I'd bet this has happened to you. You're driving somewhere, and a song you like comes on the radio, or you have a CD plugged in. You turn up the volume and let it rip. You might even sing along. The noise of the outside world is drowned out as you cruise along (at 19 miles an hour, of course). You turn it up a little more and start singing more loudly. Then you arrive at your destination, and that's the end of that.

When you get back to your car later, you turn on the ignition and the music almost blows you into the back seat, because you left the volume turned way up. You wonder how you could possibly have had the thing on so loud.

If that hasn't happened to you, perhaps this has: you have air conditioning at your house or in your hotel room. You set it to 72 degrees and everything is just the way you like it. In due course, you notice it's a little warmer than is comfortable, so you drop the thermostat down to 70. Later on, you lower it to 68, then 66, and finally 62. You go out for a while, and when you come back, the place is unbelievably freezing.

One more example. All your life, you have taken sugar in your tea or coffee. Then one day you go to someone's house and they're out of sugar, so you have your beverage without. Or, you go on a diet that doesn't allow you to take sugar. Surprisingly enough, your drink tastes fine without it, so you never have sugar again.

After all that, here's the point. Your ears, skin or taste buds have become habituated to a certain way of doing things. All you need to do to change things is to change them. You can quite quickly become habituated to something different. Even after years. It's not tricky. You just have to do it.

The same applies to your spending. You have become habituated to buying, oh, I don't know, eight pairs of socks a week (or whatever it is), even though you rarely wear socks. Yet when you read these columns, you think to yourself: "I could never stop buying quite so many socks."

The point is: you could. You could buy one fewer pair and in no time flat, you wouldn't even notice it. Soon enough, you could be saving money regularly. Change your habits; change your life.

I've been made aware recently of the extent to which we learn our financial habits from our parents. My folks were prudent; I'm prudent. His parents were never out of debt; he's never out of debt. Your parents ?

This might suggest that you are a helpless victim of your parents' way of doing things, but you know that's not true. You already do all kinds of things that they didn't, and vice versa. Unlearning isn't easy, but it can be done. Bad habits are only habits, and habits can be changed. Being perpetually incapable of saving is not indelibly stamped in the genes. Being broke need not be a hereditary condition.

* * * * *

Dear diary: a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the lobby at my apartment had rotten floorboards, and that sooner or later someone would fall through the floor and plummet to their death.

Good news! My landlord took pity on me and I now have a new floor in the lobby. And the floor has taught me a lesson, which is a neat trick, if you think about it. Whereas before I had a floor that was not functional, but nice to look at, now the reverse is true.

The pleasant flooring that was covering the rot has been replaced by ugly wooden boards stained a ghastly brown colour that matches nothing else in the place, and the stain won't dry in the humid climate.

Tiling the area, and the areas surrounding it, is going to cost $8,000. It's a $300 job anywhere else in the world, but Bermuda being what it is, fixing a few square feet of floor is going to cost $8,000. So, of course, I'm not going to tile the floor, since I'm on a month-to-month lease and a day-to-day life these days.

Yes, I'd rather have $8,000 in the bank and a crummy floor than a fine floor and an overdraft. Does this make me a skinflint? Probably. Do I care? No, because if I fix the floor, you know as well as I do that one of two things is going to happen: either I'm going to be asked to leave the apartment, or the landlord is going to raise my rent. Either way, I'd be out eight grand for no good reason.

Luckily, my friends stopped coming by when it became apparent that visiting me might mean instant death, so no one but me will see the new hideous floor. And every time I see it, or at least this was true for the first week, I would imagine it covered in $50 bills, which would be marginally cheaper than tile. And then I'd imagine the Scrooge McDuck treasure room in my mind with all those $50 bills piled up in it.

So, looking on the bright side, there'll be no death by plummeting at my house. (Actually, it turned out that the space between my floor and the surface of the planet was only about two feet deep, and it was full of pipes.) Nor will my rent be jacked sky-high because I had to borrow eight grand from the bank.

It's a win-win. The only time I feel sad about the whole thing is when I visit other people's houses and see that they have floors tiles. That makes me wonder why I don't just live in a regular country, but then I remember that I love Bermuda and besides, I don't think they have insurance in Afghanistan.