So how much money do you need anyway?

It may be my memory powers but the past has a habit of reappearing in current situations.

I was reminded this weekend of one of my better sayings from 1986 or 1987.

I was still living in Manchester, working as a Systems Analyst, earning the stunning sum of just over 11,000 pounds a year, and spending most of my evenings hanging round one of three pubs in Didsbury or the city centre  with one of my younger colleagues.

He was a staunch Thatcherite. Given that he was living in a tacky, overpriced, one-room bedsit at the time his political standpoint took some understanding, but he had overdosed on the Daily Mail, spent far too much time believing stories about the Cockney wide-boys who were getting extremely rich extremely quickly in the City of London (this was before Nick Leeson got found out a few years later and we were to find out how these characters got away with so much!), and doses of instant reality from myself were helpful in his personal development.   

Such as:
"If I start earning 10,000 a year more tomorrow, I am definitely not rich, but if I am forced to earn 10,000 a year less tomorrow, I definitely am poor!".

At the time an extra 10,000 pounds a year would have turned my life round. I would have gone from indebtedness to a degree of relative comfort very quickly. So much I did not need, my lifestyle was not extravagant, my needs not excessive. I did not need or want to have millions, or to live in luxury - wharrever.

I can also think that I was by no means alone in thinking in those terms.

Curiously though, the people who think like that have been squeezed, the jobs in that range have decreased in number, and there has been an increased polarisation between those with excess and everyone who is trying to stay out of poverty. In 25 years things across the Western world have not improved. The one thing that has changed though is that it has become harder for people to stay in work as they get older, with the ageism that is rife just about everywhere!

This weekend I was again back to the same theme. Namely how do I generate 2,000 Euro a month more - net. That is petty cash to the Murdochs and Romneys of this world, but all the difference to my personal life style. I would go from indebtedness to a degree of relative comfort very quickly (sound familiar????).

Something using the talents that you possess, that is secure, that will not kill all the time that you now have spare (the translation work is using up long periods of my days for the peanuts it brings in, as it is!). And avoiding the scams that make up 99.999% of ways to make money on the Internet!

Quite how? Good question, but unless we reverse the trends that have been imposed upon us for the best part of the past 30 years, no answer is likely to be forthcoming for any of us. The trend appears to be down not upwards and nobody seems capable or interested in offering anything practical that works - merely the same glib old clichés that have taken us nowhere for longer than I care to remember!