Managing your money
Money can't buy you love. Well, actually, it can if you're a filthy-rich old rock star who looks like a cross between an octogenarian aunt and a goanna in leopard-skin leggings and you want to marry a supermodel. Then it can buy you love. Other than that, it can buy you dinner and school shoes and necklaces and secateurs and pomegranates and a vacuum cleaner. If you're a 'kept woman' married to a filthy-rich old rock star, read this chapter anyway, in case he's about to leave you for a new model who looks like a Bratz doll and you need to get a job.
Don't speak to me of money. In fact, I will pay you not to speak to me of money. Oh all right. If we must (and we must). What must we know about it? We must know how to save it, spend it, be wise with it, stretch it, have some when we're old and most especially how not to get sucked into stereotypes about spending it all on shoes or dodgy schemes.
Shopping & spending
Everybody wants you. Every clothes company, shoe company, fast-food chain, drink company, TV network, major electronics company. The companies pay advisors, organise 'focus groups' and brainstorming sessions, and then proceed to spend billions and billions of dollars on marketing hype, trying to get you to buy their stuff. They want you to mix up the ideas of 'want' and 'need' so that you feel you must must must have something new now now now. And I'm so sorry, but they don't care about you, really. They just want your money, and to get it they'll lie and cheat and put giant women in lingerie on billboards next to your bus stop.
So: how can you recognise when you're being conned? What's the best way to work out what to buy? And how do you avoid shopping regret (buying stuff you don't want, or never wear)?