Post in association with Tesco Bank

money saving hacks

 

A little while ago Tesco Bank asked me to put together some of my best budgeting hacks for their website. I came up with 10 really simple ways to save money – I was quite proud of myself. You can read them here, so please do go and have a look.

In the process of writing that piece though, I realised that I’m a bit of a natural in the old money saving department. Perhaps that first class economics degree really is good for something?? I thought I’d put together a few more ideas for you here.

Have a read and let me know if you have tried any of these and if they’ve made a difference to your household finances. I’d love to hear about any other tips you have too! View Post

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saving tips Aviva

So last week I did this quiz.

It was put together by Aviva, and the idea behind it was to make you think a bit more about your attitude to savings. My result came out as ‘The Enlightened One’ – I apparently have a good instinct for saving, but run the risk of being a bit complacent about it.

I think this sums me up pretty well. I know that I could do most things, if I chose to put my mind to them, it’s just that most of the time I choose to let things tick along as they are and sit down and watch repeats of Alan Partridge instead.

It’s not that I’m lazy…

Heck, who am I kidding? I so am. View Post

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How much money would you like to earn? More importantly, at what point would an increase in salary and responsibility no longer be worth it?

I asked my fiancé this question on the back of a news story we were talking about on our community radio show on Friday. (Yes, it is everything you imagine – a hut in a playground, the noise of coffee cups in the background – it’s wonderful.)

“I’m not sure,” he said, “about £120,000?”

“£120,000??” I said. “You can tell you’ve come from London. Who earns £120,000??”

“Lots of people!” he said.

“Well, no one I know.”

The actual tipping point, according to research randomly conducted by Anchor Cheddar, (cheese? why?!), is just £37,000. 91% of the 2,000 people surveyed believe that there’s a point at which the extra salary simply isn’t worth the extra stress and the impact this has on your life. This point averaged out at £37,396. View Post

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How careful are you when it comes to protecting yourself against fraud?

I have one of those fancy shredders that shreds things in two different directions, but it’s under my bed, not plugged in, which isn’t very helpful. Normally I will build up a pile of things for shredding – a pile which I will store alongside the shredder under my bed until it begins to spill out onto the floor – but sometimes I am just too lazy to walk upstairs and will chuck the odd thing in the recycling.

I have ex-Boyfriend’s voice in my head the whole time of course, scolding me over my careless approach to fraud protection, and depending on my mood that can go one of two ways; either I accept that he always was more sensible about stuff like that and I make the effort to climb the stairs, or I think ‘well sod you, I don’t have to do what you say any more’ and it’s all I can do not to post my sort code and account number on Twitter. (Which again just proves that he is generally far more mature about things than me.)

I digress.

Fraud isn’t just about people rummaging through your recycling for old credit card bills of course. It can happen to anyone, any time, and it’s important therefore to understand exactly how you might be at risk and what steps you can take to prevent becoming a victim. Did you know for example that £27.5million of cheque fraud is committed every year in the UK? Who even uses cheques any more? Surely just the presentation of a cheque as payment for goods or services would be enough to make anyone suspicious?

Natwest have put together some tips in the form of the funky little graphic below, so you can get up to speed on the risks.

Have you ever been the victim of fraud? What do you do to protect you and your family?

Credit – Natwest

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Would you eat a poo for a million poundsI love having children. As a parent you are forced to face those great philosophical questions that only children can pose.

“Mummy,” Belle asked me last week, “would you eat a poo for a million pounds?”

“My own poo or someone else’s?” I asked, as clearly there is an important difference morally.

“You own poo,” she reassured me.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked horrified. View Post

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I have done a brave and possibly over-ambitious thing.

I have added ‘buy a house’ to my list of 40 things to do before I’m 40.

Now I should say here, before you worry I am going to rush out and buy something stupid, Homes Under The Hammer style, that I have three years and 10 months to go before I’m 40, but still; as we speak I have just about zero pounds in savings and no wealthy yet elderly relatives, so I’m going to need a Sensible Plan.

