So, estimating our expenses for the next year, I included £300 a month for the jabs, plus £200 as an estimate for my gym, hair, cosmetics, contacts, nails and clothes budget. It is a chunky ongoing cost for sure, and even I was shocked at what it adds up to.
I did mention to him that his horrible vape habit costs just as much as my jabs, but he seems to think my meds are less important.
How do we avoid this tit-for-tat type negotiation and achieve a more dignified way of meeting our joint commitments without doing inventory and confessions every month?
Can you actually spend £300 – or £500 – on vaping?
My boyfriend and I have been working out a joint budget because we have recently moved into a flat together.
Since I earn less, we’ve always agreed that to move into our nicer flat, it would need to be subsidised by him. Going 50/50 would mean I’d be spending more than I paid living alone, so I’m just going to contribute the same amount as I have been.
However, as part of all this, my spending has come under the microscope.
See headline for what is really going on here.
I’m sure he’d rather she spent the £300/mo on the flab jabs, and not the £200/mo on nails and hair.
Nails and hair are for other women. Wash and brush your hair and your man will be happy.
And handbags and shoes…
Just when you thought the Telegraph couldn’t sink any lower it’s its quest to out Guardian the Guardian we learn that they have a “moral money columnist”.
Moral money: money not in the hands of the state.
It’s good to see the claim about women wanting equality still means what’s yours is ours and what’s mine is mine.
Scrodinger’s feminist strikes again. #metwo.
Has she tried just not eating so much crap?
If ‘the jabs’ are slimming aids, cutting her spare cash will have the advantage of having less to eat…
Sadly fattening foods are cheaper than healthy foods so cutting food spending will result in *more* spent on flab jabs.
A couple of thoughts.
Flab jabs aren’t ‘meds.’ They are telling you that you are a lardarse and that you are unable to eat healthily without some form of crutch to guide you along. Five minutes true lifestyle thinking will sort that one.
Next, if you go to the gym and your buttocks still skim the carpet, you are either full of mean muscle elsewhere, or you spend gym time checking your mobile and looking in a mirror.
Next, if you go to the gym and your buttocks still skim the carpet, you are either full of mean muscle elsewhere, or you spend gym time checking your mobile and looking in a mirror.
I’ve pointed this out before, but it’s worth repeating: people grossly over estimate how many calories they burn when exercising and under estimate how many calories are in that treat they reward themselves for going to the gym.
This morning I had a relatively easy session on my cross trainer and then doing functional strength training aka weights and exercises. In 90 minutes I burned just over 300 excess calories – that’s calories I burned over and above what I would have burned for just being alive. Even though it was an easy session I still worked harder than a lot of women who go to the gym.
On the other side of the equation that latte and brownie they treat themselves to comes in at around 250 calories assuming no syrups in the drink and a very small brownie. If they have a chocolate brownie you can add another 200 calories or so.
True, but there are people who have the treat without the gym.
The strongest correlation I see is people who exercise. Whether it’s the people in my street that get around by bus/bike/foot, or if they go to the gym.
I like the sound of that chocolate brownie, with a cup of tea from a proper place like Assam, not that Harrogate schite.
Whenever I’ve been training (of which the gym is a subset), I’ve always regarded weight/flab loss as a bonus as the principle aim was getting fit.
250 Calories a day is 91,250 Calories per year is 26 pounds of fat per year. So after 10 years you would have put on 260 pounds, or 18 stone. After 40 years, about 74 stone.
With a chocolate brownie (are you allowed to say that, these days?), 450 Calories a day makes 164,250 Calories a year, 47 pounds/yr of fat, or 134 stone of weight gain in 40 years.
It’s kind of amazing that anyone age 60 can move at all. And they all do it while remaining entirely clueless to exactly how many Calories they’re either consuming or burning! It’s like driving round the M25 with your eyes shut! Amazing!
For those who put on weight, it is truly saddening how far you can walk on a mars bar, for those who don’t put on weight it is amazing.
In reality I’m pretty sure this couple would only buy the Telegraph by mistake.
Hm, not sure. To take just on example, today’s Telegraph has a drive-by hit piece on reform: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/28/far-right-extremists-exploiting-buy-me-a-coffee-fundraising/
And their reporting on ‘Palestine’ seems to rely on retyping faxes from Hamas’ press office. (watch out for a certain Henry Bodkin).
I meant Restore.
Dunno who the boyfriend is, but he gets everything he deserves…
Why the *hell* would you date a woman like that more than once, if at all?
Dump the bloody bitch and find something decent…
High maintenance is she? Running one of those is like running a Ferrari. With both, the only benefit is you look good in it.
