OTEGHA UWAGBA

It’s a week before her 35th birthday and Otegha Uwagba has just gotten off the phone with her mortgage broker. The two-bedroom South London flat she bought in 2020, at the height of pandemic, is due to be remortgaged, so it’s time to strategize.

“Because I bought my flat when interest rates were historically low and they are no longer historically low, I’m going to have to pay more each month. And that’s fine, I can afford it—I’m resentful of it, but it’s fine,” she says with a grin. “In my 20s, an unexpected £80 [$100] penalty would ruin my week. Now I’m much more equipped to handle the financial unpredictability.”

The story of how Uwagba came to buy the apartment forms the triumphant final chapter of her 2021 memoir, We Need to Talk About Money. In it, she traces her journey from demoralized public school student to private school scholarship kid to underemployed Oxford graduate; and her later experiences with the casual sexism of media boys’ clubs, a rotation of nightmare living situations, and the on-and-off-again financial precarity of her 20s. Personal anecdotes are intercut with observations about liberal guilt, the beauty tax, the #GirlBoss and “the right type of Black.”

Throughout, she reflects on the impact growing up in a modest Nigerian immigrant household (her family moved to the UK when she was five) has had on her attitudes toward money. When she didn’t have it, she felt like a failure. When she did, she was vigilant—pathologically saving and afraid of spending.

“I thought, I cannot be the only person who has a relationship with money that’s this complicated and this emotionally fraught and anxiety-ridden,” she says, recalling the moment she conceptualized the book in 2017. “I remember making notes on my phone that were literally something like, ‘A book about women and the emotional turmoil of money told through my own stories. Part memoir, part cultural commentary.’”

The book became a Sunday Times bestseller, in the process subverting the chic-and-successful-girl-about-town facade Uwagba had been projecting on social media and in glossy magazine profiles. Having founded Women Who in 2016, a now-defunct community supporting women working in creative industries, she’d made a name for herself with articles, speaking gigs and a podcast that centered on money, careers and feminism.

The longest sections of her first book, 2017’s Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, pertained to money management and negotiating salaries. Her second book, Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods (2020)—released months after the murder of George Floyd and the protests and performative allyship that followed—approached the topic from another direction, reflecting on the mental labor required of Black people to navigate whiteness and suggesting that true racial equality requires a redistribution of wealth, power and opportunities. 

But though she seemed to have her life together when she first conceived of We Need to Talk About Money, she explains that she was actually living at home with her parents in South London and earning very little. The future was a blur; homeownership was an impossible dream. 

It was only when royalties from her first book rolled in that the dream came into focus. Even then, buying her first apartment, just as she turned 30, necessitated not only years of “penny-pinching and counting and planning and worrying,” as Uwagba writes, but also having to endure COVID-era restrictions on house viewings, deceitful real estate agents and lenders who doubted her viability as a self-employed solo buyer. In doing so, she joined the minority of Black Africans (22% versus 68% of white households) and millennials (39%) in the UK who own their homes.

The roots of our problematic relationships with money—intergenerational wealth transfer, workplace sexism, austerity politics—is something she comes back to repeatedly in We Need to Talk About Money. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying to cast Uwagba as a millennial Suze Orman, doling out advice to the masses sporting Ganni and Loewe. Editors and producers still reach out for her quick tips for financial success and fighting the system; they’re looking for pat behavioral solutions to the systemic issues she describes. “They want the neat bow, the happy ending,” she says. She routinely declines.

“It’s impossible to give one-size-fits-all money advice,” Uwagba says. “Is this person married or divorced? How old are they? Are they renting or homeowning? Are they Black or white? I decided around the time that I was writing this book that that’s not what I was interested in doing with my platform.”

“A lot of the book is like, ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’” she continues. “Here are some mistakes I made; here are some ways in which I was naive. Here are things that I wish I’d known or done differently.” Your boss could be passing you over for opportunities because you aren’t white or male, she suggests, or your progressive friends are probably too embarrassed to tell you that parental help, not sensible saving, is what landed them their new apartment.

“So, in that sense, I hope it’s informative or educational, but I never set out to write a how-to,” she says. “I can’t help you with that situation personally. But hopefully, now that your eyes are open to it, you might start thinking about how you can make some changes.”

The success of We Need to Talk About Money presaged a wider change in how—and how much—we talk about money. “The cultural conversations have really changed,” Uwagba says. “Back in 2017, 2016, people were not talking openly about money and what they were being paid, and even I wasn’t really sharing figures with friends in terms that I do—and I think we all do—much more freely now.”

Indeed, Refinery29’s wildly popular Money Diaries series, in which working women track their spending over the course of a week, has bred legions of imitators offering insights into the habits of normal people. But this shift is particularly obvious on social media, where regular people cheerily confess how much they’re paid, how much they pay in rent and how much they have in savings. In 2024, TikTok reported a 373% annual rise in financial content, and a recent survey found that 59% of 18-to-30-year-olds follow a “finfluencer.” What was once personal finance, Uwagba says, is now public information—often framed as a lifestyle topic.

“I just have some reservations about how much depth some of these conversations actually contain. Some of it feels quite surface level and designed so some media outlet can drive clicks with a splashy headline—“Here’s how I managed to buy my first flat when I was just NINETEEN.” And then there are a lot of unqualified people doling out financial advice with the aim of building their own platforms, and of course monetizing that.”

“But I’m pretty financially literate,” she concedes. “I imagine for a lot of people—who haven’t spent years researching and writing about this topic, and don’t necessarily feel on top of their finances—that content is actually really helpful.”

She wears a dress by TALLER MARMO and a ring by TOM WOOD.