Clare Seal is one of the most honest women in finance you’ll ever meet (which is exactly why when we knew we were launching The Sisterhood Works Project, we wanted her involved – read more below).

And that’s just one of the reason’s you’ll love her. She’s also the author of Real Life Money, founder of Instagram channel @myfrugalyear and founder of The Financial Wellbeing Forum - a place for honest, judgment-free conversation and information about personal finance, emotional wellbeing and mental health. Clare is the first to admit that it took her a decade to realise that she had a broken relationship with money – and hitting rock bottom was the catalyst for real change in her life. 

Her book Real Life Money is a holistic approach to personal finance that addresses the deeper causes of debt and financial difficulties. The goal is not to get rich overnight, or to pay off debt at the expense of all of life's pleasures, but rather to gain an understanding of why we feel the way we do about money, and how we can use that to change our mindset and our finances for good. Earlier this year, Clare announced to her followers that she had just paid off £27,438.11 of credit card debt. How did she do it? Here, we share an extract from our recent AllBright Money Podcast episode with Clare, hosted by Melanie Eusebe. 

Listen to the episode here.  

About The Sisterhood Works Project

To celebrate the #TheSisterhoodWorksProject ⁠- our global mission to connect 100,000 women up through our digital platform, so we can unite you all, wherever you are, and whatever your passion is - we've interviewed these incredible founders about the brand’s backstory, and what advice they would give to friends thinking of going into business together.

Find out more about The Sisterhood Works Project here. We'll be running an unmissable line-up of free networking events, industry-specific networking opportunities, inspiring interviews, IRL meet-ups and much more. ⁠Join the sisterhood. Share with your friends. Let’s tackle the gender network gap together. 

Heeral Pattni and Clare Seal, photographed for The Sisterhood Works Project. Photography by Helene Sandberg

I always had quite a​ fraught relationship with money, and I think that's fairly normal and acceptable when you're a student, right?

The odd ones out are the people who already have their budget spreadsheet, the people who are already planning what to do with their student loan or with their allowance or with money that they earn from a job. The norm is the people who are using their overdraft for shots of tequila. When you leave university, it becomes very, very clear who is ready for the real world of money and who isn't and I wasn't. I left university and I went straight into a job that was not really a graduate job. It was in the hospitality industry. I was on 16K a year which seems like quite a lot when you've never earned anything, but you very quickly realise that's a very low salary to try and live off. I already had this relationship with money and credit in the form of overdrafts.

I had my first child when I was 25, got married and had a second child, all while earning not very much. I think I went from 16 grand to 20 to 25 and I was still earning that amount of money when I was 29, which is when my rock bottom moment happened. 

I'd been juggling for so long and transferring small amounts of money from one account to another, trying to plug these increasingly massive holes in my budget. In March 2019, I got a call from my bank to say that it was in an unarranged overdraft and that's the bad one where you used to get charged a daily fee. She asked me when I'd be able to make good and come back within my limit.  I just heard myself say, "There's just no money left." It wasn't something I felt like I could speak to my family about. They had to bail us out so many times before. I came off the call knowing something needed to change. 

I’d tried to do this before and had been very restrictive with budgets but and then slipped up and lost all confidence in myself. I knew that approach wasn't going to work for me, so I set about trying to find a different way to do it. Money is so tied in with our emotions and our self-esteem - I couldn't contain it all. My solution to that was to start an Instagram account to try and document things there. Many people ask me why I did that and I have absolutely no idea, but it's undoubtedly the best thing I've ever done. It's created a community. I really hope that it has opened a conversation for quite a lot of people that didn't think it was possible. It certainly did for me. I felt very, very alone in my financial difficulty. I didn't think anybody else was making the mistakes with money that I was. It's held me accountable as well. 

We glorify rock bottom in society…

I reject the idea that you have to hit rock bottom before you can make changes. I wouldn't wish rock bottom on anybody and part of what I want to do is to try and reach people before they hit rock bottom because actually all of the shame, stigma and not knowing where to go for help, that had been there since I had 500 quid on a credit card.

If I had been able to get rid of that shame, feel like somebody else understood me and have had access to the right information back then, it would have taken a matter of maybe a couple of months to turn things around rather than the two years that it has been. And actually I've been very lucky in that I have been able to pay off that sum relatively quickly.

I was really overly restrictive. I would strip out every ounce of enjoyment from life in order to try and make ends meet…

Takeaway food, meals out, cosmetics, clothes, fitness memberships, entertainment subscriptions - I took out everything that fleshes out your life beyond work and looking after children. It just wasn't realistic for our family. My husband was working in the hospitality industry until very recently. He would have his days off during the week usually and then he would be working evenings and weekends. 