To be honest I had half resigned myself to never being able to afford a house, but surely one of the upsides to living in Taunton has to be the fact that I’m saving money on rent? Add to this the fact that I’m working more than ever – a dual consequence of no longer having Boyfriend to moderate my ‘just say yes’ reflex and also wanting to fill my time with things other than moping – and really there is no reason why owning a house shouldn’t be at least plausible.

It’s not going to be easy though. In fact, it could well be that by the time I have saved up, my savings won’t be enough any more. As the  infographic from Totally Money at the bottom of this post shows, house prices have risen over the years at a pace that’s almost impossible to keep up with.

I do have some ideas, but I’m not sure how effective they are going to be:

  • Stop going to cafes just because I am bored at home and want to work in Starbucks. (Never going to happen.)
  • Stop getting take away just because I can’t be bothered to cook up some crap from the freezer. (See brackets above.)
  • Cancel my cleaner. (Come on now – do you want me to live in filth?)
  • Hire out Belle for babysitting/chimney sweeping etc. (Note to self – is this legal?)
  • Rent out Bee’s rooms to students during term time. (Possible – but potentially embarrassing when I am roaming the house naked in the middle of the night looking for snacks.)

You see? It’s hard. Perhaps I will just have a little muffin and cappuccino while I think about it some more.

Do you have any house buying or saving tips? View Post

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I’ve spent a lot of money over the last few months. Partly it has been the classic ‘I’m sad about breaking up so I’m going to buy some pretty wine glasses’ type of spending, but also there has been a fair amount of eating out because I don’t want to cook and trips to the cinema because I want to entertain Belle but also want to sit quietly in the dark for two hours.

Budgeting as a single parent generally is tricky on several levels.

Firstly there is the fact that you only have one income. Dur, obviously that’s tricky. You have to basically spend the same as if you were a two-parent family though, because you have to live in a proper house and have a TV licence and pay bills and what not.

Secondly, and the bit I actually find hardest, is that you end up solely responsible for entertainment. You can’t tag team the amusements so that one of you can have a nice lie down with a book while the other one attempts wholesome craft activities, and it all ends up feeling a bit intense. As a result, I often resort to the aforementioned cinema trips and other outings that dilute the feelings of responsibility a little but that inevitably cost money.

Thirdly, you basically have no time to do anything and the fact there is no one to research car insurance prices for you makes you cry, and then you have to play patience on your phone for a little while to calm down, get distracted and forget to pay the credit card bill. (This last bit could just be me.) View Post

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Before Christmas I had dinner with a group of bloggers and some of the team from Voucher Codes. We were talking about children and family finances as Voucher Codes were doing some research to put together a white paper. It was an interesting discussion, but what I thought would be more interesting than just me telling you about it would be to get Bee to read the report and give her opinion from a grown up child perspective. I told her she could be as honest as she liked, I wouldn’t stop her pocket money.

Over to Bee…

Recently Voucher Codes put together a white paper on the relationship between children and family finances. The paper combines data, expert opinion and the informed judgements of parents to form a view of how children feel about family finances. After a survey of 1000 parents and 1000 5-16 year olds, some statistics came to light on the subject.

“So what if kids worry about money? It’s nothing to do with them.”  View Post

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How is your cash flow looking this month? A little peaky after all that Christmas extravagance?

There’s a lot of talk in January about losing weight, getting fit and doing wholesome yet sometimes tedious things like spending Quality Family Time together, (yawn), but how many of use are brave enough to get the credit card bills out from behind the bread bin and take on the challenge of tackling our finances?

If you want to get your pennies in order, why not join me during February for the Great British Budget campaign?

Great British Budget View Post

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It often surprises people to hear that I have an online betting account.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not placing bets on greyhounds every day or anything, but I do like the occasional gamble. Sometimes it’s just for fun – like the Grand National – other times I place bets to balance out things I really do or don’t want to happen.

