TV Money School.

Glazing out over TV adverts I noticed a pattern. Obviously, though not necessarily beneficial to the viewer, 60% are about the virtues of spending money; never ending happiness, undreamt of joy, attraction to the opposite sex, that sort of thing. The other 40% are how to acquire said money. These include PPI repayments, injury insurance claiming, lotteries and gambling and payday loans. The gist is get money for nothing and spend it all. Now call me old fashioned but I earned money, saved it and only spent it on what I deemed necessary. I noticed there were no advert about not spending, on saving and on working and acquiring the skills to earn it. The impression is it will come in as a cheque from ‘Injury Lawyers for You’ and go out on a myriad of products to make you or your bathroom look ten years younger. But there seems something a tad unsustainably about this scenario. For one why bother going to school after you’ve learnt to fill in a claims form and enter six numbers on a lottery ticket? Why earn money when you can get it for free or can borrow it? Why save money when nobody’s explained the concept? And for, I think this is four, why resist the urge to spend when everyone wants you to buy everything? And everyone else on TV lives in Kensington and can afford to spend money like it’s golden rain. But of course reality kicks in and you feel shafted on the way to Lidl’s for a tin of beans. ‘Why can’t I get £5,000 for twisting my ankle on a discarded Magnum wrapper from Waitrose?’ along with a thousand other rhetorical questions. Is it that you’ve been set up to think that way by adverts? But here’s the rub. All those cunningly conceived ads are beginning to backfire. Nobody’s got any money to spend anymore apart from the top 5% and they can’t eat more than one restaurant meal a day or buy a hundred times the average amount of toiletries. And companies can’t find skilled workers because they’re too busy filling in bogus claim forms, and you don’t need to work or know stuff when you can get money for nothing. I know that because I learnt it at TV Money School.