I suppose that the reason to purchase is derived from the utility gained from a product – if the utility is sufficiently bigger than the price, then the decision is easy. For example, even if someone was broke, and a house was cut to half the price, then they would bust a gut to get it.  The credit crunch has cut this perceived utility though which explains why people are not longer as willing to part with their cash.

My wardrobe is still in development; I’ve thrown away or donated loads of clothes to charity since last year. The sad truth was, I was a bit clueless and a fashion victim. Let’s take a suit; of which I own perhaps one now;  subconciously I would fall into the trap of that more expensive = better. This is just not true and doubly more so when we are talking about the low to mid-ranges.

When you have limited cash, the most important consideration is fit, not brand. A cheaper suit that fits well is far better than any suit that does not. If you live in a city, then you can see by looking at guys just how many people have suits that don’t fit properly. Jackets that are too long or loose, trousers that are too loose. You’ll also see guys who have got it right; a guy in a well-fitted suit looks confident and powerful. The effect is something that money can’t buy.

Honestly – something well fitted will draw compliments; then when you tell people that it was cheap, they might say ‘oh’. But this is a symptom of the society we live in, that cheap = not good. Let’s not fall into that kind of trap.

Here are my tips that I’ve learnt:

1) Know your size. It’s surprising how many people don’t know what theirs is, or base this on a mixture of estimates or wishful thinking. Get the tape measure out and do it. Baggy is not a good look; if you look at the celebs that dress well, things verge on the edge of tight.

2) Play to your strengths: If you’ve got a defined phyisique, then get stuff that is tighter. Muscular arms, then show them. It is really amazing the difference that fit makes, even a simple white t-shirt can look vastly different when correctly fitted.

3) Know value. With a lot of sales on now, there is a lot of decent value in clothes. With fit as your first criteria, this opens up a lot of options. For example, I refused to shop in shops like Primark because it was cheap. But having rescinded this, there is a lot of acceptable stuff in there that fits great. If you see something you really like, then go for it – but bear in mind the usage factor. I find that it is always best to reserve bigger purchases for things that will last – suits, jackets, shoes – the longer the life, then the more you can spend.

4) Accessorize. This is a dead cheap and effective way of making different outfits look different. Belts, bracelets, chains, hats, the list is endless. Subtle touches, like matching your belt colour to your shoes, really go a long way.

5) Don’t go too fast too soon. Sales and the internet mean that it is often quite tempting to splurge and buy loads at one go. This is usually a mistake – resulting in extra clothes bought in ‘gag’ mode, that you realise won’t be worn. If you shop on the internet, go for someone with a good returns policy. And buy little at a time, consider each piece you buy and whether it will complement what you have got at present. This reduces those kind of clothes that you have in the wardrobe that don’t seem to suit anything, and therefore never get worn. I was an absolute sucker for sales, I would just add loads of things to the basket, thinking what great value it was.

6) Don’t be afraid to chuck things out. You see those dormants clothes – all they do is take up space in your wardrobe and make you think you have more clothes than you really have. You say in your mind ‘I’ll wear it one day’, but never do. Get rid of it; and you’ll motivate yourself to get some decent replacements.

7) Balance. Don’t go bananas on one type of clothing, for example, t-shirts, at the expense of jeans, or even the essentials, such as underwear or socks. Quality, not quantity is the way forward. You may get paranoid about seemingly wearing the same clothes, but believe me, other people care less than you think. I see pretty girls that dress quite similarly a lot of the time, and I sure don’t laugh at them.

A good site for men (sorry, I don’t know women’s) is www.kinowear.com. Check it out.

To get it, just get onto Facebook with your account and search for Financial Times. At the time that I checked, there were barely 1000 subscribers which is quite surprising for a good publication. They are looking to crack a new market here, with most FT readers being male and old-ish, I would guess.

Anyway, let me know how you get on.

I also got rid of a small fridge that was bought for me for Christmas. I only used it once and was a total waste of space – the only thing keeping it in my house was the sentimental value as it was a present from my sister. However, she won’t find out for ages, and it doesn’t really matter either.

