I have recently returned from a weekend away with my oldest, closest friends. They are the ones I see less often than I’d like but when we meet it’s like yesterday. Of the 6 of us I am probably the most content and when I look at their lives it seems clear why that is. They all had difficult childhoods and less than rosy relationships with their parents. I am the only one whose parents didn’t separate or divorce. Whether it’s a fact of us all being daughters I don’t know, but they have all had particularly difficult relationships with their fathers. There seem to be so many lessons to learn from the way each of them has experienced life and in particular parenting.

The most obvious lesson is the career one. A parent working hard to earn money to make everyone happy. But as one of my friends herself explained, her family life was sacrificed for her father’s career. Sure he earned big bucks but at the expense of time with his wife and children. At the end of the day that is what they wanted and what ultimately might have kept them together. It’s a cliche, but happiness, he found, couldn’t be bought after all.

Another is where the parent/child relationship has been pretty much turned around. The parent is needy, selfish, demanding and self obsessed. The child is trying hard to please, be loved, fulfil expectations. Shouldn’t that be the other way around? What happens to “I just want you to be happy”? So often it seems to come with a dose of “as long as I approve” or “as long as it’s making me happy too”.

Many of my friends’ experiences of parenting are too personal to share but suffice to say the thing they all missed was time spent surrounded with happiness. Never mind the career, the money, the holidays, the buying stuff. What my friends needed as children were parents who were simply happy. If you are happy, chances are your kids will be too.

I arrived home empty-handed and sat down with my family. I told them that I’d had a revelation, that we should stop the madness and just not buy each other presents any more. That we should extend this to wider family members. My mother admitted that she and her brother had told each other to go out and spend some pre-arranged amount of money on each other and she was feeling badly that she hadn’t got around to deciding what to buy herself from him yet. She rang him immediately and told him of our plans and he wholeheartedly agreed. In fact, everyone did. There was a real sense of relief. Relief that we didn’t have to head back out into town for yet another Saturday and could instead focus our time more productively. Relief that we didn’t have to spend money for the sake of it. And relief that we wouldn’t be cluttering our lives up with yet more stuff we didn’t need.

Now many of my friends all tell me that Christmas gift giving is about the thought rather than the actual gift. That the person you are buying for will be glad you thought about them (and spent all your Saturdays leading up to the big day immersed in the horror that is the Christmas High Street). That we just didn’t put enough thought into what each other might like. As Christmas approaches though and they are all madly running around still shopping they each secretly admit that they too wish they could stop.

Of course this arrangement has been adapted somewhat since we’ve had children. I remember the excitement of presents when I was a child and wouldn’t dream of denying it to them. We adults still go without but they wake up on Christmas morning to a stocking and a (modest!) pile of presents under the tree. I guess that for children the experience of opening presents really means that the thought does count. For the grown-ups, or at least for us, the negative experience of all the mindless shopping outweighs the pleasure of the presents. Oh, and the other thing people think is that come the day we all sit around regretting our lack of presents. I promise, we don’t. And neither would you.

I wonder how I ended up so hopelessly in debt after such an upbringing. I completely admire my parents ability to live within their means. Now, having paid off our debts (we didn’t walk away) I aim to emulate their skill with money. It’s one reason we didn’t take up the offer to increase our mortgage when we moved house. For the budget we had we could afford a house that easily fulfilled our needs. We didn’t need anything more. We have become so much more interested in doing more with life that to tie ourselves to a bigger financial burden than necessary just doesn’t make sense.

Just recently, some friends of ours have been presented with the same choice. Whether to buy an adequate house and be (almost) mortgage free, or whether to blow the budget, spend to their limit and buy a huge place. They, like us, have two children and have been living to date in a house pretty much the same as ours. It has enough bedrooms, a small garden and plenty of living space. For me it’s a no-brainer.

The question wasn’t such a no-brainer for them. In a few weeks they will be the proud owners of a five bedroom house with a large garden. No denying it’s beautiful but I wonder what price it will come at. They have taken out the biggest mortgage they can afford. They are looking for a cleaner. I have no idea how much it will cost to heat. He will need to work harder to make sure his job stays secure to cover the outgoings. I know everyone is different and that’s what makes life so interesting but it seems like a bit of a missed opportunity. The mortgage was on offer so they took it. The house was lovely so they bought it. I wonder if at any point they stopped and asked themselves what’s important. Is the house so important it’s worth pushing themselves to their financial limit? What could they have done with life, together, by living more within their means? Will the house make them happy? I hope so.

Can you? Help yourself? Are we that weak and easily led? I can’t hold myself up as an example of someone who isn’t tempted by those impulse buys of course. Clearly, with a history of debt to my name, I succumbed to many a trip into town for something and returned home with quite a few somethings. But was it my fault or could I just “not help myself”?

