“Tea bags were always used more than once”

To mark Talk Money Week, OT is launching the My money diary series, speaking with optometrists in a range of roles about their approach to budgeting and gathering insight on how optometry as a profession is valued.

I’ve paid off my mortgage so most of my money goes on groceries and other bills for the house. I put money aside in case of illness, for travel and for tax. When I was younger, I would spend my money on material things. But over the past five years or so, I have preferred to spend what I earn on experiences.

My parents came over from Hungary just after the war. When I was growing up, they would shop at Polish shops in Wolverhampton. My mother would cook wonderful, nourishing, low-cost dinners. In our house, tea bags were always used more than once. My mother is now 87 and will still tell me off if I have bought cheese from one of the more expensive supermarkets.

These days I do my grocery shopping at Lidl. It is not only good value but there is an element of nostalgia to it too. For transport, I have an electric car. Compared to what I was spending on fuel, the savings are amazing – I might spend £25 a month on extra electricity to run the car.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, people were paid in cash. I can still picture my father coming home from work at the end of the week with his pay, and putting £5 in one envelope for the electric and £5 in another envelope for the gas. When the bill came, there was no running around panicking because the money had been put aside.

My mother is now 87 and will still tell me off if I have bought cheese from one of the more expensive supermarkets

When I started out as an optometrist in the early 1990s, I worked at a hospital in Birmingham for £16,000 a year. All my friends had gone out to get jobs as locums or working with multiples, and were earning twice as much as me. The one financial benefit of working as a hospital optometrist is that the staff accommodation was only £40 a month – which included all the bills and a cleaner. It was three minutes’ walk from the hospital and close to all the amenities of central Birmingham.

After about five years, I was looking to buy my own place, but no bank would give me a mortgage on the basis of my salary. As soon as I started working as a locum, my salary doubled.

When I changed roles to work as a junior lecturer, I took a pay cut – starting off on around £22,000 per year. By the time I left, my salary had increased to £58,000 per year.

There was never too much money in the house when I was a child but it was well-managed. We didn’t have a car or coloured television until I was 12. As a result of money being tight, when I did start to earn an income, I went a little bit over the top. I would buy a nice shirt, shoes or cufflinks – even when I already had 10 nice shirts. I spent more than I should have been spending and I did have a negative bank balance at points, which was not great.

Over the past six to seven years, I have gone the other way where I am struggling to think of the last material thing that I bought. After I became interested in minimalism and decluttering, I’ve probably moved on around 10% of my possessions, and I am aiming to get to 60%. The aim is to reduce duplication – I’ve realised I don’t need 15 fancy ties in my wardrobe or 10 wooden spoons in the kitchen. I recently cleared out the garage, which had boxes of old notes and research papers, and now whenever I go into that space I feel good. It’s like a weight has lifted off my mind – there is no clutter anymore.

What I value about the practices where I locum is that they are always very welcoming. There is never any pressure around conversion rate. The owner understands that some people will need new glasses and some people won’t. At the end of the day, he always thanks me for my work and tells me that he looks forward to seeing me again. That is very different to a previous company I worked for, where the focus was more on profit. I didn’t feel comfortable with that approach. Where I currently work, the owner has bills to pay but his focus is on the patient. His top priority is the patient, then his next priority is looking after his staff – as well as locums like me. Profit comes after that.

As told to Selina Powell