[Melancholy music]
Sue: Twenty years ago, when my marriage broke down, my life was turned upside down and I really didn’t know where I was going to go or what I was going to do.I couldn’t afford new clothes. I could barely afford the food. There were no food banks at the time, so that’s why everything had to go on my credit card and putting food on your credit card is really bad news.
[Upbeat music]
I became a Christian on November 2003 and started going to church regularly, and that made a huge difference. And the church then started doing money coaching, and I think I was one of the first people to actually join in with that. That made a huge difference to the way that I learned to budget.
I had a serious credit card debt then, and because of their help I managed to pay that credit card debt off in ten months. Certainly, after I’d done money coaching, I was well aware that I had a sense of freedom, that I could do other things that I hadn’t been able to do before. That feeling of hope is so, so good. It really is.
[Background chatting]
The lady running that asked me if I would become the lead coach. And for three days I remember being really quite traumatised by it because I didn’t think I’d be good enough. I didn’t think I knew enough, but as soon as I said yes and was doing what I think God wanted me to do, all of my fears and worries just went away, like that and I thought, ‘Yes, I can do this.’
When I did the training for the money coaching, I became aware that it was a really, really good course. Seeing it from the other side, being a coach and not being a participant, really brought it home to me how much it helped me, but then how I could help other people and I thought it was such a worthwhile thing to do.
You get people in their early twenties, middle aged, older people, retired people — there’s a really big cross-section. So it’s not just one group that is vulnerable. It actually could apply to lots and lots of different people and lots and lots of different groups.
[Enthusiastic ‘Hooray, I agree with you!’, clip taken from money coaching session]
Now what we see is that people come, but then they come back to church for some of the other events that we have, and it’s so lovely to see them. One guy phoned me up one day and said would I think about joining the prison and running the course inside there. And again, that was another one. I thought, ‘Prison, can I do that?’ But then I remembered the saying in the Bible about Jesus saying, ‘You gave me something to drink.’ ‘You visited me when I was sick and you visited me in prison.’ And I thought ‘Prison.’ ‘That’s the only one that I’ve never done.’
It was scary. The first time, it’s scary but I enjoyed it and they seemed to get a lot out of it because we are showing them skills that they can use once they get out of prison. The prisoners asked us how CAP could actually run these courses, and I said, ‘well, we’re Life Changers and we pay money every month to CAP to help run these.’ And they were absolutely amazed.
[Laughing]
My life journey has been made so much easier by God and also having done the CAP money coaching. Those two things together have saved me basically, they really have. And I feel more contented, I’m not so anxious, very rarely am I anxious now, and I just know that everything is going to be okay.
