Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset
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, it’s worth it. ‘When it comes to shopping … the normal rules don’t apply.’ She’s not alone in thinking this. Glamour magazine last year ran a little piece about a woman looking for a boyfriend. The journalist asked her how she was going to go about it. Her answer? She’s going to splash out on a Caribbean holiday so she has an all-over tan, have her hair done at Nicky Clarke, buy all her cosmetics at Carita, her lingerie from upmarket underwear shop Myla and her clothes (£500 worth a month despite the fact that she takes home pay of only around £1,300 a month) from upmarket designer Paul and Joe. This makes no sense. Most men have never heard of Paul and Joe and while the label makes lovely clothes they aren’t going to make her look much nicer than Topshop stuff. Nor will knickers from Myla. Oh, and the sun shines in places other than the Caribbean. This woman might end up with a boyfriend (although he’d have to be a very tolerant one) but it won’t be because of her Carita face cream. And she’d better hope he’s a generous boyfriend because she’s always going to be broke.
The fact is that normal rules do apply. They always apply Spending money should not be thought of as an emotional experience. Falling in love is an emotional experience; having a baby is an emotional experience; attending your best friend’s wedding is an emotional experience; buying a handbag simply is not.
“I like my money right where I can see it – hanging in my closet.”
Carrie Bradshaw, Sex and the City
If you aren’t happy with your weight, with your job or with your relationship, no number of dresses will cheer you up for long; a £1,000 weekend at a spa will do you no more good than a lie-in and a walk in the park, and if you’re getting old a £100 pot of wrinkle cream will no more make you young again than a jar of cold cream. Instead it will just make you feel slightly disappointed, pushing you back to the shops to search for something new to cheer yourself up. Women often say that they feel moments of ‘joy’ as they make new purchases. Why? Because for that moment they genuinely believe that what they have bought will make their lives better. But they quickly see that it has not and the joy goes – it is a very fleeting feeling, to say nothing of an expensive one. The moment you have something you start getting used to having it and the joy you find in it starts declining. New shoes make you happy for a few days but after several wearings they’re not all that new any more. To be happy you find that you need another pair. It is the same for handbags and jeans.
It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not just expensive stuff we’ve been conned into buying too much of. When advertisers aren’t using the ‘improve your life’ line to sell us stuff, they’re using the ‘it’s so cheap you’d be mad not to’ line instead. Over the last decade the big business success story has been the rise and rise of the discount store – the likes of Matalan and Primark for clothes and Lidl and Aldi for food. I’ve nothing against discount stores – low prices are obviously a good thing – but when prices are cheap we tend to buy more than we would have otherwise and end up spending more money in total. We think we are saving when we buy jeans at £4 and if we needed jeans anyway we probably are. But if we didn’t intend to buy jeans and only did so because they were so cheap and then bought three pairs for ourselves and one pair each for our sisters as well, we are not saving, we are spending: £4 spent is £4 not saved.
We now buy twice as many clothes as we did a decade ago for the simple reason that they are cheap. In 2004 clothing sales in the UK were worth a total of £36.6 billion, 19% more than in 2000. Around £9.5 billion went on men’s clothes and £6.6 billion on children’s clothes. The rest – a massive £20.5 billion – was spent on women’s clothes. We also travel at least twice as much as we used to. Back when it cost £400 to go to Paris people didn’t go very often. Now it costs £29.99 to fly there on a discount airline we go at the drop of a hat. Then when we get there we stay