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Meter Beaters: Reducing the household bills
Running a family is an expensive business. So expensive, in fact, that many people decide not to have a family at all, because they don’t think they can afford it. This is extremely sad—unless, of course, they are mean, ugly, child-hating bastards who would rather spend their pennies on spa-breaks and a wine cellar, thus making the rest of us jealous.
There are two facts about the average amount of money families in the developed world spend every month of which I am certain: one, it is colossal; and two, it doesn’t need to be.
If you need confirmation of either of these facts and have nothing better to do on a Saturday morning then pop down to your local Big Supermarket and take a look at the trolleys being pushed by puffing, panting, frowning parents towards the extra-large parking spaces reserved for those unsexy, environmentally catastrophic family cars. You will notice that these trolleys are piled far higher than can be deemed even remotely safe or elegant, with plastic bags literally bursting at the seams with stuff. Food, drink, clothing, electrical goods, garden tools, hoover bags, hair accessories, cleaning products, DVDs and nappies all fight for space before being loaded into the aforementioned Family Transportation Vehicles and ultimately consumed by starving and needy family members back at home.
And that’s just the supermarket. It’s a similar story in toyshops, clothing shops, DIY stores and—my personal favourite—interiors shops. Just look at all the stuff people are buying to keep every member of the family happy! It’s shocking, fairly sickening and it makes one wonder just how people survived before they were able to buy themselves into £30,000 worth of credit-card debt. Poor them.
No: poor, stupid us. We have somehow convinced ourselves that not having everything we desire is tantamount to failure and that a family without a newly fitted kitchen, a fridge full of fresh pasta and organic prawns, three holidays a year, enough clothes and toys to fill several large warehouses, a designer sofa, two flat-screen televisions and hot water on demand is a family that is letting things slip.
There are, of course, two schools of thought on running your finances. The first is to say ‘I am going to spend less than I earn, and save the rest for a rainy day, or for a time when I am buying something frivolous and pretty that will make up for the fact that my boobs are getting so saggy.’ This is the school I attend, and it is rather dull and safe, but it means I know there’s something in the bank should I need it. When I get paid less, I spend less. If I hit a particularly cash-rich phase, I spend a little more. Usually on shoes.
The second way of looking after your money is to say ‘You only live once, and what I want I shall have. When I die, somebody else can pay off the debt.’ Credit was invented for people who think this way, and the almost £1 trillion worth of debt in this country seems to indicate that there are quite a lot of them. On the face of it, it’s a wonderful way to live: ‘What the lady wants, the lady shall have’ has always been a dream of mine.
But there are obvious drawbacks. Being in debt is very expensive. Credit-card companies don’t just lend you the money, after all—they want it back with a little sweetener, in the form of interest. That holiday didn’t cost you £1,000, more like £1,200 and a lot of worry. Living beyond your means is risky, and any kind of risk brings with it the biggest wrinkle-producer after a week in Majorca: stress. However much fun people may seem to be having, spending all that non-existent money on designer kids’ clothes and new sofas, they are living under quite a lot of stress, and this can become so bad that families crack under the strain and no amount of Botox can fix the furrows.
Of course families are expensive, but they needn’t be cripplingly so. There are simple ways of reducing the monthly bills that don’t require you to move into a yurt and wear shirts made of old bits of sacking cloth. Try some of these and you should have some pennies left over for treats for all the family. Just not too many, mind…