EXPERIENCE
Despite a successful career in fashion, Stacey Duguid was never quite in control of her finances – a problem that intensified when she married and had children. Now divorced, she shares the long road to navigating her way to a place of security
On my 44th birthday, my then husband took me away for the weekend to a snazzy new hotel, The Fife Arms. A former coach-tour hotel I’d visited as a child now transformed by art behemoths
Hauser & Wirth. It was walking into the hotel that weekend that gave me the idea I hoped would secure my financial future: what if I were to buy my own property nearby, with a view to developing it into an Airbnb?
Despite being two decades into a career and with two young children, the sad reality was that I still had no savings or pension. In my early 20s, I’d chosen a career in fashion on a salary that barely covered the cost of living in London because I loved it and was good at it – all the while accepting the fact that the industry’s version of a pay rise was free handbags or expensive moisturisers.
I’d spent the past few years trying to maintain my career amid the maelstrom of motherhood, defeated by the knowledge that it was my husband who paid for our lives. It was a set-up that felt completely incongruous to my background growing up in Manchester and Scotland, seeing my mother work three jobs to keep the household afloat.
Although nobody ever said it, when working in fashion, ‘looking the part’ felt somehow part of our contracts – as if written in invisible ink. And so I shopped, buoyed by new-season ‘workwear’ and vodka, maxing out credit cards and dipping lower into my overdraft. If lipstick and hairspray were my mother’s armour in Ashton-under-Lyne, designer clothes and expensive shoes were mine at Paris Fashion Week.
It was when I reached my 40th birthday that I realised I was no closer to a disposable income or financial independence than I had been in my 20s. Why it took another four years to have my epiphany at The Fife Arms, I don’t know – perhaps it was the fact that, by then, my children were in school and I could make some different decisions about my future.
And so, a few months after our mini-break, I secured my first-ever corporate job with a decent salary. At the same time, I learned that I could finally get my own chunkysized mortgage, and flew back to Aberdeen alone to make an offer on a five-bedroom bungalow in Braemar. For some reason, the ‘masterplan’ I had conjured up while sipping something a bit too strong in an expensive hotel now felt totally viable. Disempowered as I was by my financial status within the household, even keeping the secret to myself made me feel more alive.
Back at home, as we chopped vegetables for a stir-fry, I blurted out the news to my husband: ‘I’ve found a house, made an offer on it and it’s