£20 each for the boxes and £40 for the fridge makes £80. This more than doubles what I have made in the challenge so far.

Total items sold: 14
Money: £156.52

I have pledged to trim my computer games usage – I have too many consoles. That will be next on the horizon so there could be further good profits soonish.

I have been thinking of the resolutions for a while.  2008 on the whole was good, but I am really looking forward to the next year which promises a lot more. It has to,  it’s a real make or break time for me.

1) Be a nicer person

Sometimes I am arrogant and anti-social – I prefer my own company. Not all the time though, I regard myself as pretty normal. But, I think this is a result of being contented, you go into the comfort zone. Your girlfriend tells you she loves you, and I suppose you don’t chase as much and act accordingly. Looking at various facets, there is room for improvement here. I am a stubborn person and won’t call unless I am called. Which, thinking of the truly great social people, is totally the opposite.
This is not to say that I will be a ‘yes’ person; I need to respect my own requirements first (of which there are a few).  In some instances, I need to say no a bit more. But a nicer person will be happier about that.

2) Waste less time

I am a habitual time waster. To be brutally honest, playing games and watching movies online was probably costing over an hour of working time each day. This is not to cut it out altogether, but keep it confined to time I can afford to waste. Already there have been good steps: no Championship Manager addiction, and also, an uninstall of much-loved apps on my machine. I have to be taking the attitude when being idle for a while, to think: ‘Is this activity bringing me closer to my goals?’.  The answer should be self-evident.

3) Take better care of myself

At 28,  sadly I am not a kid no more and university feats just aren’t possible no more. I have to get 8 hours sleep, eat a good diet and exercise well to stay in shape. And this is not just for the internal, on the external I need to get back to basics and treat myself better; hair, smell, dress… etc.  I have already bought some shirts to move into a new type of style.

4) Keep up the clearout

I not only sold and traded my items last year. I threw a hell of a lot of stuff away, bags of crap that I never used. This has to continue. Of course, if I can get money for it, I will try – but I keep on selling things. I haven’t bought a major appliance in a while, probably a computer early last year.

5)Look after my house better

It’s a sobering thought that I have my own place that people live in. I want to make a pad that people will be proud of. I must be cleaner, declutter my own stuff while at the same time be more tolerant of other peoples. So far, things have been done on this front but has required a significant spend. But, it has to be done. Next year, I could be doing something totally different and things have to be ready at that point. I envisage something beautiful, with lots of space and also good gadgets.

6) Put the fun back into business

In the past couple of years perhaps, business has become a bit of a chore. I plan to recapture the magic, so to speak and to deliver better results. I will be maximising my opportunities to both improve my home and office life. And, as a bonus, will get some income.

7) Blog more

In the past year (and years before that), I rarely exceed 50 posts on blogs. Which equates to less than 1 a week.  I want to get settled here and just post a load of stuff. And, even though the title may be misleading in future climates (deflation may be the enemy), it is still mildly amusing for me. And if no-one reads it, that’s no big deal either. Writing this is a good release for me.

I think that’s good for now – too many will make things too difficult. I think that this will be hard enough in itself!

I’ve not written in here since I’ve been ill for the last few days;  although my definition of ill is different to everyone elses. As I work for myself, I just have to bear it, and do it. I have had no sick days although there have been times when I have gone back to bed on a morning for a few extra hours.  But this only means that I have to catch up later and therefore stuff like the blog, and also other things like New Year Resolutions are postponed for a while.

The end of 2008 sees me partying out of town. I’ll remember it well, for the last time was the bottom for me. I had broken up out of a long-term relationship and to look back at me then, I was a proper tool. In my mind, I was never going to score with women, and so this proved to be so. In that period of a year or so, things have changed quite a bit for me and mostly for the better. The women part (for so long drove me crazy), made me wonder what all the fuss was about. As you just stand being sociable, opportunity just falls in front of you. I am with someone now, and should she sort herself out, we could have something amazing. I have more prospects on the horizon than ever before and more ambitions. The only trouble is, that they haven’t arrived yet.

