We’re poor as church mice but we still try to live like kings

I looked at my bank balance just before payday the other week and thought: “How the hell am I in the red again?” Finding myself shy isn’t an unusual occurrence in my current account on the eve of payday. By all accounts I earn a decent enough salary in London, well above the living wage. So how come I — like most of my contemporaries in their twenties or early thirties — am short every month?

I happen to know not all countries are like this. In Dubai, where I lived for 15 months before I came here, I was earning less money but could still afford a prosperous lifestyle with taxis everywhere and dream holidays to far-flung places. It was the same in America and Barcelona — the only difference was I wasn’t maxing out my credit card every month as I am now.

Six years on and my lifestyle in London doesn’t ostensibly differ much from my time abroad.

Friends and I live like kings but I’m afraid most of us are all fur coat and no knickers. When I arrived in London, I was aghast to find the only room I could afford based on my meagre salary was what I can only describe as a bunk bed with a desk and a wardrobe underneath. At £500 a month, this tiny box room in Neasden was just under half my monthly salary — I used to bang my head on the ceiling every morning when my alarm went off.

These days I live in nicer digs but I can only afford to go on a dream holiday every two years instead of four times a year because I force myself to squirrel away some cash every month into my holiday fund. Experiences are the only thing we’ve been left with because most of the services we work in are extremely underfunded.

With inflation as high as it is and Brexit looming, most of my contemporaries have made peace with the fact that the banks will never lend us the money to buy a house or even a studio flat in London.

It’s no surprise that more than half the people contacting debt charities are under 40. Millennials earn lower income, don’t have assets and are saddled with student loans. Yesterday the Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Andrew Bailey said: “There is a pronounced build-up of indebtedness amongst the younger age group.”

With the cost of living the way it is, you can forget Prada: one of my friends has managed to max out two of her credit cards trying to pay her monthly rent. Then there’s cost-effective romances — my friend moved in with a gentleman she only met a few weeks ago because “it’s half the bills”.

“When I was your age I would never have been able to afford your lifestyle,” says my mother. But that’s probably because she was busy paying off the mortgage while feeding her five kids.

Luckily neither I nor my friends suffer from those problems. Our mantra has become — to paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara — “We’ll starve tomorrow!”