Tax season can be a confronting time for the self-employed. I keep a mildly chaotic spreadsheet – a money diary of sorts – of the comings and goings throughout the year, but it’s only when the time comes to share it with my accountant, aka the most patient man in the world, that I’m truly confronted with how the sausage got made, financially.
If the sausage in this clumsy metaphor is a spicy mix of my accumulated expenses, then the main ingredients are: (1) My rent – more for a one-bedroom flat than any of my friends are paying in mortgages for their multi-bedroom family homes, the swines. (2) Utilities – the cost of which seem more made up as the months go on. I swear I could go off grid and my electricity bill would still go up by €47 euro, which I would be informed of in a jaunty email I’d read on stolen Starbucks wifi. (3) The car. Yes, I know the planet is burning but I didn’t have children. Let me have this petrol guzzling sanctuary where I can listen to my audiobooks on 1.6x speed in peace. (4) The truly staggering number of subscriptions I’ve amassed, as I seem caught in an ever-rising tide of paying a monthly fee for absolutely everything: €4.99 here, €8.99 there. Who signed me up for all of these? I was obviously hacked.
Add in the medical expenses and the pension contribution that feels huge and very grown up, but my accountant assures me will see me living on 53 cent a day in my 70s, and the €7 a month I pay to Microsoft just for Word to constantly tell me it needs to restart, and there’s not much left over from the surprisingly small amount one earns as a best-selling author. Please line up with your tiny violins while I tell you a tale of not being able to afford a house in Dublin, or anywhere near the east coast.
[ Tim Harford: The high price of our increasingly subscription-based lifestyleOpens in new window ]
One of the most jarring numbers that leapt out of my rudimentary spreadsheet was the €5,000 I spent last year on private therapy. My therapist was excellent, don’t get me wrong (she never told me I was her favourite, but I think we all know who gripped the cushion and revealed the traumas with the most dazzling panache). It was confronting though, to see it all totted up. One-sixth of a house deposit. One-third of a second-hand 2017 Nissan Qashqai. “Two weeks in a very nice all-inclusive in Mexico, flights and all,” as I carped to a friend, who reminded me that good mental health is priceless.
Of course, it’s a privilege to have €5,000 to spend on therapy. It has, at times, been life saving for me. Thoughts of those who need it and can’t afford it or access it haunt me. I only gave it up after I was accepted to a group therapy programme paid for via my eye-watering health insurance policy. Another privilege, another sausage ingredient, another barrier to care.
I’ve promised myself I’ll go through my subscriptions and ditch at least a third. But, my babies! Who would I even choose? Not Spotify, because the ads are a fate worse than death. Not Netflix. I can’t get rid of Disney+ because at least seven other people benefit from my multi-user profile and who am I to sever the magic? What if they haven’t watched Dopesick yet? Amazon Prime feels wrong but also so, so right. I try not to invoke the Prime delivery feature but sometimes you just need 50 clothes hangers and a paint by numbers kit fired at your front step within 48 hours. I can’t hurt the feelings of any of the Patreons and Substacks I’ve pledged to support, and at a fiver a month for every episode of Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules, my Hayu subscription feels like it’s making me money, somehow.
RTÉ seems to be missing a trick on the subscription front. I would probably pay up to €7.99 a month for an RTÉ Player that didn’t induce homicide, although if the licence fee is anything to go by, we’d still have to endure the commercials.
And herein lies my money problems. Actively looking for more ways to spend, rather than cancelling the YouTube premium subscription and returning to a life of abrupt ads. The ads in turn might push me back into the €5,000 therapist habit. So really, when it all boils down to it, I’m saving money.