ALDI-lightful!

Get it? ALDI-lightful! ALDI... How deligh- oh never mind.

Today we visited Aldi! I haven't been there in yonks since I visited my Dad oop North a lot. That was his local.

As many people, I have a weird loyalty to the supermarket that my main caregiver used to shop at when I was little. My Mum favoured Tesco as we had a nice big one near us in sunny Somerset, so I've just always gone there. I also shopped at Lidl lots at uni and it was magical.

Well, now we live near an Aldi and I ventured in this evening with just under £12 in my purse and some purchases to make.

Well now, let me tell you, dear reader, I am in love with Aldi. I actually said to my partner as we left that I couldn't wait to go back with a proper food budget and get some crazy bargains.

As it was here was our shopping:

1L Sunflower oil - £1.39
Premium pork & apple sausages (6) - £1.99
Diced chicken - £2.69
4 pints semi-skimmed milk - £1.00
1kg carrots - 79p
Loaf of wholemeal bread - 50p
Luxury icecreams - 99p
Ibuprofen - 30p
1kg Long grain rice - 40p

Total: £10.05

I MEAN WHAT THE HELL? That's amazing. I am definitely going back for all the stock foods and the basics like bread and milk again. The meat I am going to venture to the local food market and see what I can find there. If they can't beat 1kg of carrots for 79p though.... well, my my my.

Sorry, I'm excited. Aldi is wonderful.

I think my next post will be about my local market. Expect photographs as well!

The Car Insurance Debacle!

After writing my blogpost about Immediate Changes that we can all make to ourselves a bit of money on our monthly bills I had a little think about my car insurance. Fairly sure it's been nearly a year, hasn't it? Surely?

Upon checking, I noted that I have less than a month to find and start up another year of car insurance. Great! I thought, I've moved to an area with off-road parking and have another year no-claims bonus so that will definitely go down!

OH NO NO. I called RAC who I am currently insured with, they quoted me a monthly payment (I can't afford the cash prices!) of almost £100 up on what I'm currently paying. Sorry, how the bloody hell is that?

I asked the woman in the call centre I contacted why this was. She may have been distracted by her coworkers chavving it up and cackling in the background* but said only that "insurances must have gone up". Helpful, thank you! I asked her to cancel my automatic renewal and promptly dashed off to price comparison websites.


*I'm allowed to be bitchy, I've worked in two call centres. It's what we did.

As many savvy thrifteroos will tell you, don't just stick to the price comparison websites. Many insurers aren't on there. In addition to the price comparison sites I checked Aviva, Churchill, Direct Line, Tesco and others directly. Despite all this, my cheapest quote WAS from a price comparison site.

The insurers are "Diamond". I believe they are a women-only sub-company of Admiral, since they are based in Cardiff. The lowest quote they offered me was £20 a month dearer than my current deal, and sadly that seems to be the best I can find. Now I know this is probably due to the new laws that women can't be sold insurance at a cheaper price -- I say fair enough to that!

Thanks to my cancellations of all those subscriptions it will actually balance out the extra £20 so we won't be WORSE off, but I was hoping to gain some sort of advantage for having driven very safely for another year! Boo.

My top tips for car insurance hunting:

1. Don't just stick to the price comparison websites. Here is a good list of sites and companies to check with and whether or not they are on price comparison sites: CLICK
2. You can tweak your job title to get you a cheaper quote as many of the car insurance sites don't actually have an option for many people's jobs. Money Supermarket has a good little tool to help you
3. Increase your voluntary excess as much as you can muster. I put mine at £350

So there you have it. As I said, this wasn't my thriftiest of ventures as my premium actually increased, but I think I did a good job to get it down to only £20 higher rather than almost £100.

Toodles!

Immediate changes we can make

So as I outlined in my last post:

• Our monthly bills are £978.53
• We spend around £140 per month on food
• I'd like to pay off around £153.54 worth of debt per month for the next 13 months
• Our dual-income is around £1300 after tax right now
• I'd like to be debt-free by June 2016

It's all well and good making all these plans and having great intentions to be more thrifty and save money, but am I actually doing anything about it? As you can see from my sidebar, I like to plan to do things but never actually do them.

Well these are my immediate changes...

CANCELLING UNNECESSARY SUBSCRIPTIONS

• Netflix - rarely use it! Cancelled! That saves £5.99 per month
• Xbox Live - NEVER use it! Cancelled! That saves £5.99 per month
• Laughing Squid - use it all the time. This is the host for my business website so will be kept. I will do a blogpost on the best value/cheapest website hosts in future though and see if I can get any better deals - keeping £5.50 per month
• Audible - my partner uses it, it's really great. But it's an unnecessary expense right now. Cancelled! That saves £7.99 per month.
• Spotify - I do use this but can use regular Spotify or just stream music from YouTube for free. Cancelled! That saves £4.99 per month.
• Last.Fm - NEVER use it. Cancelled! That saves £3 per month.

Cancelling unnecessary subscriptions took half an hour of my evening (some places make it quite difficult to find where to unsubscribe -- Microsoft was particularly confusing) but will now save me £27.96 per month.

