What Time Is It Mr Cook…

So Apple have reinvented the watch and no doubt, come the release date, there will queues of people camped outside every Apple store to marvel at this new fan-dangled contraption in hope of being “the first”.

Personally, I think I will pass. I turned my back on anything Apple almost 3 years ago,when they made my iPad 1 obsolete within 18 months. I paid nearly £600 for it, brand new. I was lucky that I managed to flog it for 1/6th of that value when they said that they weren’t updating it with whichever version of iOS was going to be the latest one at that time. My iPhone had already been replaced with an Android device just before this fateful event. But even if I did still have an Apple gadget I still would not be bothering with their latest marketing gimmicky tool.

People! It is just a fancy watch! What tangible benefit derives from owning such a thing? Oh, it means that you don’t have to take your phone out of your pocket to do some task or open an app, or look at the time maybe? Whoop-de-bloody-do! The one thing it will do, with some certainly, is that it will diminish your bank balance to the betterment of a company that already has profits the size of the GDP of some mid-table second world country!

This is the new me. The old me would have been suckered in by the hype, by the bollocks, the marketing and I would have increased my own personal debt to have this latest “must have” gadget.

If you really, really, REALLY want this new toy – and that is all that it is, an expensive toy, then wait. Give it six to twelve months. You’ll be able to get your hands on one a lot more cheaply on eBay, at CEX or any other such resellers. Look at it like this, the iWatch 2 will probably be due out next year anyway. I’m sure that it will be marketed as a slightly better, slightly faster and slightly lighter than the old, mundane and clunky iWatch 1, with one major difference being that any new watch will cost a lot more than it’s predecessor!

I am on the road of getting out of debt and I want it to stay that way. So no Mr Cook, I won’t be buying in to your vision of the future nor indeed to any other manufacturers vision of that future either. The only future I envisage is where I’ve placed that few hundred pounds I’ve saved, by not buying your latest mechanical machine, towards my shrinking debt pile.

 

Why The Frugal Funghi?

As my strap-line says:

“MONEY, JUST LIKE MUSHROOMS, IF LOOKED AFTER CAN GROW AND GROW AND GROW….”

Also another saying can easily be said about mushrooms:

“MONEY, JUST LIKE MUSHROOMS, IF LEFT IN THE DARK WILL FEED ON SH*T….

 

I’ve have been there, to both of these places!

Years ago I was bad with money. Very bad. So bad that sometimes I couldn’t pay the rent on my flat without getting in to debt. My philosophy back then was “As long as I could pay off the minimum amount owed to anyone (after the overdraft was maxed-out the credit cards would get used), then everything was good.” And the accumulated interest never ever figured in to this “philosophy”. Then I got wise; I started to pay the minimum AND the accumulated interest each month. But then I added more debt to the card(s) each month. A rinse and repeat cycle whereby the only people getting rich were the credit card companies and banks. But at least I had the nice material, shiny things, to show for my money. So here I was, living in the dark, being fed on (consumerism) shit and my debt burden was growing. Just like a farm full of poisonous mushrooms. And I wasn’t even aware of what was really happening to my financial situation (read ignorant!).

Then the epiphany happened. Ironically it was a combination of the debt crisis of 2009 and the fact that we wanted to move house (more debt) that spurred me into action. I got my mushroom farm in order. Just doing some basic sums I realised that I wouldn’t be able to afford the new mortgage repayment rates AND the minimum repayments on my credit cards. I decided that it was time to face up to the realisation of my situation and to shine a light on those bad mushrooms! I started to budget my money (albeit reactively). I faced my debt challenges head-on and tackled that debt.

Within 18 months I had cleared my credit card debts, paid off the car loan and I no longer needed any overdraft. I could afford the new (increased) mortgage repayments.

Even though I was married at this stage our finances were separate and we only pooled resources to pay for the joint expenditures; the mortgage and food in the main.

After getting myself out of debt and looking forward to a life of solvency and having a farm full of healthy mushrooms. Then the bombshell hit that was very similar to the real banking crisis; my wife’s finances were in a worse state than mine. A lot worse! And she too was ignoring this growing burden. Floundering under the weight of bad mushrooms! AND SHE NEVER EVEN TOLD ME ABOUT IT UNTIL WE WERE REFUSED OUR FIRST REMORTGAGE APPLICATION BECAUSE OF AN “UNDISCLOSED DEBT”!*

I’m going to fast forward to now, the beginning of 2015. It will seem like I’ve missed a whole “Well, come on, how the hell did you do it” etc. type segment could easily fit here. Let’s just say  we are still paying off the wife’s debt burden, which I now view as “our burden”. If all goes to plan that will be cleared by mid-2017 and by then the only debt left will be the mortgage, and I have plans to pay that off as quickly as possible too. The whole idea behind this blog is for you to join me on the journey ahead and I will hopefully post regularly enough for you get an idea of what I did to “fill in the blanks” of this inaugural post.

 

*Oh, and if you want numbers, our combined pre-2009 debt was easily over £20,000! Over 75% of that has been repaid – we took a set back when we had to buy a new (to us) car in 2013.