I don't know how much my mortgage repayments are. Or how much is in my current account, writes Róisín Ingle.
I know, roughly, what I get paid but not how much of it goes in tax. My outgoings are many and varied. A car loan. Another loan. A third for something else. Bills arrive and get paid, but I don't look at them. Twice last year I left large sums of money at cash machines. Once last year I lost my wallet and about €150. Five years ago I didn't have the cop-on to open an SSIA.
None of this was weighing particularly heavily on my mind when I asked the taxi driver to take me to a Wealth of Women seminar one recent Saturday morning. "Wealth of Women?" he asked. "What's that all about?" I couldn't tell him much, as I didn't know. The seminar was one of those things I'd agreed to because the woman was so nice on the phone and so persistent in her follow-up calls.
I didn't even know the full address. We circled St Stephen's Green a couple of times until, frustrated, I phoned my mother to do some Googling for me. By the time I found the place I was 20 minutes late, and a €7 taxi ride had mutated into a €20 orienteering expedition. Wealth of women. The irony was not lost on me.
I don't know what I expected. Power-dressing women talking about stocks and shares? I didn't, in any case, expect a small office smelling faintly of incense and containing a group of women - not a power suit to be seen - introducing themselves and explaining why they were there. "I don't think I value money enough," I heard myself say when my turn came around. I wasn't sure what I meant.
As the seminar got under way I realised I'd never looked at my relationship with money or thought much about my financial expectations. WoW's motto is: "Because how you do money is how you do life." The way I do money is haphazard, unfocused, sometimes wasteful and mostly instinctive. It is the way I do life.
It all made sense, but the name of the organisation had niggled a bit even before I arrived. What about the wealth of men? Something the seminar facilitator said reduced the niggle to a manageable level. She asked us how many woman in Ireland over 65 are able to support themselves independently, without help from family or the Government. I guessed it would be low, but not as low as 6 per cent. She said women had "dropped the ball" on wealth. The gap between what men and women earn is still a big issue. A couple of years ago a few enterprising Irish women set up WoW to try to turn this around.
We were told to write a letter to money. Free writing - for fast, raw, exact and easy - is key to the WoW approach. No punctuation required; just stream-of-consciousness stuff that is supposed to clear out the dross and allow through pearls of wisdom. A letter to money over a few minutes. Go.
Here is an edited, er, highlight of my missive. "Dear Money I am ambivalent towards you I like the fact that you can take me out and bring me to fancy restaurants and allow me to spend hours in karaoke booths but if you weren't around as much it wouldn't bother me there is something that makes me feel guilty about wanting you yet I will still go for a pay rise because I feel I'm worth it it's all very confusing."
We talked about how, at school, we learn a lot of stuff we never use again in everyday life. About how we aren't taught how to use, accumulate, manage and value money. In the past women were not encouraged to strive for financial power, and, although this has changed, many of us, men and women, are not internally wired to strive for it. Many of us, men and women, find finance intimidating. So to various degrees, from extreme poverty to missed opportunity, we get left behind.
Later, money got a chance to set the record straight. We were encouraged to write a letter from money's point of view, to become a kind of ventriloquist for wealth. Having been given the right to reply, he - money is always a he - was very tough. The gist was: "Dear Róisín, you are a waster. I can't figure you out. Everyone else is chasing me, but you just waste me, discard me and treat me like rubbish. I could do so much for you, but you don't deserve me, the way you are carrying on."
Money reduced me to tears that day, but after signing up for membership I walked out wanting more. More power, more prosperity, more well-being, more money. And for once all this wanting didn't make me feel greedy or guilty.
See www.wealthofwomen.com or call 086-1675272