That's literally something I could sit down and do this evening to save immediate money. Other aspects take a little longer to figure out but I will still do them! Coming tomorrow => car insurance!


I also want to highlight one more immediate change which I've noticed:

Being completely honest with how much we are spending and how much we owe, and having that written down for anyone to see, is extremely freeing. I am much less worried now I know what the damage is and am making daily steps to change it. I sleep better at night knowing that eventually, with concentration and care, everything will be okay.

If, like me, you are/were having sleepless nights worrying about the finances I really urge you to change something now. Right now. Go cancel a subscription or clear out clothes you don't wear from your wardrobe. And most importantly write down EVERYTHING you spend per month and see where you can cut back. Then sleep well :)

Confessions of the Anti-Thrift

Oh boy, this is going to be hard...

Okay, so I quit my job in February partly due to stress and anxiety and partly due to the fact that I wanted to start my own at-home business. I've started that business but it's not bringing in the millions yet so I'm getting into a bit of a pickle.

Here's "The Situation":

MONTHLIES:

• My rent is £550 per month (I live with my partner -- he lost his job in March and has only just started a new job, which is the main reason for the pickle!) 
• Our council tax is £126 per month. 
• Our water is included and we don't have gas which simplifies things!
• Our electric bill is looking like it will be around £100 per month. It would be less per month now we're entering summer but we were underpaying in the winter at about £62 per month so a little behind with that bill.
• My car insurance is £79.58
• Our Sky bill (TV, line rental and broadband) is £29.50
• I subscribe to Netflix, Spotify, Last.FM, Laughing Squid, Xbox Live and Audible which totals to £33.46 (holy sh*t)
  
• My partner pays £14.99 per month for Cineworld Unlimited
• My partner pays £15 per month on finance for a previous purchase
• My partner is charged £30/£31 per month overdraft charges

This amount to average monthly bills right now of: £978.53


DEBT:

• I have a £1400 overdraft from my student bank account, £400 of that now has interest charged on it and as of September this year (2013) another £500 will begin being charged from it.
• My partner has an overdraft of £2000 which is fully charged interest of £1 per day. 
• Neither of us have had the balls to take out a credit card!
• I owe £384.07 from a previous council tax account.
• We are a month behind with the Sky bill of £29.50
• I owe one friend £300
• I owe another friend £200

In total (not including my student debts) we are in debt of: £4313.57


That's the financial situation. We are waiting to hear about the proper salary for my partner's job but I think after tax it will be £900.
My income varies depending on how many items I sell each month, I'm hoping to see if I can make around £600 in PROFITS this month. I need to better myself about how to determine profits too... If it's not working out, I may have to bite the bullet and return to a full-time "proper" job for a while to help us more.

What is it that I want to happen?

• I'd like to reduce our monthly bills as much as possible so we can begin using extraneous income to begin paying off debts. I'd like to get the bills down to around £900. This would mean that my partner's wage would fully cover the bills and then whatever I earn is extra to pay things off.
• We are hoping to start looking for a new place to live in June 2014 so by then I'd like to have reduced my overdraft to £1000 (from £1400) and his overdraft to £1500 (from £2000). So to take off around £900 altogether in 13 months.
• I'd like to be caught up with the electric bill - £566.51 in 13 months.
• I'd like to be up to date with the council tax - £500 in 13 months.
• I'd like to be up to date and free from contract with Sky - £29.50 in 13 months.
• I want to fully register as self-employed and be properly paying my income taxes on that.

That sounds like a lot to want to pay off in 13 months but I added it all together and divided it by 13 and it came to £153.54 per month which is NOT too bad at all.

And what's the end goal? By June 2016 I want to be fully debt-free (bar my student loans) and able to apply for a mortgage and start a family (if I want to). Yup, that's the end goal. I bloody well intend to achieve it.

It's doable and I want to do it! Will you join me in my thrifty journey to save and stockpile money each and every way I can? If you do, please subscribe to my blog :)

The next post will be able the immediate changes I can make to "The Situation" and try to create a timeline of savings for us.

Toodles!

The first rule of thrift club is...

...you MUST talk about thrift club.

I can't apologise enough for my photo editing skills...

 Whether it's saving money to go on that holiday you've always dreamed of or simply to try and pay off your debts from your previous life, Thrift Club will be here to offer tips.

Now we mean REAL tips, not these "Oh if you want to wax your BMW but want to save on your most expensive wax you can cut it with Vaseline to make it last an extra third longer" tips.*

[*not at all sure if that's a real tip, don't try it just in case]

REAL tips like "if you only have £10 to spend on a month's food shopping for 3 people here is what you can do...".

I want to be incredibly honest with you about the way I live my life too. I am not going to lord it over you, pretending that I have all the money in the world because I penny pinch at every opportunity. In fact, I'm quite the opposite. I'm awful right now. That's why I need to change. And I want you to join me. I want you to help me.

The next post will be my personal confession as to how bad I am with spending, what changes I want to make and how much debt I am in.

Toodles!