A short retirement blog for Friday about spending

If you’ve read these retirement blogs over the last 6 years you will be aware that I often quote my grandma and her little ‘sayings’. She was a mine of ‘expressions’ that, at the time, seemed totally nonsensical to me as a child. Over the years I’ve come to treasure them to the point of including them in some of my retirement blogs.

Perhaps the strangest expression she would trot out was if she asked me a question and I would respond, I don’t know. She’d come back with, you don’t know, I don’t know and neither does the cow. Bonkers or what and of course I never asked her the origin of it and now it’s way too late. I doubt whether anybody else has ever heard this expression. But maybe you can prove me wrong.

Another of her sayings and this one much more common and sensible was, penny wise and pound foolish. Or was it the other way round? No, I think that’s right. If ever an expression was designed for me this surely must be the one. I have had many occasions when this saying has come back to me.

For example, a few weeks ago Mrs Summerhouse did an unusual thing. She bought 3 cakes I suppose you’d call them. Buns more precisely. I used to love Belgian iced buns (as above but only one) with my coffee. Just about once a week as I recall. When I started to lose weight to tackle my diabetes they were banned. Despite, when she asks, is there anything you need while I’m out (shopping) and when I reply, a Belgian iced bun, Mrs Summerhouse laughs off my request. No, she says, I meant like toothpaste.

So not to be, until, as I say, a few weeks ago. Then, to my absolute amazement, she came back with a pack of three buns / pastries including one Belgian iced bun. I ate that and she had the Danish pastry and, obviously, one was left over. It went in the cupboard and I forgot about it, until about a fortnight later when it was discovered like some archaeological remains.

To cut this long story shortish, Mrs SH wanted to throw it out on account of it being stale. Not me, the idea of throwing out a perfectly feasible bun, albeit a little on the firm side, was an anathema to me. I covered in butter and ate it. Absolutely fine and a real saving.

For some reason the bun came back to me (not literally) a few days later when we booked a night in a posh hotel along with an English wine tasting evening. The opportunity to taste some top quality English wine and compare it with ours was hard to resist. True the bad person side of me secretly hoped that our wine would be better than their’s, but that’s another story.

When I agreed to be a part of the wine-tasting I didn’t realise it included a night in the hotel so that it cost £450. True it would have been a little bit embarrassing to admit that the price was too high but that wasn’t entirely the reason, we still made the booking, even at this price.

The truth is that it didn’t bother me that the price was astronomical. I saved about 30p on the bun and then spent £450 on a hotel room / wine tasting. Now is this just me, or is there something of a double standard going on here? Perfect example, I think, of the penny wise pound foolish theory.

There are many others. Refusing to pay more than a £1 for a paperback from a car boot sale and then spending £2,500 on a Martin guitar. Just doesn’t make sense does it? And don’t ask about my obsession with using paper towels more than once – as a serviette, then to clean up the kitchen, and this is a relatively acceptable example.

So here’s the thing. Although I’ve always inclined to this dichotomy of spending, since I’ve retired, I’ve got worse. My extremes of spending have become more polarised with the passing years of retirement. At the simplest level I’m more committed to looking for bargains (like 4 books for £2 from Oxfam) and yet more willing to spend ridiculously large sums of money on hotels, meals, bottles of wine, guitars etc. Is this crazy?

The obvious answer is that, as I move gracefully through my retirement years, I am becoming more bonkers and less sane. Who knew?