While I was at university I worked at Costcutter - “That’s £4.78, please! Would you like a bag?” – to earn my pocket money. For every hour I spent stocking baked beans, sweeping floors and searching for out of date cream cheese, I got £5.80. Working on average 12 hours a week meant that I had about £70 to spend on food, clothes, birthday presents, toiletries, going out and – oh so annoying – text books! Having to watch my pennies (and being German and therefore naturally tight), I soon learnt not to spend money on unnecessary things like bus tickets (I can walk), take-away (I can make better food for half the price) or nice shampoo (I can buy shampoo for £1.50 rather than £4.50 and console myself with a drink). I discovered that the Tesco Value Yoghurts and the Asda Smart Price muesli are actually quite nice and that walking places is not that bad after all – especially in a country like the UK where it never rains…
And then I started work and things changed… oh yes!
On January 5th 2009 I started my first job as an Economist for the National Treasury – exactly 555 days ago.
555 days of $$$!!!
It took a while to shake off the student habit of living life on the cheap and I don’t think I will ever be able to mute the German inside me, but I am slowly getting used to the fact that a regular income paid into my bank account every month and that it’s okay to spend it! Having realised this, I started to buy the yoghurts I actually like, spoilt myself with nice shampoos and if I want a can of coke on the way home, I will get it (rebel me!). I have said goodbye to my VC (vintage computer) and bought a shiny new PC which actually operates more than twenty seconds without a charger! And next month I am going all out and buy myself a net book to fit into my new handbag :)
Despite treating myself a bit more these days, I am by no means going crazy with my spending. And fortunately I live in a country where most things are cheap, so I don’t ‘work all day and work all night’ without a single ‘penny left for me to spend’– so not too bad at all :)But contra to common belief, ‘money is not for nothing’ and I have to ‘work hard for’ it: I get up every day at 6am, am at my desk by 7am and finish whenever all the work that needs to be done is done... which means that days can potentially be very long!
It is a well known fact that if you work hard, you must relax even harder! Liza Minelli supposedly claimed that ‘money makes the world go around’, but she has been misquoted and actually wanted to say that ‘money makes you go around the world’! Despite working much harder than at university and basically writing a dissertation on a monthly basis, I no longer have 200 free days a year anymore... But on the other hand I now have the funds to make the most of the 22 days I get. In the past 5$5 days I have been to Mozambique, Tanzania and Zanzibar, Uganda, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho and travelled a lot within South Africa as well. Now that’s what I call time management skills!
But even though money makes you go around a rich man’s world, ‘mo money’ also means ‘mo problems’. In order to get to work, I had to buy a car ($$$) which I now have to insure ($$) and maintain ($); I am no longer covered by my parents’ medical insurance or the NHS ($$$); and people have started to ask me if I have decided on a pension fund yet ($$$ - wtf?)!
So while it is nice to have, money is indeed quite slippery - Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen... easy come, easy go!
But fortunately the best things in life are free and there is one thing money can’t buy, it can’t buy me love...because love don’t cost a thing :)
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