John Bird: 'At five I sold wooden boxes for firewood' It's because I've got more of my mother's Irish side in me. If you gave her a pound it burnt a hole in her pocket. She had to spend it on something. She never saved. I have sometimes got money and I've spent it on starting largely social businesses that haven't worked, but I have been very tough at The Big Issue because what I'm very, very good at is keeping costs down. I learnt that because I became a small-time printer and publisher 20 years before I started The Big Issue. Apart from stealing, what was your first paid work? When I was 10 I combined stealing with being a butcher's boy. I got 10 shillings for the Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, delivering meat to houses. It felt like a lot of money but eight shillings went to my mother, which made me feel very good because I love the idea of contributing. Did you ever have to resort to begging for money? Oh God, I was a great beggar, I was begging from five and six along the Portobello Road. You could make a sixpence in a morning, which might be the equivalent of a quarter of a man's wages for an hour, and I combined it with a bit of trade because there used to be lots of greengrocery businesses. So we'd get their wooden boxes and drag a kind of caravan of these boxes up streets and knock on doors to sell it as kindling. I remember two big brown pennies were given to me by an old lady - I sold her three boxes and I was five. You spent several of your teenage years in prison. How long did it take you to achieve some sort of financial stability? I wasn't serious about money or crime. I just hated everyone so eventually I went off to France for about six months, became a Marxist revolutionary, then I came back and got paid in cash for various factory jobs making buses and trucks for British Leyland. And then, when I was 27, I got married and stabilised myself and also started educating myself. I'd only learnt to read and write when I was 16 in a boys' prison so I had a lot of catching up to do. In the end I became a printer, small scale at first, eventually larger, working for the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy and Pan American, and I was bringing in a good middle-class turnover of about £60,000 a year and generating about £22,000 profit. You launched The Big Issue in 1991 with the help of Anita Roddick's second husband, Gordon. Did you struggle financially at first? A year after we started the business we were losing £25,000 a month and Gordon said to me "I will give you three months to break even," so I went back and got rid of 10 people because we'd grown too quickly. We were selling to the public for 50p and we were selling the paper to the vendors for 10p - I doubled it to 20p and turned it from a monthly to a fortnightly so we had two selling periods rather than one. And I changed printers and moved it from an A3 to an A4 format. I was taking a wage of about £27,000 working all the time and we turned it round. Now we produce 70 different editions all over the world and sell about 550,000 a week, hopefully helping thousands of homeless people all over the planet to start to get back on their feet again. On a personal level does money make you happy? I've never had a lot of it, and I don't have a lot of it now. I don't have much savings, but my saving grace has been marrying a woman, my third wife, Parveen, who is very serious about money. I still get a wage from The Big Issue and I have no other form of income except occasionally from talks I do. What I've tended to do with money I've accumulated is spend it on trying to develop other social enterprise projects. My biggest piece of frivolity was when I got married for the third time. I went out the day before, because I'd left it too late, and bought a suit for £500, which made me feel a little bit sick. I've never been in anything that cost that amount. I don't use cash, I love cheques, absolutely love them. I am a bit of a fetishist over paper. I hope they don't become obsolete and if they do I might try and invent a replacement for them for those fetishist people like me. Do you give to beggars? I've always given to beggars but what I always say is that if you feel that you're going to get people off the street by giving money to beggars then you're kidding yourself. The best thing you can do is give them an opportunity to get off the streets. I always engage with them, I talk with them, I get out of them what I want so there's a trade-off going on. If I've got money I always give to buskers because I feel that's trade. I say to them, "Get off your a--- and go down The Big Issue," and some of them say, "Well it's run by that ---- John Bird who is a f------ multi-millionaire and has a house in the south of France." Do you ever gamble? No, I have an elder brother destroyed by it. It's the same reason why I don't do drink and drugs really. I've got brothers who have been destroyed by drink and drugs and by gambling and it's horrible. My wife does; we're with HSBC. I'm not bothered about identity fraud as I haven't got enough money to steal. If they robbed me of my life savings it would probably be about £3,500. Have you invested in property? I had my first mortgage at the age of 58, so I joined the property-owning democracy rather late. My wife had owned property before, she's 24 years younger than me so we managed to get a mortgage, and I managed to get a bank account through her, which was great. When I married my wife I got drafted on to her bank account. I had no credit rating because I had all these cards, somebody would send me something and I took out a card, I had a Morgan Stanley card for 10 years and never paid it off. In the end the £3,000 I'd borrowed on the cards became a debt of about £12,000 and when we got married my wife cleared that debt for me. In total I think she cleared about £25,000 of debt for me. I now don't go anywhere near a card. My plan is to pay off our mortgage, which is about £130,000. In the meantime I have delusions of grandeur as I've written a kind of replacement for Fifty Shades of Grey called Why Drawing Naked Women is Good for the Soul that I'm hoping will sell a million - but that's the speculator side of me. What do you like least about money? What I don't like about money is the ignorance of most people; I would impose on our children at school a thorough understanding of systems. The first system is the system of the body, how it works, what you put in; it's the same way in any economic system. I would be selling the concept of learning how systems work. If you want to change something first understand how it works, and most people don't. That's what I hate about money. 'Why Drawing Naked Women is Good for the Soul' by John Bird is available as an e-book published by The Word Machine at £5.99 from all international e-book retailers, or in paperback at £9.99. Twitter: @johnbirdswords