So I've been looking at our household income because we are still putting the littlest one through nursery three days a week and that's costing £1000 a month, which is bizarre considering that when we had both girls in there it was 2/3 of that. Youngest is eligible for the 30 hours free childcare per week when she turns three, which should get that down, but in the mean time I've stumbled across a few things that can save money. 1. PHONE - I took out a contract in 2021 to get an iPhone 12. EE offered me an Apple watch for an extra £26 a month, which I took because my old one broke and it's a cool piece of kit that's great for getting stuff while I'm teaching. I checked my bill this morning and saw that they'd been billing me full whack for the watch despite the contract ending last September. It used to be that phone contracts would end and then auto enroll you onto a SIM only contract, but this is no longer the case and they don't tell you because apparently that's hard selling and it's illegal (sounds like bullshit to me - sounds like they don't want people to realise their contract is over). I did change my phone contract to a SIM only one which knocked a good £50 off my bill. Rang them this morning, the watch had it's own SIM card which meant that it had it's own contract, with the CPI increase it was now £35 a month on top of my phone contract. Pissed off isn't the word and there wasn't anything they could do. I was under the impression that an Apple Watch worked like fit bit and just worked from your phone, apparently with a SIM card it's effectively a standalone wrist mounted phone. Anyway, the end result was that they cancelled the watch SIM and the bloke on the other end gave me an upgrade (my battery capacity was degrading at an alarming rate) which works out cheaper than what I'm paying now, which has saved me £38 a month (because of the watch deal they agreed to pay the basic part of my Netflix subscription and for my Microsoft Office package, which was nice). This is probably common knowledge to anybody who knows about phones, I thought I was pretty tech savvy and I didn't realise any of this, definitely worth checking especially if you're on EE. The guy also said that BT had bought out EE (or the other way around, can't remember), which I also wasn't aware of. Check this if you haven't already, EE are pretty good at giving deals to long time customers. It's also worth pointing out that iPhones aren't exactly that different, I just changed from a 12 to a 13 and it's got twice the capacity for a slightly cheaper price. 2. BROADBAND - I've been with KCOM since we moved to Cottingham, but since these Connexion poles have popped up, I was curious to see what the difference was. So Connexion offer a faster connection speed of 1000MBPS for £49.99, which is two thirds of what KCOM charge me for 100MBPS less. I know they've had teething problems, but I'm hearing good reviews about them and I'm considering switching in the coming weeks. Check what you're actually using and see if it's worth changing your package. I play a lot of online games in my free time, my wife watches a lot of stuff on Amazon at the same time plus connected devices through wi-fi and we have no problems with those speeds, but some people might be paying more for more bandwidth that they don't need. 3. FOOD - Obviously everybody has their own tastes, but I stumbled across this fact thanks to a friend who works in a food manufacturing plant. He said that supermarket brand items have different ranges at different costs, but the overwhelming majority of edible items only differ in the amount of salt and fixings included in the meal. We don't eat processed food in our house anyway, we make everything from scratch, but to give an example, my wife wanted to make a curry and so we needed chicken. Aldi have three different packages of chicken breast, the "essentials" one, a standard one and a "luxury" one, which seems par for the course in most places. We usually get the standard one, the essentials one didn't look different so we got that. It's the same ****ing chicken, it just cost £1.50 less. I was curious about baked beans because my kids eat a lot of them, so I bought the essentials beans which were like 30p a tin, we normally get the Bramwell's ones. Kids couldn't tell the difference, so I tasted it and yeah, it's the same stuff they normally get, I couldn't even tell if there was less salt or whatever. So yeah, don't get tripped up paying more for what is essentially fancier packaging, it's pointless. We managed to knock a good £20 off our food bill by doing this. 4. SURVEYS - There is an app you can download called AttaPoll, which pays you to answer surveys. You only earn a few pence per survey, but I use it to accrue beer money. The longer ones can pay more (up to £1), but sometimes require you to do more or tell you what to say. I usually do them when I'm on the ****ter