The older I get the more I realise that the entire world of consumerisim is ganging up to part me from my hard earned cash.

Now this may not be a new thought to many of you reading this but it really was an epiphany moment for me about 4 weeks ago. You see, the wife (my good lady and better half) decided to spring clean. What we couldn’t recycle or sell went to the local dump, everthing else used or sold.

Following the cleansing we had about 100 DVDs that for reason or another we had kept as they brought back memories of earlier times evoking emotional responses as one would expect from old photographs. The problem is these we’rent old photographs they were old DVDs many of which are now being repeated endlessly on TV. The real question was when did I last watch any one of them. For the most part I couldn’t remember.

The reality was that I had spent thousands of good english pounds on DVDs because I wanted to own the film, and not necessarily because I thought I would watch it again. I even started doing this recently with Blu-Rays – actually replacing DVDs that I never watch with their Hi-Def counterparts which I’ll probably never watch.

My loss and now a collector’s gain. Good old eBay and Play.com.

And my epiphany? Ah yes. I vow that when I next go to buy something that isn’t a necessity (food and drink not withstanding) I shall ask myself two questions, “Do I really need it?” and “Will it be on eBay in year’s time?”. Answer yes to either of these questions then don’t buy it.

How much have I saved this month following my wake up call? £500.

‘Nuff said.

One thing I’ve learnt over the last few years is the idea of having a financial safety net. This is more born from the current unstable climate and the fact that I am self employed. So I feel that my income is very much susceptible to market forces in what seems to be a more immediate effect than those of my peers who are in salaried positions. I also have a family to support and being the sole income provider has an added pressure.

Before I looked at investing in gold bullion for the long term I had to secure a financial safety net. I did the usual research on the Internet, and a read a few books. The answer was much simpler than I had originally thought. Simply save 3 to 6 months gross income and look it away for a rainy day. Now for many of you reading this, you probably think that this is just plain common sense. But you would be amazed by the sheer number of people who literally live month to month with no savings what so ever.

So that’s what I’ve done. Being an Englishman I’ve locked away £12k (about $20,000) into an easy access savings account. This money is purely for rainy days things like forced employment breaks, illness and similar. This has been a liberating exercise in so much as a I know I have six months money should anything unforeseen happen. It also releases me to think about using any new savings for investing in vehicles like precious metals.