Smugness on every channel

I am beginning to dislike Kirsty Allsop. I used to love Location-Location, but I am disillusioned. All she does is marry ‘smug-30-somethings’ with picture-box cottages in Cornwall, wearing her natty Hobbs outfit, looking smug. She never even bothers to ask her smug clients where the hell they got the cash from.

Please ask them Kirsty; if only so I can apply for whatever dreadfully overpaid job they’re doing.

Life, I have realised, is nothing like Location-Location. Nevertheless, I am sure most of us have spent at least 200 hours of our lives watching couples (mainly smug) agonise over whether to stretch their budget to £650,000 for the thatched cottage or stick at £599,000 for the converted barn in the middle of nowhere. And you know something else? I bet there’s never actually anyone on the end of the phone when they talk to the ‘estate agents’ from the gastro-pub beer garden.

But in ‘Smug aspirational TV stakes’, Kirsty and Phil don’t hold a candle to Grand Designs. You too can have your dream-lifestyle; build your fantasy perspex home with its eco-composting, sustainable insulation and antique bath tiles. That is of course if you have a quarter of a million in the bank, a year off work, and are, as well as being a financial advisor, a highly capable electrician.

Rich people used to spare us the details of their wealth by building high fences around their giant homes and blacking out their car windows. Now we must watch it all on every channel. And we’ve got time on our hands, we the great unwashed, as we wait patiently for our fortnightly dole appointment.  Of course we’re not all cashing our dole cheques and drinking white-lightning, but we might as well be lying in a ditch for all the respect we’d get at a middle-class, ‘smug’ inhabited dinner party.

For years, we have made the error of contrasting ourselves unfavourably with television stars, imagining we know them when all we really know is a carefully edited presentation. But these are supposed ordinary people. Albeit ordinary people with far from ordinary bank accounts.

Perhaps these TV shows should just come right out and say it, ‘This is what you could have won;’ if only you’d been born in Downton Abbey, married a banker, or been properly schooled.

I might have to change the channel and watch TV shows where the characters are renting their homes, worrying about money, and the only homage to green living is low energy light bulbs.

Coronation Street. That seems like a good bet.  I can watch from my pleasant rented flat as a working-class single mother who struggles with her weight is made redundant. Perhaps for a change, I will not feel like a cider drinking down-and-out.

What? Is that Leanne Battersby wearing MY jumper? Oh the shame. I knew shopping in Primark was a bad idea. Maybe I’ll switch back and continue envying Kirsty’s new coat. Superiority is overrated anyway.

Throw your money down the drain

I think I might have to change my tune. Money Saving Madam is in a mood. Month one of saving has ended and I can report that there is nothing in the pot. Zara’s profits have dropped by 10% but we’re still in the red. Perhaps I don’t care for the property ladder after all.

If it isn’t enough that my own bank account is against me, so are the statistics.

It costs approximately one arm and one leg to buy a home. The average property is 5 times the average salary. The proportion of first-time buyers able to buy a home without financial assistance has hit an all time low. Just 17%.

With rising rents, the cap on university fees removed, and a desperate employment market, it is hard to see how the next generation are ever going to conjure up the savings.

Actually, sod the next generation. How am I ever going to conjure up the savings?

Perhaps home ownership is overrated anyway. How often I hear people talk of their ‘cursed mortgage’. The mortgage is the reason they stay in a job they hate, why they cannot holiday at will, and why they endlessly wait for the day it is paid off and they are free.

Common wisdom (which is far removed from common sense) is that you should take on the largest mortgage that you can afford. By doing this you are able to trick people into thinking you have enough money to live in the smart part of town. And because your mortgage is just more than you can really afford, you have effectively made yourself poor.

Renters amongst you will be familiar with the phrase ‘throwing money down the drain.’

Let us examine the moral high-ground of our homeowner friends.

Say they have a £200,000 mortgage. On a 25 year term they will pay well over £240,000 in interest. So the idea that they own their house is a myth. The bank owns it, and is selling it back to them at a ludicrous mark up.

£440,000 for a £200,000 flat? I think wonga.com has better rates.

To me it seems that the mortgage system is just an organised method of throwing money down a different drain. I can’t deny that I’d still like my own front door, but for now, I’ll lease the one I’ve got and try and keep the usurers away from it for another month.

A new resolve

I have never saved money. I have always assumed that a certain ‘type’ of person saved. Perhaps the type that always wears a watch or worries about home contents insurance. I have plenty of friends of this persuasion and I judge not. I am simply not her.

This is not to say I am particularly reckless with money, it is just that I have never believed in doing anything ‘in case of a rainy day’. What a pessimistic approach. And anyway, should rain come, I’m pretty sure I could find an umbrella somewhere.

I recently read an essay by the American writer Nora Ephron. Writing on the loss of her best friend to cancer she says ‘It taught me to always use the good bath oil.’ Life is certainly too short and too wonderful to deny ourselves. She goes on, as poignant as she is witty, “If the events of the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that I’m going to feel like an idiot if I die tomorrow and I skimped on bath oil today.. So now I use quite a lot of bath oil. More than you could ever imagine.”

I do believe I am in good health, but you get my gist.

However, perplexing recent events have forced me to reconsider my lacklustre saving efforts. I have developed a sudden interest in Laura Ashley furnishings, a penchant for kitchenware stores and a longing desire to craft a mood board.

Put simply, I rather fancy my own front door. And in recession gripped 2010, the banks ain’t gonna lend me ‘nowt without a deposit. Latest statistics claim that a ‘non assisted’ first time buyer does not manage to make the giant leap onto the first rung until the lofty maturity of 37. I am not sure that I can share a bathroom, be at the whim of landlords, and hear that I am ‘throwing money down the drain’ for ten more years. The bank of Mum and Dad is firmly closed, so it is about time that I got my act together.

 As denying myself life’s pleasures seems a terrible shame, it strikes me that I should get all of this unpleasantness over and done with as swiftly as possible. As such, I resolve to save a deposit for a flat too pokey in an area I’d bearably live in over the course of 2011.

The average property price is a terrifying £246,000. I reside in a capital city. I’d probably want 2 bedrooms – after all I have spent a fair few quid on clothing over the past 5 years. On consideration I might have bitten off more than I can chew.

But where there is a will, there is a way. I will cease shopping, take my packed lunch to work, find a second job, babysit, sell my Whistles’ dresses on EBay, become a TV extra and investigate the moral implications of medical trials.

I will succeed. And when I have succeeded I will not take out a mortgage that is just beyond what I can afford and will thus trap me in a job I hate. I will learn exactly which fabrics compliment duck egg and own a hoover.

So, in pursuit of this lofty dream, I decree that from January 1^st 2011, for 12 months, I will go cold turkey on my Zara habit, ditch the luxury holidays for the Caravan Park, and replace the after work wine with a soda, lime, and a swift exit.

Flat deposit here I come.

And if I do get hit by a bus on January 1^st 2012, then he who acquires whatever small fortune I have amassed should spend it frivolously, recklessly and definitely not on home contents insurance.

May I suggest a vat of very expensive bath oil?