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We tend to use the phone to keep contact with friends despite our whirlwind lifestyles. Commendable, but not if it adds a good few hundred rand onto your phone bill every month. Try adding up your monthly call costs to friends over one month to see if your costs are spiralling unreasonably.
Solution: Discuss mounting costs with your friends and agree rather to cut down the daily contact and meet once a week for a special meal. You might well find you are all suffering to keep the bills in hand. Make a pact to keep costs in check and go shopping together with the money you have saved on the phone calls. Once the habit is broken, use SMS, e-mails and landline phone calls in the evening they're cheaper.
Crisis! A friend in crisis means one thing: hours on the phone talking her out of her misery and into a calmer frame of mind. This is one of the unshirkable duties of friendship, but, again, the financial costs can skyrocket.
Solution: Send an SMS or e-mail every day with an inspirational message. If she needs to talk, give her the space to contact you herself. Alternatively, call from your landline to hers. Or, even better, go and visit her. A hug and a pot of tea can do wonders and will cost you a lot less.
Gifts
It's not just the birthdays, it's the kiddies' birthdays, and then Christmas and wedding gifts, engagement gifts, anniversary gifts, housewarming gifts... Aargh!
Christmas: If you are single and your friend is married with three children, they can get away with a single gift to you at Christmas worth R150, but you will probably feel obliged to spend R100 on each of them.
Solution: Ask each friend what their policy on Christmas is. You could find that they prefer not to have a materialistic free-for-all, but rather a family gift they can all enjoy. A fun board game, or a family-sized box of chocolates could be more appropriate at a time like this. Or you might decide to just give the children small gifts and the adults can share a good bottle of wine. Another suggestion for a family or group of friends is that each of you is assigned just one person to buy a gift for with an agreed amount. That way each person ends up with one gift and a bit of Christmas cheer, and everyone survives with fairly intact bank balances.
Birthdays: This might sound miserly, but why consistently spend R300 on a gift for a friend who generally buys you a R75 present? In fact, overspending can be embarrassing for the receiver, especially if they are not in a position to be so generous.
Solution: If you feel you are overspending in this area, take a deep breath and give a smaller gift. But add to it a more precious gift: your time. A handwritten voucher promising a day of window-shopping followed by lunch is often more treasured than a trinket.
Regarding children: You need to be realistic. Until the teen years they will not really look at the value of a gift, so why go bananas? Buy something small but fun, or offer to add money to a savings account for them.
Engagements, weddings, housewarmings, baby showers: There is a wonderful scene in Sex and the City when Carrie Bradshaw realises just how much money she has spent on her friends' engagements, weddings and births. She decides to marry herself and sets up a gift registry at her favourite shoe store. The point is well made: The gift-buying process can get out of hand, particularly in the tying-the-knot and making-babies phase of life.
Solutions: With baby showers, it's often best to club in with a few friends and buy one really useful gift for the new baby. If you're going big on a wedding gift, why on earth do you have to buy an extravagant engagement gift too? You are essentially buying two gifts for one event. A good compromise is flowers: If you feel the gift-buying just never stops, grab a pretty bunch of fresh blooms and tie them with a gorgeous ribbon.
Shopping and eating
It has to be said: Friends can be a really bad influence when it comes to spending money.
On impulse: Not knowing your personal budget, they just want you to have fun and, more often than not, will encourage you to buy that second pair of shoes. You know you don't need it and can't really afford it, but they don't and will urge you on all the way. Equally, a lifestyle of constant dining out with friends can start to strain your budget.
Solution: You need some rules and a good dollop of honesty. Tell your friends they are doing you no favours by encouraging your impulsive shopping habit. Ask them to become your conscience, and tell them your budget limits at the start of the shopping spree.
Regarding eating out, perhaps one evening meal a week and one coffee date are all your budget allows. For the rest, meet at home, and start cooking.
Remember, however, that elaborate dinner parties at home can become very expensive. On some occasions, it's not appropriate to ask friends to bring their own food to your house. For informal get-togethers, such as a braai, however, it's more than acceptable to ask various people to prepare different parts of the meal or to bring drinks.
Ultimately, honesty is the best policy, and if they are true friends they will be understanding of your financial restrictions no matter what they are.
