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feature Turpin Time: your money and your life Opting for a career in newspaper journalism is like crossing Dick Turpin on a particularly bad night. He will take not only your money, but also your life.
It’s commonly accepted that journalists are underpaid. But 25-year-old Spanish graduate Siobhan, like many her age, never imagined that her first years after university would be so tough. “When I was at university, I thought that I would leave and have this fantastic job, where I would be speaking languages all the time and travelling the world and have a ridiculously glamorous flat.” It is extremely rare that graduates are able to realise this kind of lifestyle early on. But for those whose hearts are set on journalism, such a lifestyle is pure fantasy. For the student-turned-reporter, every month is a financial struggling, juggling act that involves paying off debt, paying rent and budgeting. It’s been an arduous journey that started the first day she arrived at university. No stranger to hard work, Siobhan put herself through higher education without any contribution from her parents. She worked wherever she could, from pulling pints in the local pub to accepting a (by British standards) Peruvian pittance for 10 months as part of her course. Despite all her efforts to remain in the black, debts have invariably mounted up. According to Spring 2005 figures by the graduate Prospects, the Higher Education Careers Services Unit, her debts represent the same as the average student today. “I have a student loan of over £12,000, which is going up, an interest-free overdraft of £2,000 from my student days and I have recently taken to putting things on my interest free credit card when I have nothing in my account,” she admits. On top of that she has signed away a monthly £26 to the Student Loans Company, which for someone on her salary, completely compounds the debt-paying process. She confesses: “I don’t even think that’s making a dent in it”, she says of the loan’s three per cent interest. “If you’re earning £12,000 plus, £26 a month isn’t even going to cover interest for that week.” When asked how much it has increased since she started paying it, she says: “I think it’s risen by about £400. But it depresses me too much to look at it.” And it gets worse. “Toward the end of the month, quite often I’m living on my credit card,” she says, whose interest free offer expires in November. “In the last few months I haven’t been able to pay it off, so it is currently at about £1,400.” “The credit card companies love people like me because they know I can never pay it off.” Siobhan is not a big spender, though. She is a ruthless budgeter. She has to be. Her trainee reporter job just simply cannot pay her current bills and her old debts together. “I spend about £60 a month on food, which I suppose is quite a lot, but I eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables, which cost more,” she says. “I really have to budget when I go round the supermarket. I often don’t buy luxury things just for pleasure, but have to plan what kind of meal I’m going to have. I only shop at Asda or Netto as the prices are so low.” So what about lunch while she is out chasing stories? “I rarely buy a ready-made lunch because I can't afford it. That is regarded as a luxury. I treat myself sometimes to a coffee in the morning, but know I really shouldn’t, even though it is only 80p.” Besides food, there is also transport to budget for. Since she doesn’t drive, and couldn’t even afford to run a car even if she did have a driving licence, Siobhan has to rely on trains. This presents a problem when it comes to visiting her boyfriend, who lives in Southampton. “I have had to tell him I can only afford to go visit him once a month because the train fare can sometimes total £50 if I come back at peak time,” she says. “And I can’t afford to do that really.” The only solution is for him to travel by car to visit her. She agrees that the money worries have put a strain on an already difficult long distance relationship. While debts have racked up, guilt about seeing each other has too. Tempers have also frayed. “Quite often I get down there and I’m wound up about stuff with work,” she says. Clearly it doesn’t help that her boyfriend, a secondary school Geography teacher, earns over £10,000 more than her. “He doesn’t think he earns enough,” she remarks, “and I really have to bite my tongue and say: ‘Don’t even talk to me.’” Siobhan knows that she could move back to Southampton if she wanted to, but she would much prefer living amid the excitement of the capital than relive a student’s existence in the south coast town where she lived as an undergraduate. However, as the young journalist will attest, London’s exciting attractions come with a hefty price tag. The same goes for accommodation. Recent research by Mercer Human Resource Consulting shows that England’s capital is still the most expensive city in Europe and the third most expensive in the world after Tokyo and Osaka. Siobhan is well aware of the city’s steep housing costs, but in the interests of safety and in order to be nearer after-work meetings, she has decided to up sticks and relocate to Clapham Common. “I can’t really afford to move”,
she says. “But I’ve been followed home a couple of times
and just thought: ‘I’ve had enough’. And if you
get the last train home at night you’re not going to be home
until 1am.” Now, instead of paying £350 and £25
council tax, she will be forking out an extra £60 per month
combined. Today, for any expenses to be claimed, a wedge of receipts is needed. Receipts or not, there are, however, some out-of-pocket expenses which can never be claimed back. “What it doesn’t account for,” she says, “is when you have a meeting. You finish at 5:30 and you haven’t got enough time to get home so you’ve got to find something to eat while you’re out, and you can’t really put that on expenses – but it is an expense because you’d go home otherwise.” She does claim expenses, though (except for the return train tickets that automatically, and mercilessly, get eaten by the London underground barriers). She’d be silly not to. “I’ve done it a couple of times and felt vindicated when I’ve done it, which is ridiculous because it’s my money going out,” she says. There’s the money going out, then there’s ‘going-out money’. This is when the financial and social-life-arresting sting of Turpin Time really takes hold, when money and life are given up in equal measures. She confesses: “My social life should suffer more because there are things that I don’t go to because I know I can’t afford them. Some friends will have birthdays and in clubs in Chelsea, and I’ll just have to make my excuses.” Her most recent was that she had to work – so rather than going to the birthday barbecue of a friend, who had splashed out a limousine to take her friends to a nightclub, she decided she would have to catch up with them at the club. “I thought there’s no way I can pay for the train fare all the way up to St. Albans, pay for the limousine, pay for wine and then entrance to the club with drinks that night,” explains the lowly paid journalist. “That’d bankrupt me. I did go to the club and I did have a good night, but it would have been nice to have been able to have had the barbecue and have the chance to speak to my friend without screaming over a DJ.” Evidently a low salary is the price one pays for being a journalist. It’s a fact that this journalist was plainly aware of when she decided to enter the profession. “It’s not that I’m embarrassed about what I earn. I just think people are sick of hearing about it,” she relates matter-of-factly. And although the remuneration package does not include private healthcare, a company car and year-round gym membership, job satisfaction is high. Her friends, who work in banks, in the City, PR and marketing, might not be able to make the same claim. Her cousin, with whom she currently lives, certainly could not. Despite having savings, a house, a car and being able to fund month-long trips to Australia, he loathes his job. But although her money and life have been swiped as quickly as a store clerk would swipe rich luvvies’ platinum cards on pay day, the trainee reporter – despite all the evidence to the contrary – attests that she does not do journalism for the pay. “It’s clearly that I do it for love,” she says. “Because I wouldn’t do it for the money. The minute that it stops becoming the job I want to do, then I’ll leave.” |
related links MediaGuardian.co.uk: Going for broke |
Siobhan
Lismore knows this only too well. The trainee reporter for the Wandsworth
and Putney Guardian in London scrapes together just £13,500
a year before tax.