it wasn’t, looking back), and monthly pocket money didn’t come with guidance on how to spend it.

I grew up in a family where money was a mysterious thing that wasn’t discussed, and so I didn’t learn the logic of what cash should be saved and what could be spent.

I watched my mum ignore money and my dad stay silent about it. I’ve definitely picked up some less-than-positive habits from that – I’ll refuse to look at my accounts for weeks out of fear, then get into an intense spiral of guilt and panic when I see I’ve failed to save an amount I think is appropriate, or I’ve had to borrow from my savings again, or a text comes through to warn I’m in my overdraft.

I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Other people will have grown up with parents who gambled, or who vocally worried about money, or who spoke about the cost of basic items to excess. Of course that’s going to affect how they spend it as they grow up – there’ll be ingrained patterns of spending and regretting, anxiety, and the fear of not having enough.


Even if you managed to grow up with financially concious parents who didn’t tilt too far into the boundaries of restricting or spending to excess, even if you learned about budgeting the moment you had your first bit of income, you haven’t cleared all the emotional hurdles of money.

Then you’re bombarded with a society that encourages you to spend, spend, spend.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Everywhere you look there’s an idea of ‘need’. You need new clothes – wearing the same outfit isn’t ‘appropriate’. You need an iPhone and a monthly data plan so you can communicate with friends and answer work emails at the weekend.

These are things that if you were dumped in a place outside of society, you could survive without. But we all know that the way the world is set up, these are needs – not to survive, but to be well-liked, to be judged kindly, to do the things you’re expected to do.

The challenge is that the list of needs never stops growing. You have to spend a certain amount on things that aren’t essential by the strictest definition, but are necessary to be what’s considered a functioning member of society. As you move around certain social groups, those needs jump up to match. While you were able to survive a full year on £4,000 in university, suddenly it’s unsettlingly easy to spend £900 in a month on what feels like nothing, dumped on travel to get to work, ingredients for healthy meals, a gym membership.

Each step of spending is easy and rewarded. You don’t just get a new product, you get social approval.

We know all this. We know that we’re in a system that requires spending and makes it unhealthily easy to get into debt. And yet we judge ourselves and others harshly for crossing perceived lines into spending ‘too much’ or not being smart with our money.

But can you really blame the reckless spenders? Can you really expect that everyone spends and saves their money wisely when everything’s telling them to spend, when they’ve grown up watching other people do the same, when they’ve had no education on how their salary should be used, and most of all, when there’s still this heavy silence around money?

We need to talk about money.

We need to have a serious look at the emotions around money and the impact it can have on our mental wellbeing.

We need to be create a conversation that’s open and understanding, where people aren’t torn down for admitting a truth that a lot of us are experiencing but hiding under the nearest blanket we can find: We don’t know what we’re doing with our money, and we’re scared.

The expectation of sorting out our attitudes to money can’t be on the individual alone. We need a cultural shift.

Imagine if people talked openly about their salary – we’d all be able to get a solid sense of whether we’re being fairly paid for our work.

Imagine if anyone struggling could ask for help, not in the form of a high-stakes loan but with an understanding look at why they spend the money they do and an actual longterm plan for getting their cashflow back on track.

The way we viciously rip apart people’s spending habits is proof that we need to talk about finances, because that judgement is coming from a place of fear.

When we see someone else spending money badly, we’re reminded that we do the same. We’re scared we’ll end up worse off and doing it all wrong.

The answer to that isn’t turning fear into rage or turning it internally and going on a post-shopping guilt binge, but a drastic shift in the way we talk about finances.

The level of the emotions expressed – the judgment, the anger, the shame – when money comes up is proof that it’s time to talk.

Money is scary, but just like any monster under the bed it’ll become a lot more manageable when we turn the light on.

MORE: How growing up poor affects your attitude to money as an adult

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MORE: Is living in your overdraft really that bad?

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