Making Friends with Money: How to start feeling wealthy without waiting till you’re rich

Sanni Kruger was once so short of money that all she could afford to eat was baked beans and potatoes. Now an accountant, she has published a book designed to help people who don’t have enough cash – or simply think they don’t - to live more fulfilled lives by changing their attitude to money. Sanni learned about money management as a young girl by helping out at her father’s accountancy practice in her home city of Hamburg, Germany. Now living and working in Bristol, she owns and runs Holistic Money Manager, a financial coaching service for people who need help managing their money. She wrote Making Friends With Money, subtitled How to start feeling wealthy without waiting till you’re rich, after realising how many people allow money problems to dominate their lives. Her work has taught her that there is very little correlation between how much people have and how happy they are. “It’s all about your relationship with the money in your life” she says. “My book invites you to define your real goals and then shows you how to make your money help you to achieve them, however much or little you have. “There is plenty of help and advice available for those who have lots of money and for those who are genuinely poor. But there is very little for the many who are somewhere in between.” The book’s first lesson is how to get out of debt – and stay out of it. “So many of us allow debt to get out of control by trying to pretend it will go away” says Sanni. “It becomes the ogre under the bed, the nagging voice that wakes us in the middle of the night. “It’s far better to take control. With proper planning you can work out a budget that enables you to keep your creditors off your back while leaving enough for the quality of life you want. Once you are out of debt, you will find that money comes to you in ways you hadn’t imagined.”

Born in Hamburg in 1954, Sanni Kruger learned about money management from her father when she left school to work with him in his accountancy practice in the city. After attending nursing college, she embarked on a career in children's nursing in Germany, East Africa and finally England. In 1984-85, partly motivated by her own diagnosis of cervical cancer, she helped to set up the Rainbow Centre, the Bristol-based charity which provides professional support to children and families affected by bereavement and life-threatening illness. She then worked in charity fundraising for a number of years. In 2003, after being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, Sanni decided to go back to accounting and studied through the Open University, obtaining the Certificate in Accounting in 2004. She went on to set up Holistic Money Manager, which helps people to learn how to control their finances in order to achieve their life goals.