or waiting for my kid to come out of school. You can easily make a quid in an hour doing it and the money is transferred via Paypal, which you can withdraw to your account. I made about £8 last month, which doesn't seem like a lot but it was for doing literally nothing except clicking stuff on my phone screen. I believe they call it money for old rope. 5. FORAGING - No, times are not that hard, it's optional, OPTIONAL! But, my wife has taken to growing our own food in our garden and we've got all sorts of wonderful stuff coming in, last year we had apples, raspberries, blackberries (on a non-prickly branch too, safer for the kids!), pears, tomatoes, cooking apples, strawberries, blueberries, carrots, potatoes, spring onions, cucumbers, kale and cabbage. We've planted up corn this year, have to say although there's a lot of groundwork (no pun intended), it definitely pays off when you get all this fresh food for nothing. We grow our own herbs too, which we use in our food. Anyway, why foraging? Well, turns out, a lot of species of funghi that you can find growing in the countryside isn't just edible, it's delicious. There are plenty of Youtube videos out there which can guide you on what is safe and what isn't, and our kids absolutely love going out and picking wild ingredients that they can then put in their food. Wild Garlic is also in season and is absolutely everywhere at the moment (any woodland area will have it). My wife has IBS, so we can't use normal garlic and this stuff is great because you get the flavour but not the gut wrenching pain afterward. We bought a dehydrator from Amazon for cheap, bung the leaves in that for 48 hours and dice it up. Herbs aren't wallet busting, but every little helps! (Syd - maybe don't do this in Australia without help ) 6. FACEBOOK MARKETPLACE - I got rid of Facebook when Brexit/Trump came along and I got fed up with the bullshit, but my wife kept hers and has been busy selling stuff we don't need on there. We made £300 across April selling old toys, baby clothes, baby gates, plants (see below), an old laptop, play equipment, wife's clothes and some Xbox games I got for free. One bloke came and said that he hadn't been able to afford a birthday present for his 2 year old lad (he'd just been laid off from his job due to ill health) and got a bit upset when he came to pick up a play garage for said child, so we offered him a couple of extra things to take and my mother in law wrapped them for him. We didn't take the money from him. I know cost of living is relative, but knowing you can help somebody brighten their child's day absolutely makes it worth it. I know it's easy to chuck stuff in the tip, but there's probably people out there who need your stuff and they're willing to pay you for it. I struggle to give some stuff up for various reasons, but weighing up whether I actually use it over why I want to keep it and then whether somebody else will get more use from it makes it easier to do. 7. PLANTS - My wife, in addition to going gardening crazy, became a houseplant addict shortly after we moved to our new house. As a result, we now have over 40 in the house with more seeded and under grow lights (my brother is a copper, don't worry, we explained). Anyway, turns out, people like plants and things like Spiderplants produce offshoots pretty regularly. Cheese plants and ferns can also be grown from cuttings very easily and these make us a decent little pot on the side (about £30-£50 a month depending on what we have available). Takes a bit of work to do it en masse, but once you know how to do it, it's surprisingly efficient. Anyway, those are some bits that I hope people find useful. Probably teaching a few people to suck eggs, but in these times, I'm always happy to pass advice forward.
yea, kc prices for what you get are disgraceful, but thats what a monopoly gets hope everyone goes to connexion for a couple years growing food is not only healthy and potentially cost saving, but absolutely incredible for mental health allotments should be made cheap as heck, its so good plus its interesting, seeing them sprout for seeds into plants, like being a parent but eating them medical trials can be good money but come with risks
The wait times for allotments are mental though, think the Cott one is into years now. My grandpa had one in Ferriby, when he died there was a bloke in there two days later turning it all over. The allotment, not my grandpa's grave.
Good luck! I hope that it pans out for you…. Im aiming for 55, but it’s my wife that’s pushing that goal rather than me. Like OLM I quite like my job & I love been away from the wife in London mon - Fri, not sure how we will cope just the 2 of us & no kids! She has this romantic vision of us travelling around in a camper van, but I ****ing hate driving
Just chuck a podcast on and the trip will be bliss. I hear The Tigers Down Under is quite a good listen.
