Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset

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      We now buy twice as many clothes as we did a decade ago for the simple reason that they are cheap. In 2004 clothing sales in the UK were worth a total of £36.6 billion, 19% more than in 2000. Around £9.5 billion went on men’s clothes and £6.6 billion on children’s clothes. The rest – a massive £20.5 billion – was spent on women’s clothes. We also travel at least twice as much as we used to. Back when it cost £400 to go to Paris people didn’t go very often. Now it costs £29.99 to fly there on a discount airline we go at the drop of a hat. Then when we get there we stay in a hotel, go out for dinner and buy souvenirs. The same is true of electronic goods. We don’t buy just one television or DVD player. No, at £29.99 each we don’t see why we shouldn’t have one in every room and a digital radio or two thrown in for good measure. It all adds up to a lot of money being spent that would never have been spent a decade ago. How much have you bought in the last six months that you don’t need? Find a credit card statement from a few months ago and have a look at it. How many of the things you paid for with your card can you remember ever having or do you still have? Were they really worth buying or would you now rather have the cash in hand?

      Shoes and handbags

      My friend Nick once asked me why on earth it is that women spend so much money on handbags and shoes. A man, he said, only needs three pairs of shoes – one for wearing with work clothes, one for wearing with casual clothes and one for playing sport. Yet every woman he had ever known appeared to need upwards of 20 pairs. Indeed a survey from Harper’s Bazaar in 2006 interviewed 1,000 women and found that half of them owned over 30 pairs of shoes and one in ten owned 100 pairs. One in ten also admitted to spending £1,000-plus a year on shoes. The right shoes, said the editor of the magazine, ‘can turn you from the girl next door into a sex goddess in seconds’. Nick found handbags even more bemusing. Men, he said, don’t need them at all; they just carry money and door keys in their pockets. So why do women need to have so many bags? Indeed why do they need them at all?

      A few days later he came back to me. He’d figured it out, he said. They are the only two things that look the same on everyone regardless of their weight or body shape: the average woman may not be able to fit into the same jeans as Kate Moss and would feel miserable even having a go in the changing room but a pair of Prada shoes looks much the same on everyone. He’s right of course. The runaway sales of shoes and handbags are nothing but a function of our insecurities about our figures. How sad is that?