By ALISON BOSHOFF

Last updated at 00:13 24 August 2006

For a woman who claims her life is 'mundane', JK Rowling likes a luxury holiday. In the past few years she has cruised the Galapagos at a cost of around £15,000, blown £14,000 on a holiday in Mauritius and enjoyed the comforts of a £6,000-aweek hotel in the Seychelles.

Her latest outing, however, tops the lot. For, after a charitable engagement in New York, she and her family have decamped to the Hamptons, that millionaire's playground on the East Coast, to stay in an imposing seven-bedroom beachfront house. The cost - £76,000 a week.

Jo Rowling can, of course, afford it - and then some. Her fortune is somewhere between £500million and £600 million and, when the seventh and final instalment of Harry Potter is published next year, will receive another significant boost.

More money generated by the movies, merchandising and royalties from the books will continue to roll in for the rest of her life.

Indeed, the scale of her wealth is such that it is hard to comprehend. It has been said she is richer than the Queen. She earns around £1million every three days. It is the kind of fortune it would be impossible to spend even if she stayed in that luxury pad in the Hamptons all year round.

Her life now is, naturally, very different from the hand-to-mouth struggle of the days before Potter was published. Back then, she famously nursed cold coffees in an Edinburgh cafe for hours as she wrote, her daughter Jessica sleeping in a buggy beside her. She subsisted on £70 a week benefits, and her flat was infested with mice.

Now, she has a property portfolio (Edinburgh, Perthshire and Kensington), flies by private jet and dresses herself in Vivienne Westwood for special occasions.

And yet the story of what Jo Rowling spends her money on is far from a predictable tale of conspicuous consumption. Indeed, it is a story which provides a valuable and uplifting counterpoint to the circus of pointless and continuous spending indulged in by other modern celebrities like, say, Victoria Beckham.

Having found fame and fortune late in life, she has not been tempted into any fashion excesses. Indeed, she has never been particularly interested in style, and often describes her younger self as a 'freckled beach ball'. She is appalled by the excesses of modern celebrity culture and particularly disturbed by the cult of thin-ness.

That said, she does like a nice handbag, and glamorous shoes - Jimmy Choo, Prada, or even Dior. When she won a literary award earlier this year, she told the audience: 'My first award was a Nibbie, but that night I was wearing much, much cheaper shoes.'

But as she told an interviewer recently: 'I've got a mental amount I can't spend beyond. I limit myself to what I think I would be justified in spending on frivolity.' The amount, it seems, is around £500.

For although her life is comfortable and she allows herself some 'treats', in truth Jo Rowling lives not much better than the wife of say, an averagely successful City banker. She does not have, a la Posh, a dozen diamond-encrusted watches - actually she barely ever wears one and the most expensive in her collection is a fairly simple £300 number from Gucci.

She would be quite horrified by the idea of buying, as Victoria has done, an expensive designer watch worth several thousand pounds for one of her three children (Jessica, from her first marriage, is 11, David is three and Mackenzie, her baby daughter, one).

Luxury cars

Nor does this woman, who is among the wealthiest in the world, allow herself the decadent pleasure of one of the new generation of luxury cars. Sources in Edinburgh indicate that she doesn't even have a Chelsea tractor. She prefers something anonymous, as does her husband Neil Murray.

(Murray, for goodness' sake, continues to work as a GP and, in her own words, 'doesn't really spend money'.)

At times over the past nine years she has seemed to be in open rebellion against her wealth. She, for instance, insisted on delivering both her children in her local NHS hospital, and her offspring are educated at local state schools.

It's not that she was born poor: her childhood was comfortable, and her father is a retired Rolls-Royce engineer. But she does have that formative experience of poverty as a young adult after the break-up of her first marriage, and this seems to have combined with a sense of social justice to make her a very uneasy multi-millionaire.

For, it emerges, her wealth has made her uncomfortable to the point of soul-searching, if not actual anguish. And although she is now far more sanguine about the 'ludicrous' amount of money which she earns, she still seems to believe, deep down, that she does not really deserve to be so utterly, stinking rich.

And so she has quietly but steadily been engaged in giving away great chunks of her money. She gave £22 million to Comic Relief, for instance.

Charity

She has just set up a charity, the Children's High Level Group, to promote children's rights, particularly disabled children in care homes in Eastern Europe. She is the global ambassador for the National Council for One-Parent Families, and patron of Maggie's Centres for cancer sufferers and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland.

Her bounty extends to smaller matters, too: she has funded the making of a short film about domestic abuse, and recently donated a signed copy of Harry Potter that was sold to help improve facilities at a local GP's surgery.

For Jo Rowling, an intelligent graduate who worked for Amnesty International after university, has never lost her social conscience. She has told interviewers that she has spent years being 'a few steps behind' her burgeoning fame and fortune, feeling caught out and overwhelmed by it.

She said: 'It just seems, well, this came to me through doing the thing I love doing most. I suppose I feel I haven't suffered enough.'

Of late, she has settled into her super-rich status, becoming more at ease with all of the nice things she can now have - hence perhaps the stay in the Hamptons.

'I'm certainly not going to complain about the money,' she said earlier this year. 'If you've literally been worrying "Will the money last until the end of the week?" you will never, ever complain about having the money.'

So what, then does she spend it on - apart from travelling and helping people? A major expense is her staff. She employs two secretaries, to deal with the 1,000 or so letters she receives a week.

She also has a very effective PA, who works full time co-ordinating her diary and her engagements.

More expensively, she is said also to pay the wages of a full-time, ex-SAS bodyguard, who gives close protection to her and her family at a cost of £150,000 a year.

Her 'day-to-day' house in Edinburgh has electric gates, high fences and a sophisticated CCTV system to deter intruders.

That makes it sound obtrusive, but the house is not ostentatious.

The home is actually two houses knocked into one - a 13-bedroom pile worth around £2million.

Described as homely and sometimes chaotic inside, it is decorated in strong colours and the ethnic patterns that she has always loved.

She lives simply. Her office is the size of a single bedroom. She writes in the morning, makes herself a sandwich and then writes again until it is time for Jessica to return from school.

Some weekends she spends with Neil and the children at their country home in Perthshire. This property, on the banks of the River Tay, is beautiful but not particularly grand, with six bedrooms.

The final property in her portfolio is a home in Kensington, West London, worth £4.5million. It seems more of an investment than a home.

'The point about Jo,' says a friend, 'is that she doesn't want to be flashy or ostentatious, ever. She wants to be left alone to have a normal family life.'

It seems the legacy she wants Harry Potter to leave is a charitable one: of giving and helping children in desperate need. Her own family, she hopes, will turn out to be simply normal.

One does wonder if Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz Beckham were to meet Jessica, David and Mackenzie in 20 years' time, what they would make of each other, and of their own, very different, childhoods.