Living costs are rising, but what happens when a ‘skint’ friend isn’t as cash-strapped as they claim? From secret savings to subsidised splurges, WH explores the murky wealth gap dividing friendships
Siobhan’s story will make you wince. After her friend Mark* was made redundant – and could no longer afford to participate in their plans – she started to pick up his social tab. Over six months in her late thirties, the now 44-year-old bought him drinks, Sunday roasts and lunches near her office. On his birthday that year, Siobhan told him to fill a picnic basket with whatever he wanted from Waitrose, offering to foot the bill (what a woman). They were eating their sandwiches when Mark dropped into the conversation that his parents had given him £1,000. He was going to buy a MacBook. ‘By that point I’d spent about £900 subbing him,’ Siobhan tells WH. ‘So I told him it would really help my overdraft if he could use his birthday money to buy his own drinks in future. He replied, “I don’t know what that’s like, I’ve never been overdrawn.”’ Siobhan’s stomach fell. It transpired that Mark wasn’t strapped for cash at all; he never had been. He had a healthy savings account – one he wasn’t keen to dip into. Not long after that conversation, he bought a flat.
Siobhan had been brokefished – a money misrepresentation you’ll know from the friend who treats loans like legal tender and still owes on Splitwise from a trip you took pre-Covid. A new riff on catfishing – where a fake online identity is used to lure you into a relationship – brokefishing paints a misleading image of someone’s monetary situation to lure you into dishing out sympathy, financial aid or one more large glass of red. As October’s energy price-hike promises to rob even more money from the ‘fun’ pot, are you about to fall hook, line and sinker?
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Vicky Reynal knows more about brokefishing than most. The psychotherapist and financial therapist (reynal-psychotherapist. co.uk) doesn’t approach money issues by telling clients to buy fewer avocados, but by unpicking cash’s complex emotional core, such as self-limiting beliefs (‘I can’t budget’) or salary shame.
‘Brokefishing has varying degrees of malicious intent,’ she shares. At one end of the scale, are the super-budgeters. Triggered by cling-on-to-your-bank-card global threats such as inflation, they have a catastrophised view that can present as money dysmorphia. ‘They might constantly feel anxious about their finances, hoard money or ask friends for money – portraying themselves as not having enough (even if the reality is that they can afford more),’ she explains, with the caveat that they’re unlikely to do it in a deceptive way and even less likely to spend it on something luxurious. At the
