Who's The Daddy: It’s all about budgeting, saving and still having fun

So far this month daughter #1 has been to Dublin (for the day) and Munich for the weekend, while daughter #2 spent a week in Athens on university business.

One of the bonuses of visiting Greece in November is, unlike July and August when you follow the herd down there, during the daytime it doesn’t feel like you’re walking on the surface of the Sun, and visiting sights such as the Acropolis is a lot less like five minutes after the final whistle at Wembley.

November in North-West England is always a bit of a challenge, in that it’s freezing cold, hammering with rain and it goes dark while you can still taste what you had for lunch.

And now the shops are full of Christmas things. Luckily for us, the boss was an expert in personal finance about 20 years before it became fashionable and an army of chancers on the internet discovered they could make a decent living off the back of it.

Live on less than you make and have a written budget. Yeah, she did all that in the 90s, including (get this) saving up for Christmas all year round so you’re not trying to fund it from November’s paycheck and your credit card(s). At the time, this felt like 4D chess to me. Now everyone’s at it.If it sounds simple that’s because, like all personal finance, it is. It’s all about behaviour, less so knowledge. On payday, out it goes, and come Christmas shopping, there’s a small but perfectly formed pot of money that pays for the bulk of it.

We’re nothing if not realists in our family and have a pretty strict present budget agreed so that when the sleigh bells ring, we don’t lose our minds and say, “**** it, it’s Christmas.”

Like that time in the Noughties when I came home with a Nintendo Wii for the kids after we broke up from work a couple of hours early, and spent a golden afternoon necking freezing cold pints of Stella by a roaring fire in a boozer that felt like a womb. Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end, etc.

Apropos of nothing, as I tap out this week’s stream of consciousness, it’s been 100 days since I last had a drink. The boss is at great pains to point out every chance she gets that before I turned into Captain Sensible, it wasn’t like I was on tour with the Rolling Stones in the early 1970s. But I’ll say this, and it’s not very Christmassy. You never feel worse the next day for not having a drink.

If you’re cranky, overweight and skint then I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but that’s just who you are. And there’s no blaming it on the sauce.

To read more Who’s The Daddy click here