Several things nag at me though. Although things have been good, there is always something in me that says ‘They could be better’, ‘look at him’, and so on. You know that you could have worked harder, much harder, and got more results. You have several goals which you set at the start of the year and things get skewed in one direction. So, for some of my desires, I have made no progress at all. Your brain injects a kind of irrational fear into you, which prevents you from moving. All this is bullshit, of course, and it’s a question of motivation.

I am strong believer in feedback loops; positive reinforces positive, and negative reinforces negative. And it’s easy to get sucked in one. I admit that sometimes you get into one without even thinking about it, and BAM! it snowballs into a wasted day, arguments, or general low feeling. Certainly, a some times recently my state has been pretty low and if I trace it back, it probably starts with negative thinking. And, if you’re in an environment where negative thinking is prevalent, then the challenge is to find images that conjure success to you.

Anyway, 2008 has been a strange year for me. A real mixed bag. It was the first year I’ve had long(er) hair, after deciding to grow it around the middle of 2007. And, with this, a new girlfriend and far more results with the opposite sex;  getting a full intake in my house of tenants (which took 1.5 years!) and therefore some steady income. More positives were travel – I went abroad 15 times in 2008 with some great experiences.

There were some downsides; namely the erosion of work/business – this will be most likely be my last year in my current state – not by choice;  but more or less by force by a mixture of business/personal reasons. I have been unable to save any sort of cash and really, if things don’t change by two years I could be in a bad situation. On the personal side, there was the return of unreleased rage, and depression, although I would concede that I might be analysing things too much and that people don’t really care. What I’ve noticed is that negative behaviour doesn’t benefit anyone, anywhere, not matter how right it seems at the time.

I suppose things came to a head this year when you consider people that you know being successful – I have too but unfortunately that was 3-4 years ago at peak and I’ve never really pushed on from there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m probably better off than a lot of people that I know. But now the reality is that I do need a change and in previous years I might have denied that.

The problem with me this year is that I can recall every week at the start saying “Right, this week is the week it starts. We’re going to improve from now.” Obviously, this would not happen and I would spend a fair amount of time on things that did not benefit me. The trouble is, when you’ve had the same routine for so long, you get into a rut – which doesn’t seem to bad at the time but on reflection is demoralising.

Throughout my life, the recurring theme has been ‘nearly’:
- I could have been a good footballer, but didn’t put in the work.
- I could have been a good musician, but didn’t put in the work.
- I could have been very fit and muscular, but didn’t put in the work
- I could have been a good businessman, but didn’t put in the work.

You get the picture. This is not to say I have failed – I am still ‘good’ in those senses but not the top. And sure – having studied NLP for a little while, you can reframe this to a positive sense, but in the cold light of day, I think have already been guilty of this for a bit too long.  My standards haven’t been high enough, and I think that things have got this way because I do not have to account to anyone.

Plans are in progress to resurrect this and the first point I’m going to tackle is the use of my time. If I can become king of this, then things are going to be very nice this year. More soon.

Few sales to report:
Shawshank Redemption book that I used whilst studying. In effect it is pretty old but in good condition and does get reasonable values – got to £5.91 with post, leaving apprx. £4.99 after postage – it was quite heavy.

British Citizen Test: No, it’s not mine but strangely, I have a copy. Spookily, this also got £5.91
for me as well and sold in the same 24 hours of the day as the previous. Profits are higher – £5.42 as the book is a lot lighter. Thank god for that.

Looking at my running total thus, it looks like this:
Items sold: 11
Profit: £76.52

I have stuff to add (a mobile phone is close to being sold) so should be adding some things soon.

It was rather sad to see the well established retailer on it’s last knees; with the throng of shoppers akin almost to vultures picking on a carcass. There were no real bargains (most of the good stuff was only slightly discounted bringing it to the price of other stores); only stuff you didn’t need was 50% off. Woolworths were doing a roaring trade; perhaps the business could survive if it held a perpetual closing down sale. Given the infrastructure that it has, and the extreme amount of goodwill, I still believe that it can survive, although this would require an extreme back to basics move. Turning it into a glorified version of a £1 store might be the way forward for it. Woolworths doesn’t have the ability to shift stuff that depreciates quickly, like some electronics, but would be far better off going for high-margin items. Certainly, it has an important presence, especially in the smaller towns.

