Harry Harris

Money

My First Big Paycheck: Why I Spent It On A Moby Dick Tattoo

How a frivolous purchase taught me to ignore my financial anxiety

Our first paychecks are often the most memorable. In this GOOD Money series, people share the details of their first career splurge—the first time they made real money and how they spent it.

When I was a teenager, saving money was easy. I grew up in the Wales countryside, in a small town of around 2000 people. Frankly, there wasn’t much of anything to spend your money on. We weren’t poor, I don’t think (though I imagine we had our fair share of credit cards), but we weren’t rich either. The kind of high-price things that people I knew spent their money on—video games, nice trainers, new phones—I never thought were within my own financial reach, so I never developed an interest in them. The money I made from a weekend job washing dishes or from a birthday, or even from the loose change I squirrelled away, I deposited into a post office bank account routinely. At one point, I had upwards of £1000 put away.

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