Money, money, money

Me, Husband and the Sprogs – as I may have mentioned – are on restricted finances right now. There’s only so far one four-day-a-week salary can go. Well, that’s the theory. But it doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to the lifestyle we are still living. As I type, the gardener is restoring order to the chicken wasteland that is our backyard. You wouldn’t think a household on a single, part-time salary should still have a gardener … but anyway. Yesterday, the cleaner came and restored order to the Sprog wasteland that is our house. You wouldn’t think a household on a single, part-time salary should still have a cleaner … but anyway. On Wednesday, Husband and I sat at a lovely cafe drinking a couple of glasses of wine while the children were at school. You wouldn’t think a household on a single, part-time salary should still be going to restaurants and ordering second glasses of wine … but the weather was so lovely. It’s a bit like the diet I promise to start every Monday, except now it’s the budgeting. Unlike the diet, if I don’t start the budgeting, it’s not just my waistline that’s going to get messy. Bottom line is that we’re spending way more than Husband earns, despite my best efforts to only stroke clothes in shops rather than buying them. (OK, there was this $49 shirt at Zara, but it was an absolute BARGAIN.) Actually, real bottom line is that budgeting sucks. Sister and I have been buying tickets in the $5 lottery, which has jackpotted to $20million or some such insane sum. How nice would that be? We’re thinking we’ll open a nice little beachy homewares store and travel the world looking for nice little beachy things to sell in it. Husband says he doesn’t understand why we’d want to work in a shop. But he’s really not getting the point. If you’ve won $20million, you don’t have to work in the shop. Someone else works in the shop for you. Then I can drink as much wine in cafes as I like when the Sprogs are at school, without that annoying, sick, niggly panic in my chest about how we’re going to pay the bloody mortgage at the end of the month.