A Domino Effect

I’ve been neglecting you again, haven’t I?

In my humble defence, I have been horribly busy.  Friends have been coming and going for dinner and sleepovers, I’ve had a fridge delivered (it really is wrong to get excited about new kitchen appliances, isn’t it?)  and I’ve had presentations to make, training sessions to attend and essays to trot out, as well as red wine to drink, amazing films to watch (this and this) and early springtime sunshine to enjoy…oh life, it’s a wonderful thing!

Anyway, I’m back now, and I hereby promise to do a little better at the whole posting thing this week.  Starting with this one.  News!

My finances got a colossal boost on Thursday when I received a cheque from HMRC (opening the letter was eerily reminiscent of exam results day).  As it turns out, I have overpaid tax to the tune of around £700 this year, and what’s even better, I got it all back in one.  Now I’m all in favour of paying my taxes like the diligent and dutiful citizen I am, but what’s mine is mine dammit!  I have second-hand china plates and felt and lace to buy!  (Actually, I’m not going to use it for plates, or unnecessary but desirable crafting supplies.  Instead, I’m going on a little trip with it when I finish my exams.  Here, in case you’re interested.  More on this later.)

My boyfriend and I took ourselves daytripping au velo on Saturday, which turned out to be one of our best impromptu outings yet.  We cycled along the Union Canal in the direction of Glasgow and ended up in a little village called Ratho (above), which I have to say takes quaint to new and rather dizzying heights.  White-washed houses, stone bridges and picnic benches?  It was like something out of a James Herriot novel, and my chintz radar was screeching.  Here’s me with my obligatory flask cup of tea and overworked bike…

…and my newly-dyed hair!  I thought it was time for a little restyle, and seeing as I’d rather spend my money on lattes and newspapers than haircuts, I decided that a new colour would do the trick.  To be honest, it’s not hugely different.  A tad more lively, I guess.  At least it’ll keep the inner voice that screams “Your hair is booooooooring” at me on all too a frequent basis at bay for a little while.

And while we’re on the beauty note, I’ve stopped drinking milk.  From a cow, that is, not completely.  I’m trying a little experiment for a month or so to see if quitting dairy will encourage my breakout-prone skin to clear up.  I’ve struggled with my skin for as long as I can remember, and have tried all manner of lotions, potions and pills to make it better.  Giving up milk is a bit of a long-shot, but I’m willing to have a go.  In case anyone is interested, I based my decision on this article, which suggests there might be a link between the hormones in milk and breakouts.  Three days in to the experiment, and my relationship with soya milk is flourishing.  It doesn’t seem to alter the taste of tea too much, which was definitely my prime concern.  I could put up with abstaining from most things, but no tea?  Well, let’s not even go there.

What have you been up to this week?  Tell me tell me!

I recently had a rather illuminating discussion with someone I don’t know all that well.  We were chatting away about what each of us has planned for the summer (we are both fortunate enough to have 3-4 months off) and I made mention of my plan, which is to save money in the run-up to the holidays, leaving me free to spend as much of them as possible doing things that interest and excite me, such as writing, travelling and volunteering.  My compadre, while apparently appreciative of what I had to say, put forward this statement in response:

“I think I’ll get a job.  I mean, I’ll need to have something to do”.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone say that, or words to that effect.  Nevertheless, it still perplexed me.  Has this person really reached the stage where they can think of no more exciting or valuable ideas, when faced with a whole four months of freedom, than to shackle themselves to a job and make money?

My incomprehension aside (and trust me, I’m still confused as all hell), this discussion led me to pondering the relationship between time and money.  For me, time wins out, no question.  I don’t care about having lots of money, because I don’t believe that money can buy you any of the things that are truly important in life: love, freedom, peace and happiness being just a few.  For me, being able to afford to sleep in a warm and comfortable house, to feed myself well and to enjoy and be grateful for a standard of living that so many people around the world can only dream of is more than enough when it comes to money.  Hell, it’s downright luxurious.

But time?  Well that’s something I’ll always be wishing for more of, but that I’ll never be able to control.  Someone or something else holds the cards when it comes to the question of how much time I have, and while there are things I can do that might ameliorate my chances of having more time (eat well, exercise, don’t smoke etc), the reality is that I could do all of those things to perfection and still lose the time game.  Spectacularly.

Although that can be a slightly uneasy realisation, I believe that if looked at in the right way, having no power to decide how much time we have can actually be immensely freeing. It means that we can relax for one thing: why worry about something we can’t control?  It also leaves us free to focus on what we can have a say in when it comes to time.  And that, in a nutshell, is how we spend it.

