The leading money-saving expert and multimillionaire philanthropist Martin Lewis has revealed the extent of his childhood trauma in a radio encounter with Lauren Laverne this weekend. As the guest castaway on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs the campaigning journalist and financial specialist tells Laverne he has still not recovered from his mother’s sudden death in a road accident just before his 12th birthday. “My mum was there one day and she wasn’t the next and that was it,” he said. “This was 1984 and you didn’t have counselling. My childhood ended that day and I am still not over it.” He was unable to go out with friends during his teens because he was still so disturbed by the loss, he adds, and also recalls that he was given the nickname “Jew” at school in Cheshire. This Lewis believes was not evidence of antisemitic bullying, just typical of the unenlightened era. “Being Jewish is still an important point of my life as a secular person, with a religious bit on the side,” he tells Laverne, adding that being one of two Jewish pupils at the cathedral school in Cheshire he went on to was probably character-forming. “All of that cemented my identity. It taught me that it is OK to be different if it is not right for you.” But perhaps an equally striking revelation for regular listeners to the show is the fact that Lewis, 48, who sold his online advice site MoneySavingExpert.com for £87m in 2012, admits he had never bought music for himself until he became a parent. He confesses that music has played little or no part in his life before choosing his eight tracks. “I have never really listened to music, never bought a record, or tape, or CD until I had my daughter,” Lewis says, although he did know all his times tables when he was four years old. Adam Ant, the “dandy highwayman” who shouts “stand and deliver, your money or your life” might seem an unlikely musical mascot for a man who urges financial caution to his 13 million followers online, but the 1980s punk singer’s hit is one of Lewis’ musical choices for his desert island stay, alongside tracks from Joni Mitchell and Ricky Martin. The man known as “the Dumbledore of debt” also picks a section of The Blue Danube which he plays along to in an instrumental first for the long-running radio show. Lewis plays his nose and his ear in a party trick that he says dates back to his early experiments in stand-up comedy after graduating from the London School of Economics.