An easier way of saving money and still getting fresh veg is to nick it from next doors garden or allotments. Stay tuned for more money and work saving tips.
Id love the travelling, just not in a camper van haha. I'm back down in london on Tuesday for the first time in ages! Lovely day visiting a show at the excel
My sister's bought a camper van and done it up with her husband, I don't hate the idea but may well if I was in it for a few days. We might try and borrow it off them at some stage to try before we buy.
Always said if I somehow became ridiculously rich the first thing I'd do is hire a driver. Bores the **** out of me
Screw the banks via switching offers, I've had seven different banks in seventeen months. I'm well over a thousand quid up. The only one I wasn't sure would take me, but they did, was the Co-Op bank. One of the questions (in January this year) was 'when did you join your current bank', I almost felt embarrassed typing December 2023, almost. They coughed up a hundred quid three days after the switch went through, five days later I filled the form for Nat West, two hundred quid from them, kerching. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
Put this here because it's sort of related. Not seen it but heard that the BBC has a news story today about the shortage of wheat which is going to make bread more expensive. First of all they had a presenter live next to a field of green stuff growing, but in his hand was a bunch of golden yellow wheat, you wont find any of that in a field until July August time. Went on to say we will have to import wheat from Germany and Canada, they are on the same latitude as the UK with much the same weather and harvest timelines. And the best bit of all is that the wheat in a typical loaf of bread £1.50 only costs about 8p so even going up in price 50% won't add much to the price of a loaf. It's just another scaremongering news item, why?
Worth haggling with KCOM. I told them I was leaving so they reduced it and I now pay £49.99 with them for as many fast bits of internet thingys than I could ever use (900 or something somethings I think)
I was reading about the house crisis in Australia . It said a lot of the properties are in the hands of older people with multiple homes . Was the drawdown for properties from the pensions
I do find the term 'cost of living' intriguing, given plenty have way less than the figures talked about on here and are still 'living'.
Trying not to open a can of worms here, but I think again it's made a lot worse then it actually is by the media and people just believe it. But go look at what's actually happening in real life and the retail parks are still rammed every weekend, people are still changing cars, flights are still full, holidays are still being booked, people still have the latest mobiles and gadgets etc, still buying stupidly expensive shoes/trainers etc, still always buying new clothes just because they've seen xyz wear it or it has ABC name on it etc, Costa and Starbucks is always still rammed..... are certain people struggling? Yes, but there's always been people struggling all throughout history. Is it a full blown cost of living crisis or do a % of people just have their priorities wrong? ( Puts tin hat on for when the usual suspects see this )
It gets described as relative poverty I believe. Like other stats based on percentages, they are eternal, as by the very nature of the maths, there will always be some below an arbitrary line. At what point did things like phones, never mind mobile ones, TV's and the internet become essential in the family budget?
Nah unrelated. Just the ability to negatively gear and cheap prices in the 70s and 80s plus low volumes of house construction has led to a bottleneck.
I think that because society has now built itself around the Internet, it's pretty difficult to do much without it. That's not to say life without it is unavoidable, but it's going that way. It's weird because I always associate the Internet as a leisurely thing, used for gaming, message boards, YouTube etc, but when you think about it, it's now a core part of nearly every major sector in the world. For example, I applied for PIP last month; I had to ring the DWP, then apply online, then they text me updates for my claim. So nearly every facet of that application was using technology in some way and they didn't give me many other options for correspondence (email or post were the other two). Somebody without a mobile phone or the Internet would have to submit everything via post, then wait for replies, then write back, which is fine but it slows down the claims process considerably. It might be that we're now at the stage where the issue for people with less money is that they don't know (and I don't mean this in a patronising way) at what level to pitch at in terms of buying products. Like if somebody wants a new car, are they buying that car based on MPG/carbon footprint, running cost. number of children they have or BHP? Are people buying the latest model of phone when they could be buying an older one that does the exact same thing?