Incidentally. Something I took away from once being involved with the whoring business. Few men are interested in sex. The first thing you’re asked is how good looking she is. What men want is to be in proximity to a women desirable by other men. Which is odd, because the nature of the business means that no one is going to see him with her. What you rarely get is the question “How good is she in bed? ” Almost never happens.
And that’s what’s at the root of the above conversation.
One of my old bosses told me about his first wife over a few beers. She was a real stunner and all heads would turn when they walked in to a room and at first this gave HK a real buzz.
Eventually he started to get quite jealous and suspicious about all the male attention she received and it lead to divorce. His second wife had obviously been good looking in her day but nowhere near the stunning category.
Did I believe him? Yes, because all the wives said he was good looking and as he had been the CEO of a major telecoms company and from what I’d learned working for him is that he was an alpha male who would have gone looking for a trophy wife.
Alpha? The true alpha never gets jealous because there’s no one fit to be jealous of. And his women never stray because they’re too entranced. Women plural, of course. Shame Chateau Heartiste is no more…
Can you actually spend £200 a month… ON CLOTHES??????
I spent £125 on a pair of shoes three years ago, and £30 on two shirts five years ago. HTF can you spend *HUNDREDS every *MONTH* on clothes? If you’ve spent hundreds on clothes you’re going to stretch their usage for as long as possible, years and years. If your clothes are so crap you are replacing them every month, you’re going to demand that they cost pennies.
Come on, easily. Women could spend £200 a month without going posher than M&S.
I sincerely doubt your £15 shirts bought five years ago look up to much now.
Women compete with clothes and bags, Timmy’s commentators compete with declarations of austerity….
You spent £5 on a Casio watch, when there’s a perfectly good sun available? An iPhone, what kind of status-obsessed moron are you? Buying wine for a tenner from Aldi, you la-di-da mug? etc etc…
Sun? Ha! We would have been lucky to have a sun . . .
Well Marius, I have shirts that I bought 25 years ago for $20 that are still fine. Admittedly, pure nylon wears and washes well. I went to a friend’s 25th wedding anniversary a couple of years ago and she had the usual, these days, photo montage up on the screen. A photo of me flashed up from 20 years before. I was wearing the same shirt as the photo. Mrs Ltw had approved my outfit too.
Money on shoes though, I understand. Foot problems in the past.
I never scrimp when it comes to hiking boots or golf shoes. When I was working ditto work shoes and the same for running shoes when I was running. In all those cases badly fitting footwear can cause long term damage.
Pure nylon shirts? Lord deliver us.
It depends whether it is knitted or woven nylon: the former allow your body to breathe but the latter are pretty much a sweatsuit. Fifty-odd years ago I had one of each.
Can a woman? Piece of cake. To a woman, 200 a day would be a doddle.
Yep. Wouldn’t even break sweat.
Then, never use most of it.
My missus is like that Kazakhstani (?) woman who was made the subject of an ‘unexplained wealth order’* a few years ago. She’d spent about £16m in Harrods in a year or so. The only thing that stops my missus from doing that is that I do not have £16m. And I let her have my debit card for only short periods of time.
*these things are abominations. But I’d like to see Blair and Mandelson explain their way out of being made subject to them. Cameron as well, come to that.
There isn’t enough room in my wardrobe (or my chest-of-drawers). The more suits you own the longer it takes to wear one out, similarly for shirts and everything else.
I. ‘Sunday Best’: rarely wear out but may become redundant or no longer fit.
II. Usual everyday wear. Of which:
2.1 Could pass for Sunday best by the standards of most people. These wear in time to become;
2.2 Not planning going anywhere or doing anything special today,
and after further wear:
III Strictly home and garden, you are not going out in that!
finally;
IV. Should be in the rag-bag but I’ll give it one more wash and keep it for a mucky job. (this category has a propensity to find its way back into cat III after a wash.)
“Can you actually spend £300 – or £500 – on vaping?”
Depending on what he’s vaping, I’d say that’s entirely possible. I had one former co-worker who (based on what he told us and some simple arithmetic) was spending something like that every month on his vape habit.
llater,
llamas
Quite believe it but… I’ve experimented with vaping & it can be almost cost free. Couple of rechargeable vapes cost 15€ per. Bottles of liquid provide about 25 refills, 4€ per. Occasionally the vapouriser head needs replacing, 2€.
