Is there a luxury item, on which you routinely spend more than you think you should? If your answer is that there are dozens, fixing your financial affairs would be a piece of cake.

I'm talking instead about the one or two things you do, knowing that you ought to feel guilty about it, but you don't, because that's the way it is, that's who you are, end of story.

I have two: a cheap one and a ruinously expensive one. The cheap one is that I won't do my own laundry, and so pay others to do it for me. Actually, I can't do my own laundry. I don't have a machine and my local laundromat is ? well, it doesn't matter, because I won't do laundry, and neither will they. I wouldn't do laundry if I had three machines. I hate doing laundry. Hate it, I tells ya. Instead, Just Shirts handles my formal laundry needs, and I borrow a friend's machine for the unmentionables that it would not be right to ask another human being to deal with. Doing laundry at someone else's house doesn't count.

Compared to my main financial vice, my laundry bill is peanuts.

I love to stay in hotels. Big hotels. Plush hotels. Expensive hotels. It's my weakness. I probably spend almost as much, or maybe more, on hotels than I do on rent. Mind you, my rent is unusually small. And I don't care anyway. It's who I am.

I could spend the rest of this column and all those on the opposite page explaining why, but you probably already know why. In a hotel, other people do all the work, and you do all the living. Make a phone call, and dinner arrives. Catch a show. Have a meal in one of the charming restaurants. Have friends stop by for coffee and don't do any dishes. Etc. Etc.

So I got to thinking about how much money I'd need to live at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess. It would take a lot, but maybe less than you think.

Say it's $400 a night, which it is easily by the time you do all that living. So that's $146,000 a year. I'd bet that if you approached the hotel management and explained your needs, they'd fix you up some kind of deal. Especially if you paid in advance, and this being a fantasy, that's exactly what you'd do.

So you'd need, say, $130,000 a year. But think what you'd save. No rent. No utilities. No need for a car. No real need for a holiday, since living in a hotel would be like a holiday. Maybe you could house-sit for friends, every now and then, if you felt nostalgic. No cost there.

So the $130,000 is, more or less, an all-inclusive figure. Add, say $20,000 for this and that, and you'd only need $150,000 a year to live at the hotel for the rest of your natural days.

To earn $150,000 a year of spending money almost anywhere but Bermuda, you'd need to be a big shot. A huge shot. At that kind of income level, you are considered anti-socially rich by most governments ? and most everyone else ? and so you are taxed until your will to live gives out. But Bermuda has few taxes on unearned income, so here you'd really only need the $150K to pull this off.

How much money do you need to have in the bank in order to earn $150,000 of income a year? If we take five percent as an achievable target ? it ought not be too hard to do better with a mix of investments ? you'd need $3 million you weren't otherwise using. I'll leave you to decide how to get that.

As hunky dory as that sounds, if you had $3 million and lived at the Princess, within a few years, your cost of living would have gone up to the point where you were spending, say, $200,000 to achieve the same standard of living you were getting for $150K.

That means you'd be spending capital, which means that one day, the money would run out. You'd be thrown out of the Princess in 15 or 20 years, without a penny to your name. Your best hope would be to die in year 19, leaving something for your funeral expenses.

So ? and here's the really discouraging part, which all fantasy fulfilment contains ? you'd need another fortune, of the same size or greater, which you didn't touch, but which you used to feed the first fortune, so that you could go on living on Pitts Bay Road in the style to which you would very quickly have become accustomed.

In other words, having $3 million is the same as having $17 and a bus ticket: it won't enable you to fulfil my dream.

That sort of makes me feel better. I'm already not able to afford to live at the Princess, and I won't have $3 million any time soon. So if I ever meet someone with $3 million, I can laugh at them, knowing that they can't afford my dream either.

And now I must clean the house and cook dinner. Sigh.