While you can, of course, also choose how you spend your money, it’s completely different.  Money comes and goes. Sometimes you’ll have a bit, sometimes you won’t. There will almost certainly be times when you will worry about money, but at the same time there will almost certainly be times when you won’t. That’s the fickle nature of the beast.  Try as it might to attain time’s immortal status, money will always be crippled by the fact that really, it’s little more than a jangly-limbed puppet, hanging listlessly from a set of man-made and man-controlled strings.  And while I might talk about money a lot on this blog, I do it because I desperately want money to be seen for what it actually is: a pawn. Money isn’t a happiness-maker, it’s just a player – and a minor player at that – on life’s chess board. It moves around sometimes and it gets in the way a bit but ultimately, money is forever subservient to the more powerful players of the game.

It’s no biggie: if you can see money for what it really is, accept that it doesn’t have the power to make you happy and then switch the entire focus of your energies to larger and more important things, then you are a colossal step ahead of anyone who hasn’t yet made that discovery. If you can find the courage to step back from money’s contrived influence and look objectively at the goldfish bowl it has created, you’ll be both amused and amazed by what you see in there.  A bunch of exhausted people for one thing, doggedly striving on in all sorts of fields, all in pursuit of the warped kind of satisfaction that a bias in favour of money over time so often brings.  And while there are plenty of people in the world with the emotional capacity to sacrifice vast swathes of time to a draining, all-consuming job and still, somehow, find the energy to fully participate in the rest of their lives, I’d wager everything I own on the premise that most people don’t have those capacities, and further, that lots of them are wishing for more time.

But how do we attempt to live by a time-based compass in a society, a world even, that’s so wholeheartedly driven by profit margins, sales figures and cash flow? Well, I don’t think there’s either a standard or an easy answer.  Everyone is different, with individual sets of priorities, desires and motivations.  What I will say, however, is this: we are all the pioneers of our own destinies, and we all have choices, regardless of how difficult they can sometimes be to see, or how daunting or frightening they might look when we uncover them.  The very fact of our existence means that we all have at least some time, and that in itself is a wondrous gift – something to appreciate for as long as it lasts, and also something which we should do our utmost never to abuse.  Not for something as profoundly inconsequential as money, at least.

Image above from Flickr – sburke2478.

I’ve decreed this Boxing Day my own personal day of slovenliness.  Pyjama-clad and with a box of chocolates within easy reach, it’s safe to say I harbour absolutely no intentions of going outside today.  My family are gathered infront of a film in the next room, the cat is curled up on the sofa behind me and I’m basking in that lovely feeling of post-Christmas warmth, the kind that naturally follows a day of relaxation, laughter and nice food.

You can imagine, therefore, my despair when I logged onto the BBC news website to find this story earlier on.  That’s right, shoppers were “screaming with relief” when they were finally permitted to enter the hallowed halls of their favoured money-sucking meccas this morning.  Apparently those pesky Sunday trading laws were keeping agitated spenders from their bounty, leaving them foaming at the mouth and stamping their feet outside in the cold until the unthinkable hour of 11am.  I can imagine the outrage: how DARE the day of rest get in the way of the best binge of the year?  Surely some MP somewhere must resign at the alter of consumer capitalism for such an atrocity?  No?  Ah well, back to the tills then.

The sarcasm is, perhaps, a touch unnecessary.  The question, however, I think is pretty clear…

What are we doing to ourselves?

Why oh why do we so stoutly refuse to say no to shopping?  Why is it that a mature, well-developed and relatively well-educated society such as ours has decided to enslave itself to ‘things’ to the extent that we have?  I know I had this rant at roughly the same time last year, but I still don’t get it.  I still don’t get why people would actively choose to go out and spend yet more money when they’ve only just finished bankrupting themselves over Christmas.  It’s absurd to the point of extremity that some people are still shopping, when they know fine and well that they will spend the whole of 2011 struggling to pay off the debts they’ve incurred over the past three or four weeks alone.  And what’s all this spending for?  For a bunch of consumer chattels with a limited lifespan and absolutely no power to bring joy, that’s what.  It’s madness.

I’m fully aware that this year the unhappy prospect of a 2.5% VAT increase looms over us, and that in a purely practical sense it is much wiser to make necessary purchases this side of January 4th than the other.  Nevertheless, I can’t for one second believe that astute tax planning is what’s motivating a sizeable proportion of the masses at the shops today.  What’s motivating many people, I would conjecture, is the desire for more.  More clothes, more DVDs, more electronic gadgets.  Forget about the stuff we received in our stockings yesterday, today is a bright new dawn of half-off consumer spending – make the most of it!

