Living beyond one’s means

Most of us, at some time or the other, have been tempted to spend more than we earn. “It’s on sale at last!” or “What a bargain — I must have it!” we think and we look around to see how we can afford it.

In our early days, we looked no further than our parents — but they rarely had the money to lend us — and more likely, they would treat us to a discourse on cutting our coat according to our cloth, eating our cake and having it too and a host of other aphorisms ... did we really want to listen to that?

Those were not the days when there were easy installments for everything from clothes to holidays abroad. So, most often, we looked into shop windows, we looked again, we yearned, we agonised over our finances — and we let those bargains go.

Then I met someone with a family background as monetarily restricted as ours had been. But somehow, he had learnt different lessons from the same situations. With immense faith in a higher source to bail him out, he went ahead and lived happily beyond his means without a thought of how he would pay up if the bailiff came knocking! Surely some lottery win (even if he never bought tickets) or legacy (even if he had no rich relatives) would come unexpectedly from somewhere ...

It did. In the form of his spouse’s salary that fortuitously was paid in the last week of the month — about a fortnight after his own had vanished. So, for the first couple of years of our wedded life, we blithely dipped into the second kitty and cleared bills he had no recollection of incurring. We also bought totally frivolous things for each other because we believed we had been “deprived” when we were young.

The day we struck rock bottom marked the end of our honeymoon and the start of real life — as we would know it for the rest of our lives. But did we do what normal couples do — make a budget, stick to it; save one salary, spend the other; tighten our belts, curb our appetite for fripperies; write down our expenses and go over them carefully each month to see what could have been avoided or what had turned out to be a really bad buy ...? No.

One of us was so accustomed to living on the edge that he shrugged and carried on as before — with a comforting smile and immense faith in some nebulous saviour of the overextended and overdrawn account. It was left to the other, who would have liked nothing better than to stay a happy spendthrift, to do an about-face, opt for unpopularity and call a stop to unwarranted expenditure.

On the face of it “we” continued to dip into the second kitty — but the centre of control had shifted. Now, only I knew what went into the kitty and I had absolute power to approve, postpone or veto what went out.

And that’s how we survived — and prospered in our own small way — over the next few decades.

I suspect many of us have a kitty of this kind, created with the tacit knowledge of the other partner and controlled by the more tightfisted of the two in a relationship. We pretend to everyone — especially our children — that it does not exist and we are going way beyond our means when we buy tickets for the next holiday or pay for the new car ...

Perhaps they accept that explanation for some time, but eventually they get too smart for us to pull the wool over their eyes.

And they protest, as one did recently: “As self-proclaimed retirees, where do you get the means to live beyond your means? Is there some hidden cache in the garden we should know about?”

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.