and I like to sit by myself in one of their armchairs for a few minutes before I go to work. I also think that going to a spa with my sisters for the occasional weekend is worth it, not because I have the faintest faith in the treatments (I’ve had a great many massages in my life and I still have cellulite) but because it gets us away from our work, husbands and boyfriends and gives us time to talk. And very occasionally a handbag is worth it too. Think of spending in terms of how much happiness you are buying yourself for the money you are spending. Is it enough? Very often it is not.
My friend Caroline has a good anti-spending wheeze too. It works like this, she says: ‘Read high-end catalogues in the bath, and as you wallow, imagine the whole consumer process: choosing the lovely new chrome coffee maker, the thrill of arrival, the excitement of first use, the novelty wearing off, the putting away in the cupboard, and, finally, the sullen realization that it hasn’t changed your life. By the time the water gets cold, you don’t want any of it after all. Sting’s been quoted as saying he wishes his wife would get into tantric shopping and that’s exactly what this is – you look and look and look but never buy.’
The good news is that shifting your behaviour so that you spend less shouldn’t be too hard if you concentrate: the scientists tell us that it takes about three weeks to create a new habit or break an old one. And when you’re vacillating, it’s worth bearing in mind a phrase that the Texans have for those who spend stupid amounts of money on ostentatious consumer goods they neither need nor can really afford. They call them ‘big hat, no cattle’ people – people who consume for the sake of it and as a result have lots of rubbish stuff but not much in the way of real assets. Look at it like this and I think you’ll find it easy enough to cut your spending on ‘big hat’ style things.
There are a thousand ways to cut your spending on the smaller things in life. We all know that if we took our lunch to work and never visited Starbucks we’d save a great deal – we can all cut at least £50 out of our monthly spending with a little concentration and most of us can cut out a great deal more. The easiest way to do this is simply to make yourself keep a spending diary for a while. Just as keeping a food diary is a splendid way to lose weight (everyone hates to look at a list that proves overeating at the end of every day), keeping a money diary is a great way to cut spending (looking at a list of wasted cash is also a nasty way to end a day). A survey in 2006 showed that the average member of the British public cannot account for £1 out of every £8 that they spend – making a total of over £80 billion every year. Where does that money go? A Diet Coke while you wait for the train, a packet of crisps when you suddenly feel a bit peckish at eleven, a few bits and bobs when you are passing Boots on your way to the post office and so on. The details may be hazy but the money’s gone.
Bartering for books
If you really want something you may not actually have to buy it to get your hands on it. Instead you could swap an item you have already but don’t need for it. www.ReadItSwapIt.co.uk is a book-swapping site – it has around 8,000 members with 40,000-odd books available to swap. The founders estimate that the swaps done in the site’s first three years saved the members £350,000 they would otherwise have spent buying books. www.Mybookyourbook.com is similar but charges you to join. Swopex.co.uk is another swapping site that allows users to trade DVDs and computer games. www.Iswap.co.uk and www.eSwapit.co.uk allow you to swap pretty much anything. Another site worth looking at is www.Freecycle.co.uk. The idea of this one is to find free homes for unwanted possessions of any kind. If you find what you want you just arrange to go and get it, no payment involved. Finally you might look at new site www.swapaskill.com which allows people living in the same community to exchange skills.
I don’t want to spend all of this chapter on the small stuff so I’ve put in an appendix at the back of the book offering 53 ways to make many small savings which I hope you’ll read (they all add up). Many are obvious (turn your heating down a few degrees) and some are not, but I hope that once you realize how you are constantly allowing yourself to be conned by consumerism and its corporate cheerleaders, and start looking at your purchases rationally, you’ll find you buy less unnecessary stuff and that your spending will automatically fall. I also hope that when this happens it feels very good indeed.
You may find that as you stop wasting hours in the shops, your obsession with consumer culture diminishes, the burden of desire lifts from your shoulders and you are suddenly much happier (see Chapter 11 for more on why consumption alone can’t make you really happy). You may be able to see beyond your needs as a consumer (i.e. those implanted in your brain by the corporate world) to your real needs as a person (time spent with your mother as opposed to time spent racing round Ikea at the weekend, perhaps). And as your spending falls you will also find that you have given yourself more choices. The less you spend the less you need to earn and the more you can look for work that fulfils you rather than just fills your bank account. Remind yourself as you go that while you don’t want to be living entirely in the future, everything you buy now that you don’t need or that doesn’t bring you pleasure is effectively money stolen from your future.
In the rest of this chapter I want to go beyond the small things and look at the big things we pay too much for on a regular basis, such as cars, furniture, utilities and insurance. Houses are another area where we waste vast amounts of money, so much so that I’ve left them out of this chapter and given them a chapter of their own. See p.221.
New cars: why you don’t need them
Every time the petrol price goes up we hear endless moaning about how much it costs drivers. The pressure groups looking for the government to ‘do something’ about the high oil price add up how much every penny on a litre costs the average driver and splash the results over the front pages of the papers and the nation gets itself in a tizzy calling for windfall taxes on the oil companies. But a penny on a litre of petrol adds up to well under £100 for the average driver. And that’s absolutely nothing compared to the money most people are chucking down the drain every day just by owning their cars.
A new car loses 20% of its value as soon as it leaves the forecourt and will be worth 30% less than its list price within three months. A few examples. If you had bought a Citroën Xsara Picasso 1.6 SX in 2004 it would have cost you £14,100. Try to sell it eighteen months later and you’d have got (according to What Car?) around £6,000 for it. That’s a loss of over £8,000 or 57%. You’d have lost a similar amount on a Ford Kaa 1.3 hatchback (£5,000 or 52% of your cash) or a Saab 9–3 1.8 four-door (£9,250 or 45%). On the Saab you’re losing about £17 a day. On a really expensive luxury car you could be losing £100-plus a day.
This doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would anyone throw that kind of money around just to drive a brand-new car? Particularly as a new car turns into a second-hand car as soon as you drive it off the forecourt. None of the answers to this question is a good one. Some say they just like to have a car that no one else has ever driven. But there’s no such thing. How do you think your new car got to the showroom? It didn’t just drive itself off the lorry – someone else’s bottom has always sat on the driver’s seat at some point. Some say they like that ‘new car smell’. And maybe they do (although given that it is a smell of plastics, metals and various not particularly desirable chemicals I can’t think why) but if that’s the case they could amuse themselves by putting a plastic bag over their heads and ripping up £50 notes. The final effect would be roughly the same as that of buying a new car.
