Guide to age

We are all up to our necks in debt, and interest rates are rising. Soon we won't be able to meet our mortgage payments. Yet we continue to spend merrily away. The old idea that you couldn't buy something until you had saved up enough money for it is now regarded as absurd.

You get what you want now and hope that the payment will take care of itself at some time in the distant future, preferably after you are dead. The banks encourage you to do this by their profligate lending policies. In theory, they could end up owning your house, but you don't really believe this will ever happen, so you cheerfully go on borrowing.

Once you have grasped that you don't need to have money to buy something, it is very easy to find a justification for making any purchase. For example, I can persuade myself that I need to buy a new computer on the grounds that I use a computer for work and that an up-to-date computer will make me more efficient.

Similarly, I can justify buying a new car as an economy measure, on the grounds that it consumes less fuel than the last one, or as a public-spirited act, because it emits fewer noxious pollutants. In short, there is always a ready-made excuse for buying anything.

This is a very dangerous state of mind, which may lead you into serious financial trouble, but it is one that is far from easy to get out of. Once you have got the habit of extravagance, it is very difficult to return to the habit of thrift.

Of course, many people don't even try. They take Cole Porter's advice to "be like the bluebird":

When your instinct tells you that disaster,
Is approaching you faster and faster,
Then be like the bluebird and sing,
Tweet tweet, tra-la, tra-la, tra-la'.
© Cole Porter

On the other hand, if you are serious about averting the disaster, you could do worse than take the Queen as your role model. One doesn't nowadays often think of the royal family as worth emulating. They certainly don't exemplify old-fashioned family values.

But however many millions it may cost to support the monarchy in all its pomp, the Queen sets a shining example of thrift and prudence. She does not like to spend money, except to the extent that this is necessary to maintain the dignity of her position.

That is a lot of money, of course, because she would consider that dignity to require maintaining large numbers of houses, servants, horses and so on. But in other areas, she would seem to be thrifty to the point of stinginess.

We got a little insight into this in the documentary All The Queen's Cooks which was shown on BBC1 this week. The TV chef Gary Rhodes once worked as a royal footman at Buckingham Palace, where he noted that the Queen hated food to be thrown away.

He said she would demand that the leftovers from Sunday lunch were recycled during the week, for the creation of dishes such as cottage pie and rissoles. You could say that this insistence on re-using leftovers is in itself a luxury that only a rich person can afford, for unless you are prepared to make cottage pies and rissoles yourself, then you need to have kitchen staff to do it. And most working people don't have the time or the energy to engage in such elaborate culinary activity. They would sooner buy a ready-cooked meal from the supermarket.

But it's the sort of thing we should all try to get into the habit of doing if we are to be able to service our debts and hang on to our homes. And it is to the rich that we must look to show us how to do it.

For it is among the rich - or, at any rate, the old rich - that the traditions of thrift and self-denial can be observed at their strongest. It is they who worry about the cost of postage stamps and telephone calls, who fret about the consumption of lavatory paper and light bulbs, who fill their baths with only a few inches of hot water, and who never turn on the central heating unless the weather conditions are arctic.

As the scions of families that have enjoyed the same protected way of life for generations, they are the custodians of a puritan tradition that regards both debt and extravagance as immoral.

The rest of us have not been so lucky. In our efforts to get on, to keep up with the Joneses, we have been blown about by the vagaries of fashion. And the current fashion is to spend like there is no tomorrow.