The first £60

My logic is simple. If I can make £60 from some place (online, via investments or some other way- anything other than a regular job) then I can make £600. I need only do the £60 thing repeatedly until I get there. The same logic applies with £6000 and so on.

I have a strong intuition that the first £60 will be as hard as £6,000,000 because it is the creative thought only needs to be done once.

Doing this is as much a spiritual battle as anything else. and this accounts for the picture above. (A church in the City of London that has a nice coffee shop inside). I sat for a while wondering if my quest was a worthy one and I decided it was. If I can make money honestly and productively then others can too. Honest work lifts the spirits like nothing else and it gives people a certain freedom. It makes it possible to lift ones nose above the struggle to pay the following months rent.

And so to work.. ten pounds is both a very small sum and a large one if all I have done in my life is work for an employer. My first task therefore is to change my mental outlook. One way I intend to do this is to work on this blog for an hour a day. This will focus my mind upon the tasks ahead.

The Way of the Frog.

There are two ways to experience wealth. The first is to earn a ton of money and be rich for real. This is the hardest way but it requires the least imagination. The second is to earn a modest income but to spend it so well that one seems to be rich. This is the way of the frog.

There are monsters in this world.

The wealthy and powerful do not get their hands dirty. They direct events from behind a curtain.

When a rich person wishes to do something he does so via a proxy. He may create a company (that is a legal person in itself) that will stand in front of him and take the bullet if his actions are discovered. The rich may also stand behind a social shield such as political correctness. They employ minority champions if they are not a member of a minority group themselves. If their plunder is called out then the champion becomes a scapegoat.

Rich people control the governments of the world and decide what it is acceptable to say. No matter how ‘left wing’ the culture becomes, the rich just get richer. Corporations such as the Church of Scientology play this game too by marketing themselves as corporations. Social Justice hides behind 'equality'.

We need our own defence.

We should invest our time and our love in our friends. Our friends are the only things we have that cannot be taken from us. Memories of good times can never be stolen and in one sense they remain even when our bodies die. Past happiness remains a fact even when we have passed away. They may take our future but the past remains.

Law is 90% bluff and intimidation. It cannot silence is if we value the truth above our own life. Register with immobilise this is free of charge. Create a database of all your belongings and registration numbers. If you are robbed this information may be instantly shared with the police and the second hand trade to make your goods harder to sell.

If your email is with Yahoo you may set up a disposable (fake) email address for spam merchants. When the mail gets too much just delete the disposable address. If you are in the habit of reading your Yahoo Mail on a public computer, go into Mail Settings and select 'always use SSL'

There are monsters in this world. Learn from them- not to become more like them but to avoid becoming prey to them.

Honesty in social media.

We all want to be honest and yet in the age of political correctness it no longer pays. Any statement that is not specifically PC may be twisted into the opposite. It is no longer good enough not to have unacceptable opinions- we need to actively oppose those opinions too. This is particularly true of social media where people will often vent while unaware of who may be reading.

How can we be true to ourselves and remain employed?

First of all we need to keep our employers from reading our posts in the first place. If our employer demands that we ‘friend’ him on Facebook we may have to do so, but we will then change our privacy settings so that only ‘close friends’ read our most honest posts. Never post while drunk!

Another method is to speak in a kind of code. Say what needs to be said but say it in such a way that only the intended audience receives it. This is known as the ‘dog whistle’ as most humans cannot hear the high pitched tone of a dog whistle while a dog- of course- can.

Above all, realise that an opinion, confidently and politely stated will become normal and acceptable over time. This takes courage but it the only real solution.

The frog and the snowball.

This pink van outside of Cafe Concerto was giving away free coffee. The catch? I had to enter a competition to win a holiday in Kenya. Not so bad.

So what is the thrift snowball? It is the art of living thriftily and putting the money to good use. This month I will hoover up free items wherever I find them. I will also have one light brunch a week by buying a sandwich (£1.25) at Waitrose which gets me a free coffee. Not only will I save around £25 a month in this way but I will become gradually thinner too. This will go to buy Premium Bonds via a standing order I have already created. Next month I will find another economy and repeat the process.

This equates to about £100,000 in five years provided I can do the same each money.

The world of luxury is the world of women.

Women do luxury better than men. They shop in groups so that the shopping experience is magnified. Each member of the group gets to feel the thrill of the purchase.

If a heterosexual man could enter this mindset of luxury-as-bonding that women navigate so well, could he also penetrate the female spirit and understand women more deeply?

,y guess would be ‘yes’.

Believe nothing day.

Today is All Fools Day (or April Fools Day). Believe nothing you are told today unless you see it by the evidence of your own eyes!

In this is good advice for every other day of the year as well.

The monument/bollard in the picture growls from time to time. It is up to the viewer to know why.

An uncomfortable frog.

The enemy of the best is the good.

I am comfortable with my life- and this makes me nervous!

How may I urge myself to greater things without sacrificing my hard won luxuries and comfort? I shall create a problem for myself! I shall create a civil defense network for Britain.

The cost is modest- £100,000 to start with which is far more than I have. I must therefore develop myself or fail.

Truth and error in the Secret.

There is there is some truth in new age thinking on the subject of money- but only a very little.

One notion is that money comes to us if we already feel rich. They claim that the universe is actually controlled by thought and so we need only be positive to be rich. There are two problems to this. First it causes us to ignore problems. If we think we might have cancer we might sweep it under the carpet and think ‘healthy’ thoughts for example. It can also cause us to lose sympathy for the poor as they have caused their poverty through their own thoughts and not misfortune.

There is some small atom of truth however. If we feel rich and successful we will carry ourselves as such. Other people will take us more seriously and this opens doors.

One method they suggest for this 'rich' feeling is carrying cash. £200 feels about right for me. Much more than this and I will become nervous. Much less and I will feel poor.

We shall see how it goes.

January is the longest month.

January can be a downer.

It is the combination of dark days, credit card bills from Christmas and the knowledge that the coldest days are yet to come.

Nevertheless, we are all still here and things will get better.

I have to remind myself this blog is about cheap luxury. I should be enjoying myself!

NB The picture is of Kings Place in London which is an art space run by the Guardian newspaper. This is a sculpture of a giant insect that has been eaten alive by an egg laid within it. Nice.

To double disposable income every year- forever.

It is not easy to double gross income.

Disposable income is a different matter. Imagine our gross income were £20,000 a year and we spent £5000 on ourselves. We need only raise our gross income to £25,000 to double our disposable income. Furthermore it gets easier over time because investible funds increase over time.

The war on your mind.

We all have our weaknesses. We may be persuaded to spend money unwisely by a variety of tricks.

A supermarket will place it's most profitable lines immediately ahead of us and slightly down. This is in our direct line of sight and most people look no further. Above and below we may find cheaper products in less appealing packaging. The difference in quality is usually less than the difference in price.

Be wary of 'buy one get one free' offers in perishable goods. These often turn into 'buy one, throw one away' offers.

Never buy confectionery at the checkout and never (ever, ever, ever) get a child in the habit of demanding you do so.

Retailers employ the finest psychologists in the world and their aim is to make us into impulse shoppers- the most profitable kind of shopper.

How to be lucky.

I make new friends and am generally 'lucky' in new environments but I become stick in the familiar.

The more we mix and combine with other people the better. We may seem to socialize uselessly but we are actually giving the world the opportunity for a lucky chance encounter.

It is not that some people are born lucky. It is that some people place themselves where good luck may be found.

To be lucky, to discover life- ditch planning. Wander. Take every free thing that life gives you. Say 'yes' more.

The Cost of Stuff.

'Stuff' costs mental energy and time as well as money. It is therefore more expensive than we think and the pain we feel while leaving the lovely things on the shelf is less than the pain of curating then for twenty years. Any money we save is a bonus.

It casts a long shadow.

The notion that 'things happen for a reason' and that the universe is communicating to us personally is egotism (and sometimes mental illness). It makes us slave to vast forces outside of us which leads to passivity.

The solution is to admit we are quite small and that the universe is indifferent to us. Nobody cares about our negative thoughts and they will not draw bad luck to us. What a relief!

Grow your own veg.

Theft act 1968.

Bicarbonate of Soda keeps the fridge smelling good.

Council tax discount.

Notice the small things.

This is a subway in Kings Cross London.

The walls change colour like the set of the UFO children's TV series in the 1960's