support for rent, council tax and mortgage costs. See www.dwp.gov.uk, the website of the Department for Work and Pensions, for more detail.3 Don’t rush into the first job you get offered. Being without work is frightening but you spend all day every day at work so you need to be sure you end up with something that is at worst bearable and at best actually enjoyable.
4 Work on your confidence. Make a list of all your skills – not just the ones you have used in your work but all your skills. This will help you to figure out what you have to offer a new employer.
5 Keep going. Set yourself a few targets every day so you don’t just end up staying in bed.
WHAT Do I Do Now?
Find out if you are paid correctly.
Demand more if you are not.
Take action if you don’t get it.
Consider changing jobs or even careers to move yourself up the salary ladder.
Consider alternative, non-salaried routes to bumping up your income.
Have the right mindset. If you work hard you do deserve to be paid well.
Make an effort: it isn’t fair but study after study shows that the well-groomed and slim make more money than the poorly groomed and overweight.
Read the chapter on investing; this explains how to make your money create more income for you without you having to lift a finger.
2
Spend Less, Have More
Why is it that you never seem to have quite enough cash? Where does all your money go? The answer isn’t that far away. Look in every cupboard in the house and rummage around under the bed. Then take out and collect together every piece of clothing you’ve worn once or never, every pair of shoes you have ever bought in the sales that doesn’t quite fit, every kitchen utensil you’ve never used or used just once (this includes the juicer and the sandwich toaster) and every piece of specialist equipment that has been gathering dust since you decided your new hobby wasn’t much fun after all. Get out your calculator and add up how much you think they all cost. Now you can probably see where a lot of the money went.
£ 851: the value of the possessions the average British woman carries with her. This includes clothes, mobile phones, MP3 players and so on (Zurich Insurance).
£ 13,000: the average value of the clothes the average UK woman has bought but never worn (Prudential).
£ 2,900: the value of the average student’s electronic goods (Direct Line).
£ 36.6 billion: total sales of clothing in the UK in 2004.
What’s the point in making all the effort we do to make money if, instead of making it work for us properly, we then just waste it?
Because that’s exactly what most of us do. Sixty-three per cent of women confess that they have often bought clothes on sale that they have never worn; 56% say they have bought shoes and 42% toiletries they have never used. They also say that on average they wear only about half the clothes in their wardrobe regularly and, worst of all, nearly 8% of them say that they have never worn the most expensive thing they have bought. On average we buy £13,000 worth of clothes that we never wear over a lifetime, something that makes a hefty contribution to the £69,000 that research from the Pru says we all waste in the average 40-year working life. That’s enough to pay council tax for each household in Britain four times over every year or to pay for a really substantial asset each (£69,000 would buy you a perfectly nice holiday home in Croatia, for example).
A third of us have bought books we have never read or kitchen equipment we have never used, a quarter of us have bought DVDs we have never watched or CDs we have never listened to. And it doesn’t seem to matter what stage of life we are at, we all buy endless amounts of stuff. It wasn’t very long ago that students who owned their own toasters thought themselves pretty well off. Today, according to a survey from Direct Line, the average student owns nearly £3,000 worth of electrical goods. Two-thirds have a laptop (which is probably fair enough) and one in eight has a widescreen TV of their own (which probably isn’t). In August 2006 a magazine survey showed that young women were some of the worst binge spenders of all: four out of five said they spent more than they earned every month and those between 21 and 24 had an average of nearly £4,000 in credit card debt. All this spending leads us into a terrible trap. The more we spend the more we need to earn to maintain our lifestyles, particularly if we are using debt to spend. This eats away at our freedom: we have to stay in jobs we hate just to keep the income coming in to pay for the clothes and TVs that, truth be told, we never needed in the first place.
“I love shopping. It’s like a little present to me.”
Lisa Snowdon
The obvious question – and the one our grandmothers always ask – is why on earth do we buy all this stuff? The answer isn’t a good one. We do it because we have allowed ourselves to be conned into believing both that we need it and that it will make us happier. For most of human history the average person hasn’t had enough of anything. Until very recently our main problems centred on getting enough to eat and drink and not getting too wet or cold. But in the last 100 years things have changed so much that in the West at least we now have too much of everything. The corporate and public sectors between them have provided us with housing, clothing, healthcare, food and entertainment. We don’t actually need anything else.
But companies still have to make profits and the only way they can do so is to persuade us that we need more – in the fashion world they can’t just shut up shop because you already have ten dresses. So every ‘season’ manufacturers change things. They produce new styles, new colours, new combinations and new materials. Then they spend millions advertising, marketing and sucking up to fashion journalists to get the details of their new ‘must-have’ look out there. Marketeers know we aren’t entirely happy (who is?) and that leaves a huge opening for them to push goods that appeal to our emotional needs. These days they separate us from our money by promising us that if we improve our ‘lifestyles’ – by buying the stuff they are offering us – we will somehow improve our lives too: that having a pair of £100 jeans will make us happier than a £4 pair; that carrying a £500 handbag as seen on Sienna Miller will provide more life enhancement than a £20 one from Oasis; that spa breaks and £50 bottles of body lotion will make us more beautiful; and that buying brand-new skis will make us better at skiing, and expensive DIY tools make our houses significantly more attractive. In 2005 there was even the launch of a magazine called Happy, devoted entirely to shopping, with a cover line ‘300 great buys to make everyone love you’. The magazine – which is still being published – represented the propagation of the great marketing lie: that owning things, and particularly expensive things, will in itself bring you a sense of well-being.
All this works. Fifty per cent of those asked by a Vogue survey in 2005 said that the brand image was one of their major shopping influences when it comes to clothes and 60% said the same of beauty products; 85% said they bought not ordinary skincare products but ‘premium skincare products’, while 64% agreed that Vogue had the ‘ability to make products more desirable’.’ And just look at the reaction of Style magazine to the news that the average woman spends nearly £100,000 on clothes in a lifetime. ‘Who cares,’ wrote one of their regular columnists,
