"Remember that it’s a work in progress, but that you can actually do the work."
An anonymous follow up you're going to want to read.
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I first interviewed K in 2022 - you can read that one here:
And followed up with her in 2023 because I knew she’d had some big changes:
And two years on, she’s had another big change, so I followed up again. Making her, I think, the third member of the double follow up club, along with Anna O’Steele and Claire Venus.
Plus she’s always fascinating and super wise.
Are there any money habits you’ve let go of since the first interview? If yes, what and why?
You last interviewed me two years ago when we were at the start of our boat life adventure. We had been forced to make the best of all kinds of difficult situations that required us to step firmly out of our comfort zone, financially and in every other way.
Moving onto the boat meant I had to seriously downsize my life. Before we lived aboard we spent months assessing what we had and letting go of all kinds of things. Because the boat was only ever meant to be a temporary thing, we hired a storage unit for the things we knew we wanted to keep and that would be irreplaceable, but everything else had to go.
As a person whose drive to spend money went hand in hand with a desire to own things, this required a massive shift in my relationship with both money and things. It was a really difficult and often painful process. Things were what made me feel safe, and I had no idea how I would feel in the aftermath of all that letting go, particularly given that during our time living on the boat I would not be able to buy things to replace them with. Not only because there was no room for non-essential stuff but also, for a big stretch of our life on the boat, we didn’t have much money, and I had stopped working because my mental health was really poor.
For the first few months I actually didn’t want to spend money and when I thought about spending it, I felt completely numb. For a while I thought that was because I had cracked my relationship with money with all the letting go I had done beforehand, but it turned out to be because I was really depressed and mentally unwell!
As I started to feel better I began to be more interested in spending again, but this time things were different. Living on the boat had coincided with me starting therapy again and I think during that numbed out period when I wasn’t interested in spending I had done therapeutic work that had helped break the original spending driver. It wasn’t conscious because I wasn’t in therapy to deal with my relationship with money, it was a by-product of deeper work that meant that when I started to feel better I was able to (mostly) stop self-soothing with spending. That was a hugely important thing to let go of.
