Disappointed by machines

One of the many wonderful things about the Tokyo metro is the ticket machines' ability to take pretty much any money you want to feed them. If you have a 5000 yen note and you want a 160 yen ticket, no problem. Plus, the machine will give you change in the most convenient way possible: 4 1000 yen bills, and the rest in coins.

To get some perspective on how amazing that is, you have to have dealt with British ticket machines for some time. They're mostly good at swallowing money and then pretending they never saw anything, or not giving you any change, or making strange grinding noises before giving you the wrong ticket. And the most you can put in them is a twenty pound note.

My Wallet Hell

I don't want to boast but I have a wallet that rivals the 'Costanza', that enormous money-containing monstrosity carried by the Seinfeld character. It currently holds three credit cards, one debit card, two airline loyalty cards, one security swipe card, one supermarket loyalty card, one combined supermarket loyalty card and credit card, two medical cards, one Hong Kong ID card, a photograph of my wife and I (that much from memory) plus two bookshop loyalty cards (one expired), my Octopus card, one gym membership card, another debit card, two plectrums and a UK driving license. And maybe twenty dollars in cash, and forty or fifty invoices, receipts and bills that I should really have removed and thrown in the bin.

The pall of wedding bills

Today I felt jolly productive (as I typed a lot) then a bit of a jackanapes (as I went to the tailor to pick up my suit for the wedding, only to find I was a day early) and then finally I felt sort of athletic because I could run very fast on a treadmill.

Having achieved all these things before eight o'clock in the evening, I felt that I'd done enough for the day, but I was mistaken. After all, today was the day that we had to pay for the wedding venue. And the wedding food. And the wedding booze. And the wedding DJ.

I'm not complaining. I'm just a bit shellshocked, because never in my life have I maxed out a credit card. Well, maxed out two different credit cards, and now I'm staring at an enormous mound of debt that seems to be flying towards me at great speed, while I worry about whether my hero, Cash Flow Man, will arrive in time to save my bacon.

Perhaps I should just get the credit card company to up my credit limit. There wouldn't be anything wrong with that scheme, now would there?

While I spin around making the noises usually produced by a scalded cat, my fiancee seems to be quite relaxed. Relaxed to the point of laughing at me, while I froth at the mouth and wriggle. And to think, yesterday I thought all that was left to do was to pack.

Oh.

Actually, packing will be quite easy. We're going away for three weeks, so that's three pairs of underpants and two pairs of socks, plus a Motorhead t-shirt and a paperback novel about tigers. I know how to live.

If that doesn't stop her laughing at my financial hysteria, I'm not sure what will.

Notary public, Hong Kong

Today I got up extra early, because the cat had decided to give my groin a massage with her paws, and once I'd pushed her away, I found I had a meeting scheduled for 7:30 in the morning. Which was nice. Nicer was that the meeting was cancelled, so I had an extra half hour of standing around feeling like a spare part, when otherwise I'd have been being molested by a cat.

Saving money: #1 Drinking Lattes

One common piece of personal financial advice is to stop drinking lattes. If every day you're paying $4 for a latte, over the course of a year you've forked out more than $1,400. Does that make you wake up a bit?

The Price Of Living In Switzerland

Switzerland is amazingly expensive. The sort of expense where your vision begins to shimmer in disbelief, that a man has charged you 60 Swiss francs to drive less than 3 miles in his car.

Trouble in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has never seemed that eventful for me. There is a march or a demonstration every weekend, but I'm either in bed asleep, or tucked away on one of the outer islands, or in another country, so I don't notice. In the week there is the posse of shouting ladies outside the banks, but they've metamorphosed for me from angry protestors to a constant cultural fixture, and the banks seem of a similar mindset, which renders all that shouting ineffective.

Day off hijinks

Tomorrow is Mid-October Festival, if you're a culturally insensitive expatriate, or the Grave Cleaning Day, if you've been half paying attention. Either way, it means Saturday is a public holiday in Hong Kong, which makes no difference when you have an enlightened employer who doesn't make you work weekends.

Bagpipes and heartlessness

Ever since the End Of The World (Financial Edition) in 2008, there have been clumps of old people gathered outside banks, complaining that they were mis-sold risky investments, and lost their life savings as a result. This being Hong Kong, their protests consist of them playing terrible music through a tinny loudspeaker, while the heartless workers stride past ignoring them, and a group of bored looking security guards stand around ensuring that they don't get in the way of the efficient running of the banks. Nothing much has been done to compensate these people, and because they literally have nothing better to do, they continue to stand outside the banks, holding up their placards and being ignored.