How money became a best friend

No more guilt or shame around money

‘£250,000! That’s a lot of money for us to receive’, I whispered to my husband.

I noticed twinges of guilt, embarrassment, shame move through me. I felt awkward. More than awkward – I wanted to disappear, overwhelmed by the thought that my bank account would show this sum in a few months or so.

That was back in about 2004. Up until then I didn’t think I had a problem with money - I’d worked hard, there had always been more or less enough, albeit with some creative thinking, saving plans, and sometimes reluctantly saying no to things.

This lump sum - that was different - and was the result of my first husband and I buying into a property with some friends, and it was where we could all practice as counsellors and psychotherapists. We were able to raise our part of the mortgage because of an insurance payout of £30K my husband had received just after I met him. Which was a result of him being knocked down, and suffering regular headaches thereafter.

This business developed into a full-blown complementary health clinic, and went well for a while, until our friends acrimoniously split up, and one of them left the partnership. Then came a difficult couple of years where I had to take on the day to day running of the clinic which meant managing the practitioners and the business.

During this time, my husband collapsed with ME, and I became responsible for all our income as he couldn’t work. It was a scary time. We sold our little terraced house in Oxford that we had done up, and moved to a cheaper town nearby, releasing a good £50K in equity which subsidised our living for the next 2-3 years. Thank goodness for our ability to renovate well, and also rising house prices.

From a financial viewpoint, it became clear we were only going to resolve matters (and all the debt the business had now accrued) by selling the business and the property separately. What’s more, we had to sell the building to a developer who would knock down the newly renovated house so there would be enough left over to pay the mortgage and other debts, the partner payouts, and for us to be left with some money. That was a huge lesson in letting go, but we did it.

This brought me to the point where I realised that after all debts were paid off, Philip and I would be left with this enormous amount of £250K. I felt very uneasy about it, realising I clearly had money issues and therefore needed to address them pronto.

I began reading, and started with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad set of books, eventually buying the cashflow board game with another couple of friends. The idea was you went round and round the board in the ‘rat race’, and by learning and making savvy choices, you could get out of that onto the fast track, making a lot of money and having your dreams come true.

The first time we played this, I won, and pretty quickly. There I was, on the fast track, all by myself, frozen with fear. I felt cast out, ashamed, embarrassed and just wanted to crawl under the table and hide. What’s more, the next eleven times we played, I also got onto the fast track first. A big message here, so I started reading more about attitudes to money, because mine were clearly not healthy. Some of them were beliefs like:

It’s not OK to have masses of money – I will be judged, criticised, lose friends, be envied. (Therefore why on earth would I want to have masses?).

I have champagne taste, but only ever a beer income (I remember my dad wistfully saying this, often).

Money comes, but it also goes too. (I proved this over and over, by having some and then it ‘departing’, so I would always come back to a level of income I felt comfortable with).

If I have more than enough money, I will be vilified and cast out (that’s the shame arising).

After selling the clinic, we eventually moved to Ireland to be near family; this was the time of the Celtic Tiger, and we discovered many opportunities similar to what we had done in England. We bought land from farmers, took the risk of getting planning (for eco-houses, a nod to our values), and then sold it on again to a developer. It worked. We made a comfortable profit from the first sale, enough to live on for a year, and continued doing up our house in Belfast.

But we weren’t happy living there, and after I attended Experience Week at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, we moved from Belfast in 2007 and got a mortgage on a cottage in Forres, near to Findhorn. By this time, we had also invested some of our money in two rental properties in the North of England. Just as we arrived in Scotland, we heard that our final piece of land had been given planning permission, and a buyer had been found for £650K. Potentially more opportunities for me to practice feeling good about receiving large sums of money! For someone who had had all these issues about money, the future looked very rosy.

This only lasted a week, however. The credit crunch came in with a bang, and in a very short time our land valued at £650K went back to being the value of farmland, about £45K.

The old feelings of shame, embarrassment erupted from a deeper level, now joined by sheer terror that we would be made bankrupt, and I would become a bag lady, wandering the streets of Forres. I criticised myself for the way we had mismanaged all we had done with our money, and I had to dig deep to create ways to calm myself down, find the positives and manage on a day-to-day level.

Eventually, the bank called in the debt, which by now was £325K. A problem, as we had nothing at all left from our investments, and our rental houses in England had plummeted into negative equity. All this time I was doing my best to cope with the feelings produced by this turn of events.

We offered the bank what we could scrape together - £3K to settle, and they agreed at £5K. A huge miracle! And then another miracle happened when a friend heard about this and offered to lend us £2K so we could pay off the bank.

And so, having had £250K in the bank, and then the possibility of more, we were back to square one, but with more debt. Clearly, having more than enough money was still not acceptable to me.

By this time, Philip had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, which quickly became terminal, so money worries flew out the window. Nothing had changed financially other than being deeper in debt; I was still the main earner, now having retrained as a life and business coach, and earning enough that way to live month to month.

After Philip died, I started worrying about money all over again. Fortunately, a lawsuit against one of the land sellers in Ireland was eventually paid up, and after huge solicitor fees, about £35K came to me which helped enormously in those first couple of years after Philip’s death.