For example, when Andy Murray was beaten at Wimbledon in 2012 by Roger Federer, I won £30. Murray may not have won, but I had a cash bonus to console myself with. Hoorah! This year I lost money, but Murray won – in each case I think to myself ‘how much would I pay to see something happen/not happen?’

Needless to say when the Tories came into power at the last election I made a nice little bit of money. View Post

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It won’t surprise you to hear that for me, the answer is ‘not much’.

This isn’t because I am spending all my cash on the latest fashions for myself, it’s just that spending on clothes generally just isn’t something that really appeals to me. Perhaps if I worked in an office I would feel a bit more motivated, but why would I dress up in a fancy skirt just to sit at home on my own? That would be a bit weird. View Post

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Last month I was asked to take part in a spending challenge. I got quite excited initially, imaging a Supermarket Sweep style dash around the shops, sweeping make-up and sweeties into a trolley.

No such luck.

The challenge was actually to reduce the amount of money I spent as part of a project by Voucher Codes called Small Change/Big Difference. The challenge asks you to think about the little amounts of money you fritter away of things like coffees and cake, and to commit to cutting back.

First off you can calculate just how much money you spend on things like this in a year with their special calculator – you put in what you have a week and it calculates your annual expenditure. I felt pretty smug filling it out, as I don’t smoke and don’t drink much, but was quite taken aback by how much I spend essentially just on snacks:

"spending calculator"

Goodness me. It seems like such a lot when you look at it like that doesn’t it? I work from home, so quite often pop to the café round the corner to work for a few hours for a change of scene. Seems like that could be an expensive habit.

Once I had shocked myself into action, I then had to spend two weeks trying as hard as possible to cut back on all those little extras that add up over the course of a year. There were quite a few obvious areas of weakness for me, so here’s how I got on:

Cafes
I do love a nice café. It’s silly, because I know I could just make a cup of tea at home for about two pence, but there is something so much lovelier about having someone else make it for you and enjoying it surrounded by people chatting and laughing. It’s just nice.

For two weeks though, I didn’t go to my local café once. I reckon I saved about £15 altogether, but I’m not entirely convinced this one is worth it for me. Working from home can be pretty lonely, and getting out of the house and being around other people for a couple of hours can make all the difference. £30 a month seems a small price to pay for my sanity.

"Pretty hot chocolate"

Magazines and newspapers
This is definitely a weakness for me. It wouldn’t be so bad if I actually read them, but all that happens normally is that I end up with about four weeks’ worth of Guardian Weekend magazines in a pile, unread. I don’t go out of my way to buy anything, but if I’m at the station or in a supermarket (which doesn’t happen often as Boyfriend doesn’t trust me to do the shopping), I’m quite often tempted to just pick something up as a treat.

For two weeks then I didn’t buy anything. So that’s two Saturday Guardians and probably one or two magazines – £10 or so altogether? Also, because I didn’t buy a magazine, I wasn’t drawn in to one of the ‘subscribe now for 68% of the usual cover price and get a free soap worth £37’ offers. Bargain.

Other miscellaneous nonsense
I tend quite often to shop, much like I eat, out of boredom. This is a risky strategy as I get bored easily. In early January for instance, bored of updating Facebook statuses and writing about goodness knows what, I went online and bought a bone china tea set hand painted with robins.

"robin teaset"

I think you get the point.

For two weeks though I tried my very best not to do this. It was tough, as I was in London a couple of times during the fortnight, each time with a couple of hours to kill in the middle of the day. During my first visit, it didn’t go so well, and I ended up with three miniature mounted photographs of London landmarks. Oopps.

On my second trip though, I did better. I even tested myself with a visit to the V&A museum shop, but resisted the urge to buy anything at all, not even a postcard, although I really quite wanted to buy a lion necklace that was in the sale. I did like this card, but satisfied myself by just taking a picture rather than buying it.

"Jerome K Jerome Quote"

What a good girl I am.

The lion necklace was £45, so I consider this £45 saved.

What are your bad money habits? How much do you think you could save if you cut out just one small pleasure?

Produced in association with VoucherCodes.co.uk

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