It’s honestly not my intention to sound all preachy and holier than thou, so if I do, I sincerely apologise.  I fully accept that we are fortunate enough to live in a society where people are, by and large, free to do what they like.  There’s no law against shopping, and neither do I think there should be.  It simply depresses me to think of all the money that’s being wasted as I sit here and write this: pounds being poured down the throats of people like Philip Green, the gap between our country’s rich and poor haemorrhaging with every transaction and all because we can’t keep a lid on our desire for material wealth.  It upsets me to think of all the Christmas presents, unwrapped with frenzied haste a mere 24 hours ago, but already consigned to the far corners of minds as their recipients race to the tills in search of the ever-elusive more.

But what upsets me most about the Boxing day shopping bonanza is the fact that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world who don’t even have enough to eat, let alone enough to fuel the festival of excess that has become the great British Christmas.  The fatal twist of the knife, and the thing that is so profoundly abhorrent about the entire charade, is the fact that for some people in this country, even Christmas isn’t enough.

Image above from Flickr – gagilas.

So I mentioned the other day that an important part of my review of 2010 would be considering my perceived successes of the year and also my perceived failings or, seeing as I hate the term ‘failings’, the things that didn’t quite work out according to plan.  Today is the day for successes.  Yay!

Just so you know, my definition of success is pretty broad, and most definitely not confined to big things like ‘got a promotion’, or ‘built a well in a developing country’.  Both of these things would definitely rank highly on a success list, but that doesn’t mean that little things, like ‘quit straightening my hair’ (which I did!) don’t deserve a place too.  The fact of the matter is that core-shaking, pulse-quickening, boat-rocking achievements don’t come along every day, or even every year.  We need to have little things on the go to keep us motivated, challenged and with progress in mind.  So don’t snigger at my list!  It has a purpose!  I’ve split it up into categories: health, money, spirit and ‘big stuff’…

HEALTH

Quit straightening my hair – Yes yes, girly and pathetic as it sounds I have been overly reliant on hair straighteners for far too long now.  I finally gave up last month, and have straightened my locks only once since (I was going to court, so I figured I had to look smarter than normal).  Giving up straightening doesn’t only mean that I’m a touch more free than I was, it also means that my hairdresser won’t tut at me quite so much the next time I go.  No longer am I the customer who doesn’t look after her tresses and sits sunken in the chair, wishing the ground would swallow her for all the grief she’s getting.  I am a haircare Goddess (almost)!

Struck up a friendship with green tea – This is pretty big for me, as the taste of green tea alone really can reduce me to tears and gagging.  I’ve found, however, that a wee splash of honey mixed in can really make the world of difference.  Which is good, because the green stuff is amazingly, super-duper healthy and carries anti-inflammatory properties strong enough to reduce the size of tumours.  Incredible, right?

Signed up to a veg box – I’ve talked about this a gazillion times elsewhere.  ’Nuff said.

MONEY

Stopped buying bread - Yup, buying, definitely not eating.  Ever since I got a breadmaker last Christmas I haven’t bought a single loaf of crappy (read: cardboard) supermarket bread.  Which is a worthy achievement to me because I completely detest the stuff.  I also figure that I’ve saved a pretty penny or two doing this as the raw ingredients to make my own cost very little and make several loaves at a time.  Double win!?

Saved roughly £3K – I did this in the first eight months of the year while I was still working.  The money paid for a fantastic holiday, and has since been on hand to sort out any financial niggles that arise from me not working at the moment, greatly reducing my need to obtain funds from other sources such as overdrafts, career development loans and credit cards.  I count saving as an achievement simply because there was a very definite time in my life where judging by my actions I really didn’t know what the term meant!  Now I most definitely do, so it’s onwards and upwards.

Started my eBay store – It hasn’t made me a millionaire, but I have gleaned a certain sense of satisfaction from packaging up my old and unwanted clothes, shoes and accessories and sending them on to someone minded to put them to a better use.  Next year, Etsy!

MIND

Gave up Facebook – I still have a profile but only bother to check it when someone sends me a ‘real’ (as opposed to auto-generated or Farmville-related) message.  To be quite honest, there’s so much else of interest on the internet that looking at photos of people I hardly know or reading banal status updates seems like the true definition of wasting time.  I’ve got absolutely no problem with other people continuing to use and enjoy the site *at all* and I definitely don’t think of Mark Zuckerberg as some kind of technological antichrist or anything.  All I profess to know is that my own Facebook ship has sailed and that it’s finally time to let it lie for good.  Which is categorically fine by me (you can read my review of The Social Network film here).

Tackled my fear of the telephone - This might sound weird to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but until this year I had a really strong aversion to using the telephone.  I hated it.  It wasn’t so bad if I was calling someone I knew, but calling strangers?  The bank?  The hairdresser?  Those all brought me out in a cold sweat.  Until this year, when somehow it just clicked.  I don’t know if I was injected overnight with an extra burst of confidence or if some remote part of my subconscious finally decided to grow a set and stop being a child, but whoever or whatever was behind it, may I just say THANK YOU.