It sounds like a hell of a lot to me unless you’re treating it as a hobby rather than feeding an addiction. I, for example, spend £50-£60 every couple of months on juice though I do buy in bulk and use economical shortfills (a 100ml bottle to which you add nicotine shots). I also need to buy the occasional replacement battery or tank and coils. I doubt that’s more than £100 a year, all in. It’s currently a damned sight cheaper than the packet a day habit I had previously.
The introduction of duty in October at £2.20 per 10ml will royally shaft vapers. By way of example, a shortfill plus nicotine shots that currently costs me £9 will increase to £35.40. The fact that duty will be applied even to products that contain no nicotine is particularly galling. Sadly, the industry doesn’t seem to have come up with a way around it yet. I assume the black market will step up just like it’s done for tobacco products.
I’m quite sure you’re both right, but you’re talking about vaping nicotine. My ex-co-worker was vaping – something else – and quite a lot. What I don’t know about this would fill a book, but I guess it was in a legal grey area in MI at the time, and the product was sold quite openly. When it became clear that he was doing this at work, the boss quietly let it be known that if it didn’t stop, he’d institute a premises-wide smoking/vaping ban, and some of the nicotine addicts took him aside and told him to knock it off. But in the right company, he’d talk about it quite openly, and it sounded like he wasn’t the only one.
I bought a weed vape (illegally imported and sold but a legit product produced in the USA) and it lasted weeks. Ended up binning it with a decent amount left. I read online people saying they were getting through similar in under a week. Can’t imagine how they function. Can see how they might have mental health issues.
He was an ironworker. Hard to say whether his mental-health issues were down to his vaping, or just your standard ironworker mental-health issues. They’re all more-or-less certifiable.
llater,
llamas
The constituent parts of vape fluid are propylene glycol & vegetable glycerine. Both are freely available to be bought & have other uses. If you want the nicotine, it’s readily soluble in alcohol. Ethanol or isopropyl. So can be extracted from tobacco leaves. Be careful with pure nicotine. It’s absorbable through the skin & in fairly small quantities can be lethal.
(Surprising what one can know without a university education isn’t it?)
Yep. A black market is inevitable. If I could be bothered I’d be producing product by the end of next week
Vapers tend to have one or more favourite flavours. My ‘brand’, for example, is Voodoo. Post-duty day, juice manufacturers could shift to selling nicotine shots, small flavour packs and, maybe, cocktail recipe books. I could grumpily live with stumping up for duty on the shots and, if necessary, the flavour mix.
Strange that the industry has not been quicker to adapt on this. They’ve shown some agility with legislation in the past e.g. introducing shortfills to get around the Tobacco Products Directive’s (TPD) maximum 10ml restriction on nicotine e-liquids. Vapers got around the TPD’s bollocks <=2ml tanks restriction by simply buying bigger ones from places that aren’t governed by fuckwits,
Nah, nah guv! That fruity liquid is for them plug-in smelly things to make yer ‘ouse smell nice. Naaht to do wiv vapes! Nicotine?! Never ‘eard of it.
Unbelievably, the duty will apply to vape liquids whether they include nicotine or not.
Not if they are house smelly pong liquids. That’ll be on the bill if lading…
“Can you actually spend £300 – or £500 – on vaping?”
I asked AI about this. It suggested that for a pack a day (or equivalent in vaping dosage) the vaper would spend about 80% less, mostly due to differences in taxation plus greater efficiency in nicotine delivery.
But this assumes you switch, but don’t increase the dosage over time. This seems unlikely from the behavior of people with other things that become cheaper.
Also, there is a startup cost in hardware. The cost calculation assumes this is one time. Some people keep losing their stuff, so this might not be true.
Cost of a pack of cigarettes in England seems to be £13 to £18 – really? If this is the case, a pack a day is roughly £500. And vaping the equivalent of 5 packs would be about the same cost. I’ve heard of 5 pack per day smokers, so it’s physically possible. They do tend not to be very healthy of course.
Spending does change status from essential to discretionary depending on whether or not it takes place in a relationship.
A woman I had just started going out with once accompanied me to Wincanton races.When we got home, she watched me recording my bets in a notebook and adding a figure under a column marked ‘Expenses’. She blew her top.
‘Is that what I am to you then? An expense?!”
She finally calmed down and saw sense when I asked her facetiously whether she would like to give up her job and come racing with me every single day henceforth, on the basis that, by her logic, my annual expenses would plummet to zero.
£200 as an estimate for my gym, hair, cosmetics, contacts, nails and clothes
That’s actually on the cheap side, if she’s including all that in the £200. (I’m going on what my two adult daughters spend.)
Sadly, not all silly fat cows are left wing.
I hope I’ve got the wrong finance writer, but Google says this is after £500 a month: