Thrift is a thoroughly old-fashioned word: one of those quaint virtues, like
chastity, sobriety and prudence, that we quite like to think of other people
practising – grand-parents, aunties, Chancellors of the Exchequer – but
which exude too strong a whiff of social mothballs for them to feel quite
right for us. Not now, maybe later, when we’ve got some living done, sucked
some of the sweetness from life. Then there might come a time when
self-denial feels natural. But not yet. Not just yet.
Besides, consider the myriad temptations to extravagance: the vastly extended
lifespan that means youth (with its confetti spending habits) stretches on
towards infinity. Plus cheap credit. Plus pensions are in such a muddle that
we’re all going to be ruined anyway, so might as well stock up on lovely
things now. Plus endless sales on the high street so really we’re saving if
we just spend now. Plus there is something about thrift that clashes quite
painfully with those easier-to-love, more open-hearted virtues of
generosity, hospitality, expansiveness, spontaneity.
Aesop’s nasty little fable of the Ants and the Grasshopper illustrates the
virtues of thrift and industry by contrasting the habits of some hardworking
ants with those of a feckless grasshopper which totters up to them in
midwinter and begs for a few grains of corn to keep itself from starving.
“May we ask,” say the ants, smug amid their well-stocked larder, “what you
were doing with yourself all summer? Why didn’t you collect a store of food
for the winter?” “I was singing,” pleads the grasshopper. “If you spent the
summer singing,” snap the ants, “you can spend the winter dancing.” And they
chuckled and went on with their work.
Some children, on first encountering this rather horrible little narrative of
good housekeeping, presumably think: “That’s me! I’m going to be an ant when
I grow up!” Those are the ones with a rational relationship with money, who
later go on to purchase, for cash, a manor house in the Cotswolds with their
City bonuses. The rest of us become martyrs to an emotional relationship
with our income that involves spending as reward, as celebration, as
proto-creativity (this bunch of nasty old £20 notes for that ravishing
lithograph expressive of my personality, world-view and exquisite good
taste), as a means of establishing identity (only when I own this Porsche,
this Chloé bag, these Kate Moss for Topshop hotpants, can I be fully myself)
and as a stratagem for warding off sadness (shopping to fill up the hole in
your heart, my spendthrift friends and I used to call it), combine ant and
grasshopper qualities in varying degrees.
Clever grasshoppers adulterate their frivolity with just as much formic
good sense as will keep income and outgoings in a reasonable state of
equilibrium. Even so, there tends to come a point when the chill of fiscal
reality suddenly makes one shiver. Myself, I combine the worst qualities of
grasshopper and ant. I am spendthrift (on clothes when young, these days on
pictures and assorted bric-a-brac) and prone to acts of ludicrous
extravagance when I chance upon something I imagine was “meant” for me.
(Earlier this year it took a powerful effort of will to stop myself spending
£800 in a Bond Street gallery on a very small picture of an honesty plant.
Only the thought of an imminent tax bill stopped me, and even now there is a
small, mad part of my psyche that despises the sensible rest of me for not
having the nerve to defy the Revenue and go for the picture.) At the same
time, I suffer from a high degree of antish anxiety about money and lie
awake worrying about the rackety state of our present finances, the penury
that awaits me in old age and the fact that my son will probably be living
with me for the next 20 years, since I can’t afford to help him to buy a
place of his own.
About 18 months ago something happened to jolt me out of my state of constant
but unfocused financial angst. Some work had to be done to the house. I
employed a respectable family firm of local builders who had worked for me
before. But things had gone wrong since I first employed them.
Respectable was no longer the word. What little work they completed was
terrible, and they made off with a fat chunk of my hard-earned cash,
ignoring with complete sangfroid a judgment against them in the Small Claims
court.
In the bleak aftermath of realising that the money had gone, I sat down to
work out how long it had taken me to earn, and how long again it would take
me to make up the loss. And in the course of my calculations I made a
disagreeable discovery. The amount I was earning had remained roughly stable
over the past few years, and I was spending it on the same sorts of things –
boring old subsistence, with fairly frequent flourishes in the form of
pictures, days out and a nice annual holiday. My income had always been
quite enough to cover all that and still put away a little emergency savings
fund. But while I hadn’t been paying attention, things had changed. Our
living expenses had increased so sharply that instead of a bit left over at
the end of every month, there was now a significant shortfall. By slow
degrees I had built up a nasty little debt: a bit on the overdraft, a bit on
the credit cards, a bit on the loan I’d taken out to pay the builders.
It was a terrifying discovery, because I couldn’t immediately see what to do
about it. Already our work/life balance was tipped in favour of work. With a
son approaching GCSEs, this wasn’t an especially good time to tell him to
shift for himself while I got on with remedying the Fortunes of the House of
Shilling. If I couldn’t earn more, we’d have to spend less. And so, like
some wicked old roué discovering the charm of abstinence after a lifetime of
dissipation, I began to explore the joy of thrift.