I’d love to think the whole sorry affair was down to someone or something much bigger and cleverer than me. I’d love to think that no matter how I tried there was just no way I could resist. But if I can manage to go into town now, with the lessons I’ve had to learn still ringing loudly in my ears, and come home with nothing more than I actually went for, why couldn’t I do it before? And why can’t the women whose conversation I wandered in to?

Part of me puts it down to excellent marketing. And I do honestly think that those folks out there touting their wares at us know exactly which buttons to press to get us reaching for our credit cards. But that’s really just a cop out. It allows me to be weak and blame someone else. I really think its down to thinking. I hope I live life in a much more thoughtful way these days. It’s taken a lot of bad decisions and mistakes to get here but maybe I needed to go through them to end up where I am. I know those impulse buys won’t make the slightest bit of difference to my state of mind (whatever it may be) once I get home. I know those lovely things that really did look so lovely in the shop will fill me, not with happiness, but with a kind of sapping emptiness once they are hanging in my closet or sitting on a shelf. I know my bank balance won’t look as rosy as it could. And I think about all those things.

I wonder too if you never have a thinking kind of moment in life and you never stop and wonder about all that stuff you buy if you can just be happy like that. Maybe those women were completely happy with life and with their impulsive shopping. Maybe you are either the kind of person who stops and thinks about it and then does something or the kind who never really thinks about it at all (and I guess there must be some in-betweeners who stop and think about it then carry on regardless). I’m not suggesting either is right or wrong and I’d never suggest that those who love to shop are poor saps who could never be happy because they haven’t found enlightenment. I hope those two women got home and were fabulously happy with their new stuff and weren’t left thinking, as I often did, “oh”.

If you’ve read some of our earlier posts, you’ll know what a mess we’ve been in financially. Though our escape was easy compared to some, at the depths of our debt there were times I could see no way out. Life was consumed with consuming because we were in so deep a little more didn’t seem to make much difference. I lost sleep, couldn’t open post and didn’t answer the phone. I tell myself now that the experience did have a positive side in that it has made me scared to death of ever spending too much again. As we are poised on the brink of a little spare cash, I hope that it really did.

Since paying off our debt we have bought relatively little. In fact, we have gone out of our way to rid ourselves of the booty that got us into the mess in the first place and we no longer own anything we don’t really need or use. But I’m acutely aware that we aren’t as good as I’d like us to be at always being careful and the very idea that there’s finally some money coming from all our hard work makes me wonder if we can pretend we still don’t have any. Can we resist just having a quick look in that nice shop in town that we always walk past? Can we still make the most economic decisions and spend time checking we’re getting the best deal?

Minimalism is easy if you don’t have anything. With spare cash comes temptation. I love our simpler life not just because I fear debt but because all that stuff never actually made us happy. I look back at us just a few years ago and the difference is astounding. I sometimes can’t believe it was me who spent £200 on yet another bag without thinking. Being in debt doesn’t make you scared of spending money. Being free of debt is what gives you the healthy respect you need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Simon’s post made me look back on what I can only think about as our previous life. I’m not a proponent of re-birth in any spiritual sense but what has happened to us is a kind of re-birth and writing about it is somewhat humiliating. Our life before children, before moving away from London was out of control. We suffered from Affluenza. I wouldn’t describe us as affluent, but we lived with no sense of limit where money was concerned.

We went on 6 holidays in one year, we bought whatever we wanted, ate out more than in. The debt we amassed was huge. There were months we struggled to make the repayments. Some months we paid the debt with more debt. Once we took out a loan to pay a debt and used part of it to go skiing. While away we ate in great restaurants, bought clothes, drank in swanky bars and stayed in a very nice hotel. All the while our debt was growing.

I guess you could say we got lucky. We had a baby and started to feel the fear. The baby wasn’t the only thing keeping us awake at night. We started to look at our situation and it wasn’t easy viewing. For the first time we added up our debt and the amount it was costing us each month. The figures were staggering. I have no idea to this day how we covered it. With baby 2 on the way we decided to move away from London and this decision was inadvertantly our saving. Our flat (our tiny, one bed, 30 square metre flat) had gone up in value by 400%. This was still crazy time, before the crash, and incredibly someone paid up. We used some of the profit to clear our debt. Too easy? Maybe, but the experience itself was the lesson.

Who or what’s to blame? We could point the finger at our parents. Mine in particular have always been faultless with money. Anything they wanted, they saved for. The very thought of going overdrawn would fill them with horror. I could claim a rebellion! We could blame London. All those shops, making us buy stuff!

The simple truth is that we were living for the moment. Stupidly ignoring the consequences. Not imagining a day when we would have to face it and deal with it. Admittedly we did have some great times and the experience has played more than a small part in our new approach to life. Luckily for us we came out of the old life not just not losing everything but gaining insight along the way. It’s not, however, a route to enlightenment I’d recommend.