I’m in the middle of a field in Somerset. It’s June 2019, I’m at Glastonbury Festival and I’ve just received a very very large punch in the stomach and I’m reeling… Well at least that’s what it feels like. I’ve just come off the phone and received perhaps the worst news of my entire life. How to describe that moment? After the gut punching shock came a wave of nausea. I coughed and dry heaved. I was almost physically sick. I’d seen this kind of reaction to bad news in countless movies. I always thought that it would never happen like that. But for me it did.
Prior to this moment I was drinking my morning coffee. I always HAVE to have my morning coffee. I was sitting outside my tent, a rather grand affair. One of those ones that you can stand up in… you know the sort of thing. My wife and I bought it off ebay. We both loved it as it looked like it sprung from the 1970s. It’s orange, yellow and beige and wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Carry On Camping, but yet again I digress. The sun is out, I’m in a private area away from the crowds. I’m at the most iconic festival in the world and I’m being paid to be there. It’s fair to say that I’m in my happy place. The phone rings. I glance at the screen and see ‘unknown number’. I ponder for a second and consider dropping the call. My catastrophising brain had trained itself, by this point in my life, to always expect bad news from an unknown number. To this day I still filter calls like this, and quite often have to take three deep breaths before listening to any voicemail message. I’m like that with opening official mail as well. For some reason I took the call, and almost instantly wished I hadn’t.
So what had happened? What did I do? Well like so much of my life with undiagnosed and unknown ADHD it’s more a case of what I didn’t do, and yet again, like my fake Facebook life status update, it was complicated. But I will try to explain.
It revolved around a few things:
An investment property I owned that had become unoccupied;
Mismanagement of said property by unscrupulous property sharks;
Damage caused to said property by vandals that cost more to repair than the actual value of the property;
and a struggle to keep up to date with bills and taxes on said property.
I knew that I had to get a payout from the insurance and quick. I needed to repair the damage and let out the property. I mean that’s what you do with investments properties right? Let them out. You know, maximum rental return. Money for nothing. Well not always. Had Homes Under The Hammer lied to me? During that fateful call I found out that the insurance company didn’t need to pay out for repairs. I should have informed them that the property had become unoccupied, and because I didn’t the insurance was invalid. It was apparently in the small print, which of course I didn’t read, who does? Turns out that most people do, when they invest all of their live savings into something. A property that I had spend the last of my inheritance on was now worthless. Financially I had just lost everything. All my life savings wiped out, in one single moment.
Hey presto! Abracadabra! Gone!
Now I’m interested in magic, and sometimes perform it, but this was the shittiest of all vanishing tricks that I’ve ever done. Yet again it was a small thing that I didn’t do that led to catastrophe. Ultimately I did what I always do when tragedy strikes. I laughed it off, sold the property for a very small fraction of what I paid for it two years prior, and got on with my life.
I should have seen it coming, I shouldn’t have been surprised, after all I’d been there before. I had previous form. This was the second time in my life that I’d lost everything. A decade prior to this I almost went bankrupt and was on the verge of fully defaulting on some very large credit card debts. I declared voluntary arrangements defaulted on them for over a year, and then paid them off with the surplus from a property sale. I lost the cards, had no profit from the sale, and was back to square one. The resulting six years of bad credit and not being able to borrow went by quickly and I resolved never, ever, EVER to borrow a penny in my life ever again… but as soon as I could I took out another credit card. I mean you can’t be too careful can you?
Fast forward to now and I’m back in debt, this time I’m declaring personal bankruptcy and yet again all of my debts will be wiped. Loosing everything once, twice, three times. It looks like I’m not very good with money.
But is that really the case?
At present I’m a member of an ADHD and money support group. I’m being strongly encouraged to think that I’m not bad with money, I just have ADHD. I have to admit that it’s a view that I find hard to get on board with. I mean, the evidence for me being spectacularly shit with money is all there right? The group facilitator, who herself has ADHD and has bounced back from debts much bigger that I’ve ever experience says this, so I am willing to give it a go.
