It's not so much that I like having money as I hate not having it. I've been poor for most of my life, and I remember clearly what it was like. The severely restricted diet. The wearing of rags. The enforced staying in. The relentless grinding pressure of it (something which those programmes in which a politician swaps places with a pauper for a week miss by many millions of miles). The dreading of the postman. The sacrificial decisions: how should I spend today's 60 pence? On food or a newspaper? I had a roof over my head, but that was precarious, since the housing benefit cheques were, of necessity, often cashed and spent on food, and only the uncommon largesse of my landlord kept it there but there was often no gas or electricity under that roof. I'd eat beans straight from the tin, wrapped in a blanket, reading by candlelight. The police matron who lived upstairs would bring me cakes. No TV, no stereo. No radio alarm to wake me up in the morning, and what was there to get up for anyway? It's unfunny.

Anyway, that was a long time ago, but I was reminded of penury's manifold miseries towards the end of last year when, for reasons too many and complicated and tedious to go into here, I found myself without any money. I was maxed out on two credit cards and had bled every last available penny from the overdrafts on two current accounts. I'd harvested my library and sold boxes of books. I'd clawed every scrap of money I could from my publishers, and was desperately goading my agent into digging up any yet-to-be-honoured foreign rights or royalties. Serbia? Don't they owe me a few quid? Did Romania ever cough up for my first novel? My girlfriend was paying my share of the mortgage, car hire purchase, utility and phone bills, council tax, insurances etc., which meant that yet another debt was stacking up for me, and meant that she was poor, too. Both our social lives shrivelled. And I realised something which I'd forgotten; that to be poor is an extremely expensive business. The charges appear from everywhere. My broadband account shut down, my DVD online rental, my Amazon account. Every returned standing order or direct debit, every bounced cheque, incurred an extra charge from the bank. Halifax, in fact, charged me a pound a day for my arranged overdraft, and five pounds a day for the unarranged one.

Their credit card department went hysterical: the first missed payment in a decade and they went into full-on screaming-indignation mode. As the wheedling phonecalls began to come every half hour, as the threatening letters began to torrent onto my doormat, as the debts grew higher and higher with charges and ever more insurmountable, it struck me; this is punitive. I'd forgotten that aspect of being poor; that it is a financially punishable offence. You're effectively fined for having no money, as if you're somehow acting criminally, or are morally suspect. The banks charge you for exceeding your overdraft limit, which happened because they charged you for being overdrawn.

Meanwhile, the bankers themselves, while being demonstrably bad at their jobs, award themselves huge bonuses, and suck out of you every penny you don't have, thereby ensuring that you remain in their debt. People don't want to be poor. They get that way through mistakes, the wrong decisions, an inability to be opportunistic; but they stay that way through acquisitive ideologies of wealth: of the already rich needing, and being able to, keep them there. There is no concession to, or understanding of, peculiar personal circumstance. It's just: you owe us money? Can't pay? In that case you owe us more.
I could see, last year, how easy it is to get into debt, and how impossible it is to get out of. The depth of the debt worsens with each day of its duration. I was lucky; I received a large chunk of money and paid every last greedy grabbing person off. And I closed my Halifax account and they were aghast: Why? Because of your extortionate charges. Ah, they said, but if you pay in £1000 each month, we give you a fiver. How much more can someone not get something? If I'm paying £250 each week into my bank, I don't need another £1.25, but if I'm overdrawn, then I really need not to be charged £5 a day. They looked at me blankly. Yes, but we award you five pounds… Might as well explain quantum mechanics to a salmon sandwich.

There's help for a lot of things out there; mental or physical illness, loneliness, material improvements or repairs - the means exist to alleviate such things. But if you're poor? Forget it. You're on your own. Caring organisations, such as the one my partner works for, are constantly having their funding cut because they do not generate money, and the welfare of the old and the infirm is only, in capitalist eyes, a social burden. Greed proliferates because poverty is so horrible. What to do? Easy; avoid being poor with all your strength, while you've still got it. And spend, gleefully, every penny you have.

© Niall Griffiths 2010

Why do they charge you more when you can’t pay? Niall Griffiths rages against the machine

Bunch of bankers