Money Money Money
In the pre-Zopa days, we were exploring what people really thought of their money. Not what they thought they should think.
Bruce Davies (an enthnographic market-researcher) led us, like a financial David Attenborough, on a vicarious journey through the lives of Domestic Entrepreneurs (devotees of Property Ladder, etc); Personal Entrepreneurs (devotees of shopping); Lifestyle Entrepreneurs (”one day I’ll run my own shop and be done with the rat race”) and Traditional Entrepreneurs (start your own business and make money). (Apologies to Bruce for my vastly crude over-simplification of his sophisticated analysis). This opened our eyes to the huge variety of ways people saw their money.
We started to talking to people about their money. Not how much they have (a guaranteed conversation-stopper), but how they manage it, how they see it, how they feel about it.
One person in our research groups showed how they managed their spending by cutting their credit card in two and sellotaping it back together. That way they couldn’t do impulse purchases in shops, but they could still use it on the internet … There’s a strong logic there. But who would have guessed it ?
Other people would explain how money was all about numbers and getting the best rates and that any other way of looking at it was just plain wrong.
And some would say they like to keep their money very very secret.
Some would say that cash is king …. so having it in your hand/wallet is the most important thing. When you’ve got it, it’s really there. The rest is just numbers on a piece of paper.
In this process I found out that my way of viewing & managing money was very different from my colleagues. We had some very interesting debates in the office. “You do WHAT !?” … “You have how many credit cards ?!” … “How could you waste so much money ?” … “How could you spend so much time on something so boring ??!” etc, etc. Quite an eye-opener.
Which leads me, in a roundabout Sunday evening-ish sort of way, to the point of this post: what a strong theme through the ages money has been and, as a result, how many observations and quotes there are about it. Here are some of my favourites:
“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well” - Margaret Thatcher
“Money can’t buy you friends, but you can get a better class of enemy” - Spike Milligan
“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to go shopping” - Bo Derek
“Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex: you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did” - James Baldwin
“Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you’re only given when you possess so much that you don’t need it” - John Braine
“Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to” - Ambrose Bierce