Miss Thrifty

Now, you may think that I have been as quiet as a dormouse this week, but I humbly refute such an allegation. It has been one of those rollercoaster weeks, filled with Stuff and Happenings.

It began relatively inconspicuously, when my mother – like a harbinger of Personal Finance Eventing – telephoned to complain that I had blogged about my DIY wedding cake without crediting her own role in this most protracted of patisserie sagas. I explained that I am planning to write about this at greater length at some point. I also promised that the instalment that takes place the day before the wedding, in which she pitches up at my flat, discovers that I have made a terrible mess of the fondant icing, and calmly sets to work with the icing bag and fluted nozzles (while I dissolve into a teary, syrupy blob in a corner of the galley kitchen), will be prominent.

My mother only found out about this blog relatively recently but, complaints aside, she is a useful reader to have on board. Every time a link breaks, she is on it like a hawk; if the server goes down, she’s on the blower immediately.  It is like having my very own Blog Inspector. (more…)

We were driving back to Yorkshire this afternoon, heading back home on a sunny Bank Holiday Monday, when we got caught up in one of those traffic jams that are so lengthy and interminable, everybody gets out and strolls about on the central reservation, chewing the fat. (Apart from the lorry drivers, who stay in their cabs and eat Pot Noodles.) Eventually we were shepherded down an obscure side road, on an impromptu diversion.

As we slowly made our way through several small villages, scrabbling to find our place on the atlas and thanking our lucky stars that we hadn’t been in the wrong place at the wrong time on this particular occasion, I switched on the radio to get the travel updates and ended up listening to the end of a Radio Four documentary about the life of Roald Dahl.

The documentary described in detail the “Writing Hut” (above) in his back garden, where Dahl sat every day and wrote some of his best-loved books and stories. (more…)

Let’s just make this clear: I don’t love all debts. I don’t love yours; you can keep them! But in truth, mine will always have a special place in my heart. This is why.

It’s fair to say that over the past few years, our marital finances have had a rollercoaster ride. The timeline goes roughly like this:

2002 - Student loans finally paid off. Hurrah! At their highest, my student debts amounted to £1,604 exactly. I thought this was the earth! My now-husband graduated about £4,000 in debt. (Note: these sound like paltry figures now, don’t they? They were normal for the UK at this time.)

2002-2005 - Minted & living in London. Fancypants jobs, rented flat, lots of expensive nights out and regular food deliveries from Ocado. Ah, those were the days! But we can’t know what lies just round the corner… (more…)

I was on one of my flying visits to London today, for a couple of work meetings. The trains from the north all go into Kings Cross St. Pancras; I have a nifty little money-saving tip that I’m going to share here, just in case it helps anyone else.

You see, when I get to Kings Cross I always pack away my laptop and swap my comfy boots for spiky heels. But this leaves me with a couple of extra bags that I don’t want to haul around all day long – and especially not when I’m balanced precariously on designer footwear! Kings Cross has a Left Luggage desk but it’s £6.50 per item per day, which is pretty steep in my book.

So this is what I do. I exit the station and pop into the lovely British Library, next door. There’s a locker room down the stairs, and it’s free to use. The lockers take luggage of all shapes and sizes; they take a pound coin as deposit, but you get that back when you open them again. The lockers are intended to be used by the readers, but even if you aren’t a registered reader (which I am *flutters eyelashes*), the locker room is in a public part of the building and technically, it’s open to all. So you shouldn’t feel too naughty! 

This ploy saved me £13.00 today; not quite enough to offset the stupendously stupendous price of my train ticket, but hey ho.

Apologies for the late-running Friday Bargains. Further to my post last week about the trials and tribulations of choosing a new computer when you’re on a budget, my wheezy old laptop decided to force my hand with a spectacularly ill-timed implosion.

I’m now the proud owner of a spanking new Sony Vaio VGN-NR32L, which is sleek, silver and – best of all – runs very fast. I’m also delighted to be the proud owner of a £ key once again. My older laptop was an American one, so it only typed $. This has caused not a little tooth-gnashing, while writing a finance-themed blog.

During the course of my laptop travails over the weekend, this is what I learned about trying to be thrifty while shopping for an overpriced plastic-and-metal cuboid: (more…)

There comes a time in every frugal blogger’s life when a harsh reality must be faced. Yes: it’s new computer time! 

In my case, my current laptop is on its last legs. It has been so well-used that the matte silver mousepad has worn away. Worse still, the damned computer keeps turning itself off. Wordpress causes its innards to combust. The DVD drive doesn’t work and a simple video clip can send the machine whirring and spluttering into meltdown. It makes so much noise, my husband says that being in the same room  as the thing gives him a headache.

I have been putting off the purchase of a replacement for as long as possible, but as is often the way with these things, Fate has muscled in and forced my hand. I have so much work on right now (I’m a freelance writer and blogger) that the problems described above are seriously hampering my productivity.

The rub is that for obvious reasons, a thrifty lifestyle doesn’t really mesh with the contents of PC World or Best Buy. (more…)

This post from Nancy Zimmerman’s Money Coach blog gave me the chills.

Although many of her clients are affluent professionals, she has encountered a “sub-set”: women in their fifties with no money to speak of.

She writes:

Often it’s not for the reason you’d think. It’s not so much about the traditional Waiting for the Man who Never Came as this: they have lived lives based on their ideals, and forgot to include the sexiness of including a solid investment portfolio in the package.

They have pursued their dreams, things like travelling the world to do good, working for causes at low pay, or pursuing passions that didn’t pay off.

Erm, check, check and check.

I don’t mind that I’ll be turning 30 in a few months’ time, but it does mean that 50 doesn’t seem as far away as it used to. I used to presume that people got richer as they got older; now, the idea that I could be skint as retirement approaches terrifies me.

I have decided that one of my aims, over the next year, is to smash the likelihood of fiftysomething pauperdom into smithereens.

A great piece in The Daily Telegraph, called Ten crafty ways to save £5,000 without trying. Some of them are old faves: stop buying lattes, ditch the expensive gym membership. But what I like is the financial value that has been attached to each one. (American readers: £1 is $2, so think of this as ten ways to save $10,000 without trying.)

For example, I save oodles of pocket change by taking my own sandwiches into work every day (farewell, Pret a Manger – I loved you longtime!) but I was delighted to learn just how much I save by doing so: (more…)