The first thing was to make a complete list of all our outgoings. I had a
vague idea of these, which I mentally subtracted from my incomings each
month to give me a rough idea of what was left as spending money, and I kept
an eye on my account balance, but I’d never set down a proper budget on
paper before. It took less than an hour to draw up two columns of money
going in and money going out, and it was an extremely revealing document,
for it showed that in theory, I ought to be breaking comfortably even each
month, with a tiny surplus. We weren’t in debt because I wasn’t earning
enough. We were in debt because money was leaking from my purse – not in mad
splurges on preposterous luxuries, but in almost imperceptible drips: £10 on
flowers, £25 on books (which don’t count as extravagance because books are A
Good Thing), £50 on an amazing sales bargain, another £20 on designer
cast-offs from Oxfam (also not extravagance, because it counts as charitable
giving), £50 or so on weekend lunches at Pizza Express or the pub . . . The
sums involved were small individually, huge when totted up. And it wasn’t
just money I was wasting, but food and energy as well. Every week I had to
clear the fridge of leftovers before I could find space for the new week’s
shopping, and a keenness for warmth on the one hand and fresh air on the
other meant that I quite often had the windows open and the heating on.
Clearly I had to stop spending: but something else had to change as well.
My attitude to money, I realised, was infantile. I was treating whatever was
left after the monthly bills were paid as pocket money, to be spent at once
on the grown-up equivalents of comics and sweeties. It was this childish
extravagance, just as much as the inflation or the rogue builders, that had
got me into debt.
What I spend my money on
Once the utilities bills are paid, my largest weekly outlay is on food.
Cooking is one of the pleasures of my life. I don’t do ready meals (because I
know I can make the same thing as quickly, better, and more cheaply) and I
don’t own a freezer (not for ideological reasons, just because there isn’t
room for one in my very small kitchen). So I spend what might be regarded as
quite extravagant amounts on fresh food. Even so, I’ve been able to make a
significant saving in my weekly budget, and reduce waste to almost nothing
by buying every couple of days, rather than weekly. Buying for a very small
family can be expensive if you treat every meal as a separate entity. But
getting clever with leftovers can have a dramatic effect on cost. Elizabeth
David is bracing on this subject: “Without allowing economy to get out of
hand to the point of hoarding things which should have been consigned to the
dustbin,” she writes, in French Provincial Cooking, “(leftover
dishes) should be cheap, quick and easy to cook and . . . as attractive as
if all the ingredients had been chosen especially for that dish.” There
follows a long list of what to do with your little bits of fish, mussels,
beef stew, chicken carcases and trimmings, roast meat and whathaveyou: an
appetising parade of soups, pilaffs and mousses, to which Claudia Roden’s
book of Middle Eastern Cooking adds a useful repertoire of meatballs,
tagines and Middle Eastern omelettes. Modern cooks are sadly reticent on the
rich subject of leftovers: you’d never guess, to read them, that the natural
end product of a roast chicken is chicken stock, chicken, leek and mushroom
risotto, chicken tagine with salted lemons, chicken and corn chowder,
Vietnamese chicken and prawn hotpot with glass noodles, lemon, egg and
chicken soup (and so on). But it is, and the satisfaction of wringing two
nourishing and elegant family meals out of a £6 free-range chicken or an £8
shoulder of lamb is not to be underestimated.
How to budget
Having worked out a budget, the first thing I did was to reacquaint myself
with the reality of cash. It felt a curiously archaic thing to do. Cards are
easy, cards are safe(ish). Only this week, a new card was announced, the
purpose of which will be to pay for goods less than £10, thus moving us ever
closer to a cashless society. The trouble is, that cards don’t really feel
like spending. Hand it over, tap in the PIN, here come the goods and somehow
I have no sensation of having spent any actual money at all. Having worked
out that our weekly living expenses come to about £200, I have started
taking that amount of money out of the cash machine on Friday afternoons,
just before doing the supermarket shop and filling up the car with petrol.
Having taken to heart the US Compact initiative to counter the negative
effects of consumer culture , I buy basics at the supermarket but shop
locally for fresh food and wine. I’m lucky enough to have a good butcher,
greengrocer (below), fishmonger, wine merchant and Italian delicatessen
within walking distance. I found I was wasting lots of food by shopping
weekly, so now shop more frequently and plan menus around leftovers.
In a good week, I spend £50 at Sainsbury’s on basics, £35 on filling up the
car, which I do once a week, another £30 on fresh food and wine, which
leaves £85 for day-to-day living – newspapers, window cleaner, piano tuner,
MOT – all those sneaky little expenses that conspire to undermine the
virtuous budget. The great trick is not to panic if it all goes wrong. One
grim week, the hoover and the printer both broke, and the cat simultaneously
developed a horribly expensive abcess. By Tuesday afternoon I was already
£85 over budget and the temptation to abandon control of my spending was
immense. I tried instead to spread the deficit over the few weeks, taking
out £175 instead of £200. It didn’t work perfectly, but it wasn’t a complete
return to the old chaos, either. The discipline of a steadily diminishing
wad of cash, admittedly a bit Phil Mitchell, works well for me.
Monthly outgoings
Mortgage £640.00
Loan repayment £332.00
Pension £179.10
Car insurance £23.70
House insurance £46.64
Horse insurance £45.55
Life insurance £13.62
NICS £8.40
Electricity £41.00
Gas £65.00
Phone £45.00
Council tax £116.00
Broadband £28.00
Credit card £200.00
Charities £25.00
Savings account for son £50.00
Total £1,859.01
