If the prospect of taking a proper look at your bank account is enough to trigger a wave of nausea, Clare Seal knows exactly how you feel. On 14 March 2019, Seal had £25,000 in credit card debt, a £2,000 overdraft, and no accessible savings. Finally sitting down and adding up everything she owed was “terrifying”, she says now, recalling that fateful day. Just over a year later, Seal has just released her first book: an “honest” guide to getting to grips with your finances.
Having faced up to the scale of the financial hole she was in, Seal set up her Instagram account, @MyFrugalYear, and shared her first post: a spreadsheet breakdown of her credit card debt, all £25,438.11 of it, out there in black and white for all of the internet to see. “The first step towards change… is admitting you have a problem,” she wrote underneath. Having vowed to get on top of her finances, Seal resolved to document her journey on Instagram “as a way of holding myself to account”.
The mother-of-two’s honesty struck a chord. She swiftly built up a community of more than 55,000 followers, there for her budgeting tips, but also her frank admissions about spending slip ups and grappling with the guilt and shame attached to financial problems – Seal no longer says, “I’m in debt”, only “I have debt”. And she still does, but, as of last month, she had cleared more than £10,000 of it.
Seal’s book is all the more inspiring for the fact that it isn’t written from a place of stress-free solvency, but rather a mid-way point on the mountain she resolved to finally climb .
Here, Seal, who revealed her identity online 12 months after setting up @MyFrugalYear, shares five small, practical steps she took at the start of her journey, all of which had a tangible impact on her efforts to get on top of her finances.“We cut out the subscriptions we weren’t using, or weren’t using enough to justify.”“We spoke to credit card companies about reducing or freezing interest.