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I Work in Finance. I Still Ended Up More Than £50,000 in Debt.

There is something particularly embarrassing about working in finance while quietly making a mess of your own money. I spend my working life with numbers. I understand compound interest, I can build a spreadsheet and I know perfectly well why funding an ordinary lifestyle with expensive unsecured borrowing is a terrible idea. None of that stopped me doing it.

At its worst, my personal debt reached more than £50,000. There wasn’t one spectacular disaster behind it. I didn’t gamble it away, buy a sports car or suddenly develop a taste for designer watches. I just spent too much money for too long, while remaining convinced that I was going to earn more in the future.

I had a good life, which is part of what makes this story complicated. Outside work I play guitar in a band, mostly at weddings and events, so weekends can involve rehearsals, long drives, late finishes and occasional hotels. I love travelling and I’ve always been susceptible to a cheap flight. Add in holidays, weekends with friends, gigs, theatre, restaurants and the normal costs of being a sociable person in your thirties and there was nearly always something happening.

Very little of it felt extravagant at the time. That £60 flight wasn’t going to bankrupt me. Neither was £100 for a hotel, petrol for a wedding gig or a weekend away with friends. I was earning money from some of the music anyway, so I could tell myself that this slightly chaotic lifestyle partly paid for itself. Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t.

That’s the strange thing about getting into a lot of debt. I used to imagine people with serious debt problems must have made a few enormous mistakes. In my case it was hundreds of small decisions which were individually quite easy to defend. The problem only became obvious when you stood far enough away to see all of them at once.

The other part of the story was work. I had spent years trying to establish myself in finance and, once I did, my career seemed to be moving in the right direction. I became more experienced, took on greater responsibility and did increasingly complex work. I worked hard and, perhaps naively, assumed my earnings would rise accordingly.

There were bonuses which I expected to receive and salary increases which always seemed likely to be coming at some point. I wasn’t expecting to become a millionaire. I simply assumed that if I continued becoming more useful and productive, my remuneration would eventually reflect it.

Looking back, that assumption did a lot of damage.

I wasn’t literally sitting in a hotel room thinking, “I’ll put this on the credit card because I expect a larger bonus next year.” It was subtler than that. There was just a general confidence that my financial position was temporary. I was going somewhere. My career was growing. I would earn more. The numbers would work themselves out.

Future Me was apparently going to be very successful. Unfortunately, I had also given him an enormous number of bills to pay.

There was some delusion in that, but there was also a bit of defiance. I increasingly felt that I was giving a lot to work without receiving the financial progression I had expected in return. I didn’t want that disappointment to dictate the rest of my life as well.

I didn’t want to tell myself that because work hadn’t delivered the bonus I expected, I couldn’t go away with my friends. I didn’t want to stop playing music or turn down interesting opportunities. I didn’t want to spend the best years of my thirties sitting at home waiting for my finances to become perfect.

It felt like being punished twice: work wasn’t rewarding me in the way I’d hoped, and then I was supposed to sacrifice the things I actually enjoyed because of it.

So I became determined that I would keep living. I’d work harder, get better at what I did and eventually earn enough to sort everything out. In the meantime I would still travel, play music, see friends and say yes to interesting things.

There is something about that attitude I still like. It gave me some brilliant years. I travelled extensively, made close friendships, played countless gigs, fell in love, developed professionally and collected a ridiculous number of stories. Some of the happiest periods of my adult life happened while my balance sheet was quietly getting worse.

The problem was that determination gradually became a justification for borrowing.

I also consolidated debt more than once, which gave me the comforting sensation of doing something about it. A loan would clear a card, the overdraft would suddenly look healthier and everything would appear much more respectable. I had tidied up my finances.

Then, gradually, the available credit would get used again.

It took me longer than it should have to understand the difference between reorganising debt and repaying it.

Eventually there wasn’t a dramatic rock-bottom moment so much as an accumulation of irritating realities. A large car bill became genuinely difficult rather than merely annoying. Housing became more expensive. Interest payments became increasingly hard to ignore. Bonuses I had mentally half-counted on didn’t materialise. My salary grew more slowly than the version of myself several years earlier had confidently predicted.

I moved somewhere cheaper. I started paying much closer attention to cashflow. Most importantly, I stopped treating future earnings as part of my current resources.

That sounds absurdly obvious for someone who works in finance, but it has probably been the most important change I’ve made. A potential bonus is worth nothing until it arrives. A possible promotion doesn’t belong in a budget. An expected fee from a gig isn’t money I can spend yet. However confident I am about my career, Future Me is no longer allowed to subsidise Present Me.

The result is that my debt is now tens of thousands of pounds below its peak.

I haven’t achieved that by becoming a monk. I still travel. I’m still in the band. I still go to concerts and the theatre. I still spend money on things that would horrify the most evangelical corners of the personal-finance internet. I also still own an elderly car capable of generating surprisingly imaginative repair bills.

I don’t regret that.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell the younger version of myself to stop travelling, stop playing music and spend his thirties attacking debt with every available penny. Some of those experiences and relationships are among the most valuable things I have.

I would tell him something much simpler: you can have a full life, but you eventually have to pay for it with your own money.

Working in finance didn’t protect me from any of this. If anything, knowing the numbers probably made it easier to rationalise things. I always had a projection. I always knew how things could improve. I could always imagine the salary increase, bonus or better year that would make the problem manageable.

Knowledge and behaviour are very different things. People who work in finance are still optimistic, impatient, disappointed, ambitious and occasionally ridiculous. We still use money to express things about ourselves. In my case, spending became tangled up with a determination not to allow professional disappointment to shrink my life.

I still recognise that instinct, and I don’t entirely want to lose it. I like the person who says yes to the trip, plays the gig, gets on the plane and believes there are better things ahead. He just needs an adult in the room occasionally asking how he’s paying for it.

For years I assumed that somebody more successful would eventually come along and clear up the financial consequences of the life I was living.

He did eventually come along.

Annoyingly, he was still me.