Séamas O'Reilly: I may not know a lot about money, but I know what I like — more of it

I thought it was weird that the only way to motivate rich people to work is to give them loads of money, but the only way to motivate poor people to work is to remove their money

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

An acquaintance was discussing the troubles of their preposterously rich friend last week.

A lifetime of wealth had alienated this friend from wider society, left them insecure and paranoid about their friends and relationships, and had fed into all manner of ills regarding their school and work career, around alcohol and substance abuse, and even just the everyday motivation to keep going.

“I guess,” my friend said, with the wisdom of a sage, “it goes to show that money doesn’t solve all your problems.”

I replied that this person was doubtless having a tough time, but that, speaking personally, I could think of very, very few problems I have that wouldn’t be almost immediately solved with more money. Most would, in fact, be solved instantaneously. Money isn’t just a nice countertop and a bigger telly. Money is safety and shelter. Money is rest. Money is sleep. Money is time.

I just wish I knew more about it. I am not a financially astute person. If you were to take financial advice from me then, like those people who dress their dogs in football kits, the very act would demean us both. Remember that famous ad for the Financial Regulator, where a guy stands up on the bus to tell his fellow passengers he doesn’t know what a tracker mortgage is? It was on TV for so long that we all got sick of it, because that’s the sort of thing that Irish people got annoyed at in 2007, back when Eddie Hobbs had eight separate programmes about where to park your yacht. And yet: I still don’t know what a tracker mortgage is.

I really should have looked it up back then, but I was a broke student who’d grown up in the distinctly boomless environs of Derry, a place for whom the Celtic Tiger was about as relevant as the Space Race. Learning what a tracker mortgage was back then would have been about as practical as learning Norse.

It’s now likely I’ll only learn what a tracker mortgage is when a smiling man in a suit tells me it has somehow robbed me of all my money.

This, you see, is how I learn about all things in the world of finances; while watching a fly buzz out of my wallet, my face screwed up and pockets pulled out. Every time I’ve learned the meaning of one of those antiseptic, financial-sounding words, it’s been because one of them has gone through my trousers and pilfered my lunch money.

Taxes, duties, rates and arrears, have all been explained to me by suited branch managers, or while reading a letter from my bank featuring disconcertingly large writing.

I suppose it’s because I’ve never had any money, and I gather that a lot of finance words are not so much about getting money as they are about using the money you have to get more money than you did before. Sounds pretty sweet, to be honest. I may not know a lot about money, but I know what I like: more of it.

After spending our entire 20s living week to week, and then month to month, never exactly poor, but always living precisely within or just over our means, in jobs we may or may not have liked, my wife and I did actually begin saving in earnest after my son was born. The idea was that we’d get enough money for a house deposit, but in the four years since we started doing this, the average price of a house where we live has risen by about double what we’ve managed to save.

This means we’re not even running to stand still, but running to move backwards at double, rather than triple speed.

This makes us feel like a pair of adorable children selling roadside lemonades in the hopes of buying the Aviva Stadium in a leveraged buyout.

(Thanks to Google, I now know that leveraged buyouts actually involve significant amounts of borrowed capital and are therefore a bad example to use, but I figure using a more correct term would both run contrary to my claim of financial ignorance, and also ruin the rhythm of the joke.)

Living in the UK through the single most insane, self-inflicted budgetary breakdown ever recorded has, therefore, been a disarming experience. I suppose I thought I was the stupid one, just because I didn’t know what a tracker mortgage was, or thought it was weird that the only way to motivate rich people to work is to give them loads of money, but the only way to motivate poor people to work is to remove their money.

Other, more sensible people had done the reading and had their reasons. And then the chancellor of the exchequer gave £65 billion to the richest people in the country in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis and the pound’s value decayed faster than a pear bought in a petrol station. I would have said this was a bad thing, both morally and financially, that the core project of government should be creating a net of security through which no one person should fall.

That taxes should pay for public services for the people who work for a living, rather than adding to the parasitic wealth hoarded by those who move numbers around.

That any strong economy should be populated by people whose basic needs are met plus a little bit of spending power left over, not just because they are human beings who deserve to live with dignity in the world’s 5th richest country, but so that they can actually use the businesses and services an economy needs to survive, let alone thrive.

And here I am, proven right. About money. If that doesn’t scare us, nothing should.