BIG STUFF

Realised a holiday dream – OK, not much else to say here but on the list it must be placed.  See photo.

Went back to school – Yup, I left my job this year to return to full-time education.  Scary, exciting and all sorts of other mixed emotions.  I’ve now finished term number 1, and while it’s been a strange sort of experience, and ludicrously difficult to make friends, I think it’s going OK.  This time next year I’ll be working full-time again so I’ve been trying valiantly to make the most of the uni experience while it lasts.  Who knows when I might next get the chance to have a two-hour lunch break and write a blog post at 11am?!

Started volunteering – After much unnecessary procrastination, I finally started volunteering this year.  I’ve started pretty small, and only work two hours per week in a drop-in advice centre for students, but hey, it’s a start and it could just lead me onto something bigger in the future.  In spite of the small amount I’ve done, I can wholeheartedly say that volunteering is a massively rewarding experience that I’m absolutely determined to carry on with into 2011 and beyond.  I’d recommend it to anyone (and anyone can do it!).

Image above from Flickr – kaysha.

For most people, being a little bit money savvy either is (perhaps has always been), or is becoming, something of a high priority.  And much of the bread and butter of writing about personal finance issues has, particularly in the last couple of years with the world’s financial credentials being what they are, begun to permeate mainstream media in a way that they probably never did in the hazy, good ol’ days of cheap credit and booming property prices.  One result of all this is that personal finance geeks are no longer the only ones who wax lyrical about the benefits of weekly budgets, meal plans and thermostat temperatures.  Anyone with the slightest dash of common sense knows that it’s emphatically more sensible to take a packed lunch to work than to buy your sandwiches out, or to think about donning a jumper before putting the heating on.  And what people know, they no longer need to be told.  Personal finance these days can probably be taken to mean ‘not being totally thick when it comes to your own money’.  And all to the greater good that is too.

But being clued-up as to the state of your own finances doesn’t necessarily make you a whiz kid when it comes to talking about financial issues on a broader scale.  I speak wholeheartedly from experience here -  I am shamefully, woefully lacking when it comes to having an intelligent discussion about any economic and fiscal issues that stretch beyond the parameters of my own little PF bubble.  I might be competent at adding to my own savings, at totting up my daily expenditures and secreting 50ps away to my piggy bank, but when it comes to talking about interest rates, inflation and investments, I’m usually exposed pretty early on as a bit of a flake.

The ugly truth is that I’ve just never really been able to get to grips with these things.  I mean, I’ll turn to the business section of the paper with every admirable intention, only to become so lost so quickly that I switch off and start to think about cake.  What I don’t understand I naturally shy away from, and it’s this head-wedged-firmly-in-sand attitude that has allowed me to arrive at the grand old age of 24 minus the ability to explain the benefits of having an ISA with any degree of confidence, or to know the difference between the RPI and the CPI (or perhaps even to know what the heck RPI and CPI stand for).

But it brings me pleasure to be able to report that there is hope on the horizon.  One module I’m taking as part of my course this year is entitled ‘Financial Services and Related Skills’, or, as I have already renamed it, ‘Useful Stuff About Money’.  It’s designed to give students a basic grounding in financial issues, and to enable us, as young (and in my case extremely ditzy) lawyers to refrain from sounding like complete boneheads when we “enter the profession” (God I hate that phrase) next year.  I’ve only been to three classes so far, which isn’t actually that many, but I’ve already learned a vast amount of useful information that I’m now ruefully thinking I should have been aware of at least five years ago.  A little late to the party I know, but I could now explain to you (if you wanted to know, which I’ll assume you either don’t or don’t need to) the benefits of having an ISA, and I’m slowly but surely getting my head around the relevance of both RPI and CPI (which I’ve learned stand for Retail and Consumer Price Index respectively).   I’ve also learned a whole bunch of other, really useful information as well, about such things as bonds, stocks, gilts and quantitative easing.  And what’s more, it’s all actually really rather interesting.  I’m never going to be the next Martin Lewis (if only because I don’t have a neck made entirely of brass) but at the same time, I’m slowly edging my way out of the ‘completely clueless about finance’ category, which has, regrettably, been my home for years.  In a harsh financial climate like the one we currently abide in, money knowledge is probably of more relevance than ever it has been before.  And while PF-inspired practices continue to lead me further down the road to a happier relationship with money, a little bit of financial and economic know-how can, I’m finding, help to ice that cake.  And not before time, either.

What about you?  Are you a financier extraordinaire, or does talk about interest rates make you run for the nearest window?

Image above from Flickr – Sam Fox Photography.