I DID A JOB I LOVED, BUT NOW HAVE NO SAVINGS – AND CAN’T RETIRE LIKE MY FRIENDS

Last weekend, I had lunch at a scenic restaurant in Richmond. A gaggle of middle-aged women, we spent a leisurely three hours laughing and tucking into steak tartare, profiteroles, and quaffing expensive wine – well, all except me.

I picked at a side salad and sipped fizzy water. Then, when the bill came round, one bright spark suggested splitting it equally. I groaned. Here we go again, I thought as I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I’d (intentionally) spent a fiver and they were on their third bottle of sancerre and expected me to chip in. Didn’t they realise I’m on a tight budget?

Don’t get me wrong, I adore my friends. But being the less financially stable member of the group has sadly become par for the course and I sometimes resent their cosy lives; the difference in wealth has a way of destroying friendships.

At 64, and single, my career as a journalist and now freelance-writer does mean I’m facing a miserable sort of penury, thanks to my total failure to make any provision for old age. And it turns out I’m not alone: research from the University of Bristol published this week found that your career – rather than how much you earn – dictates your propensity for saving.

With business, sales and finance jobs being at the top of the pile and creatives (artists, and writers like me) being much less likely to save, fewer than half of us are saving at all. It is almost a cliché, but one I know to be true. I am that typical impoverished creative who – following artistic tradition – pursued my childhood dream to become a writer, but was recklessly extravagant with anything I earned and never bothered to build a nest egg.

Yes, I might have a successful career as a journalist and author, but I have zero pennies in the pot. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been happier in a nine-five with a monthly salary. It sounds idyllic. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

My twenties, when I worked as a features writer for women’s magazines, were a carousel of high-profile dinners, designer outfits, exciting parties and jetting off to interview celebrities. Savings? Forget it. The future was so far down the list of priorities that it disappeared.

I remember seeing a £600 pair of gorgeous black suede Jimmy Choo boots. Despite it being nearly half a month’s salary, I breezed in, swiped my credit card and left feeling a thrilling shiver of pleasure. As an experience junkie, why did I need to think about saving for later?

In my thirties, my friends who were in more financial careers – who’d talk about pensions and spreadsheets (the Bristol study found some professions better equipped employees to save because of skills picked up at work) – started to set up nest eggs, as well as settling down with investment banker husbands. Weddings became a bi-monthly feature before their 2.4 children.

I remember drumming my fingers on the table in boredom at dinner parties as Smug Marrieds talked about getting on the first rung of the property ladder. How tedious, I thought, as I sloped off to some nightclub. In the mid-90s I had an opportunity to do the same but turned it down. When I got my first book deal I could have put down a deposit on a London flat that might have seen me through to my old age. I found a lovely place I could afford easily but changed my mind; I didn’t want the pressure of owning a property.

Instead, I walked out of Joseph in a new brown suede coat with a fur collar, and a new dress from Betsey Johnson and forgot all about the flat. It’s now worth over £750,000 – and I have never again been in a financial position to buy as I’ve never earned as much since.

I only started to worry about my finances seriously when I hit my fifties and realised that a bestselling novel or a lucrative column wasn’t going to appear. But by then I was unsure how to mitigate the problem. I was stuck in it.

Today, I feel a kind of hopelessness that I’ve left everything too late. My earnings just about tide me over, but I rarely have enough left to stash for a rainy day, let alone for retirement. I love my job but at this rate I will still be tapping away into my dotage. In fact I am so broke, sometimes I cant even afford to heat the flat and spend my days holed up in my bedroom.

I live in a flat left to me by my parents – I pay the mortgage and service charge – but it does at least save me from living in a grim bedsit. This is a far cry from my financially-savvy friends who are talking about stocks and shares ISAs. One university friend who lives in Paris with her family told me I should have bitten the bullet and married my fiance in my thirties, like she did.

This has become one of the unexpected consequences of my financial situation: friendship needs shared experience to flourish. When our lives take different paths, it can be hard to find a common ground. Last month I was talking to a monied friend on the phone, when suddenly there was silence. Why? We had nothing in common. She wanted to talk about investing and I was thinking about how I could only afford beans and rice for dinner.

I know this is my fault. Both for picking a creative career and having sacrificed saving for a life of momentary pleasures. But now I see that what separates people in mid-life more than anything else – including marriage or parenthood status – is money (or lack of it).

I have become a square peg in a round hole. Everyone else is arranging lunches at nice restaurants, getting mani-pedis and swishy blow-dries, or comparing soft furnishings from Peter Jones and I am wondering if I can heat my flat. This means the phone has stopped ringing and invitations dried up. There is a stigma about being old and poor, a whiff of Eau de Failure.

A friend who recently bought a house in France didn’t bother inviting me to celebrate the move, because she knew I couldn’t afford it. I only found out when someone put a photo on Instagram.

“You ruin the atmosphere,” a friend who had gone told me later that day over coffee. Turns out that having to always worry about the “poor friend” brings the group down. They feel guilty.

I know they don’t do it on purpose. But what has become clear is that those like me who are stuck in a dull monotony that a lack of money brings find ourselves staring into the abyss with only cans of baked beans for company.

So what’s the answer? While I massively regret not saving sooner, I don’t regret the fun and the excitement that my life bought me. I just never realised I would lose my friendships as a result.

2026-02-04T10:36:48Z