I was looking after one small child and then two small children largely on my own and trying to manage everything else. I would keep going for maybe a couple of weeks, maybe a month on a really strict budget, then I'd feel terrible and be completely wrung out by trying to do absolutely everything and outsource nothing. I often say to people, if you give yourself a super restrictive budget that doesn't allow for anything you enjoy or anything that makes your life easier then, one of two things will happen. If you will stick to it for the amount of time that you need to, which could be years, you're not happy. The cost of that is too high for me. Or the far more likely thing that will happen is that you just won't be able to keep it up, you'll slip up and then you'll give up entirely. You'll completely undermine your whole confidence that you're able to live within your means and budget. It was the latter that kept happening for me. So this time around I put takeaway in my budget and trimmed other things to fit it in.

Allowing for a bit more childcare as well was a decision that we then made further along the way. What I learned quite early on this time around was that it's really important that you create a budget that you can live with but you also need to remember that you can change it as you go on if things aren't working, if you need to be able to afford more childcare, or if you want to be able to afford a bit more enjoyment. As things start to get easier, you can prioritise your own quality of life over the amount of time it's going to take you to get to your financial goal. You don't have to carry on, on the same trajectory that you set out on. I've changed my trajectory and my plan so many times over the last couple of years and I genuinely think that's why it's been successful.

I took a massive risk about six months after I started the Instagram account - I changed jobs for slightly more money…

I hated my new job. It was not a good fit at all. It was a start-up and I had a nine month old baby and an almost four year old. The expectation of me and the stress that was there, coupled with the stress of having two very small children and a husband that worked very long hours was just so much. I crashed into the back of someone on the way to work because I was so anxious and pre-occupied. I arrived at work and I had an email on my personal account from my previous employer offering me 12 weeks of freelance work if I wanted it.

I thought this can't be a coincidence. It was one of those moments in my life where I just thought these two things have happened on the same day for a reason. I handed in my notice and went freelance. I haven't looked back but I recognise now that that was a very big risk. It was a risk that I had to take, because the bigger risk for me was that I was going to completely stop functioning or that I would have had that crash with my children in the car. I could see where it was headed. Obviously then the whole plan had to completely change because I was budgeting for a variable income which is mind blowing when you're doing it for the first time.

I think one of the main problems that people have is that when they set out a monthly budget or they look at how much money they've got and how much money they're spending which is the essence of budget, it all seems to work on paper and then you still get to the 20th of the month if your salaried and are like, "Oh no, there's no money left."

It helps to go back through your accounts and see where did all of that money go that was missing by the end of the month? You need to understand your spending habits. It's one of the elements of personal finance that is missing from most of the discourse. There are always reasons why we spend the way that we do and why we feel we can't save, why we feel we can't invest, why we feel so ashamed about debt. There were so many reasons behind that. So many solutions are just like a plaster on a gaping wound essentially. For me, I had to go quite deep to understand everything. 

The whole advertising industry is built on making us think that we've got a problem and them flogging us something to solve it…

Particularly for women, we're told from a really early age that there's something wrong with us. Whether it's like the shape of our body, the colour of our hair, the shape of our eyebrows. We're relentlessly flogged all of these solutions to it. And then the final kicker is that there's this narrative in society about frivolous women who spend all of their money on shoes and handbags. It's impossible to navigate.

For the first year,​ I was posting anonymously to @myfrugalyear...

I think it's really much easier to be authentic when nobody knows who you are and you're not going to get the kinds of awful, below the line comments. A couple of months before Real Life Money was published, I sort of revealed myself if you'll pardon the expression. The support on the platform was absolutely incredible. It wasn't until I started doing the book promotion outside of my community (places like The Telegraph and The Daily Mail) that tend to be more sort of right-leaning and a bit more sensationalised in terms of headlines, , that I started to face the opinions that I knew were out there.

For a good couple of months after publication, I felt like I was walking around with no skin on, I felt very raw and very vulnerable. A lot of the shame that I thought I'd got rid of reared its ugly head again. I know for a fact that lots of other people are in that same situation that I was in and nobody else is brave enough to talk about it, so I regained the courage of my convictions a little bit but it was a very, very tough summer last year.

There are so many parallels between personal finance and diet and fitness…

I have to say antidepressants and therapy are the biggest things that I've ever done to take care of myself. I love yoga, I think it's brilliant. I love mindfulness, I think it's brilliant, but sometimes they don't cut it. So that was a big step for me. I took them for about eight months and I'm still doing therapy now. When I wrote Real Life Money, I was so honest and I didn't really hold very much back. But I had excavated all of this stuff and then it was just there in a pile and in a book and available for lots of people to read. I needed someone to come and therapise me so that I could deal with it. 

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