Twelve years inside payroll departments and bank back-offices. Two kids, one overdraft, and the system that closed it. Now read by more than four thousand UK mums.
From a Small Harbour Town to Bestselling Author.
Sarah Elizabeth Mitchell grew up in Whitby, North Yorkshire — a modest household overflowing with second-hand paperbacks. Her mother Anne, a part-time librarian, gave her a love of books and an unshakeable belief that ordinary lives are worth documenting.
She read English Literature at the University of Leeds. When her father suffered a serious heart attack during her second year, Sarah turned to writing as a way through. “I found that if I could write it down, it became something I could hold rather than something that held me,” she says.
After graduating, Sarah started working in a financial firm. Surrounded by colleagues managing household budgets and navigating the invisible anxieties of financial precarity, she saw first-hand the toll money stress takes on families — and especially on women. The seeds of her future work were planted in that beige open-plan office.
Her debut essay collection, The Receipts We Keep, was called “a quiet masterwork of domestic observation” by The Sunday Herald. When the chapter What My Overdraft Taught Me went viral, the book sold over 40,000 copies — and sudently, Sarah had became a sucessful author.
Today, Sarah teaches creative non-fiction at Edinburgh Napier University and mentors emerging writers from working-class backgrounds. With The Mum’s Finance Book, she’s turned decades of lived experience into a practical, honest guide designed for one person: you.
The journey
Sarah wrote this guide for women like you — practical, honest, and without a single spreadsheet in sight.
Read The Mum’s Finance Book — £9 →