Frugal Living Tips For Billionaires

It's not just single mothers, the unemployed, proletariat workers or the squeezed middle classes who are grappling with the prospect of poverty during the current economic malaise; billionaires are feeling the pinch too. There has been a spate of horror stories in the media since 2008 describing the hardship facing the world's financial elite yet sadly far too many people have been caught up in a maelstrom of home repossessions and small business bankruptcies to notice.

Fear not, for help is finally at hand. If you're a struggling billionaire then these five frugal living tips will help you rediscover the path to prosperity and world domination.

Having an original Paul Cezanne, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock or Vincent Van Gogh hanging above your fire place is an extravagance that you might wish to curtail. At current market prices, a masterpiece by any of the aforementioned painters will cost you upwards of $100m at Sotherby's or Christie's. Putting that into perspective, a cool $100m would fetch you a hundred million items at the Dollar Store or act as 3% downpayment on a nuclear submarine.

Some would say that art is one of the few sound investments in a world of plummeting property prices, collapsing Ponzi schemes and stagnant markets. But what if your interest is one of artistic appreciation rather than accumulation of wealth? What if you're simply an art-loving billionaire who doesn't possess the hardnosed instincts for picking up a bargain Braque or Picasso? Can you really afford to risk $100m+ from your crumbling empire to satisfy your lust for early 20th century French Cubism?

If you found yourself answering 'yes' to these questions, then art reproduction is for you. Shun costly auction rooms and instead commission replicas of your favourite works. A well constructed reproduction (like the Jackson Pollock above) will hang just as beautifully on the wall of your Billiards room as the original painting itself.

Satisfying your cravings for extramarital romps doesn't come cheap these days. High-class escorts who can assure indecency and discretion at basement prices are few and far between. Save yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by exercising a little restraint and adopting a more frugal approach to your philandering ways.

There has never been a better time to seduce your maid.

If you're pig ugly, lack a debonair appeal or are short on chemistry with the opposite sex, try wooing her with your Rembrandt and Dali replicas (her lowly social status and unsophisticated tastes mean she will be incapable of spotting an original from a fake). If this isn't enough to lure her into bed, you could simply summon a little of the cold inhumanity that earned you millions from oil in the African delta, and threaten to fire her.

But be careful: trysts with maids can backfire as several of your millionaire siblings have discovered. You wouldn't want to get into touble with the law (Dominique Strauss-Kahn), father an illegitimate child (Arnold Schwarzenegger) or bludgeon your lover to death with lead piping (Lord Lucan). As a billionaire, you should be able to rise above the shortcomings of these less-wealthier men.

That 0.02% of your annual income that you donate to 'charitable causes' might not seem like much, but as they say, 'every penny counts!'. Call your bank managers and Instruct them to terminate the flow of money between yourself and poor people. Cancel any engagements with charitable organisations and devote that time to frugal activities such as negotiating a better deal with your wine dealer.

You'll then be faced with the challenge of maintaining your hard-earned 'philanthropist' moniker on your Wikipedia entry. Click here to open an author account so that you can doctor the page yourself.

Let charity be the preserve of the working classes. Since they are the largest recipients of charitable donations anyway, you might as well just leave them to exchange resources between themselves, like a table of equally unskilled poker players.

In John Steinbeck's classic novella, Of Mice and Men, the farmhand, Lennie Small, dreams about one day living "off the fatta the lan". Lennie is a simpleton with little money and, as a billionaire, you'd normally have no dealings with such a man, except when tipping your golf caddie $2 or that time your limo took a wrong turn and drove unwittingly into the wrong part of town.

However, you can still take inspiration from Lennie's doomed American dream. Striving for self-sufficiency is saving millions of people money across the globe. There is no reason why you can't have a piece of this action.

By purchasing a few thousand acres of land in a region with a mediterranean climate like California, you can grow grapevines and produce your own wine. Additionally, you could build a fish farm for lobster and caviar. Add a few orange groves, a tobacco plantation and a brandy distillery and you're well on your way to realising total self-sufficiency. Finally, you can erect a giant smelting plant where the steel for your yachts is extracted. Waste produce can easily be transported to South America and dumped in a river or buried under a village.

With wine, caviar, lobster, oranges, brandy, tobacco and steel being produced in abundance on your doorstep, you have completely removed the need for spending money, thus reducing Swiss banking costs. Lennie Small would have been proud, not that you care about that. Bottoms up.

When drumming up support for economic austerity measures, the political party of Great Britain's elite classes, The Conservative Party, likes to remind the electorate, "We're all in this together". And, as a billionaire, you should consider reining in on some of the more extravagant excesses until it's safe to resume your prodigal spending habits. Here's two austerity measures that you can take yourself:

- Hire Chesney Hawkes for your daughter's 18th birthday party. He's much cheaper than Rihanna or Beyonce with lower maintenance costs. And even though The One and Only was a hit before your daughter was even born, he still strikes a chord with the young.

- Don't buy a big football or baseball team. If you must have one, buy a smaller team instead. Not only is it cheaper to purchase a team from the lower divisions but you'll also incur the wrath of fewer supporters when you move the team to a new town.

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The Jackson Pollock No.5 replica painting, as seen at the beginning of this article, is available for $20, or $20+ if there is widespread interest. Please contact me via Hubpages. Genuine interest only. I also have Whistler's Mother (not literally; she's dead). Other fake masterpieces available on request.

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