Oh, grow up! Sam Beckbessinger’s adult’s-only guide to managing your money

Money makes the world go round, the world go round, the world go round, as the cabaret singers and the financial advisers like to remind us. But all that money-go-rounding can put your head in a spin, as you battle to balance your budget, top up your savings, and scrimp just a teeny bit of disposable income to dispose of by the time the end of the month crawls around. If that sounds like you and everybody else you know, then Sam Beckbessigner has some sage advice to offer. “Manage your money like a f*cking grownup,” she says, that being the title of her not-so-coy book on the subject, although she did thankfully include an asterisk for the faint-of-heart. So who exactly is Sam, and how did she learn the secrets of staying solvent, and maybe even building some wealth, merely by acting your age? As she explains in this on-the-money chat with Ruda, it all comes down to change. Change your attitude, change your outlook, change the way you think about, look at, and work with money, and it will all start falling into place. Sam admits that she herself struggled with “self-limiting narratives about money”, working in jobs she hated because she was terrified of being broke. Then she overspent to “fill the hole of how miserable these jobs were making me”, a vicious cycle that she only managed to bring to a halt when she spent a few weeks at Yale on a scholarship, meeting fellow Africans, far away from home, who inspired her to look at her middle-class angst in a whole new way. Now, as a tech entrepreneur and writer, she is putting those principles to good use as a “money coach” with a difference. Her book, fun, quirky, and packed with practical wisdom, is all the proof you need that managing your capital doesn’t need to be a chore, and that it’s never late to make your money grow up too.