Give me some credit

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars ... and the rest I just squandered." - George Best

Well, I really picked the worst time to have a rip-snortingly good Christmas holiday. Maybe I shouldn’t have had such a "it’s not like I’m going overseas anytime soon so I may as well buy a new washing machine" spending spree in November, and answering the call of Tourism NZ’s "do something new, New Zealand," domestic travel campaign hasn’t turned out to be a supergood idea, either. I really should have stayed at home, drinking tap water and nibbling on cardboard.

Because while I’ve been single-handedly propping up the hospitality and tourism sector (and where’s my thanks?), if you want to borrow money from a bank right now, for example to buy a place smack bang between you and the one you love - Omarama, place of light - thus reducing your travel time to an hour and a bit each instead of three hours and a wee, they are going to troll through three months of bank statements, and mine are like the contact tracing of a hedonistic patient zero whose locations of interest make you wonder what you’re doing with your life.

We’re in the era of the monastic mortgage - where securing funds, even if you have plenty of equity and a good salary - means no going out for pints at Kai, no mini break weekends, no spending money on petrol to drive to see your long-distance lover ... It means a lot of no, no, and no.

I really picked the worst time to come off my antidepressants.

But rather than glum, I’m mad. It’s my money and I work hard for it. I’ll squander it on cocaine and hookers if I want. It’s not the bank’s job to play moral police about my spending habits, especially because I religiously pay my bills on time and keep on top of my credit card, (although my doctor might have something to say about mixing hookers and cocaine with Setrona).

Designed to protect borrowers from loan sharks and other unscrupulous lenders, approval for mortgages in Otago dropped by 6.5% after the CCCFA changes came in December last year and the number of monthly home loan approvals has dropped 23% nationally. Mortgage brokers say they have never seen such strict criteria for borrowing.

When people are getting turned down for mortgages because of things like eyebrow waxing and being preggers, it makes me wince over the sums I spend on my ambassadors hedge. Although it’s impossible to escape the irony that the reason I spend money on enjoyable things is because I have enough discretionary funds to service a loan. Any responsible banker should be thinking, "if this woman has enough for three pints of hazy of a Friday, she has enough to repay a loan, by Jingo".

Now that I’m seeing red, on the traffic light system, I’m doubling down. Facing two weeks at home should I get sick and months of obstacles to normality, I do not regret for a second the money I spent having a good time. This reminds me of the parable of the grasshopper and the ant: the industrious ant, who was a total snore, soldiered away all summer banking seeds while the grasshopper fiddled in the sun, only to perish in the first snowfall of winter because he was financially imprudent ... OK, so that’s not such a great example ... but just as no-one will stand up at your funeral and say you ran a good meeting (unless truly desperate for eulogy content), neither will you be fondly remembered for being tighter than a fish’s bum and reusing your teabags. As an angry sidebar, are the rich having their bank statements picked over? Do they need to fawn and scrape? Or is it just us normals who are having our spending scrutinised? Don’t bother answering, it’s obvious.

Most of us are just trying to find some nice to take our minds off the crushing stress of life in pandemic times. The average peasant, working from his hovel during the plague, trying to home school the kids with a couple of turnips wasn’t expected to be economically prudent. Because life is too short and too lovely to keep count of your takeaway coffees.

There’s only one thing left to say, and that’s: get knotted.