The outpourings of grim personal finance details are as disturbing as the arrogance of the get-rich-quick years, writes ORNA MULCHAY.
SCHOOL’S OUT. The children are on holiday from today and in many households the parents are too. Enforced holidays in some cases, so it’s not like they feel the same wild thrill of freedom, or can toss their briefcase into the back of the wardrobe and tear off their suits with the same abandon.
In the last week, two business contacts called to say that they would be taking a couple of months of involuntary unpaid leave, while another appears to have relocated to Spain “until things get better”. Yet another seemed to have gone off the radar altogether, but I finally tracked him down – he was at home on the sofa glued to Wimbledon, and suggested I call one of his partners who it seems has returned to his first love – sculpture – in his expanded free time. He cheerfully admits that his earnings have dropped to the level of a subsistence farmer. One tough negotiator told me the best deal he had done all week was to get 30 per cent off his ferry trip to France for the holidays.
These are men who once lived for work. Hobbies were for wimps, except for golf of course, which was just another form of work. They used to boast about being cash rich and time poor, constantly having to throw money at emergency situations because they were so blessedly busy: forgot the wife’s birthday, had to buy her a Mini Cooper to make up; left the clubs at home, dropped €1,000 in the golf shop before the charity four-ball; missed the plane, only room the hotel had left was the honeymoon suite.
That kind of drama.
Now they are cash poor, with plenty of time to analyse where it all went wrong. Theories abound and so do solutions. If only we could talk our way out of this problem, recovery could happen next week.
Oh the arrogance is all gone now, you’ll hear people say, and we’re the better for it, but, socially, the blowing and boasting of the get-rich-quick years has been replaced by an outpouring of personal financial detail that is just as disturbing. Stop, too much information, you want to say, as victims of the crunch expose their money woes (and their friends’ even worse ones) in much the same way as the recently operated-on like to show off their scars.
At a party an acquaintance tells me that he has taken his wife’s Visa card, and his own, and put them in the safe until further notice. Also, that his rents do not quite meet his mortgages, that his salary has been cut and that furthermore his electrically-powered Aga is out of bounds since you want to see the way the electricity meter races when the thing is switched on. Whatever happened to talking about films and books?
Later, a sensible woman who is many years in business, explains that she has just enough funds to keep going until February, but after that . . . ruin. Trade is dead. The bank is killing her. She is drip feeding her creditors. They don’t like it and neither does she, but she has NO MORE MONEY. She finds solace in ironing. For years she allowed someone else the pleasure of reducing her family mountain of shirts and sheets down to orderly piles – now she discovers that she has a flair for it. It’s better than therapy she says, being able to put order on the linen, if not on her accounts.
Moving on, there was the couple who have to let their house and move in with mother to make ends meet, gossip about a well-known architect who has cashed in his pension just to keep his office open for another few months, and about a socialite who recently had to welcome the bailiffs into her home. They arrived in broad daylight and in jumpsuits which looks far worse than having the Dyno-Rod van pull up outside.
Of course there is still room in the downturn for one-upmanship. A source in the local tennis club tells me that the snobbish element is fixating on pay packets. Specifically husband’s pay packets. If he’s not down at least €1,000, then he wasn’t earning that much in the first place was he? appears to be the thinking. If more is being deducted, it’s a licence to brag, since it is now perfectly acceptable to vent about the things one doesn’t have, and how one is coping – whether it’s cutting out the organic chickens, hectoring bone-idle teenagers to clean the car rather than have it valeted; not rushing to get that arthritic knee seen to – or postponing braces for the 10 year old.
In years to come will a snaggle-toothed generation blame their parents for ruining their looks over some dodgy investments that crashed in the Great Irish Depression? It’s likely. On the plus side, they may remember this as the time that parents were home a lot more. The recession might yet succeed where worthy studies and EU directives have failed – in providing a better work/life balance.