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Personal finance influencer Clare Seal challenged herself to improve her mood and day-to-day living without splashing any cash for more than three months. Here’s what she learned…
Clare Seal shares challenge she set herself to feel better
Few of us can say that we’ve never bought a treat to cheer ourselves up or indulged in a bit of retail therapy. But did we need that slice of cake, new lipstick or handbag?
In fact, do we ever need those things that we buy so easily and without thinking – and are they really making our lives better?
Clare Seal, 35, has long wrestled with these questions, and even went public with her efforts to clear £27,000 of credit card and overdraft debt that she accrued in her 20s. Clare, who lives in Bath with her husband Phil and their three children (aged 10, six and 18 months), has paid off her debts and even trained as a financial coach to help others take control of their spending.
But last year she found herself slipping into old habits and knew that she needed a plan to get herself back on track. “I had a real severe decline in my mental health over the summer holidays. I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety over the years. I’d been suffering from covert post natal depression – I’d gone back to work six days after my daughter was born. I was trying to juggle a baby, career and job and I felt like I disappeared.”
Clare was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 32, and credits some of her financial woes to her condition, whether it’s splashing out on impulse purchases or accruing parking tickets and forgetting to pay them. “In September I realised that I had, yet again, been trying to buy solutions – it might be the quickest way to deal with something but it wasn’t working and was causing serious problems. For instance, buying an air-fryer isn’t going to resolve the fact that I have one child who only eats five things and I’m constantly having to cook three meals.
“There are some issues in life that can’t be resolved by a product – none of my problems were something I could purchase away.” But it gave her an idea. “I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to see if there was something small I could do every day to improve my life in some way?”
What followed was her new challenge, “100 days of making life a tiny bit better (without buying anything new)”, which she documented on Instagram. “Because I have ADHD I struggle with consistency, and I wanted to have an alternative approach, in which every time I did something positive and good for me, it was as though I’d put a coin in the bank. So I wanted to take that approach and put something into the ‘bank’ – it could be something tiny, like the micro annoyances that drag my day down, or something quite significant, like cleaning my car.”
She realised that she gained a sense of accomplishment by tackling the niggly household tasks that had been on her mind, from glueing two halves of a broken ceramic coaster back together, to creating a slow cooker lid out of foil to replace the one she’d previously dropped and smashed.
Another was going through her toddler’s baby things, packaging them up and passing them on to her sister who was due to have her first child. She unsubscribed from the newsletters and commercial marketing emails that were clogging up her inbox and constantly exhorting her to buy things. “I also learnt how to load my heated airer properly and now all my clothes dry thoroughly,” she says.
She also set aside time for herself, from a lie-in one Saturday morning, and a chunk of reading time to doing a 12-minute yoga video while Phil was putting the boys to bed. She also made sure that she was focused on her children when she spent time with them, rather than checking emails or dealing with work issues.
Both her finances and her mood improved. “There were way fewer things arriving, less buyers’ remorse and less guilt,” she observes. “Unlike impulse shopping, small acts of service that you do for yourself don’t come with unintended consequences. It’s a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over again that it’s genuinely the tiny things that you do and not the big things that you buy that make a big difference.”
The challenge has also made her think about generosity. “I derive pleasure from giving something to someone else – sometimes I’ve sent someone flowers, which has cost me money, rather than call them for a chat. This challenge made me think of all the other ways I can be generous. For instance, I left Google reviews of the small businesses that I use and appreciate, including my nail salon and accountant. That’s a gift that doesn’t cost anything.”
The experiment was particularly useful for Clare as a mother-of-three, highlighting to her why so many mums end up “throwing money” at any issues to make things easier. “We’re so targeted by adverts and solutions to all our problems and we’re susceptible to over-spending because we’re trying to buy solutions to the chaos that’s happening, but it just doesn’t work.”
Clare traces her struggles with money back to her younger years. “In my childhood, the messaging was ‘money’s not important’ and then throughout university, I excavated my overdraft.” This was followed by an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 24. “Phil, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I had our oldest child and then another.
“We were trying to build a semblance of family life from nothing, but incremental over-spending culminated in a sum of debt that was equal to my annual salary. It reached a breaking point in March 2019, we had to strip everything back and make cuts and difficult choices. I started to write about it online as an outlet and it captured some people’s attention.”
Clare now helps others manage their finances and understand the motivation and behaviour that can lead to over-spending. She’s also training as a financial planner, helping people to meet their goals. Her ambition for the future is to train as a psychotherapist, focusing on financial therapy. But for now she has pledged to keep questioning every time she gets the impulse to buy something. “No one’s ever fixed something and thought ‘I shouldn’t have fixed that’.”
For more information and personal finance tips, visit @clare.seal at Instagram