Any port in a storm

More specifically, Paul Masson California Port. To be frank, it’s not Taylor’s LBV, but in its defence, it is a mere $5 a bottle, which makes it even better value on the price per unit alcohol scale than the European wine lake La Mancha (£2.35 from Unwins if memory serves me correctly) that sustained me 1993 – 1997. And that’s without taking inflation into account.

Californian wine falls into two distinct camps, so far as I can tell. It's either downscale "two buck chuck" or else it's criminally over-rated vintage nonsense with pretensions on Bordeaux, pointless Parker points and price-tags starting at $30 for their undeclared plebeian estate plonk, which they produce for people who wear designer labels where you can read them in public. Paul Masson sits firmly in the former camp, proudly servicing the Dionysian demands of undiscerning alcoholics on a budget from sea to shining sea. Paul – my thanks.

In any case, my headlong descent towards the lower shelves of Safeway’s liquor aisle is merely one symptom of the serious belt-tightening exercise brought about by our recent metamorphosis from a double-income-no-kids to a single-income-one-kid family.

Of course there is nothing – nothing – so wonderful as being a parent and the countless joys etc

With that said, let’s take a hard look at the bottom line.

In broad terms, one can divide one’s outgoings into two categories, which we can label discretionary and non-discretionary spending. Non-discretionary spending includes all those things which you have to spend money on to get by e.g. mortgage payments, taxes, utilities, certain insurance policies, transport, healthcare. Discretionary spending is everything else. You could class food as non-discretionary, but in fact the amount you need to spend on food in order to merely survive is not very high. So stop cheating.

Clearly when you have a child, discretionary spending goes up. Though, proportionally speaking, not by that much (of course, we have been fortunate in that we have been the beneficiaries of an enormous quantity of baby inspired charity, which has lessened the impact rather). What's also clear is that with one less breadwinner, income drops substantially (no maternity benefits here, needless to say). What is less obvious is that all that lost income was previously discretionary spending. Allow me to illustrate this graphically – I have altered the data labels for clarity.


Here you can see quite clearly that fun (by which I mean frivolous expenditure) has suffered a real terms cut of 70%.