Terry Prone: Here are 28 great truths about money that everyone should know
When someone says 'I’m struggling with saving' it’s the same as when they say they’re struggling to find the time to read a book. Not much actual struggle going on there.
Now that it’s pre-budget submission season, we offer 28 great truths about money.
1. When someone suing someone else says “It’s not about the money," it’s about the money.
2. When someone says, apropos a fee, salary, or book advance, that “We won’t fall out about that”, it is a lie. You will always fall out about it.
3. Anyone who suggests that you buy a horse or art as an investment should be removed from your life.
4. Owning folded fivers means you are an OAP. A solvent OAP, if you have enough of them.
5. Owning folded €50 notes means you are a First Holy Communicant. A rich one, if you have enough uncles and aunts.
6. When someone says, about not giving you a present for your birthday, “Sure what can you give the woman who has everything” they’re just a mean, unimaginative git, who can’t be bothered to take the trouble to please a friend. A supposed friend.
7. When someone says the cheque is in the post, it’s meant to be witty. Wit doesn’t work when it presupposes shared knowledge that isn’t. Shared, we mean. The majority of people under 50 don’t know what you’re talking about and the majority of people over 50 don’t want to think about waiting for cheques, having fallen in love with bank apps that get you paid the next day, rather than in 30 days if you were lucky.
8. If you thought you were saving the environment by paying more for free-range eggs, you were wrong. Eggs coming from cage-fed birds are actually much more sustainable. And if you thought you were investing in the happiness of the running-around chickens, you were wrong on that, too. The mortality rate is higher among the free-rangers. Staying home and having your food handed to you has a lot to be said for it, particularly if you’re a hen.
9. When someone says “I’m struggling with saving”, it’s the same as when they say they’re struggling to find the time to read a book. Not much actual struggle going on there.
10. People who do maths in front of the waiter to decide the tip need severe retraining. Just guess on the generous side. Over-tipping makes everybody feel good and won’t break you.
11. The fact that so many people every day fight to get an ugly machine to accept their empty cans is sad testimony to how broke they are. Rich people delegate the task, the way they delegate to others their child-minding, picking up the dry cleaning and keeping the house spotless.
12. Myth holds that thrift shops are great places to buy clothes. They aren’t. It’s actually cheaper to buy something new and good. Thrift stores, on the other hand, are mega when it comes to buying cheap and recent books. If you’re a donor, you’ll have found their staff getting aggressively picky. They make you stand while they do appalled segregation on your stuff and hand you back the things you really wanted rid of.
13. Anybody who spends €360 on a tub of Crème de la Mer moisturiser needs their head looked at, never mind their face.
14. When someone begs from you in the street, you can reprove them with a look that says “I know you would spend 50p, if I gave it to you, on drugs.” Or you can mind your own bloody business, give them a few quid and shut up.
15. When petrol gets expensive again — and it will — buy it at the nearest station, not the cheapest station.
16. If your financial situation is so bad that you expect the ATM to swallow your debit card and refuse to give it back, that’s the time to apply the cease-and-desist rule, rather than the economise-on-quality one: Give up coffee rather than drink crap.
17. Don’t complain about interest rates. Buy something with your cash, rather than hoard it to bore others with how the system is screwing you.
18. If your parents didn’t tell you “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” you need to sue them. Especially when it comes to loans to and from friends or relations.
19. No matter how skint you are, don’t give up on private health insurance. All together now: The public health system in Ireland is unequalled, once you can get into it. You noticed that “get into it” proviso? Precisely. Meanwhile, private health insurance costs a lot but gives you access. Now.
20. BOGO is good in theory, not in practice.
21. Wealth management is a vital and important professional task. Visit Mabs, where they give brilliant advice and don’t fleece you. Otherwise, remember Warren Buffet’s observation that “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from people who take the subway."
22. Treat size was invented by Satan to tempt fools to spend more, believing it doesn’t count.
23. Save money by not collecting things. People, yes. Things, no.
24. Don’t buy into cruise economics. That’s where you pay a fortune to be stuck on a boat where you can eat and drink from dawn to midnight and tell yourself that it’s cheap, all things considered. It isn’t and waddling off in elastic-waisted stretch trousers when it’s over is not a good look.
25. Buying a cheap bra never ultimately saves you money. Same with a frying pan. (For different purposes, obviously.)
26. Like wrinkles and arthritis, worrying about money even when you don’t need to is a function of getting older. If you believed you would be statespersonlike and above it all once you hit 60, it is a disappointment when you find yourself beginning to see the point of Wilde’s observation that “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
27. Do not believe that current shortages of squishy toys mean that they are worth collecting to sell in the future as rarities. This is a recurring idiocy that stretches to infinity and beyond.
28. Be realistic. Even if Simon Harris’s upcoming budget makes you rich (which, in fairness, isn’t that likely, no matter how hard he tries) research shows you’ll be no happier six months down the road.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
