Why are so many smart women so bad with money?

This is a conversation between me and an unnamed young man at the Halifax, a bank in the UK. I have pressed many, many buttons on my phone before reaching this stage.

Me: "I would like to make an appointment to talk to someone about my mortgage. Someone quite high up."

Young man: "You can talk to a mortgage adviser over the phone."

Me: "I want to talk to someone who can use their discretion and make an executive decision. Do you have a head office?"

Young man: "We do, yes, but I can't make you an appointment there. If you want to make a complaint, you need to write a letter."

Me: "No, I just want to talk to someone before I kill myself."

He can't cope with me, so our conversation ends.

The reason for this fraught exchange? I am mired in debt: £200,000 (Dh1.1 million) worth, in fact. That doesn't include my mortgage; it's credit cards, loans and overdrafts.

It sounds like a staggering amount of money and it is. But the really shocking thing is how easy it was to accrue. And how difficult it is proving to get back on track.

Yes, my case may be extreme, but I'm certainly not the only one grappling with this situation.

Unable to cope

I've received 4,000 letters and emails, the majority from women saying they, too, had let their finances fall into disarray and simply could not cope.

They were not the stereotype of dim-witted debtors. They were often successful, intelligent, independent women who had been the victim of failed marriages, redundancy, the recession, even simply red tape or unfair interest rates, and were struggling to see a way out.

As if in a quagmire, the more they struggled to get free, the deeper in trouble they found themselves.

Some of my friends contacted me, too. One is a businesswoman who employs dozens of workers, another is a married woman with several children, and a third is a high-profile woman on TV. They all confessed they live in fear of bills.

One famous novelist told me she has a drawer stuffed full of unopened envelopes. She has a son with dyslexia in a private school, and is on antidepressants, unable to see a way out of her debts.

How can so many smart women be so naive with their money? What makes us dig ourselves into debt and push our heads into the sand in a way that men do not? And why don't we learn from our mistakes?

Could it be a generational thing? Unlike our mothers, who relied on their husbands and rarely divorced, we are the first generation of women who struck out on our own. And yet we are so ill-equipped. According to a survey last month, 47 per cent of women have no pension arrangements, compared to 28 per cent of men.

When I spoke to my friends, not one could tell me the interest rate they were paying on their mortgage or what APR meant. We are supposed to be self-sufficient, but a colleague admitted: "I've always thought I'd marry money."

And there are others who took time out of work to have children, so have not made enough National Insurance contributions.

I suspect we're sitting on a poverty time bomb. Women owe nearly £2 billion more than men, even though we earn much less. But don't think this means we are all guilty of splashing money on Jimmy Choos.

Nicola Scowen, of Women In Debt, a helpline for women with financial worries, says women are paying the price of carrying the family burden of financial responsibility. "The woman is invariably the doer, the shopper," she says. "She is the one in control of the money, the one who will buy a buggy for the baby or book a holiday for the children, while a man will just not bother." Hence, she is the one who overspends.

That is what happened in my marriage. After my divorce, I vowed never to support anyone ever again or to be over-generous, which was always my way — and many women's way — of getting men to like me.

But then it happened all over again. My financial problems stem from the moment I moved from London to Devon. I took over a conversion of a barn and the costs spiralled out of control. It ended up 150 per cent over budget, six months behind schedule.

Yes, I should have stopped the build or read the riot act to the builders, plumbers, carpenters and electricians. But, like many women, I wanted to be liked even more than I wanted to be solvent.

So when I was unable to pay the six or seven men's wages last autumn, I tried to do the right thing. I went to see my personal bank manager. Bear in mind, I have banked with them since 1977 and they've made a great deal of money from me. I have a £10,000 overdraft limit, and all I asked for was an extra £5,000 so I could pay the builders. I was turned down.

I felt I had no option but to put their wages on my credit cards. From that point, things went from bad to worse.

American Express brought in a debt collector and agents for my other two credit cards started to chase me. Every time they phoned, they charged me more.

Finally, the building work was finished, but the nightmare didn't end. I stopped spending, but the interest meant I was never able to catch up. I was late paying my mortgage; every time Halifax called me about it, they fined me £35.

Options

I could see no other way than to sell the property and clear my debts. But if only it was that simple.

I wanted to buy a smaller property with a more modest mortgage. But I've been told I will never qualify for another home loan because I had been late with three payments (due to a direct debit mistake).

So my only option is to buy something outright with whatever money I have left after I've sold my home and paid off the mortgage.

Ah, but if I pay off my mortgage before next July, I will be slapped with a £21,000 penalty. In other words, I can't afford to sell my home to settle my debts and I can't afford to stay there. It's madness. It's little wonder I'm having sleepless nights and am dogged by fear and worry.

I feel powerless, and it's this despair that women have written to me about. Janine, 42, wrote to say that, five years ago, her husband left her for his ‘younger, blonder' secretary and she was left to bring up their sons, then aged five and one, on her part-time optician's salary.

She says: "Though I never missed a single mortgage payment, I picked up a default on a store card in the same year. But when I sold my house, paid off the mortgage and tried to buy another home, no one would lend me money because of my credit record."

Nicola Scowen, 43, is married with four stepchildren. Before setting up Women In Debt, she was forced to remortgage her house three times to pay off her credit cards."I know what it's like when your credit cards talk to you. They tell you: ‘I am not real money'," she says. "I work at it every day, trying not to listen. It's hard."

Sense of failure

Sometimes, it's not the women who have accrued the debt, but their partners. Georgina Earle is a single mother of 40 with three children, whose ex left her with debts, all taken out in her name. Yet she is the one left nursing a sense of failure. "Women feel they have let people down when they can't make ends meet," she says. "They hide money worries from their partners. They are ashamed and start avoiding the phone and not opening the post."

So what are we to do? When I tell Nicola Scowen that despite having faced my fears and arranging to see my bank manager, I am still no further ahead, she urges me to be persistent.

"The worst thing you can do is nothing. An insolvency practitioner will arrange voluntary arrangement with your creditors to pay off a small amount each month, with the interest frozen. It will dent your credit history, but I suspect it's ruined anyway. And after six years, you get a clean slate."

I have set up a direct debit for all my credit cards for the minimum amount, which means I will never be late with a payment. I can pay off chunks when I have the money. And I have set up online banking so I always know how much money is in my account, rather than just hoping for the best.

I tell Nicola the worst part of all this is feeling like a pariah. I was sat at a cafe the other day, watching women walking past and I thought: ‘Why can't I be like them? Why do I have the weight of the world on my shoulders?'

"So many women are like you," says Nicola. "I have a friend who told me she will sit at dinner with her friends and feel like a fraud because she owes so much. But there are lots of us out there. We need to stop feeling ashamed of ourselves. There is no impossible situation. There is always a solution." I, for one, hope she's right.

Why do you think an increasing number of women are in a financial mess? Do you know of women who are good at managing their finances? Tell us at readers@gulfnews.com