So am I actually good with money? Well I certainly understand it, it’s maths right? I understand compound interest. I understand accounting, bookkeeping and the balancing of budgets. I understand how a country’s GDP works. I even understand the nuances of the Norwegian economic miracle (no really, I do, and I am prepared to bore you to death for hours on the subject). I remember in my mid 20s the excitement of my first meeting with a financial adviser. A wise sage, that would give me the magical key to financial success. He explained what savings were, what loans were, and what mortgages were, and suggested why certain ‘financial products’ were better than others…. “Is that it?” I remember thinking, “that’s fucking obvious you moron!, tell me something I don’t know! That’s just maths, and basic maths at that. Do you think I’m an idiot?!!!” Don’t worry, I didn’t say all of this out loud, but I thought it.
The problem is this. Knowing how money works, hasn’t really helped me keep hold of it. It’s like having a hand that can’t hold onto things. It looks like any normal hand, but it just can’t hold onto stuff. Imagine you have some coins in it, and someone says to you, “look, just count the coins, one two, three, four, five… there, you have five coins. “Yes, I know”, you think. They continue “All you need to do is close the gaps in your fingers and then wrap your fingers around the coins and you’ll keep hold of them. “Makes sense,” you think, “that’s easy. I can do that.” And then you watch as your shaking hand just drops all of the coins down the drain. “Huh!” you think, “How did that happen?” “Oh well” you decide “I’ll just get five more”, and then you forget that you dropped the first lot. It never occurs to you that you have to work on the hand that holds the money and not your ability to find the money itself. That’s what it feels like.
Maybe my relationship with money’s the problem. It’s like a mother of all co dependant marriages that I can’t get divorced from. Money, the old ‘ball and chain’, can’t live with it, can’t live without it. At time of writing I own a rather schmick drill. It’s a very powerful cordless De Walt. My friend who’s a woodworker tells me it’s top of the range. I mention this because it’s the only vaguely sellable asset that I have. You could say that it’s my net worth. Not much to show for a lifetime of reckless spending. But you see my reckless spending has been on things that are ephemeral. Partying and business, broadly speaking. Make no mistake, my instant gratification and dopamine craving brain is not adverse to the idea of a nice juicy get rich quick scheme. In the naughties I lived, for a short time, in a very large and extremely run down house in Rural France with my first wife. It had 12 rooms, but we only had furniture for two or three. I used a room on the top floor as a sort of office. A large bare room with no furniture except a desk. A computer and a chair. This room could have held a dozen such desks, but there was just one, sitting dead centre. This was my Narnia. My portal to the ever growing and ever changing online world and, in the middle of this cavernous bare room, I was sucked in. I got quite obsessed with so called ‘business opportunities’ or as they were called then ‘biz ops’. You know the sort of thing. People (well, mainly men) selling you the key to buying a yacht and having a millionaire lifestyle by only doing 5 minutes work a week. My kind of thing for sure. I think they just call them scams these days. These were springing up all over the internet and I spent hundreds and hundreds of pounds to have a similar experience to the one I had with that financial advisor. At least his advise was free. Again I was desperately trying to take the path of least resistance, but this time it really wasn’t paying off. I spent decades convincing myself that all of this stuff. The get rich quick schemes. The ill fated property investment. Quitting street performing and living off my savings while I tried to run cabaret clubs and tour theatre. I convinced myself that all of this was a business investment, but really it was all just reckless spending. I can’t help wishing that I’d had a mid life crisis and bought a Harley Davidson instead.
And what now?
So the cycle of financial ruin has happened yet again, but this time who’s kidding who? I now know that a miracle get rich quick scheme is very unlikely to either materialise, or indeed be the answer to my prayers but that’s OK. An old Irish proverb says, be careful of what you wish for it will surely be yours. All my life I’ve craved financial stability, and now I have it. All I have to loose is a drill. You could say that the situation is finally stable, and I can live with that. Looking at all of this through the lens of ADHD I realise that my ability to earn money is maybe not the problem, but I do need to take some time to fix habits that stop me from holding onto it. I need a new sort of financial advisor who can show me, not how to count the coins, not how to do basic maths, but how to fix the hand. And as for the future. Well, I still have dreams. To live on a boat. To walk to the edge of Everest, and to return one more time to that beach in Australia. Maybe we’ll stage another mock ‘forgetting the rings and diving into the sea’ joke for my friends 30th or 40th anniversary. Who knows? But only if I can afford it this time. I’m just now thinking that the De Walt drill will come in very handy if I ever do get a boat. Perhaps it’s the wisest investment that I’ve ever made.