As a student, I was so terrified of getting into debt that I wrote down every purchase and expenditure in a little black book. Debt scared me far more than arriving in London alone aged 18 armed with nothing more than an A-Z and a suitcase. No one likes to owe money, but for certain personality types, the fear is particularly real. Money buys many things, not all of them material. Yes, it buys freedom, but more than that, it buys control.
It’s kind of quaint, how diligently I strove to avoid an overdraft – not least because my worry was completely disproportionate. It was the 90s. I had it easy. Not wealthy parent easy, but the next best thing: a grant (from memory, of around £2,500) that ensured I started each term of university with a decent sum of money in the bank that I simply had to preserve. My tuition fees were paid by the local authority, so my grant was mine to spend on food, rent, highlighter pens and as many Moscow Mules as I could drink.
Truly, it was the best of times. Imagine, as an 18 year-old, being given thousands of pounds that you didn’t have to pay back, that didn’t clock up interest, that didn’t make you wake up in a cold sweat every night stressing about whether you’d ever find a job that earned you enough to repay it.
