Suzanne Paul on escaping poverty: ‘I made up my mind…I’m not having this life’

Celebrity Treasure Island – Suzanne Paul. Photo / Matt Klitscher
Every week on the Money Talks we ask guests if money has been a driving force in their life or whether it is a by-product of their success.
Businesswoman, TV star, infomercial icon, and Celebrity Treasure Island returnee Suzanne Paul is the first (in more than 50 episodes) to just say it:
“I do it for the money,” she says.
“Earlier on a lot of people used to say to me, don’t let money be your driving force. Well, you wouldn’t say that if you grew up in Wolverhampton with nothing. It is my driving force and it always has been. It’s a powerful motivator.”
Paul isn’t exaggerating how tough her childhood was.
“The part of Wolverhampton I grew up in was very, very low-working class. We didn’t have a shower. We didn’t have a bath. There was no inside toilet, no hot running water. It was very basic,” she says.
Paul, whose mother left when she was young, was raised by her father who was caring but had to work long hours in a factory.
“We were latchkey kids. We had our door key around our neck on a bit of string. From about seven, we would come home from school make a jam sandwich for tea, go out and play till it got dark, then come in and make a fire.”
She says she didn’t realise until she was nine or 10 that they were poor.
“If you’re only mixing with people the same as you don’t know how other people live. We didn’t have cars, we didn’t have telephones. It was all very basic.”
There was no pocket money but from the age of about 11 Paul worked at a local pub clearing ashtrays and cleaning up.
“I think I got 50 pence and I’d use that money for a dance class that I went to,” Paul says.
“That was when I also noticed that I didn’t have the money the other girls had because I did the ballet class in my socks. And I’d see the girls in the lovely soft pink leather ballet shoes. Then I did the tap dance class just in my school shoes.”
“There was so much I couldn’t do,” she says. “I felt like a second-class citizen. I looked in absolute state. I was scruffy all the time. It didn’t help that from about the age of eight I had to wear glasses all the time. They were like the bottoms of milk bottles … National Health glasses. You’re only allowed to have one pair every year or so.”
“Well, I’d break them straight away. So they were always held together with a bit of sticky tape, they were lopsided. And for a 14-year-old girl to be like that, it was hard, when I’d see the other girls in nice clothes and talking about going to the disco and all this sort of thing.”
Paul says she made a conscious choice from an early age to get herself out of poverty.
“I knew that if you had money, that meant you’d have a better life and you could do what you wanted and buy what you wanted,” she says.
“I knew it straight away. I made up my mind. I’m not having this, I’m not having this life. I need to earn some money.”
But Paul struggled at school. She has since discovered she suffers from dyscalculia – a specific learning disability related to numbers and maths.
“I got expelled at 15, but that all stemmed from the problem I had with numbers, figures, maths.”
Paul spent many years as a professional sales demonstrator, travelling and working on commission. She learned how to sell and had a knack for it.
That transitioned to a successful TV career – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? remains a favourite, she says. She did Celebrity Treasure Island around 20 years ago, and is back for the new season, and her philosophy to life hasn’t changed inbetween.
“I’m always of the opinion, I always say yes to everything and then worry about how I’m going to do it later on. I always think, these opportunities might not always come along.”
There aren’t as many TV opportunities anymore as they were in the 90s and 00s, but Paul is adapting. Her next target: TikTok.
“I’m all over it with TikTok,” she says. “The young people that see me on TikTok or Facebook, they say to me, ‘you’re the OG’. So apparently I’m the original influencer. And now here I am again, and I’m selling things for people, but now it’s on social media.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Paul on her remarkable journey from the malls and tradeshows of the British Midlands to stardom in New Zealand.
You can see Suzanne Paul on Celebrity Treasure Island, starting 7.30pm Monday September 9 on TVNZ 2.
Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. It isn’t about personal finance and isn’t about economics – it’s just well-known New Zealanders talking about money and sharing some stories about the impact it’s had on their lives and how it has shaped them.
The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor-at-large for the Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
Money Talks is available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.