Louisa Simmonds

The biggest bonus about doing your Christmas shopping online is being able to sneak in extra personal purchases, so when you’re being tortured by the in-house financial Gestapo about over-spending, you can fob them off as presents. 

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As you are aware, I am unfortunately married to Tightus Pocketus, and so during our VERY LONG marriage I have been forced to come up with underhand clever ways to make many of my personal shopping purchases surreptitiously.

Because for some reason my shopping prowess upsets him, and it’s becoming apparent, as we age together, that his inability to co-enjoy my purchases is beginning to affect his health.

You see, as we approach middle-age and have had to prepare for all that really boring ‘getting older’ stuff (yawn!), like retirement and health plans, the old man’s pockets have become even smaller when it comes to what he terms ‘unnecessary expenditure.’

‘Unnecessary expenditure’ is categorised as anything fun or stuff that I like to spend money on, such as holidays, clothes, jewellery and shoes.

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So every year or so, I have been forced to develop new tactics to enable myself to purchase those few NECESSARY extras without getting caught or persecuted by financial control. Cash has been my best friend in the past, as TP finds it harder to trace our cash expenditure from the bank statement, but there is a limit to what I can allocate to cash and occasionally I have come unstuck. According to TP, those times have been noted in our marital history as when I compromised the seal of trust that should be the foundation of a marriage – his words, not mine.

A few months ago, I asked NC to pay for something on my behalf and the old man accused me of dragging our innocent daughter down to my basement level of dishonesty and refused to speak to me for weeks.

I can’t remember if I noticed…

Which is why December is such a joyous month for shopping extravagancia when all those parcels FOR FAMILY AND FRIENDS arrive at the apartment and Scrooge is so bogged down by the abject misery of what Christmas symbolizes for him – seasonal ‘unnecessary spending’ – that he is blind to my clever shopping tactics.

My excuse for hoodwinking him is that if he only demonstrated an ounce of understanding of what the average woman’s needs are at Christmas – new outfits for Christmas Day and New Years Eve as a bare minimum – I wouldn’t have to be so damned cagey about the whole process.

And there are just so many enticing, pre-Christmas, Christmas sales on at the moment, that I can’t actually understand why his analytical brain doesn’t see how much money I am actually saving us.

As NC pointed out the other day when she successfully sourced a $45 pair of shoes in the sales for $18 – ‘well, they were practically free!’

So proud.

#onlineshopping #finance #Humor #money #Christmasandholidayseason #Marriage #Christmas #Creditcard