2013/2014 Pt4: Finances and such

I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't pay much attention to, well, anything at all, really, in 2013.  Among the many, many things I wasn't giving anywhere near enough attention to was money.

This is, sadly, not something unique to 2013.

I do, as a general rule, ignore anything with maths involved.  Accounts and finances doubly so.

As a result, it appears I've been haemorrhaging money over the past few years.

I've been living with my family since returning to Townsville (primarily because I stayed to help take care of my grandmother and I've been too lazy to change my circumstances since my grandmother died), and I've had the perfect opportunity to save up some money.  But I haven't.

I worked out the other day that I've been in a situation where I could have easily put aside $30,000 a year for the past five or six years - if I'd just bothered paying attention.

Sure, there have been a couple of overseas holidays, a new car, a couple of degrees and a few new hobbies thrown into the mix to put a drain on the bank account... but I'm still about $150,000 worse off than I need to be, and I can't adequately account for what I've spent that money on.

I expect I've largely squandered it on magazines.  Also books, comics, DVDs, coffee, novelty T-shirts, random pieces of camping equipment that I've never used (why?  God only knows), but mainly magazines.  Those things are expensive, but I find I rarely walk past a news agency without being drawn in to look at the shiny pages.

Anyway, I've decided that 150K is a lot of money to not have in my bank account and not have anything to show for it.

I've decided that 2014 shall be my year of a) paying attention to what I spend my money on, and b) spending less of it.

I've set myself a challenge of living off an allowance, rather than buying whatever I feel like on random occasions, and seeing how much I can save.  I'm hoping for over 35K.  We'll see.

You get what you get - Black Wolf Taipan hydration packs

It's one of the great fallacies that I buy hook line and sinker every time:

"You get what you pay for"

The truth is, you get what you get. I've lost count of the times I payed extra for the sake of perceived value, only to find that the expensive thing I bought broke just as quickly and easily as something much cheaper and "nastier". Heck, sometimes the more expensive thing was so awkward and hard to use, I ended up ignoring it and using the "cheaper and nastier" option anyway.

I'm feeling particularly burned, at present, by the Black Wolf "Taipan" hydration pack.

The first one I bought didn't even make it home from the shop before the plastic grip on the handle snapped. I took it back to exchange it for a non-broken bag, and noticed there were a few others in the shop with snapped handles. I figured this was clearly a design flaw, and decided to avoid holding it by that handle if it could be avoided.

The second bag (the replacement for the first) made it home without breaking, but never made it out of the house in the same condition. I removed the bladder to fill it with water, and when I put it back in the bag the tabs for holding the tubing popped out of the stitching. To add insult to injury, the bladder leaked.

$100 for a bag that broke (at three different places) the first time I tried to use it. I'm not getting another one of those, I can tell you.