Although the shopping centre was busy – and how I hate it – you have to think that things will be different for next year. I have no doubt that a good percentage of people there were buoyed by Woolworths and other one off sales. But I see a lot of stores with not particularly strong brands offering goods at high prices. I would not be surprised if some organisations could not survive another poor year. The question burns is who is going to take their place? It will be interesting.

There are some parallels with the financial world here. When it comes to weight loss, I am quite a scientific man. If you expend more calories than you use, you will lose weight. According to the third law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, simply transferred. Therefore the calories approach has merit (although whole lifestyle needs to be considered). There are many who don’t agree with that – I rather suspect that people don’t want to think that something is so basic and easy.

But I digress. The same procedure can be done to look at your finances. If you want to get richer, then you either have to spend less, or earn more. Both are possible as you’ve seen. But the financial RMR gives you a better look at what you are spending, and pinpoints areas that you can save money. Extrapolating helps; for example, an £8 a month dormant website cost (which seems like hardly anything) is almost £100 in a year. And downsizing helps as well, you can divide your RMR by 30 to give your daily RMR – this is the amount of money you need to make every day to break even. See if you can exceed this by a set amount each day.

How to create this? Write down all your expenses. Only essential expenses should go on there; as in, stuff that you are already committed to. Put it this way, if you were injured and bedbound, what bills would you still have to pay? For me, the list looks like:

- Rent/Mortgage
- House Insurance
- Car Insurance
- Life Insurance
- Mobile Phone Bill
- Gas Bill
- Electric Bill
- Water Bill
- Landline Bill
- Food
- Payment on loans/credit card
- Website hosting costs
- Broadband cost

Pretty scary huh? The best thing to do is look through that list and work out what can, and what can’t be trimmed. Once you have your daily RMR, keep this in your head as your survival figure. If your income is less than that daily, well, now’s the time to look for a job that pays more.

There is an advert near the station about stopping smoking by the NHS, saying that a smoker spends over £2,000 a year on cigarettes; doesn’t seem so bad when you hand over a fiver and change. I rather suspect that the £2,000 is a ‘worst case’ figure as:
- average consumption (for all smokers) must be less than 20 a day; there is only so much time. Even once every 30 minutes every waking hour (let’s assume 16) gives a total of 32, and I have never known anyone to do that.
- average cost would be less than the RRP. Any hardened smoker would be getting their cheap Ryanair flights over to Europe and bagging the cheap smokes (probably around £2 a pack), I’d reckon the total would be closer to £1,000.

Still, £1,000 is a large figure. As a proportion of disposable income (that is, income after all expenditures has been taken out), it has even more impact. Some people I know only have a few hundred pounds left at the end of the month – therefore smoking can account for up to 33% of expenses! Of course, there will be people who can easily afford it; but it’s my own opinion that smoking is one of the reasons why the poor stay poor. £1,000 a year buys a hell of a lot, especially for families on lower incomes.

Even despite the raw cost, there are several downsides which have their own hidden costs (perhaps worth more):
- It supposedly relaxes you, but this is taken back with interest at a later date. The ‘high’ gained from smoking is vastly overrated (as is alcohol).
- Smoking decreases efficiency and makes it hard to focus. It decreases motivation and induces a ‘ahh, fuck it’ attitude
- Smoking suppresses the appetite which contributes to poorer performance. You need food to function, and cigarettes contain zero nutrition.
Of course, these are my own personal observations, yours may be similar or worse.

Now, on the flipside, I think that the whole picture needs to be looked at. An infrequent smoker who goes to the gym is probably going to be better off than a non-smoker that doesn’t. But then, a non-smoker who goes to the gym is better than an infrequent smoker that goes to the gym. It’s like the trump card.

At least our parent’s generation had some sort of excuse – back then, smoking was actually portrayed as being good for you, everyone did it and it was normal. Now, I honestly believe that in maybe 20 years time, we will look back and wonder why the hell anyone did it – and will probably have some sort of healthy version. The message: don’t.