After building three of the biggest insurance brands in this country and selling them all, it’s fair to say Naomi Ballantyne is financially comfortable.

Ballantyne, who started Partners Life in 2011 (after selling ClubLife to ING in 2009), sold it to Japanese life insurer Dai-ichi Life Holdings last year for around $1 billion.

But asking her about her first memories of money is revealing of a tough childhood.

“My first memories of money were not having any,” she says.

“Mum trying to borrow money from people, having to work when we were at school, she worked while we were at home, sewing, she worked every minute she could to try and supplement Dad’s income.”

“So not having any money was my first memory of money, other people having different lunches and being able to pay for stuff at school or wearing different clothes rather than hand-me-downs.”

Ballantyne grew up in Glenfield on the North Shore in the 1960s and 1970s.

Her mum was Tongan and her dad was from Vancouver in Canada.

“Dad had a major drinking problem. Mum had a gambling problem so what money we did have was often redirected to the wrong places,” she says.

“We weren’t alone, but we were certainly not the same as large chunks of people from the North Shore who went to the same schools.”

“One thing I will say is that my parents were very strong on the need for us to go to school. There was no option.”

Ballantyne was bright. She knew she was good at her schoolwork and it made that part of life easier.

But as far as money went she was on her own.

She started working at 13.

“I’ve never stopped. I worked strawberry picking, then in a dairy, I worked in Farmers menswear,” she says.

“My parents never paid a single cent for me, not school things or clothes.”

Her father was very keen on her going to university though.

“He would have had he had that opportunity,” she says. “I was the first person in my family to go.”

Ballantyne was good at science and Jacques Cousteau was hugely popular at the time, so she took marine biology.

“I soon realised there was only one Jacques Cousteau and a lot of marine biologists working for DoC for $3 an hour after five years of training. So decided that wasn’t for me.”

She also wanted to get married and she couldn’t afford to do that and stay a student.

“I saw an ad for management training insurance. I thought that sounds like me.”

The whole idea of insurance was new to her then.

“My parents were poor. They never had insurance, we never talked about money, which is still a problem in New Zealand families. You just experience the outcome of that as a kid.

“So I didn’t even know what insurance was...but I found out that we pay money to people when bad things happen.”

Looking back, Ballantyne credits the struggle through her early years, and the work she had to put in, as key drivers of her success.

“Most of the entrepreneurs I’ve met didn’t have backing,” she says. “They started at the bottom, they had failures. They thought they had a good idea and they ran out of money because they didn’t have the backing, so they learned the next time.

“I think in many cases successful entrepreneurs had to fight and brave their way through and bluff their way through a lot of hard stuff to get to the level of being successful.”