Meanwhile I was still working on my money attitudes. I recognised I would never have done all this investing if Philip hadn’t taken the lead on it. I was nervous about money, much more cautious than he had been, and I certainly didn’t feel like it was my friend. In 2020, I signed up to Denise Duffield Thomas’ Money Bootcamp, and in her Facebook group discovered lots of women who were much wealthier than I was. This was an eye-opener – because they were just like me! Honest, brave, caring souls who wanted to make the world a better place. This was a biggie – and it was in this group that I met a woman called Joanna Hunter. I noticed her comments to others in the group, and I liked them.

A year after joining Money Bootcamp, I joined Joanna Hunter’s Divine Planning, Abundant Profits programme. I loved the name, and had become more comfortable around women earning a lot of money, so it felt like the right time. How did I pay for all these trainings? I put them on a 0% credit card, kept tabs on when the 0% interest ran out and then moved it to another, if I hadn’t already paid it off.

I began working on my ability to receive, and that was my main focus for the next two years. You might think that anyone wanting more money would easily be able to receive, but I discovered this was not so. While saying I wanted more money, I was also pushing it away at the same time, by being unwilling to receive it in various different ways (for example, not having an easy way for people to pay me, insisting on paying when someone else wanted to buy me lunch, not feeling grateful regularly and consistently).

Not receiving clearly also applied to a lot more than money. How good was I at receiving love, for instance? Or help? Or gifts? There was a lot of room for improvement, and I’m glad to say I have become better and better at this as I have practiced all sorts of tools that I have learnt from both these programmes, and others.

One has been adopting a committed practice of gratitude, whereby I give myself time to really focus on the feelings associated with whatever I’m grateful for. This is crucial – and it feels very nice indeed! But it’s so easy just to jot down three things you’re glad about in your life, as so many advise, and have it be just one of the other things you tick off on your to-do list. Not quite so nice. Or effective, for that matter.

Also, I understood I had to be ready to receive. When I needed my business to be bringing in more income, I knew I had to expand myself to be ready for that income to come in. The kind of person who attracts £2K pm is very different to the kind of person that attracts £6K pm, or more. I started embodying what it would feel like to be a £6Kpm person. One of my favourite ways of doing this was walking around saying I am a £6K pm woman. At first it was really weird, but I soon got used to it and could say it cheerfully – and then out loud. And then to my business colleagues. And then increase it. This is one of the inner tools that allowed me to build the last business I had from scratch to well over six figures in revenue, while doing something I loved (training).

Over the years, I slowly began to start thinking of money as a possible friend, rather than the enemy on which I was so dependent.

The inner work on receiving was paying off. I met a man who is now my second husband, and he told me he wanted to build a house for us to live in together. The feelings of shame and embarrassment that this might have produced earlier in my life, had disappeared. I’m glad to say that we live here now, in our dream house, and I feel incredibly grateful.

Recently, I found this love letter from money to me, written in April 2024:

Jane, I would love to live with you, I would love to hang out with you more, hey I’d just be glad to get to know you more, you seem like a cool person…well, to everyone except me!

I am not sure what I have really done to piss you off or hurt you because I have always tried to be there for you, the fact is you have needed me to keep you alive… and – well, you’re still alive but it’s not been easy to hang out with someone who is constantly mad at you; who tells you that you’re never enough.

Other energies would honestly have given up by now but I am still here trying to bless your life… I feel your disappointment in me, it really hurts.

Other people in your life have come and gone but I have always been there for you even when you’re raging at me for not being enough - but I was always enough to get you through to the next day, wasn’t I?

For years you’ve heard such rubbish about me, but have you ever taken the time to get to know me yourself? Or have you just believed a bunch of stuff others told you and now you believe things like ‘rich people are greedy’, and ‘you have to work hard for me’?

I would love to be allowed more into your life, I would love to take up more space in your bank account. But what I would love the most is to be treated with respect and kindness, just as you want for yourself.

When you’re angry, mad or pissed off at me you push me out of your life, and I have to work so much harder to be part of your life. I would love nothing more than for things to be easier between us but unfortunately that’s not up to me, it’s up to you because it’s actually you that holds the power. The only power I have ever had is the power you’ve given me. I have no power without you.

I think we could do great things together. It’s actually what keeps me going because I want to be part of what you’re creating.

Nowadays, I consider myself to be best friends with money. I’ve been keeping an income tracker for years, welcoming in money from all sources, and also all the equivalent in value that has come my way from people buying me coffees or whatever. It’s fun and I love it. If you have several sources of income, it’s a great way to pay attention to money (aka your friend), and helps create space for it to come to you.

I’ve also tidied up all my personal and business finances. This is really important in a friendship. It represents caring for someone - this is how you look after money, by taking care of it properly and with gratitude.

It’s been quite the up and down journey but I’m now in a place where I know I will do well with whatever money I have, and I look forward to having a flourishing friendship with money for the rest of my life.

Resources:

Place of Peace Visualisation: I created this to help move me back to ease and flow when I was terrified about being a bag lady. I still use this today, to calm down about all sorts of things. https://janeduncanrogers.gumroad.com/l/PoP

7 Steps to Thinking Rich – Essential Inner Tools for Prosperity, Abundance and Wealth https://janeduncanrogers.gumroad.com/l/7steps

Divine Planning, Abundant Profits – this is Joanna Hunter’s business programme that I am still an active part of. https://janedr--joannahunter.thrivecart.com/dpapa/

(This is an affiliate link, meaning if you use this link to join DPAP then I will receive a bit of commission).

Multi-source Income Tracker from Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4334329673/multi-income-tracker-income-tracker?

Me, writing about Embracing Ageing, on Substack: