Latest from Write on Finance members' blogs

Swinton Pet Insurance Review – Everything You Need To Know

Adam Buller — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:46:01 GMT

In this Swinton Pet Insurance review we examine the company more closely to see if they are the best UK pet insurance provider for you.

We’ve written quite a few pet insurance reviews on this blog, so I’m always intrigued to see what a company has to offer in this area. Today we’re looking at Swinton Pet Insurance*.

One thing that immediately struck me about the company is how quick Swinton were to add feeling to their policy offering. The first paragraph on the Swinton website is all about how dear our pets are to us and how devastating it would be if something were to happen to them. I know a lot of pet insurance companies will include thoughts like this, but to have it laid out so quickly before discussing anything monetary is nice to see.

Another thing which struck me right away was the simplicity of what Swinton have to offer. When reading the websites of some pet insurance providers it can be awfully confusing at times. This can be due to the array of policy options available. With Swinton the choice on offer has been made very simple indeed.

Before we explain what’s on offer in more detail in our Swinton Pet Insurance review, though, let’s just quickly run through a little background info on the company.

Who Are Swinton Pet Insurance?

Swinton are certainly a well known insurance brand in the UK. Many of you will have seen their name pop up when searching for car or home insurance. Perhaps you’ve even visited one of their branches before. Swinton offer various other types of insurance including pet insurance.

The company started life back in 1957 with its first branch opening in Salford in 1964. In 2018 Swinton were bought by the Ardonagh Group for £165m and the company have since invested millions improving their digital presence and capabilities. This is likely why you will now see Swinton appearing much more often when you are searching for insurance online.

Swinton Insurance is a trading name of Atlanta Insurance Intermediaries Limited. They are also authorised and regulated by the FCA. Swintons head office is still based in Salford where the company began their operations.

What Do Swinton Pet Insurance Offer?

As we mentioned earlier Swinton have made their Pet Insurance policies very simple to understand.

Swinton offer two different Lifetime Pet Insurance policies for you to choose from. These are…

Essential
Classic

These offer different levels of cover and are available for both cats and dogs. Once you decide which type of cover best fits your needs, you can then decide any limits on the policy. You can do this by selecting a total annual vet fee limit from the following options:

£2000
£4000
£7000

Do keep in mind that this is the total annual vet fee limit available on each policy. There are many different limits set on different types of treatment, however.

A good example of this would be with something like behavioural problems. Although the total vet fee limit on a policy (essential or classic) may be £2000, the limit on treatment for behavioural problems is set at £750. This would then leave £1250 available for other types of treatment in your total vet fee limit.

A full list of cover limits for each type of treatment or condition can be found on the Swinton website*.

When deciding which level of cover might be right for you it would be worth considering your specific breed of dog or cat and the problems that tend to arise with these. Even the size of your pet might play a role. And then, of course, there is your own budget to consider.

Lifetime Cover But No Pre-Existing Conditions

Swinton makes it clear that both their Essential and Classic options are both Lifetime Policies.

Lifetime cover means that – as long as your policy is in place with Swinton – your pet will be covered. This is true even if you make a claim. This can be a good option if your pet is prone to a long-term illness like diabetes or arthritis.

Each year you renew your pet insurance, you receive a fixed maximum amount to cover veterinary treatment. This will cover both new and recurring illnesses and injuries, as long as they occurred since your policy started with Swinton.

It is worth mentioning that it is not possible to claim for any pre-existing medical conditions which occurred prior to the start date of a Swinton Pet Insurance policy.

Swinton Reviews

One very prominent feature displayed on the Swinton pet insurance landing page is their TrustPilot review score. When I clicked through to check the TrustPilot profile page, though, it seemed to take me to a different company.

With this in mind, I thought it was best to look at Swinton’s overall reviews as an insurance provider to see how customers rate them, rather than focussing just on the pet insurance reviews.

Swinton Insurance have an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars on TrustPilot based on 17,040 reviews. 86% of reviews left rated Swinton as Good or Excellent. Just 8% of reviewers rated Swinton as bad.

Getting a Quote

It was simple and straightforward to get a quote online* and one thing I particularly liked was how easy it was to adjust the level of cover at the end of the process, without having to go back to the beginning. This meant that if the quote was much more affordable than I had imagined, I could easily increase the vet fee limit or even switch between the Essential and Classic options. The same would be true, of course, if the quote was more than you could afford.

I also liked how the limits on certain treatments or conditions were laid out to with the final quote. This enabled me to analyse the levels of cover in each area again with the premium quote in front of me, to see if there were any areas where I might want extra or less cover.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve found this Swinton Pet Insurance review useful in making a decision.

Swinton are a well established and trusted name when it comes to UK insurance. While they were taken over in 2018, this does seem to have given their online offering a great boost. The quote I received from Swinton was broadly in line with what I received elsewhere for my own dog. The ability to quickly and easily adjust the level of cover once I’d received my quote was very helpful. One thing I would have liked to see more of would be customer reviews of Swinton Pet Insurance, rather than just Swinton. That being said, the overall reviews of Swinton Insurance were good at 4.4 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot.

To see how much Swinton Pet Insurance would be get a quick online quote here*.

The post Swinton Pet Insurance Review – Everything You Need To Know appeared first on Money Bulldog

Bought By Many Review – Best Pet Insurance Provider?

Adam Buller — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:30:00 GMT

In this Bought By Many review, we take a closer look at what the company has to offer pet owners.

As a pet owner myself, I know how much our pets can mean to an individual or family. We view the health and well-being of our pets as being as important as our own. I also know how much it can can cost when things do go wrong. This means it can be important to ensure that you have the right cover in place.

With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the different Bought by Many* pet insurance policies on offer. We’ll start our Bought By Many review by looking at who they are and why they came about.

Who Are Bought By Many?

Bought By Many started life in 2012. The basic concept behind Bought By Many was to create online groups for people who have similar insurance needs. The company then negotiated discounts or enhanced cover with insurers, harnessing the power of group buying.

In recent years, Bought by Many started offering their own insurance policies and even won the best Pet Insurance Provider of the Year 2021 at the Moneyfacts Consumer Awards.

Why Bought By Many Created Their Own Pet Insurance

Bought By Many decided to create their own pet insurance policies to address the most common problems for pet owners.

Some of these common issues included things like getting reasonably priced insurance for a pet with a Pre-Existing condition. There was also a need to provide better Lifetime Cover policies.

Bought by Many have created 3 products with different vet fee limits attached. These are known as ‘value’, ‘regular’ and ‘complete’ policies.

To see how much your cover might cost you can get a quick online quote*.

All of Bought By Many’s policies offer…

Lifetime Cover of up to £15,000 depending on the level you choose
Unlimited FREE vet video calls 24/7 through the FirstVet app
Hassle-free claims – online with no forms
Cover for pre-existing conditions that ended at least 2 years ago
50% off flea, tick and worming treatments from VetBox
FREE TrustedHousesitter Membership worth £99
Pay monthly at no extra cost
15% multi-pet discount for pets on the same policy

They also offer policies for those with more specific needs such as cover for pets with pre-existing conditions within the last 2 years.

Bought By Many Pre-Existing Conditions Pet Cover

Bought By Many’s ‘Pre-Existing’* policy provides cover for pets with pre-existing conditions, as long as they have been free of them for at least 3 months.

In year one of your policy, pre-existing conditions will only be covered for vet fees of up to £500. If you don’t make a claim in the first year, this will increase to £1000. It will then jump to £7000 from the end of year 2 onwards if you still don’t make a claim.

If you do have to claim for a pre-existing condition, then you will still be entitled to cover. The vet fee limit, however, will stay at £500 or will drop down to that level if you claim in the first two years. You will also get £7000 of vet fee cover for any new condition.

If your pet has a pre-existing condition but has been free of it for 2 years, it should be covered to the £7000 limit. Pre-existing conditions which have been experienced in the last 3 months are not covered by the policy.

Bought By Many Value, Regular and Complete Cover

Bought By Many also offer 3 other pet insurance products known as Value, Regular and Complete cover.

Their Value Cover* is their most basic offering and it covers you for £3000 of pet fees for each condition but this is time limited to 12 months from first diagnosis.

With Bought By Many’s Regular Cover* the amount of vet fee cover rises to £7000 and with the Value and Regular policies dental cover is only available for problems arising from an accident.

The Bought By Many Complete Cover* is described on their website as being the most comprehensive cover available on the market. It comes with £15,000 of annual vet fee cover and full dental cover is included as standard.

Do They Offer a Multi-Pet Discount?

Yes, Bought By Many offer a 15% Multi-Pet discount* for pets on the same policy.

Free FirstVet App Access

One feature we have found really useful with our Bought By Many Policy is the FirstVet App Access. We’ve used this policy benefit a few times and it saved us many expensive trips to our vet. It has proved even more useful during Covid as it kept us safe too.

Bought By Many Reviews

If you’re like me, you will likely want to know what experience others have had with Bought By Many. On this point, it’s encouraging to see that they currently have more than 21,000 5 star reviews on site Feefo and they are also highly rated on Trustpilot.

Some recent reviews say things like:

Caroline – ‘Very quick and easy to obtain quote and cover with good multi-pet discount’

Nick – ‘Very easy process. Very good customer care. Very good value.’

Alison – ‘Excellent service, easy online claim form to fill out. Kept well informed by email/text at each stage.’

Karen – ‘One of my cats became very ill suddenly and passed away last month. Dealing with this company throughout such a difficult time was easy. They were so understanding and sympathetic and made the whole process as painless and easy as possible for me.’

Bought by Many Review Summary

Bought By Many have used their extensive knowledge of the pet insurance industry to come up with useful policy offerings for their members. The company has very good reviews from its current customers and it is continuing to grow at pace. With cover for pets with pre-existing conditions and a multi-pet discount too, it’s easy to see why they recently won the Moneyfacts Pet Insurance Provider of the Year award for 2021. It is easy to get a quick online quote* and also to sign up for a policy if you are happy with the quote.

We hope you’ve found this Bought by Many review helpful!

The post Bought By Many Review – Best Pet Insurance Provider? appeared first on Money Bulldog

GoHenry App Review – The Best Value Money App For Kids?

Adam Buller — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 23:27:49 GMT

In this GoHenry app review we take a closer look at the features on offer to see if it’s worth the money.

Many people today feel that we should be doing more as a society to teach kids about money. Financial education is still not given as much attention as other subjects taught in schools. This leaves parents looking for other ways that they can financially educate their children. Some try and do it completely by themselves, whereas others look to utilise pocket money apps like GoHenry.

Get 2 Months Free when you sign up to GoHenry via this link*

Who Are GoHenry?

GoHenry started life in the UK almost a decade ago and have been expanding rapidly ever since. In 2020 GoHenry raised $40m in new funding to further expand into the US and UK. GoHenry currently have over 2 million members.

GoHenry’s goal is to help parents to improve their child’s financial literacy. They do this by means of the GoHenry App which includes financial tools, videos and quizzes. These cover money basics such as investing, saving, interest, borrowing, gifting and much more. GoHenry label these activities as Money Missions. These missions can be beneficial for children who are these days forming financial habits at a much younger age. A recent survey also found that many children want to have these kind of fun features.

What Do GoHenry Offer?

The company offer a range of features which may be attractive to parents. These include…

A GoHenry personalised prepaid Visa debit card – No debt or overdraft
Pocket money on repeat via automatic bank transfer
Set chores via the app and pay your kids once completed
Set savings goals which parents and kids can track together
Instant money transfers for when they need money fast
Real-time app notifications when your child makes a purchase
Ability to Block or Unblock a card via the GoHenry app if lost or stolen
Control how much and where your kids can spend their money
Pay wages into a GoHenry account for kids with jobs
Kids can easily send and receive payments
The option to give to a charity via the app
Receive money gifts from friends or relatives with personalised messages
Compatible with Apple Pay
£20 free for you and a buddy when you refer a friend
Fingerprint and Facial Recognition
Chip and Pin enabled
Find your pin in the app if you forget it

More about Money Missions

Money Missions were introduced by GoHenry to close the financial literacy gap between young and old. These interactive lessons are designed to build financial confidence in 6-18 year olds.

There are animated videos, quizzes and points / badges to be won. All of this whilst gaining real world experience in money matters. These games have been developed in collaboration with teachers and financial experts and are age appropriate. There are different levels to unlock, ensuring your children continue to develop at a natural pace. All Money Missions are included with the subscription fee.

Who Is Go Henry For?

GoHenry has been created for children aged 6-18 and parents can have up to 4 children on each account. If you need to add more than four children you will need to set up another GoHenry account using a different email address.

GoHenry Fees

GoHenry Charge a fee of £2.99 per child per month on a subscription basis. This fee includes a kid’s prepaid debit card and all of the Money Mission features we’ve mentioned in this GoHenry Review. UK transactions and ATM withdrawals are free with GoHenry.

Get 2 Months Free when you sign up to GoHenry via this link*

GoHenry App Reviews

Now we come to the part of our GoHenry app review where we look at what others have to say about them.

The Trustpilot GoHenry reviews are mixed. GoHenry’s overall rating is ‘Average’ scoring 3.7 out of 5 stars at the time of writing. This is based on 4891 reviews.

68% of reviewers gave GoHenry an Excellent rating and 10% said it was great. 13% gave them a bad rating. What was the cause of a lot of these GoHenry bad reviews? Most of these came about because the customer either failed to realise that this was a paid account or didn’t understand how the topup process worked.

Some reviews even seemed to leave one star reviews by accident even when they apparently liked the service.

Many people compared GoHenry with a standard bank account for children. Really, though, GoHenry offer something very different and are more of a financial education app for children with the feature of a debit card and account included. This is why they charge a monthly fee, for the extra features the app provides. If you don’t require any of these extra features then it may well just be cheaper for you to go and open a standard child’s high street bank account – if there’s not a lower age limit to prevent this.

GoHenry App Review Summary

What do we think of GoHenry given everything we’ve discussed in this GoHenry review post?

My natural inclination with apps like GoHenry is to dismiss them as I don’t like having to pay for things (financial education) I feel I can give to my kids for free. However, with GoHenry I actually quite like the idea and I can see why they’ve amassed over 1.5 million customers.

I have two kids of my own and the eldest has just got his first bank account. He is pretty astute and takes to the technology side of things quickly, but he seems to like spending his money a soon as he gets it. He also doesn’t always like to listen to his dad when he’s lecturing him about what he should and shouldn’t spend his money on. So I do think the ability for both of us to be working together via an app to help him grasp the benefits of saving money would be nice. For my other boy I know he’d really enjoy the fun element of the ‘Money Missions’.

I also think they’d really love the personalised card designs with their own name on too.

If you think that GoHenry could be good for your kids then our 2 months free trial offer if you use this link* gives you a commitment free way to give the GoHenry app a go. This way you can see if the benefits make GoHenry worth the money for you. We hope you’ve found this GoHenry App Review useful.

The post GoHenry App Review – The Best Value Money App For Kids? appeared first on Money Bulldog

Yopa Review + £100 Off Discount Code

Adam Buller — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 17:23:30 GMT

(The following post is an advertisement feature from Yopa but all opinions remain my own)

When UK residents think of online estate agents one of the first names they will list is Yopa. Yopa have been around for years but over time the way they work and also their fees have changed. So what do Yopa offer in today’s competitive housing market? Find out in this Yopa Review.

Who Are Yopa?

Yopa have been around since the very early days of online estate agents entering the market.

Yopa’s slogan is ‘Local in a big way’ and their website is very keen to highlight the personal approach. Those who sell a house through Yopa will be assigned a local Yopa agent. This agent will help and assist you through the sales process with local knowledge and expertise.

Yopa also state that they sell a house every 12 minutes and that they save sellers an average of £2800.

The Yopa website says that in the past 12 months more than 12,000 have used Yopa to sell their home. They also state that those who did sell with Yopa achieved over 96% of the asking price on average.

To book a free valuation visit the Yopa Website*.

Get an extra £100 off in December 2021 with the code: HoHoHo100

What Do Yopa Offer?

Here is a short list of Yopa’s main selling points. We will look at these in depth as we go through this Yopa review…

Local agents who are always available – including on evenings and weekends
No commission – Yopa only charge a single fixed fee agreed with you from the start
No sale, no fee – The option to only pay once your house sale is completed
YopaHub – an online dashboard to help you keep track of viewing requests, offers and feedback
Partner access – mortgage and conveyancing advice is available if required

Yopa’s Fees

One very important part of any Yopa Review will be the fees charged and packages on offer.

Yopa only charge a single fixed fee but they offer 3 different ways to pay that fee. It’s worth noting that Yopa’s fees will be higher in some postcodes, especially in or around London. To check if this affects you enter your postcode on this page*.

Yopa’s Pay Now Option

The Pay Now option is for those who want the simplicity of knowing their fee has been paid right from the start. There will be nothing to pay after your house has sold.

Yopa currently charge £999 for the Pay Now Core option which gives you a…

Dedicated local agent
Professional Advert
Floor plan
Professional and high quality photos
For Sale Board
Access to YopaHub – the online dashboard and control centre

For further features you can upgrade to Pay Now Premium which will also include a…

Viewing Pack
Premium Listing to help you stand out
£349 discount when using Scout Financial Services for your mortgage

The current cost for Pay Now Premium is £1399 with a £99 discount on the usual fee of £1498.

All Prices include VAT by the way.

Yopa’s Pay Later Option

The Yopa Pay Later option costs the same and includes exactly the same features as the Pay Now option. The only difference is you get the option to pay the fee either in 10 months time or when your house sells, whichever comes first.

The Pay Later option again gives you a choice of both a Pay Later Core (£999) and Pay Later Premium (£1399) package. These both carry the same benefits as the Pay Now options listed above.

You will be required to pay the fee even if your house doesn’t sell or if you remove it from the market.

The pay later option does not affect your credit rating and there will be no footprint on your credit report.

No Sale, No Fee Option

Yopa also offer a No Sale, No Fee Premium option with most of the features of the other listing options. The only thing I can see which is missing is the discount on the ‘Scout’ mortgage service. As this option could come at cost to Yopa if your property doesn’t sell, it is likely the cost to sell this way will be higher. For this reason there is no fixed fee listed on the Yopa website. To sell on a No Sale, No Fee basis you will need to contact Yopa for a quote.

The Yopa Sales Process

The house sale process with Yopa is as follows…

Step 1: Book a Valuation – The first step is to book a free valuation*. A local Yopa agent will visit your home and use their local knowledge to provide you with an accurate valuation. They will also explain how and why they have arrived at that figure.

Step 2: Decide – Once you have your valuation and have met with your local agent, you can then decide whether you would like to proceed using Yopa to sell your house.

Step 3: Choose A Fee Option – If you decide to proceed you can then choose whether you would like to Pay Now, Pay Later or Pay Only If Your House Sells as outlined in the ‘fees’ section of this Yopa Review.

Step 4: Creating an Advert – Once you’ve chosen a fee structure, the local Yopa agent who visited you to value your home will then create an advert for you. This advert will then be placed on major property sales websites including Rightmove, Zoopla, PrimeLocation and others.

Step 5: Start Taking Viewings – You can either host the viewings yourself or ask your Yopa agent to take care of them for you. It’s worth noting that there is an extra fee of £300 (£399 in some London postcodes) if you decide to use your local agent to host your viewings for you. This extra fee covers unlimited viewings. The feedback you receive from these viewings will also be made available to you. This could help you to make any improvements needed to help with the sale.

Step 6: Mortgage and conveyancing help will be made available if required.

Step 7: Time to Sell – Your local Yopa agent will help you to negotiate the best price and see the process though to completion.

Yopa Reviews

It’s encouraging to see that the Yopa Reviews on TrustPilot are largely positive. Yopa achieved a rating of excellent with a score of 4.7 out of 5 stars based on over 15,000 reviews. This is a very impressive score with 87% of reviews giving Yopa the highest rating of ‘Excellent’.

Yopa also recently won the won Hybrid Estate Agent of The Year at The Negotiator Awards 2021.

Yopa Alternatives

What if after reading this Yopa Review you have decided they might not be the right choice for you? In this case you can check out how they compare to some other online estate agents in this post.

Conclusion

We hope that this Yopa review has helped you to decide if they might be the right online estate agent for you.

Yopa’s fees appear transparent, with both ‘Pay Now’ or ‘Pay Later’ options available. There are also ‘Core’ or ‘Premium’ bundles to choose from, making the service affordable for different budgets. The option to negotiate a No Sale, No Fee deal with Yopa may also be attractive for some. All prices include VAT and listings on major property sales portals such as Rightmove, Zoopla and PrimeLocation.

Finally, it’s always encouraging when you see positive reviews on websites like TrustPilot and others. There will always be some negative reviews as there will be a few people who experience difficulties for whatever reason. To see over 87% of reviewers give Yopa the top rating of ‘Excellent’, though, is great to see. This is especially true when it is based on such a large sample of over 15,000 reviews.

To book a free valuation visit the Yopa Website*.

Get an extra £100 off in December 2021 with the code: HoHoHo100

The post Yopa Review + £100 Off Discount Code appeared first on Money Bulldog

Chase Bank Review UK – The Best Digital Bank for You?

Adam Buller — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 16:54:05 GMT

As soon as I saw the name Chase Bank being advertised in the UK, I knew this one was going to be worth writing a review for.

We’ve been blogging and writing reviews for almost a decade now. In that time I’d seen just how popular Chase Bank were in the US and I’d often wondered if they’d try to venture into the UK market. So who are Chase and what do they offer? This is what we’ll be discussing in this Chase Bank UK review.

Who Are Chase Bank?

As we mentioned already, Chase Bank are very popular in the US serving over 56 million digital customers!

Chase UK have their main headquarters in London and their support team headquarters are in Edinburgh.

Chase Bank is a trading name for J.P Morgan Europe Limited and is Authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority. The company are also regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority.

What do Chase Bank Offer?

Some of the main features available through a Chase UK bank account are…

Cashback on everyday spending – Ts and Cs apply
24/7 customer support with REAL PEOPLE and NO CHATBOT
Variable 5% AER interest boost on any spare change savings accumulated
Extra Current Accounts for Free for Increased Money Management Options
Fee-Free Banking with No Charges Abroad
Spending Overview to help Track Your Spending and Budget
Extra Features and Cashback Options for those who use Apple Pay

Who Can Bank With Chase?

To open a Chase UK Bank account you will need to be over 18 and reside in the UK only. As Chase is an App based bank account you will need a smartphone. You will also need to have a UK mobile telephone number. On top of this you will need to be a tax resident of the UK too.

Downloading the Chase Bank App

The Chase Bank App is available for download on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. While most modern devices will be supported, there may be some which aren’t due to hardware issues. You will need to be running iOS 14 or above for Apple devices or Android 8.1 and above for android.

How to Open an Account

To open an account with Chase Bank in the UK the first step will be to download the app. It’s free to open an account with Chase and the in-app instructions are quick and simple.

There is no minimum monthly deposit amount to open and maintain a Chase account. Also there are no account opening fees, no monthly charges or ATM fees. Some ATM operators charge their own fees but this money doesn’t go to Chase. Finally, there are no fees to use your Chase Mastercard debit card to spend or withdraw money abroad.

What About Direct Debits Using Chase Bank?

One downside to Chase Bank in the UK right now, is that it cannot currently be used for direct debits. While this may cause complaint for some, Chase say they are working hard to resolve this. They also say to keep an eye on their social channel for any updates in this area.

Is your Money Safe With Chase?

You’ll be pleased to hear that eligible Chase Bank deposits are cover by the FSCS up to the £85,000 limit. Deposits over this amount are unlikely to be protected if Chase Bank was to fail.

Chase Bank Reviews

On the surface Chase Bank seems to be a good option for those looking for a basic UK bank account. As always when writing a review, though, I decided to check out other reviews to see what customers had to say about them.

As Chase are only new to the UK there weren’t an awful lot of reviews available. The few that were online, however, sadly weren’t as glowing as I’d expected them to be.

On Trustpilot, for example, Chase.co.uk only hold a rating of 2.7 out of 5 stars based on 20 reviews. 60% of customers also gave them the worst rating possible of ‘bad’.

While this could just be down to teething problems for the UK version of this banking app, the US reviews on Chase were even less positive. This is certainly something to keep in mind and we’ll try to update this page over the coming months to see if things improve in this area.

Chase UK Bank Alternatives

With no shortage of alternative app based bank accounts available in the UK such as Revolut, Monese and Monzo it’s clear that Chase are going to face stiff competition if they wan’t to corner the UK app banking market.

Conclusion

As we said at the start of our Chase UK Bank Review this company have had success in the US. Whether they will be able to replicate this in the UK will be largely be down to what extra features they add to the account and how well their customer service can rival it’s competitors. To date the reviews of Chase haven’t been great but it’s still early days for its UK service, so let’s see how things progress.

Have you used Chase? How have you found them? Let us know in the comments.

The post Chase Bank Review UK – The Best Digital Bank for You? appeared first on Money Bulldog

Revolut Review

Adam Buller — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 23:17:00 GMT

In this Revolut review we examine each of the personal accounts Revolut offer to help you decide if they are the right choice for you.

Who are Revolut?

Revolut are an alternative app-based account provider aiming to shake up the world of banking as we know it.

When they started life back in 2015, Revolut weren’t legally recognised as a bank. This changed in 2018, however, when they were granted a European banking license. They currently have over 8 million people using their service.

Revolut are looking to bring banking into step with the modern world. They do this by allowing you to transfer money into different currencies with no fees attached. You can spend money abroad using your Revolut card, without all of the high fees that high street banks charge. On top of all this, they even integrate cryptocurrency use into their accounts.

You can sign up for a Revolut account for free* with no monthly fees but they also offer paid accounts. These paid accounts come with added or enhanced features.

The first thing to note is that all of Revolut’s accounts come with three common features. These are that they come with a free UK Account and Euro IBAN Account. They also allow you to spend in over 150 currencies at the interbank exchange rates.

Let’s look at each of the 4 accounts currently offered by Revolut for personal use. We’ll then look at the Revolut for Business account, to see what that has to offer.

The Revolut Standard Free Account

The Revolut Standard Account is a completely free account offered by the company. It’s easy to open a Standard account* and there are no monthly fees. You can do it in minutes using your phone and you can control your account via the Revolut app.

This means that you won’t pay any extra fees or charges when you transfer or spend money in different currencies. You also won’t be charged extortionate exchange rates.

The Standard Revolut account is a good basic account. It does come with limits on the amount you transact each month without incurring a fee, though. These limits mean that you will be able to:

Exchange in 30 fiat currencies with no fees up to £1,000 per month
Enjoy fee-free ATM withdrawals up to £200 per month (5 withdrawals allowed)
Shop safer online by having unlimited disposable virtual cards
Have 1 kid on a Revolut Junior account (no junior account features with standard account)
Daily interest on savings up to 0.15% at the time of writing
2.5% cryptocurrencies exchange fee (crypto withdrawals only available with a metal account)
1.5% Commodities exchange fee

For extra services, you will need to have either a Revolut Plus, Premium or Metal account.

Revolut Plus Account

A more recent addition to the Revolut accounts available is the Plus Account.

This Plus account gives you a some great premium features for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. These include…

Purchase Protection – Up to £1000 of insurance for purchases you make through Revolut for a whole year!
Enhanced Return Window – If you’re retailer won’t accept a return within 90 days you can get a refund through Revolut for items between £50 and £300
Ticket Cancellation Protection – If you have to miss an event unexpectedly you get up to £1000 back through Revolut
Daily Interest with a Flexible Account – £30 interest on £15,000 in savings but with the flexibility to withdraw anytime
Enhanced Junior Account Access – Up to 2 kids can access junior accounts with exclusive features
24/7 Priority Customer Support
Custom Card Designs

As we can see Revolut offer quite a few perks through their Plus Account. Be sure to read all of the T’s and C’s on the Revolut Website* but is certainly worth looking at.

Revolut Premium Account

Priced at £6.99 a month is the Revolut Premium Account. The account comes with all of the features of a Standard and Plus account but with higher transaction limits and other perks. Here is a summary of the benefits…

Withdraw more from ATMs – Limit rises to £400 per month with a Premium Account
Purchase Protection – Up to £2500 of insurance – increased from £1000 on the Plus account!
Enhanced Return Window – If you’re retailer won’t accept a return within 90 days you can get a refund through Revolut for items between £50 and £300
Ticket Cancellation Protection – If you have to miss an event unexpectedly you get up to £1000 back through Revolut
Daily Interest with a Flexible Account – 0.5% AER on savings – compared to 0.4% on the Plus Account
Enhanced Junior Account Access – Up to 2 kids can access junior accounts with exclusive features
Lower Exchange Fees – Cryptocurrency (1.5%) and commodity exchange fees (0.5%) are 1% lower than on the Plus or Standard Account
1 Free International Payment Each Month
24/7 Priority Customer Support
Custom Card Designs

There are some great extra features and perks that come along with a premium account for travel too! These include…

Unlimited No Fee Currency Exchange
Overseas Medical Insurance – Including Winter Sports
Delayed Baggage and Flight Insurance
Free Lounge Access with Smart Delay for you and a friend

Revolut Metal Account

The Revolut Metal account is the most enhanced account on offer. It comes at a cost of £12.99 per month. The Metal account includes all of the features of a Standard or Premium Account but with even more enhanced limits and features.

Limit on ATM withdrawals rises to £800
Get an Exclusive Revolut Metal Card
Get Cashback on card payments
3 Free International Payments per Month
Up to 5 kids for Revolut Junior Accounts
Purchase protection rises to £10,000 per year
Crypto Withdrawals are allowed with a Metal Account
Daily Interest on savings rises to 0.65%
3 friends allowed on Free Lounge Access With Smart Delay
Car Hire Excess Feature included (see website for details)

Revolut Reviews

Hopefully this Revolut Review will have given you a good overview of the features of each account level. What do others have to say about their experience with Revolut, though?

In this area the TrustPilot rating for Revolut is certainly very encouraging. Out of almost 100,000 reviews – yes one hundred thousand! – Revolut have a customer score of 4.4 out of 5 stars with 76% of reviewers giving them the highest rating of excellent. I’ve seen a lot of TrustPilot reviews while operating this blog and I have to say that’s very impressive.

Give Revolut a Try for Free

We hope that this Revolut review has helped you to decide if they are the right digital bank for you.

If you’re still unsure, then remember that Revolut have a free plan for their Personal Account. This means you won’t lose out if you open a free Revolut Account* to give them a try.

The post Revolut Review appeared first on Money Bulldog

PensionBee Review

Adam Buller — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMT

In this PensionBee review we carefully examine the PensionBee service to help you decide if this is the right place for you to find, combine and grow your old pensions.

If there’s one area of personal finance that people in the UK need to be taking more seriously right now it is our pension arrangements. With large holes appearing in both company and government pensions alike, it is vital that we make the most of any money we have already invested into our pensions.

Similarly, we also need to ensure that we are putting enough money away to adequately fund our retirement years.

This is where PensionBee come in.

Who Are PensionBee?

PensionBee are a company who are working hard to transform the pension industry as we know it. They aim to make pension saving simpler by helping you to find and combine all of your old work pensions. This means you can bring them into one, easy to manage pension platform known as the Beehive.

From the Beehive you will be able to see simply and clearly how much money you currently have put away for retirement. You’ll also be able to track how well your pension pot is performing and make top-up contributions as and when you want to.

Since launching in 2014, PensionBee say they now have over 602,000 customers and have been campaigning hard for change to the pension industry. They have specifically pushed to improve the ease and speed of being able to transfer a pension.

Why PensionBee?

PensionBee aim to take the hassle out of moving and combining your pensions by doing all of the hard work for you. PensionBee will ask you for some simple information. Using this info, they will then trace and find all of your old pensions for you.

PensionBee will assign a dedicated ‘Beekeeper’ to take care of all aspects of the switching process. Once they have found your old pensions, they will then transfer them all over to one of their own competitively priced pension plans. These plans are managed by some of the biggest and most trusted pension providers in the world in Blackrock, State Street, Legal & General and HSBC.

If you’re not happy with any aspects of the PensionBee service, you can cancel the whole process within 30 days of it starting. PensionBee will then return your old pensions back to their previous providers at no cost to you.

PensionBee’s Fees

With PensionBee, you only ever pay an annual management fee. This means there are no entry or exit fees.

Starting at just 0.5% per annum, PensionBee’s fees are priced competitively and are lower than those charged by many other pension providers. They are also lower than the industry average as a whole.

The fee you pay will depend on which plan you choose. There are currently 7 different plans to choose from which we’ve listed below. For more details on any of these plans, please see the PensionBee website.

Tracker – 0.5% annual fee
Tailored – 0.7% annual fee
Fossil Fuel Free – 0.75% annual fee
4Plus – 0.95% annual fee
Shariah – 0.95% annual fee
Preserve – 0.5% annual fee
Pre-Annuity – 0.7% annual fee

PensionBee also recently updated their fees so that they gradually reduce the more you invest over £100,000.

As we can see, when it comes to fees PensionBee offer good value. This could result in your pension pot growing at a much faster rate than it would if you simply left your old workplace pensions where they are. This is because these plans can often be subject to unnecessarily high management fees and charges that can easily eat away at your returns over time.

PensionBee Reviews

Most of us would agree that a company is only as good as it’s customers say it is. On this point it’s encouraging to see that PensionBee has a rating of ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot and an overall score of 4.7 out of 5, which is extremely good indeed. Recent reviews left by customers read along the lines of:

Alex – ‘Amazing service. I’m a real customer and gobsmacked by what they have done.’

Neil – ‘So easy, so quick! Now I can keep track of my pension on my phone!’

Stephen – ‘A fantastic service with very helpful informative staff. A very simple and easy to use process. My Bee keeper (Martin) kept me informed of every step and explained everything very well. Allowing me to make informed decisions. I am currently in the process of transferring some old work pensions and I do feel more in control of this money now!’

Who Is PensionBee Not For?

It should also be mentioned in any PensionBee review the people who PensionBee might not be right for.

Firstly, you can only use the PensionBee service if you are transferring old pensions over to the platform. You cannot start a brand new pension with PensionBee. You can make top-up contributions to your PensionBee plan once your old pensions have been transferred, though.

The other notable restriction to using the PensionBee service is that they are unable to transfer any pension that has guaranteed benefits of over £30,000. The reason for this is that the government requires that you take financial advice from a transfer specialist before you transfer any pension over this size.

If you feel you need professional before signing up with PensionBee then you can find a local advisor here*.

Is PensionBee Safe?

The big question most people have when transferring a pension to a new company is whether their money is safe and protected?

As mentioned earlier, PensionBee’s plans are controlled by three of the biggest pension providers in the world. This should straight away allay some fears.

The other point of note is that PensionBee are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. This means your pension savings will be protected by the FSCS for 100% of your pension as assessed and accepted by the FSCS. This protection has no upper limit.

PensionBee Alternatives

If after reading this PensionBee Review you feel that the service is not right for you, then be sure to check out this page to see some alternatives.

Get Started Today

So there we have it, our full review of PensionBee. Hopefully you now have a much better idea of how the PensionBee service works and whether it is the right option for you.

The post PensionBee Review appeared first on Money Bulldog

Freedom24 Review – The Best Investment Platform For You?

Adam Buller — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 17:22:00 GMT

Who are Freedom24 and what do they offer that’s different? Let’s find out in this Freedom24 review.

Who are Freedom24?

Freedom 24 is the online trading name of Freedom Finance Europe Ltd. These, in turn are the EU subsidiary of the Nasdaq listed Freedom Holding Corp, whose market cap is around $3.8B.

Freedom24* offer both an investment account and a savings account. One major USP of the investing platform is that it offers individual investors the opportunity to invest in IPOs. We’ll discuss this in more detail as we go through our Freedom24 review.

Getting Started

Freedom24 offer access to multiple different stock exchanges worldwide via their online trading platform. The platform is available on desktop computer or mobile device. Freedom24 also have a mobile app which is available across different platforms.

There are over a million different trading instruments to choose from including stocks, ETFs, bonds, options and futures. These cover a variety of major exchanges across America, Europe and Asia.

Once you open a Freedom24 account* you will be able to access their demo terminal. This will allow you to get a feel for the platform before making your first trades.

Freedom24 currently have a promo offer for new clients with no trading fees for the first 30 days. (Ts and Cs apply so be sure to check the full details of the offer.)

Freedom24 don’t just offer a trading account. They also offer a USD savings account. The interest payable on a Freedom24 savings accounts is 3%. You can easily transfer money between your investment and savings accounts.

Freedom24 Fees

When a promotion is not available Freedom24 offer 3 different account levels. Which account level you choose will largely depend on how frequently you intend to trade. The 3 levels available are…

Smart – Ideal for those just starting out (no monthly fee)
Fix – Low monthly fee account for more frequent traders
Super – Higher monthly fee account for those trading large volumes

The basic details of the fees charged on each of these accounts can be seen in the image below.

It’s worth noting that card payments carry a 2.5% transaction fee. There is also a small charge to receive sms notifications on all but the super account.

Investing in IPOs

Freedom24 are the only stockbroker based in the EU to allow individual retail investors to invest in IPOs*. These have included the Airbnb IPO as well as Snowflake and Robinhood. They are, however, not just a platform for those looking to invest in IPOs. They also allow investors to trade around 40,000 different stocks, 1,200 ETFs and 147,000 different bonds across Europe, Asia and the US.

The opportunity to invest in IPOs as a retail investor is exciting but it may be daunting too. This is why Freedom24 have analysts who study the markets to suggest good IPOs to invest in. Once purchased, investors can then sell any IPO stocks after a 93 day lock-up period has expired. While there is no guarantee of profiting from IPOs, Freedom Finance state the average price growth of IPO stocks during this period is 65%.

The minimum amount to invest in IPOs is $2000.

Support for New Investors

Freedom24’s customer service department are available to answer any questions new traders may have. Customer service can be contacted via phone, email, live chat or social media messaging apps.

There are also webinars available to help you learn the investing ropes. The Freedom24 InvestIdeas blog is also run by award-winning Freedom Finance securities analysts. This blog includes investment recommendations and financial forecasts.

Is Your Money Safe?

If you are wondering if your money will be safe with Freedom24 here are a few points to consider. Freedom Finance…

are fully MiFID ll compliant
are A Direct Member of Euroclear Bank’s Admissions Committee
have a B long-term credit rating assigned by Standard & Poor’s
customers assets are protected by ICF

Conclusion

We hope this Freedom24 review has helped you to decide whether they are the right investment platform for you. The option to invest in IPOs is a huge bonus for the platform but it’s clear Freedom24 have more to offer.

Don’t forget for a limited time you can open a promo account* with Freedom24 allowing you to trade fees free for 30 days.

*Capital at risk

*Tax treatment is dependent on your individual circumstances + *Subject to HMRC requirements

*Past results do not guarantee future results

The post Freedom24 Review – The Best Investment Platform For You? appeared first on Money Bulldog

Scratch and Patch Review – The Best Pet Insurance Provider?

Adam Buller — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:07:00 GMT

In this Scratch and Patch Pet Insurance review, we take a closer look at this popular UK pet insurer, to help you decide if they are the right choice for you and your beloved pet.

Before we review Scratch and Patch* in full, let’s highlight a few ‘good to know’ points about the company.

Scratch and Patch offer Pet Insurance for both Cats and Dogs
The company runs a 24 hour, 7 days a week helpline
Scratch and Patch’s Premier Policies hold a 5 Star rating from Defaqto
They offer a 10% Multi Pet Discount
You won’t be charged interest if you choose to pay monthly

Now you’ve seen a few key points about the company, let’s carry on with our full Scratch and Patch review.

Who are Scratch and Patch?

Scratch and Patch are a trading name of Only Pets Cover Limited, which is an appointed representative of URIS Group Limited. Their policies are underwritten by the well-known insurer Hiscox.

Scratch and Patch started life back in 2016 and have since built up a good reputation within the industry for their pet insurance policies, some of which hold 5 Star Defaqto ratings. (Defaqto are an independent ratings agency).

The company are based in Doncaster and they are fully regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

Types of Cover Offered by Scratch and Patch

The first thing to note is that Scratch and Patch offer Pet Insurance cover for both cats and dogs.

To ensure that there is a policy that is right for nearly every budget and circumstance, Scratch and Patch* offer 4 different types of dog and puppy / cat and kitten insurance across 5 levels of cover. Let’s look at these levels of cover more closely now, going from the lowest to the highest level of cover. The policy benefits are broadly the same for both cats and dogs with each level of cover.

Bronze Cover

Scratch and Patch’s Bronze Cover is their most basic level of cover for those with a lower budget.

The Scratch and Patch Bronze Cover* comes with £2,250 of veterinary fees cover. This includes £500 of cruciate ligament cover and £250 of cover for dental (accident/injury), alternative treatments, loss & recovery, emergency boarding/pet minding fees and accidental death.

For dogs only there is also £1,000,000 of third party liability cover.

The Bronze level of cover is time limited to 12 months. This means that cover for an accident or injury will end 12 months from the first date of treatment or when the policy ends, whichever is first.

To keep the cost of the cover down, Scratch and Patch’s Bronze cover does not cover illness, only vet fees for accidents and injuries.

Scratch and Patch’s policies are all covered in the UK / EU PETS Scheme Area.

Silver Cover

The Scratch and Patch Silver level of cover is a slight upgrade on their Bronze policy with one major difference, it includes cover for illnesses after the standard 14 day waiting period.

The Scratch and Patch Silver Cover* comes with £3,000 of cover for veterinary fees. This includes £100 for diet food. £300 for alternative treatments. £500 for cruciate ligament, MRI/CT scans and death by accident or illness.

There is £750 of cover included for loss & recovery, emergency boarding/pet minding fees and holiday cancellation. There’s also a big jump in the amount included for dental cover (accident/injury) to £3,000 when compared with the bronze cover.

It’s worth noting that holiday cancellation cover is also included at this level up to £1000.

For dogs only there is £1,000,000 of third party liability cover.

This cover is time limited to 12 months. This means that cover for an accident or injury will end 12 months from the first date of treatment or when the policy ends, whichever is first.

Scratch and Patch’s policies are all covered in the UK / EU PETS Scheme Area.

Gold Cover

With Scratch and Patch’s Gold level of cover we again (as expected) see an upgrade on what’s offered from their Silver and Bronze policies.

The first thing to know is that the Gold cover is a maximum benefit policy, so cover for an injury or illness ends once the maximum benefit has been reached.

The Scratch and Patch Gold Cover* comes with £4,000 of veterinary fees cover. This includes £100 for diet food. £400 for alternative treatments. £1000 for cruciate ligament, MRI/CT scans and death by accident or illness.

There is £1000 of cover included for loss & recovery, emergency boarding/pet minding fees and holiday cancellation. There’s also another small jump in the amount included for dental cover (accident/injury) to £4,000 compared with the silver cover.

For dogs only there is £1,500,000 of third party liability cover. This is £500,000 more than with their silver and bronze cover.

Scratch and Patch’s policies are all covered in the UK / EU PETS Scheme Area.

Prime Cover

A recent addition to the Scratch and Patch line up is their Prime cover.

The vet fee and dental cover limit of this policy is £2,500. Payments for death, loss and recovery, emergency boarding and holiday cancellation payments are limited to £1000 with Prime cover.

Premier Cover

Now we come to Scratch and Patch’s Premier level of cover.

The Premier and Premier Plus levels of cover are different to the Bronze, Silver and Gold as they are Lifetime policies. This means that the annual limit for Vets Fees is fully reinstated at each renewal.

The Scratch and Patch Premier Cover* comes with £4,000 of cover for veterinary fees. This includes £100 for diet food. £750 for alternative treatments. £1500 for cruciate ligament, MRI/CT scans and death by accident or illness (with £100 for euthanasia).

£1500 of cover is included for both loss & recovery and holiday cancellation. While there’s also £1000 for emergency boarding/pet minding fees. Dental cover (accident/injury) with this cover remains at £4,000.

You’ll also get cover in two new areas when you opt for a Scratch and Patch Premier level of cover. These are behavioural treatment (£250) and accidental damage (£500).

For dogs only there is £1,500,000 of third party liability cover available.

Scratch and Patch’s policies are all covered in the UK / EU PETS Scheme Area.

Premier Plus Cover

Let’s now look at Scratch and Patch’s top level of cover, Premier Plus.

The Scratch and Patch Premier Plus Cover* is again a lifetime policy. On renewal of the policy the annual vet fee limit is fully reinstated.

Scratch and Patch’s Premier Plus cover comes with £8,000 of veterinary fees cover. This includes £100 for diet food. £1000 for alternative treatments. £2000 for cruciate ligament, MRI/CT scans, with £1500 for death by accident or illness (£150 for euthanasia).

You’ll get £1000 for emergency boarding/pet minding fees, £1500 for loss & recovery and £2500 for holiday cancellation. Dental cover (accident/injury) with this cover doubles to £8000 from what you get with the standard Premier plan.

There’s also an increase in the two new areas of cover when you opt for Premier Plus over Premier. For instance, the amounts available for behavioural treatment (£500) and accidental damage (£750) both increase.

For dogs only there is £2,000,000 of third party liability cover.

Scratch and Patch’s policies are all covered in the UK / EU PETS Scheme Area.

Scratch and Patch Excess Fees

The excess fees charged by Scratch and Patch are the same on all levels of cover and are as follows.

Scratch and Patch Reviews

When it comes to Scratch and Patch reviews from other sources there are more available now than when we first wrote this review.

TrustPilot for example now rate Scratch and Patch as excellent – 4.3 out of 5 – based on 519 reviews. There are always a few negative reviews to be found for pet insurance providers as there will inevitably be cases where claims aren’t eligible to be paid, which tends to leave people angry even if the decision was justified.

Summary

We hope you’ve found this Scratch and Patch Pet Insurance review useful. As we have seen, the company has a variety of cover options available to suit a range of budgets and circumstances. If the company sound like a good choice for you then you can easily get a quick quote from Scratch and Patch* to see how much it might cost.

The post Scratch and Patch Review – The Best Pet Insurance Provider? appeared first on Money Bulldog

Which Is the Cheapest Family Music Streaming Plan in the UK?

Adam Buller — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 16:11:00 GMT

It wasn’t all that long ago that people were wondering whether music streaming services like Spotify would really take off. Nowadays they have transformed the way most of us listen to music. This has led to more music streaming services popping up such as Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Tidal.

Today we are going to look at which of these 5 UK music streaming services offers the best deal for family music subscriptions. While family streaming subscriptions are more expensive than standard plans, they can still save you a lot of money when compared to buying separate plans for each of your kids. So let’s see what each company has to offer.

Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan

First up is the Family Plan from Amazon Music Unlimited *. (get 3 months free for a limited time!)

Amazon Music Unlimited has a huge library of over 75 million songs in HD quality and over 7 million in Ultra HD!

Their family plan comes at a cost of £14.99 per month and offers up to 6 accounts for family members. They do specify on their website that family members need to be over 13 years of age.

There’s another way to save money here if you have a small family and only plan on listening via your Amazon Echo devices* at home. Amazon offer their Music Unlimited service to be played on a single Echo device for just £3.99 a month. This means if you are a family of 3 persons or less, you could save money by linking each of your Echo devices to separate Amazon accounts. For example, you could have 2 Echo devices able to play different music at the same time for just £7.98 per month.

As you would expect when paying for a premium plan the music is served ad-free and you are able to download music to listen offline.

While Amazon Music is available on lots of different devices – Echo devices being the most obvious and attractive – Google Home and Google Home Mini owners may be disappointed to learn that you cannot voice control Amazon Music through these devices. While there may be ways to work around this, this is still not ideal. As we’ll see later, though, the same problem exists for Amazon Echo users with Google Play.

Spotify Premium Family Plan

Next up is Spotify.

Spotify’s Premium Family Plan costs £16.99 in the UK. For this you get up to 6 seperate accounts for family members living under the same roof. This means up to 6 family members can listen to different music on different devices all at the same time, ad-free. It’s also possible to download music so that you can listen to it offline.

Spotify has a library of over 70 million songs available to all users including on their Premium Family Plan.

The great thing about Spotify is that you can listen to it on most devices. This includes Amazon Echo devices, Google Home, Smart TVs, Games Consoles, Mobile Phones and more. This is great if your children have various devices in the home and you don’t want to have to buy new ones to be able to stream your music.

Spotify also have a parental controls feature to allow you a level of control over what your kids can and can’t listen to. Great if you want to filter out explicit music. In fact, they now even have a separate app -Spotify Kids – made just for kids.

Apple Music Family Plan

The next UK music streaming service on our list are Apple Music.

Apple Music’s Family Plan also costs £14.99 and allows up to 6 family members to use the service with separate accounts.

Apple music has a library of 90 million songs available to listen to online or offline. As you would expect, you’ll be able to access your Apple Music service across your Apple Devices. The good thing with Apple Music – as with Spotify – is that you can listen via your Amazon Echo devices. There is no support for Apple Music via Google Home, though, at least not yet.

YouTube Music Family Plan

The YouTube Music Family Plan – as with the others we’ve mentioned so far – comes at a cost of £14.99 per month and allows up to 5 family members (aged 13+) to use the plan.

The most recent figure I could find suggested that YouTube Music has a library of 70 million songs.

We mentioned earlier that it is not possible to play Amazon Music via a Google Home device. The same works in reverse here, in that is is not possible to play YouTube Music through Echo devices. There is a workaround in that you can hook up to an Echo device via bluetooth and play it that way, but it’s not really ideal.

Tidal Family Plan

Tidal is the streaming service owned by US rapper Jay-Z. Tidal comes with a library of over 60 million songs which includes a lot of exclusive content from artists like Beyonce and Kanye West.

The service is slightly different to other streaming services in that it has a two tier subscription model. The cheaper version offers standard quality audio and comes at a cost of £9.99 for an individual plan. The more expensive plan offers Hi-fi quality lossless audio and costs £19.99 per month for an individual plan.

Tidal now has a family plan option which (in the UK) allows you to add up to 6 users to your account at a cost of £14.99 for a standard audio plan or £29.99 for HiFi quality.

It’s good to see that you can now link Alexa devices to Tidal, so you can play Tidal through your Amazon Echo.

The Verdict

It’s clear to see that most of the big music streaming services have matched one another in the cost of their Family Plan options and the amount of users they allow on each plan, each charging £14.99 per month and allowing roughly 6 users. Spotify charge £16.99 for a family plan.

You could work things out in your favour if you only plan on listening via your Echo devices at home, as Amazon offer Amazon Music Unlimited* on a single Echo device for just £3.99 per month.

The post Which Is the Cheapest Family Music Streaming Plan in the UK? appeared first on Money Bulldog

Three years later - what happened in that time?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 08:32:00 GMT

It's now June 2021, and Investimouse finds himself wondering why the blog hasn't been updated for a couple of years. What happened?

April 2018 saw Investimouse divest quite a bit and with the sale of property back home in NZ was able to move out of the humble abode and into a proper dwelling again, with a garden, garage, and nice neighbours. Lovely stuff.

So it was a case of starting again with the iWeb ISA.

I sensibly held onto Apple and Fundsmith. Along with those winners, I chose to keep BCPT (the commercial property REIT - disastrous following COVID), an index-linked GILT fund, and HINT (an international income trust). Three other fixed income instruments survived the cull too, NWBD, LLPC, and SQN (now renamed KKV).

It was revealed last year, that SQN was sitting on a pile of nothing and the assets held were nothing near the valuation the fund managers claimed. Change of manager and name (KKV) and they've decided to run it down to nothing and end the fund - slowly getting some money back from it as they sell assets but a lesson well learned. Never put money into finance companies. They are con artists on the whole and far too prone to mistakes, misadventure, and lying.

That has steadily been added to over the last few years with an Emerging Markets bond ETF, LGITI (the global ex-UK trust), Unilever, Computacenter, and an Asian income fund. It seems like a hotchpotch and I could probably replicate it with a global ETF and a global bond ETF, but once in Apple and Unilever, it seems mad to sell them.

Then in Jan 2020, I found Trading212 and the appeal of an app along with no commission on share buying meant, that last year's ISA was put there. Got to say they've been brilliant so far, speedy buying, access to loads of markets, fractional shares, and pies. Fractional shares are a game-changer, meaning you can get access to expensive shares like Berkshire Hathaway and Amazon without emptying the entire bank to get one share.

So I've also built up a tiny nest egg in T212 with 7 pies:

Artificial Intelligence

Diggers

Dividend

Future

Quality Growth

Trust Me

UK Tech

Just to mention again, Pies in Trading212 allow you to build a group of shares into a mini-fund of your own. You assign each holding a % of the pie and then future funds and dividends will be invested in each holding at that percentage. And with fractional shares, it means you can drop small amounts (say £20) and the money is still able to be invested in your pie. So a Pie with a bunch of tech shares in it can act like SMT without having to pay any OCF (fees).

I'll save going into the detail of each one for later posts, but probably fairly obvious where I'm going with each of them.

The Mythbuster’s Guide to Saving Money on Energy Bills

Miss Thrifty — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 22:20:15 GMT

If you have been here a long time, you might remember when I went on ITV Tonight to dispense a masterclass in saving money on energy bills.

Energy-saving is one of my favourite money topics, because once you get past the boring bullet-point lists, a whole new world of thrifty nerdery opens up.

You know those bullet-point lists. You start spotting them everything at this time of year. They go like this:

How to Save Money on Energy Bills: Beginner Level

Don an extra jumper.
Insulate your loft.
Have a shower, not a bath.
Only boil as much water as you need in your kettle.
Put off turning on your central heating for as long as you can.
Turn the light off when you leave a room.
Unplug all your devices at the wall, because standby mode costs money.

Pah! This is beginner level energy-saving. You can push it much further than that – but how far are you prepared to go?

How to Save Money on Energy Bills: Advanced Level

At this point, in the interests of disclosure, I should point out that my husband has been known to stage interventions, because I can get carried away.

He is happy for me to tack aluminium foil behind the radiators, to reflect heat back into the room instead of into the walls.

My entire family is appreciative of the hearty winter soups and stews I make in my trusty slow cooker, which uses a third of the electricity of the oven.

They don’t even mind when I play the game of ‘How Low Can You Go?’ with the thermostat (probably because they don’t notice; I’m good at that game.)

But my husband drew the line the other year when I wanted to stick bubble wrap on the windows, for extra insulation.

What? You think that’s going too far?

In my defence, it wasn’t all our windows: just a couple of the small, single-glazed ones on the side of the house. We haven’t yet replaced them, since moving into this doer-upper – and up here in the North West, it gets cold and draughty in the winter months.

How to Save Money on Energy Bills: Busting the Myths

What I didn’t know, until npower approached me to collaborate on their latest research project, was that a third of people in the UK “can’t be bothered” to make the effort to lower their bills.

What? What is this madness? I thought everybody did it these days. I accept that tin foil behind the radiator isn’t for everyone, but still… It takes only five minutes to bob onto a comparison site and find the cheapest supplier. It only takes a second to lower the dial on your thermostat by one degree, saving you up to £75 per year. Who wouldn’t do that?

As you can probably tell, the energy company’s research piqued my interest. For example, did you know 43% of the 2,000 people surveyed believe that energy-saving lightbulbs have little to zero impact on bills? Come on, people! The clue is in the name.

That said, it turns out some of the basic energy-saving advice, listed above, may not be up to scratch after all. For example, four in five of us believe showers use less water than baths. However if you have a power shower, as so many people do these days, this might not be true after all. Apparently a power shower can use up to 50 litres more than baths. A water-efficient shower head could save a household up to £195 per year.

Here are nine more energy-saving myths, busted.

The Thermostat. Almost half of bill-payers think it’s cheaper to have the heating on low all the time, but having a room thermostat to adjust the temperature can save you up to £150 per year.
The Smart Meter. More than half of Brits believe Smart meters use electricity and will add to their bill, but you can save up to £21 by accurately monitoring your energy.
The Lightbulbs. Two fifths of us believe energy saving lightbulbs will have little to no impact on our bill despite research revealing savings of up to £35 per year.
The Thermostat Again. One in five Brits believe setting the heating to a slightly warmer temperature won’t make a difference to their bill, yet bill-payers could save up to £75 per year by reducing the temperature by just one degree.
The Kettle. Almost a fifth of us believe boiling more water than necessary doesn’t use more energy, a myth which could be costing you up to £36 a year.
The Computer. 41% of Brits think charging a laptop uses the same amount of energy as a desktop, but you could save up to £17 a year by ditching this clunkier tech.
The Standby Mode. One in five Brits don’t think appliances use electricity when in standby mode, a myth which could be costing you up to £30 a year.
The Shower. A fifth of the nation don’t think a long shower adds a significant amount more to their water bill, but just one minute less in the shower could save you up to £80.
The Washing-Up. One in five of us think a running tap uses less water than a bowl when washing up, but you could save up to £25 on your water bill by investing in a washing up bowl.

Apparently a quarter of us have been given rubbish energy-saving tips or energy-saving advice that doesn’t add up. Are any of the busted-myths above new ones on you?

Something I like is that many of the ideas are quick wins. I do have an old desktop computer kicking around, albeit turned off at the wall. But the only idea I haven’t taken up is the Smart Meter: I read my own meters, and I’m waiting for the next generation of meters (which don’t lose functionality when you switch suppliers) to become more widely available.

As ever, I’m going to see if I can hold out until 1 October before banging the heating on. Who’s with me?

This post was written in collaboration with npower, who have contributed towards this site’s web costs for 2018.

Image credit: Marco Verch; Creative Commons 2.0 licence.

Recession Watch Part 3

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 18:06:00 GMT

Well, well, well. Things have been getting interesting since the last Recession Watch post. In the weeks since then, Carillion have gone bust, big high street retailers are dropping like flies (Maplin, Mothercare, Toys R Us, etc. ), casual dining restaurants are closing their doors in droves (Prezzo, Byron Burgers, Jamies Kitchen, etc.) In fact a report shows that a third of all casual diners are losing money. There is more carnage to come I think.

Carillion's plan to become the defacto government for building and doing stuff backfired on them when they turned out to be more incompetent than an actual bureaucratic government department. Hopefully the little companies that they took over MacAlpine, Tarmac etc. can be recovered and put to good work again. And the various services that should be looked after by govt. can be put back in the right place.

And now the 'Beast from the East' arrived and has decimated the business environment for a whopping 5 days. pffff... no effect whatsoever you'd say, but papers are reporting today as much as several billion pounds - maybe up to 0.2% of GDP. Once you add that to everything else going on, there will be no growth to minus levels in the first quarter of the year in the UK.

Over the weekend news of Trump declaring a trade war. Tit for tat tariffs are now virtually guaranteed and everything will get a little more expensive. Inflation will tick up again and the Fed and the BOE will have little choice than to up interest rates. While that might not have much effect in the US, here in the UK everyone has borrowed too much at tiny rates for too long.

Lastly, on Friday a leading indicator for a recession (quoting myself "so RecCon 4 will probably be the failure of an online stock broker"), stockbrokers taking their clients money nefariously and running away with it. Beaufort Securities may have been little more than a boiler room operation but they were regulated by the FCA and they still managed to run off with everyone's money.

So the Recession Watch is going to move the RecCon meter straight past level 3 and on to level 4. One to go and we're in the mire looking for the paddle.

In the meantime I've gone half to cash after selling up in the second week of Jan and the rest is in world trackers. I'm no perma bear but if Mr Buffett can't find things to buy and is stocking up on Apples then that sounds a pretty sensible plan.

Be careful out there kids.

Rockstar Finance gave me $100 to spread some love at Christmas. This is how I spent it.

Miss Thrifty — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 21:05:19 GMT

This is a post about the Rockstar Finance Community Fund – but first of all, an update. I’ve been quiet of late, I know. I’ve been juggling parenthood, my full-time job and Christmas: fortunately, I still adore all three. But I’ve also been doing a lot of flitting, spending time in hospitals.

My beloved Frugal Grandad died in November. Frugal Grandad made the occasional appearance here on Miss Thrifty, and I miss him every day. There are some great stories I’d like to share with you – not here, but in future posts – such as the time he insured his underpants. (And claimed on them.) Ah, the 1950s: they did things differently there…

My dad has been in hospital for the past five weeks. He insisted something was wrong; the GP insisted there wasn’t. Then my dad collapsed at home and was rushed to hospital, where he was found to be suffering from a particularly nasty bout of pneumonia. The industrial-strength antibiotics didn’t touch the sides and he wasn’t expected to pull through – but he did. Unfortunately he is still bed-bound: when he fell at home, he fractured vertebrae.

The long and the short of it is, I’ve recently been spending a good deal of time at the bedside of a poorly and grumpy man. My bedside patter alternates between brisk pep talks about doing everything the physiotherapists tell him to, and… well, just trying to cheer him up, really. The doctors are keeping him on the respiratory ward, where he has earned the dubious honour of being there longer than any of the other patients. Good old NHS: I dread to think what the cost of this prolonged stay would be in other countries.

If you are reading this post in the UK, then you know what the weather has been like here over the past few weeks: absolutely awful. The hospital, of course, is like a sauna. My dad has been grumbling about wanting to go home and in reply, I’ve been gesturing towards the window. Snow, hail and sleet have been smashing against the glass, a gale has been howling outside and I have been saying to my father: “Look! Look how awful it is out there. It’s horrible: it’s so cold and icy, I’m dreading the walk from the door to the car park. You would be shivering at home; even if you could go out, you would probably be blown off your scooter. And here you are: tucked up in this toasty ward, with nice HCAs and nurses waiting on you, and hot meals brought to your bed. I know it’s not home, but you are in the best place right now.”

Then I have been travelling back to Greater Manchester, tired, looking forward to my own hot dinner and warm bed. And here’s the other thing: in Manchester right now, homelessness is twice the national average and the difference between the haves and have-nots is starker than ever. In the city and the surrounding suburbs and towns, as in many other areas of the UK, it is impossible to ignore the steep and steady rise in the numbers of rough sleepers. It shifts perceptions. It is difficult not to feel blessed and lucky – and at the same time, angry at the decision-makers who led us here. Here the hostels have waiting lists, many families are accommodated in B+Bs and, despite the weather dropping below freezing, people are still huddled in doorways and living on the banks of the canal.

The wish to do a little something – anything – to help is what led me to email the American blogger J. Money. J is the founder of a website called Rockstar Finance, which is popular with a lot of money bloggers. Rockstar Finance curates some of the best personal finance blog posts from around the USA and beyond. It also has a Community Fund. Last month, J. Money announced the site was looking for “20 bloggers who can take $100 each and then turn it into some some joy and happiness for someone in their lives who really needs it.”

So I emailed J to ask if the Rockstar Finance Community Fund could cross the pond this Christmas. He shot back: “YES PLEASE!!! We love being international stars!”

Within hours, the $100 had been wired to my account.

I knew what I wanted to do with it. In Stockport, which is my bit of Greater Manchester, there is a great initiative called The Rucksack Project (Facebook group here). It runs every December. You fill a rucksack with items including warm clothes, toiletries, tins of food and a sleeping bag, and take it to a local homeless resource centre called The Wellspring. The rucksacks are then distributed to homeless people and rough sleepers in Stockport and neighbouring boroughs.

I figured that with $100, I could fill more than one rucksack. However I’d been beaten to it: people round here filled so many rucksacks this year, the project organisers had run out of storage space and were asking would-be donors to hold off until January.

So instead, I topped the $100 up to £100 and donated it to The Wellspring, to help feed people over the Christmas period. The Wellspring is open 365 days a year and the volunteers are amazing. Look at all the Brussels sprouts they had to peel!

For every donation of £5, the volunteers were able to provide someone in need with a full Christmas dinner and a gift. At other times of year, a donation of £100 means The Wellspring can provide a meal service to 150 people once a month. (If you are in a position to help: the JustGiving page is here.)

Many thanks to J. Money and the Rockstar Finance team, for the $100 and the command to go forth and pierce the gloom. Thank you, you lovely people! With everything else that has been going on, it has been good to break out and do a little something positive.

I’m not sure 2018 will be able to match 2017 for the ups and the downs, but it’s already shaping up to be a busy one. Spring my dad from hospital, blog more, live smarter and survive my son’s sixth birthday at the local trampoline centre. I’m ready…

How to make a reverse advent calendar

Miss Thrifty — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 02:24:16 GMT

A reverse advent calendar is easy to make and it’s a great cause. You will need the following items:

– An empty cardboard box.
– An open wallet: if you are in the UK, around £15 should do – although you can create a reverse advent calendar for as little as £5. See below for details.
– An open heart (awww).

A reverse advent calendar is the opposite of a normal advent calendar. With a normal advent calendar, you open a door each day to see a picture, take out a chocolate or get some other prize. With a reverse advent calendar, you begin with an empty box. Every day for 24 days, you add one item a day. After 24 days when the box is full, you donate it to your local food bank.

Why make a reverse advent calendar?

With food bank use having risen sharply over the past few years, it is a sad truth that our food banks are always in need of donated items from members of the public.

In the UK, you can’t just walk into a food bank and walk out with bags of food: you have to be referred by an approved organisation such as a community mental health team, children’s centre or welfare agency. Foodbank users are there because for whatever reason – suspended or delayed benefits being the most common – they don’t have enough money to feed themselves or their families.

This year alone the Trussell Trust, which runs the biggest number of food banks around the UK, has made up nearly 1.2 million food parcels for people in crisis. It’s a similar situation in the USA, where the Feeding America food bank network distributes 4 billion(!) meals annually.

While all this is going on, have you noticed that adult advent calendars are suddenly a thing? Big bulky things, costing between £30 and £100. So far this year I have seen:

Cheese advent calendars
Gin advent calendars
Cosmetics advent calendars
Prosecco advent calendars

I’ve also noticed children’s advent calendars becoming increasingly luxurious and expensive: I know we are on countdown until Thrifty Kid discovers this £30 one exists.

Each to their own. I don’t begrudge the cheese fan their 24 little chunks of cellophane-wrapped cheese at inflated prices. However my own thoughts on the subject could be best summed up as: HEAVENS ALIVE! ARE YOU SERIOUS? Stop rinsing us, retailers! Christmas is expensive enough without making a new, needless ‘tradition’ out of this.

What can I say? I’m a terribly worthy tightwad. As are you, I am guessing: that’s why you are here. But it is for these reasons that, when my blogger pal Sara at Debt Camel told a bunch of UK Money Bloggers what a reverse advent calendar was, I loved the idea immediately. So did the others: we have taken it up as a collective UK Money Bloggers Christmas project this year. (You can find more posts about our reverse advent calendars here.)

So: instead of spending money on tat novelty items for yourself, why not spend a fraction of the amount on making Christmas that little bit nicer for people who are struggling right now?

It’s so quick and easy to make a reverse advent calendar. I’ve seen people on Pinterest going all Tony Hart on the idea, and creating beautifully-crafted boxes, but you really don’t have to do that if you don’t have time. An empty, plain cardboard box works just as well. The donations will be split up and food bank users tend to transport their items in carrier bags. What is in the box is what matters most.

When is the best time to start?

This is an excellent question – and one for which I have a slightly pointed answer. The answer is: not December!

Many food banks only open for a couple of days a week, and Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday this year. If you begin filling your reverse advent calendar on 1 December, with the aim of dropping off your donations after 24 December, the supplies won’t get to people until January is under way.

Then again, December is fine – as long as you are aware that your supplies won’t get to people until the following month. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing: apparently donations to food banks peak in December and drop off in January. Your local food bank volunteers won’t mind; they are simply grateful for any supplies you can provide.

However if you are making a reverse advent calendar to help tide people over the Christmas period, the best time to start is the end of October or early November. That way, you can get your box to your local food bank a few weeks before the Christmas break, which leaves plenty of time for its contents to be sorted and distributed.

What should I put in my reverse advent calendar?

At the Trussell Trust, more than 90% of the food is donated by the general public. It is collected and divided into food parcels, each of which will provide at least three days of healthy, balanced meals for individuals and families.

A typical food parcel will include the following:

Breakfast cereal.
Packet or tinned soup.
Pasta.
Rice.
Pasta sauce.
Baked beans.
Tinned meat.
Tinned vegetables.
Tea or coffee.
Tinned fruit.
Biscuits.

Non-food items, such as toiletries and feminine hygiene products, are also appreciated.

What did you put in your advent calendar?

Day 1: a six-pack of toilet roll (£2).

Day 2: tin of baked beans (25p).

Day 3: a pack of 20 nappies (£1.38) and a pack of baby wipes (56p). Nappies are expensive, but the supermarket value packs come in at around the £1.40-£1.70 mark and are perfectly serviceable. I didn’t buy the value baby wipes, although they cost 10p less, because the chemicals irritated my babies’ bottoms when they were little. Own-brand sensitive wipes it was.

Day 4: tin of Irish stew (60p).

Day 5: another tin of baked beans (32p), supermarket brand this time.

Day 6: tin of sliced carrots (20p).

Day 7: tin of potatoes (35p).

Day 8: spray bottle of kitchen cleaner (£1).

Day 9: bottle of shampoo (40p).

Day 10: bag of rice (65p).

Day 11: bag of penne pasta (40p).

Day 12: tin of chicken curry (60p).

Day 13: tin of tomatoes (25p).

Day 14: tin of spaghetti in tomato sauce (20p).

Day 15: tin of peas (40p).

Day 16: three bars of soap (50p).

Day 17: small bag of sugar (50p).

Day 18: bottle of washing-up liquid (61p). I went for supermarket own-brand: the value stuff just doesn’t last long.

Day 19: jar of lemon curd (35p).

Day 20: tin of custard (30p) and a packet of strawberry jelly cubes (55p).

Day 21: tin of sardines (50p).

Day 22: a packet of sanitary towels (25p), a box of tampons (71p) and a packet of incontinence pads (£1.25).

Day 23: biscuit assortment (£1), containing four packets of different biscuits.

Day 24: bag of banana eclairs (70p). Everybody deserves a sweet treat at Christmas, right?

What items are not suitable for a reverse advent calendar?

The following items should be avoided:

Perishable food.
Food past its use-by or best-before date.
Chocolate advent calendars. (There is a sad reason for this, which I have detailed at the bottom of this post.)

How much does a reverse advent calendar cost?

My reverse advent calendar cost £16.78. As you can see from the list of items, the prices varied. The most expensive item I added was a multipack of toilet roll, which cost £2.

However the cheapest items, tinned carrots and tinned spaghetti, cost just 20p each. If your own budget is tight and you don’t have £17 to spare, but you still want to make a reverse advent calendar for your local food bank, you could do so for less than £5 (20p tins x 24 days = £4.80).

How do I find my nearest food bank?

If you are in the UK, you can find your nearest Trussell Trust food bank by using this postcode tool. The website will have also have contact details, so you can arrange to drop your box off.

Not all food banks are run by the Trussell Trust. Your local supermarket is likely to have a poster on its noticeboard, with details of the closest one.

If you are in the USA, there is a similar tool on the Feeding America website.

Both the Trussell Trust and Feeding America recommend that, if you are planning to donate grocery products, you contact your nearest food bank to find out what they are short of at that time. The Trussell Trust also lists these items on the local food bank pages so, even if you know where your nearest food bank is, it’s worth a look.

I enjoyed putting my reverse advent calendar together: I’m delighted that such a small amount of time, effort and expenditure can make such a difference to somebody’s Christmas.

A final note: avoid adding this item to your reverse advent calendar.

This is gloomy but, if you are planning to make a reverse advent calendar, you should know this.

When my fellow money blogger Faith, from Much More With Less, spoke to a volunteer at her local food bank, she discovered that chocolate advent calendars are not recommended items. Apparently, chocolate advent calendars often arrive too late and create unrealistic hopes and expectations about Christmas Day: “for most children getting food bank parcels, there is no pot of gold at the end of the calendar.”

Recession Watch Pt 2

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 08:58:00 GMT

I'm moving the RecCon meter to level 2. Although I'm not completely sure we're not already at level 3. Let's be cautious though.

From the weekend's papers, we find that investment in the UK motor industry will halve this year. Last week Sainsbury's announced job cuts of 2000 and IWG (formerly Regus), the purveyor of rented offices to the self-employed and small business sector announced a massive profit warning and shares dived 35%.

Today, profit warnings from more UK companies including Pendragon, the car retailer.

With inflation at 3% and chugging north, Carney sitting on his misbegotten hands, and Brexit talks circling the drain there's no good news on the horizon. Where's the extra money going to be found for people to spend? Pay packets on the decline (not even remotely keeping pace with inflation) according to the latest stats from the ONS.

We are at the beginning of a maelstrom of disaster by the looks of things. Brexit caused or not, it increasingly looks more difficult to make as much money as last year. Which means less to spend in the real world.

What can you do with an old pound coin? Here are 5 great ideas.

Miss Thrifty — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 01:50:51 GMT

The old one pound coin went out of circulation on 15 October 2017. This has all happened rather suddenly, hasn’t it? It feels like the shiny new one pound coins only came out the other week. However if you have found an old one pound coin lurking in your money box or down the back of the sofa, STOP RIGHT THERE, BUSTER. There are still a number of ways in which you can spend an old one pound coin – and they are all listed below.

Before you continue: do note that at the time of writing, certain shops and supermarkets will still accept your old one pound coin. I haven’t included this list in the bigger list below, because the amnesty for the old one pound coin is of an extremely limited duration. However here is what you need to know:

Tesco – accepting the old one pound coin until 23 October 2017.

Aldi – accepting the old one pound coin until 30 October 2017.

Iceland – accepting the old one pound coin until 31 October 2017.

Poundland – accepting the old one pound coin until 31 October 2017.

Small shops – it’s worth asking!

Here are five other ways to spend your old pound coins:

1. You can use your old pound coin in supermarket trolleys.

Certain supermarkets have not upgraded their trolleys, so the round pound coins will still work. Earlier this month, Sainsburys and Tesco both admitted they hadn’t yet modified their trolleys to take the new pound coins, blaming ‘internal logistical problems.’

2. You can donate your old pound coin to the Poppy Appeal.

The Royal British Legion is accepting old one pound coins as donations to its 2017 Poppy Appeal, which runs until 12 November 2017.

Claire Rowcliffe, director of fundraising for the Royal British Legion, has said: “We’d be delighted to turn your out-of-date pounds into poppies, commemorating the fallen while enabling us to offer vital assistance to all members of the Armed Forces community, young and old.”

3. You can donate your old pound coin to Pudsey’s Round Pound Countdown.

Another charity that would be grateful for your old one pound coins in 2017 is Children in Need. It’s called Pudsey’s Round Pound Countdown.

You can no longer spend your old pounds, but we can still collect them and put them to work changing young lives here in the UK.

Millions of round pound coins are still in circulation. We’re challenging the nation to hunt for them in saving jars, piggy banks, coat pockets and down the back of sofas, then put them to good use by donating to BBC Children in Need!

We’re aiming to collect as many as we can before our big Appeal Day on 17th November.

More details here.

4. You can add your old pound coin to your bank, building society or Post Office savings.

It turns out that a lot of high street banks will still accept old one pound coins as deposits into bank accounts. The amount of time for which you’ll be able to do this, however, varies from bank to bank.

According to the Royal Mint, the following banks are still accepting old one pound coins:

RBS
NatWest
Ulster
HSBC
Barclays
Lloyds
Santander
Nationwide
Clydesdale
Yorkshire Bank
Halifax
Bank of Scotland

If you are self-employed: it is worth noting that this policy applies to business accounts as well as personal accounts, but you have to separate the old pound coins from the new ones when you are making a cash deposit.

Also – and unsurprisingly – this offer tends to be open to current customers only. If you are not a customer and you walk through the door waving a bag of old one pound coins and asking to change them up, you will likely be told to get lost.

Lloyds Banking Group, which includes Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax, has said that in addition to accepting old one pound coins as deposits, it will also change old one pound coins for new one pound coins. Again, this offer is available to their current customers only. No deadline for the expiry of this offer has yet been set.

The list above may not be exhaustive, so if your financial institution of choice isn’t featured, it is worth checking with your bank or building society to see what the deal is. I’d also like to point out that at a lot of the banks listed there, you can open a savings account with as little as £1. So what are you waiting for?

5. You can check to see if your old pound coin is worth any (well, more) money.

If you are the owner of a rare one pound coin, you can flog it on eBay, sell it on another specialist site or sell it to a dealer – and make a tidy profit.

There is a terrific website called Change Checker, which focuses on the UK coin inventory and collectors’ market. The first thing you should do is take a look at the year engraved on your old one pound coin, and cross-reference it with this diagram:

As you can see, the rarest one pound coin we have is the 2011 Edinburgh design. This was part of the series depicting the UK’s capital cities. The 2011 Edinburgh one pound is the only one coin with a mintage of less than a million. Change Checker compares it to the 1983 Royal Arms shield one pound coin: more than 443 million of those were minted. At the time of writing, 2011 Edinburgh pounds in excellent condition are selling on eBay for up to £95 each.

The next rarest one pound coins are the 2011 Cardiff pound coin and the 2010 London pound coin (selling on eBay for up to £68).

Coin Checker notes:

Another coin to look out for is The Royal Arms £1. Although this is a common design which is regularly ignored, make sure to look out for one with a 2008 date – that’s actually the fourth rarest £1 coin.

At the time of writing, 2008 Royal Arms pound coins in excellent condition are selling on eBay for up to £57 each.

If you have one of these coins and it isn’t in mint or excellent condition, it could still sell on eBay for around £5 – which, let’s face it, is still a handsome profit after eBay fees are paid.

The next rarest one pound coins are the 2014 Thistle, 2013 Daffodil, 2013 Rose and 2014 Flax. The selling values for these seem to range from £1.50 to £15, with much depending on the condition of the coin.

Finally…

If you have read all the way to the bottom and you haven’t found an old pound coin yet, your time is likely to come. Earlier this year, the government estimated there were more than 433 million old pound coins in circulation. Chances are that squirrelled away somewhere, you have one, or two, or three, or four…

I’d gently suggest that if you have found an old one pound coin, the best time to spend it, save it, donate it or cash it in is now. While deadlines have yet to be set for trolleys and bank amnesties, they aren’t going to be around forever. We don’t yet know if charities will be asking for old one pound coins in years to come. Coin values change over time – but they can go down as well as up. I don’t usually say this, but… spend spend spend!

Image credits: William Warby & TaxRebate.org.uk (CC by 2.0.); Change Checker/288 Group Ltd.

Decorating a 1950s bedroom on a budget

Miss Thrifty — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 01:00:51 GMT

Our guest bedroom didn’t always look like this. When we moved into this house, it became clear that decorating ideas needed to come thick and fast. The guest bedroom walls had chunks out of them and were painted lilac. The thin blue carpet was threadbare in places, and stained with drips and drops of lilac paint. The faded floral curtains were mounted on a wonky, plastic curtain-pole. I bought a double bed, but was startled to discover the prices of brand new headboards and resolved to find one in a charity shop (I never found one). The only other furniture was an wobbly IKEA wardrobe left by the previous owner. This was our guest bedroom – and it was so utterly unwelcoming, I found myself apologising whenever guests came to stay.

Our house is a 1960s semi, with square rooms and long, high windows. Right now these 1960s houses are often regarded as a tired style, but I’m a vintage girl at heart. When it comes to style and design, I’ll take mid-century modern over current fashions any day. When decorating the guest bedroom, I knew I wanted to go for a mid-century theme. Also, while I was on a tight budget – as in, statutory-maternity-leave tight – I wanted to make the room as comfortable and welcoming as possible. Basically, I wanted it to be all-round lovely. So although I scrimped on budget, I wasn’t prepared to scrimp on quality.

Welcome to the guest bedroom as it looks now. Let’s take a look inside…

So that’s limited edition Graham & Brown wallpaper, a stupidly-posh Schreiber bedhead (RRP £449) and a set of G-Plan bedroom furniture. See, I said I wouldn’t scrimp on quality! The cost for that lot? A little over £600, including the wallpaper paste.

Now I don’t want to show off too much here. I did make two purchases for this bedroom that, while heavily discounted, were still jeffing expensive. (That Schreiber bedhead was one; the carpet was another). I’ll come to those at the end.

Plaster & Paint

I was lucky to have people to help – and VERY lucky to have people in the family with plastering knowhow. When I was in the later stages of pregnancy and it was uncomfortable to move, let alone decorate (my son was born weighing 10lb, which explained a lot…) , my mum and stepdad came to visit from Essex, 250 miles away. They emptied out the guest bedroom and plastered it.

Then, when the plaster dried and my parents-in-law came to stay and meet the new baby, they did the washcoat (half white paint, half water) on the walls and ceiling. Heroes, all of them.

My husband painted the walls. Then my mum and stepdad came back and painted the skirting-boards and radiator a gleaming white. Honestly, I am spoiled.

In the guest bedroom, we papered two walls and painted the other two a pale, soft grey. I know grey paint is all the rage at the moment, but I’m not sold: a lot of the time, the grey-painted rooms look dingy to me. It took a while to find a shade that was soft and light, and which helped open up this modest-sized room.

My chosen shade: Grey Lace from the Crown Paints Period Collection. You can get it at Homebase for £15.99 for 750ml, but that’s dear. Paint Direct does a better deal on this paint: £22.99 for a 2.5 litre pot, plus £3.49 delivery.

Bedroom Accessories

I didn’t feel the need to buy many accessories for the room: it isn’t a big guest bedroom, and that wallpaper is busy. I looked high and low for a candlewick bedspread, eventually finding one in the House of Bath catalogue. I suppose that made sense: House of Bath caters to an elderly demographic, and the market for old-fashioned bedcovers is narrow these days. I love this peach candlewick bedspread: it’s garish but distinctive. It’s also good quality and hardwearing: my toddler, with his chocolatey paws, has seen it into the washing machine and tumble dryer on a number of occasions now. This bedspread retails at £69.95 on the House of Bath website, but I picked it up for £34.95 when a half-price sale was on. If you register on the House of Bath website, you will get an email when the next sale launches: you will also get a 10% off code on your birthday, and (at the time of writing) 20% off your first order.

The pink glassware came from a charity shop in Frinton on-sea: £5 for the set. I didn’t notice at the time, but one of the glass candlesticks has lost its top: if you look carefully, you can see that it has been carefully filed and buffed to a smooth finish. I have kept it: clearly, somebody treasured their pink glass.

Vintage Wallpaper

A few years ago, when it was the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and there was a Royal Wedding and British memorabilia was everywhere, I won a roll of beautiful wallpaper in an online competition. It was limited edition Graham & Brown wallpaper called Jubilee Design, and it was awesome. The wallpaper was illustrated with pictures of 1950s ladies in New Look dresses, with Big Ben and Tower Bridge in the background.

I had a problem: a single roll of wallpaper doesn’t stretch far. Not unless your wall is very, very small. But I loved it and I wanted to find a use for it, so I hoarded it.

When we moved into this house and wanted to decorate the guest bedroom, I knew the wallpaper would be perfect… and I wondered, given the time that had passed, if I could find old rolls being sold cheaply.

I lucked out on the first go: when I checked the Graham & Brown website, the wallpaper was still there – on clearance. It had been reduced to £10 a roll. I bought two rolls for £20, with an extra £4 shipping. So I ended up with three rolls of tip-top designer wallpaper for £24. What can I say? Sometimes, unreasonable hoarding pays off!

The Jubilee Design wallpaper is no longer available on Graham & Brown’s UK website, although it is still sold on the US website for $35 a roll. I found an amazing wallpaper on WallpaperDirect, with illustrations of ladies in vintage fashions, but it is £165 a roll (glurk).

G-Plan Furniture

How I love mid-century G-Plan furniture. The trouble is, it has soared in popularity and now everybody loves it. Even my local charity shop, when they have old G-Plan furniture donated, ship it straight off to waiting customers in China. The vintage emporium near me used to have a entire floor dedicated to furniture, with lots of G-Plan – but it was all so expensive. The going rate for a wardrobe was £175-£225 – and I wanted a matching set of furniture for the bedroom.

I needed a Plan C. I found it on Shpock, the app billed as a virtual car boot sale. It’s a little like Gumtree, with people in your area offering their preloved items for sale – but with plenty of pictures.

On Shpock, I found a set of E. Gomme bedroom furniture – wardrobe, chest of drawers and dressing table – going for just £80.

I negotiated the price down to £70 (something else you can do on Shpock) and we went and fetched it. This furniture was 50 years old and and had clearly been loved and used for a lot of that time. The finish was worn away in places, and the set was in need of some TLC. But it was solid, sturdy, fully functional – and a great find. The original receipts were dated 1955 and 1957, from furniture stores in Bradford: biro handwriting on yellowed, crumbling paper.

Here is the stamp of authenticity, on the inside of one of the wardrobe doors:

This is an early G-Plan stamp: the ‘EG’ is for the traditional British furniture manufacture E. Gomme, which began producing the first G-Plan furniture in the 1950s. This bedroom suite is from the ‘Brandon’ range, which was extremely popular. Something else I like about this furniture set is that because it is so sturdy and ubiquitous, there are lots of G-Plan Brandon items still around. If we want to buy matching items at any point in the future, they shouldn’t be too difficult to find. I’ll have to look hard to find bargains as good as these though.

My husband renovated the wardrobe and the chest of drawers as a wedding anniversary present (it helps to have a woodworker in the family). He took off all the handles, sanded everything down and refinished it all. He did an amazing job: I love it.

The wood is oak and I like the small details of the design: the edging and the way the grain on the side strip above is at right-angles to the grain of the wooden doors, for example.

There isn’t enough room in our guest bedroom for the dressing table. It’s prettier than the drawers but to be honest, we needed the storage. Right now the dressing table is still out in our garage. My original plan, at the time of purchase, was that we could renovate it and sell it on for more than we paid for the three-piece set. Free G-Plan: wouldn’t that be great?

However I underestimated just how much I would like this furniture. I’m even thinking that when we renovate our own bedroom (which is pink and flowery and AWFUL right now – but that’s for another post), we could move the G-Plan furniture in there, dressing table and all, and find a couple of bedside tables in the Brandon style. Hmm, we shall see. Don’t be too surprised if you see this big ole’ wardrobe and these drawers popping up on another post here in the future…

Sadly the lock to the wardrobe door is missing. I wish we had it: Thrifty Kid likes to hide in this wardrobe. It’s so spacious, he likes to pretend he’s in Narnia. When he comes out it’s like a bomb has gone off in there.

If you like G-Plan furniture in the Brandon style, keep an eye out in charity shops because it does pop up there. Another good place to look is this little corner of eBay: because lots of Brandon G-Plan was made, I guarantee you that you will find the wardrobe, drawers, dressing table and more there.

Carpet and Curtains

The carpet is a Milan Saxony Plain Carpet in Anthracite, from Carpetright. It’s hardwearing, but feels thick and plush underfoot. It also comes with a lifetime stain warranty, which is handy when you have two small children.

This was one of my big spends, but even so, I think it has provided good value for money. At the time of writing, you can kit out a room the size of our guest bedroom with this carpet for less than £300. That price includes the door bar, grippers and underlay.

The curtains are Chenille Grey Lined Pencil Pleat curtains from Dunelm, which sell for £45. I still need to take them up – like a lot of 1960s houses, ours has short windows – but I’m very pleased with them. They are readymade, ready-lined – and the lining is so thick, these velvety curtains are like blackout blinds.

The Headboard

I’ve left my splurge until last: well-made headboards are crazy expensive! This Schreiber Portisham double headboard was £270 from Homebase. That was the sale price, when Homebase was clearing all its Schreiber stock last year: the full price was £449. It is solid, very neat and fits into the room perfectly but I am not going to pretend that, even as a clearance buy, this was a thrifty purchase. The Schreiber brand rights belong to Sainsburys and, if you like this style of furniture, you can still find some Schreiber items on the Argos website, which is also Sainsburys-owned.

If you are feeling confident – well, more confident than I was – you can make your own tufted headboard. There are lots of tutorials on Pinterest.

This guest bedroom was put together, piece by piece, over the course of about a year. The walls came first and everything else followed. The room still isn’t complete: I’m looking for a picture to hang on the big blank grey wall facing the bed, plus a new light fixture. But I like it, decorating like this. You can save up and buy the right things, at the right prices, when they happen to come along. It’s the DIY version of Slow Food.

Featured products: where to find them

Paint: Grey Lace from the Crown Paints Period Collection, from PaintDirect, £22.99 for a 2.5 litre pot.

Bedspread: peach candlewick bedspread from House of Bath, £69 (but wait for the next sale).

G-Plan Brandon furniture: here are the latest listings on eBay.

Carpet: Milan Saxony Plain Carpet in Anthracite, from Carpetright, £284.

Curtains: Chenille Grey Lined Pencil Pleat curtains from Dunelm, £45.

Screiber furniture: Argos.

Recession Watch pt 1

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 09:35:00 GMT

As the bull market rumbles on into its 8th year, Investimouse has his ear to the ground looking out for signs of an impending recession in the UK.

Monarch Airlines Collapse

We just moved to RecCon 1

I see RecCon 5 being another run on the banks. But who has any money left in the banks? so RecCon 4 will probably be the failure of an online stock broker followed by the collapse of the property market to take us to RecCon5.

Some way off hopefully.

Finally someone else talks some sense about devaluation

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Wed, 30 Aug 2017 14:22:00 GMT

It's not just me that can't see why the constant devaluing of the pound is a good thing. I wrote way, way back in 2012 about how poor I was getting due to the madness being caused by devaluation back then and it's only gotten worse due to Brexit and that fucking idiot Mark Carney (head of the Bank of England) dropping interest rates even further in 2016.

I really only care about the GBP to NZD rate which has been on a tear down ever since 2007. Take a look at this graph. It's halved in 10 years. That basically makes the UK and everyone in it half as wealthy as it once was.

Now a few people are starting to wake up to the fact that constantly devaluing the pound is only doing harm. Plus, if it was actually useful then its benefits would have been felt by now and the UK would be the most prosperous paradise in the universe.

Stephen King wrote in the FT over the weekend about it - no link to the original article as The Times has a paywall, but there's a discussion on it here along with the text from the article.

Zero to house-buying hero: how to save a mortgage deposit

Miss Thrifty — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 23:56:10 GMT

This time 10 years ago, we were buying a house: our first home, in North Yorkshire. The floors were bare boards, the walls were covered in yellow vinyl wallpaper, and the gas and electricity were on pre-pay meters (on a frozen January night when all the newsagents were closed, I discovered this the hard way). The garden, used by the previous occupants as a landfill site, was devoid of lawn and covered in knee-high brambles.

We had saved a 10% mortgage deposit and bought our red-brick terrace at the top of the market, just before the credit crunch came whomping on house prices and equity. When we sold up two years ago to move to Greater Manchester, the house prices in the local area had just drifted their way back up to pre-crunch levels so despite all the home improvements, we made little on the sale.

Were these trials and tribulations? Pah! Not at all. They meant nothing: instead, I was (and am) grateful, relieved and rather amazed that we’d managed to claw our way onto the housing ladder in the first place.

As it turns out, our house-buying timing was beaut: a week after we moved in, banks began tightening lending requirements and pulling fixed-rate repayment deals left, right and centre. While we made little when we sold up, we had built up a good chunk of equity via mortgage payments and when possible, overpayments.

It was difficult enough to be buying a house back then; it’s even tougher now. The economy is looking dodge, mortgage lenders want would-be customers to walk through fire – and on top of it all, increases in the cost of living make the prospect of saving a mortgage deposit seem more daunting than ever.

Something I have learned, however, is that while the prospect of saving for a mortgage deposit can be daunting, the truth is that unless you are set on buying in London or somewhere else with crazy prices, it can be done. Drastic lifestyle changes, budget makeovers and the sourcing of extra streams of income may be required, but it can be done. In my case, we moved up north, where you could – and still do – get a lot more bang for your buck. I lived extremely frugally, to pack away as much of my salary as possible. I did a lot of eBay selling, reselling and more besides. We got there.

Gleeson Homes, a housebuilder with a strong base here in the North of England, approached me to make some short videos about my tips and ideas for saving for a deposit. It was an interesting company with which to collaborate: Gleeson specialises in low-cost homes for first-time buyers on modest incomes. In a Guardian profile, which you can read here, the chief executive describes the typical customers as “a Sheffield bus driver and his shopworker wife on a combined income of £34,000 a year.” (See what I mean about bang for your buck? Move north. Come join us!)

If you are currently saving for a mortgage deposit, or know somebody who is, you can find all six videos playlisted on my YouTube channel. I have copied partial transcriptions below. There are a number of tips here and, although they won’t all be suitable for everyone, there are plenty of tips to go around.

1. It’s all about mindset.

When you begin to save for your first house, you will be told that you need to save vast sums of money, that it’s going to take you forever, that you’re going to need to overhaul your lifestyle… Actually, that’s not always true. Thanks to homebuilder schemes and government assistance schemes, such as Help to Buy, the sums you need to save and the amount of time you need to save for can be less than you would expect. For example, it could take just 6 to 12 months to save the amount you need for that first deposit.

Attitude is all important. You need to fix that budget. Work out how much you intend to bring home every month on top of your regular pay packet. I’m of the opinion that if you are in full-time work, you should be able to bring home an extra £200 to £500 per month.

2. Cut those household expenses

If you are looking to slash your monthly outgoings, the quickest and easiest way to do this is to take a good look at your monthly household expenses: what you are spending on utility bills and what you are spending at the supermarket every month.

Every three months, have a look at the direct debits and standing orders that are coming out. Never let them auto-renew. When a contract nears its end, shop around, get a cheaper deal. I bet you will find something that is less money and more value.

Secondly, supermarket shopping. I’m a very careful shopper: I shop right at the end of the week on a Sunday, an hour before closing. That’s when you get the best whoopsies: those yellow stickers with the steep discounts. The discounts get steeper and steeper as the day comes to a close.

I shop from the bottom shelf where items are cheaper. When shopping for fresh produce, I look at the back of the shelf where the best-before dates tend to be far lengthier.

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, I would recommend that you invest in a slow-cooker. It’s a secret weapon if you are looking to save money on your household expenses. Firstly, it uses less electricity than the regular cooker. Secondly, you will get back home from work every day to a delicious cooked dinner ready and waiting for you. So, none of those expensive last minute dashes to the supermarket on your way back from work, or worse, takeaways.

3. Get over your FOMO

One of the easiest ways to haemorrhage cash is on lots of nights out with your friends. So you need to get over your FOMO (‘Fear of Missing Out’). What you will find, perhaps to your surprise, is that a lot of the time you aren’t really missing out on much at all! Instead, make a night out into a special occasion.

Secondly, gyms. Lots of us love going to the gym. But if you don’t feel that you are getting good value for money from your gym membership, consider one of the free alternatives instead: running, running apps, such as Couch to 5K, or my personal favorite, the Green Gym. This is where keep fit meets conservation projects around the UK: planting trees, sowing meadows and more. Apparently the Green Gym can burn up to a third more calories than an aerobics class.

Finally, holidays. We all love hot, sunny overseas holidays but, if the pound continues to flounder, there are cheaper options. Stay within the UK. This doesn’t have to mean camping or caravanning, if these aren’t your things. You can have a quirky adventure, such as barn hopping in the Lake District. For £10 a night, stay in a farmer’s barn: it’s an interesting way to tour that region. Or draw upon homestay networks, such as Airbnb. There’s an option out there for everyone.

4. Sell that clutter

If you are looking to make extra income on the side, purge your personal belongings and sell off your unwanted junk. However it’s a mistake to think that this process begins and ends with eBay. As wonderful as eBay is, I have found other great sites and apps out there, where I get good prices.

For books, CDs and DVDs, I use sites like Ziffit, webuybooks, and musicMagpie. Fashion? The app Depop is great for selling fashion items. If you have lots of supermarket and high street clothes, try selling them in job lots on local Facebook selling pages.

Don’t forget good old car boot sales. If it’s not car booting season, check out an app called Shpock, which stands for Shop in my Pocket. It’s a virtual car boot sale. You can advertise your belongings on there for free. And if you’re in the market for a bargain, it’s also a good place to go hunting.

5. Find your side hustle

Side hustle: making some extra cash on the side. A side hustle will help you reach your house saving deposit target faster. Side hustle is an American term. It means additional stream of income. So if you have several side hustles, you have several streams of income. So far so good, but do you know how to find a side hustle? How do you know which side hustle is right for you?

It’s simple. You need to draw upon your available time, your skills and your expertise. For example, there are sites out there like upwork.com where people are seeking to purchase time, skills, expertise on a project basis or by the hour. Virtual PA, for example, bookkeeping, graphic design.

Another example of a side hustle is blogging. Blogging is my side hustle. That’s how I make my extra cash on the side, and it’s a great way to do it. If you need get started, but there are lots of free guides out there.

Finally, if you have found that by purging your belongings by selling your things online, that you have a knack for this and you have a knack for getting really good prices, why not make that your side hustle? You can pick up items at car boot sales and jumble sales for a fraction of the price for which you then sell them. There’s a side hustle out there for everybody.

6. Maximise those savings

Finally, if you are looking to to maximize your savings towards that deposit for your first home, there are some really good assistance schemes out there to help you get there faster. For example, the Help to Buy: Equity Loan. This is when you are buying a new-build home from a Help to Buy registered home builder and you have 5% of your deposit saved. The Government will contribute an additional 20%.

Another one is the Help to Buy: ISA. This is when you save the money for your deposit within a specific type of ISA account and the Government will top it up by 25%. As you can imagine, however, these schemes do come with lots of terms and conditions attached, so do check them out thoroughly online to ensure that you are eligible.

If you are saving to buy your first home: good luck. Keep saving, keep boosting those savings – and keep going. You will do it.

The videos in this post were produced in collaboration with Gleeson Homes.

I’ll tell you how to clean up at the January Sales

Miss Thrifty — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:56:39 GMT

If there is one thing I love, it is flinging myself head-first into a sale and emerging with an AMAZING bargain. Every year, it’s a challenge. So far this year, I have picked up a kitchen clock from Habitat (reduced by 70%) and some smart work tops from Hobbs, reduced from £££ to less than £20 each.

Over the years, I have honed a sales shopping strategy that works well for me. BBC Watchdog recently approached me to share some of my sales-shopping secrets with their views on Watchdog on Three (the online version of the programme, which broadcasts while the BBC1 version is off-air). It was good fun: a small camera crew came to Manchester city centre when I was at work, and we spent my lunch hour filming shoppers’ reactions to my tips and pointers:

You can view the three-minute clip here on the BBC3 website.

In the frame above, that’s me on the left: making a case for haggling with sales assistants in high street stores. Are you bolshy enough to give it a go? More details below, along with four more of my favourite tips and ploys for cleaning up at the January sales.

1. Budget BEFORE you splash the cash – not after.

It’s January. Everything is rubbish, including your bank balance. For the sweet love of Jesus, don’t go out shopping in the sales before you have been through your finances and worked out what you have to spend. I’m not asking you to draw up spreadsheets; all you need is one number.

Once you have that number, be hardcore. Don’t go over that number. If you find some amazingly unmissable bargains and want to bung them on your credit card, fine – but only if you know for sure that you can pay that balance in full as soon as your next pay cheque arrives.

If you know what you are looking for in the sales and you can draw up a sales shopping list, great. If you don’t, that’s fine but set a solid objective instead. For example: this year my clothes #salesgoals are smart tops for work, in black or navy.

2. Your smartphone is your wingman.

I first wrote about this trick in the post, How to get money off at Currys at PC World EVERY TIME. In short: I never venture out to the sales without my trusty smartphone to help me secure the best deals.

All you need is a good connection, the website of the store in which you are shopping, and a little chutzpah.

These days, most high street retailers have shopping websites with online exclusives, discount codes and all the same products they have in-store. So when you find the item you want in the store, look it up online. Is it more expensive to buy the item in-store rather than online? For example, is there an online exclusive or an applicable voucher code?

When the online version is cheaper, I show my phone to the sales assistant and ask them to match the price – they often do. If they don’t: well, in certain stores such as PC World, I have been known to stay online and arrange to Reserve The Item For Collection, at the store I am standing in…

On other occasions, I have found cheaper prices online simply because the price tags in the store aren’t up to date. A lot of the time, the freshly-discounted price will ring up at the till anyway – but it goes to show that a quick check online can show you which items have the best discounts and bargains. It’s handy for me because I tend to swoop in and buy when the sale prices hit rock bottom.

3. Haggle!

If you are new to haggling, you can find my quick and easy beginner’s guide here: Become an expert haggler. In short, two qualities – FRONT and PERSISTENCE – will get you everywhere. The second quality is deliciously British; the first doesn’t tend to come so naturally. Here are some of my tried and tested opening lines:

If I buy [NUMBER OF] items, what discount can you do?
I shop here regularly and saw this was on sale last week, but wasn’t able to make it here in time. Would you do a ‘latebird’ offer?
Ouch! Is that the best price you can do? I’m sure I saw this cheaper in [COMPETITOR STORE].
I’m rather taken with [PRODUCT], but my budget is only £X. Could you do it for £Y? That would really make my day.

It’s always worth asking: the worst sales assistants can say is no, and the end of sale season can afford them some additional room for manoeuvre.

4. Look out for old Christmas stock.

For rock-bottom prices, head to discount stores to pick up items for pennies. Right now you can find the end of the Christmas sale in Poundland, with items ranging from 5p-25p. In my experience, you’ll find the next steepest markdowns in large supermarkets: cards, gift wrap, ribbons and tags, cut down to bog all and gathering dust in the corners of discount aisles and shelves.

Stock up now for next Christmas: it may seem like an age away, but you know it will be here before we can blink twice…

5. Know your consumer rights.

We have all seen the signs in shops, spelling it out: if you want a refund on an item purchased in the sale, you are out of luck. But is this really the case?

I’d like to direct to the guidance published by the Government and last updated in September 2016. These extracts are taken directly from a GOV.UK webpage titled Accepting returns and giving refunds: the law. It is written for retailers and business-owners, and is admirably easy to follow. Here we go:

Customers have exactly the same rights to refunds when they buy items in a sale as when they buy them at full price.

Capiche? It couldn’t be any more clear, could it? So shop with confidence – and if any retailer tries to tell you otherwise, or fob you off with a credit note, click the link above and wave your smartphone in their direction (another good reason why your smartphone is your sales wingman). The webpage has a picture of the Crown on top and is stamped GOV.UK; you can’t get much more authoritative than that.

That said, it is important to note that there are certain circumstances when a retailer isn’t obliged to offer a refund. These are as follows:

You don’t have to refund a customer if they:

knew an item was faulty when they bought it
damaged an item by trying to repair it themselves or getting someone else to do it (though they may still have the right to a repair, replacement or partial refund)
no longer want an item (eg because it’s the wrong size or colour) unless they bought it without seeing it
You have to offer a refund for certain items only if they’re faulty, such as:

personalised items and custom-made items, eg curtains
perishable items, eg frozen food or flowers
newspapers and magazines
unwrapped CDs, DVDs and computer software

As for goods purchased in a sale online:

Online, mail and telephone order customers have the right to cancel their order for a limited time even if the goods aren’t faulty. Sales of this kind are known as ‘distance selling’.

You must offer a refund to customers if they’ve told you within 14 days of receiving their goods that they want to cancel. They have another 14 days to return the goods once they’ve told you.

You must refund the customer within 14 days of receiving the goods back. They don’t have to provide a reason.

Right now is my favourite time for sale-shopping: it’s the final week of January, when the markdowns go berserk before the sales end. So if you are currently bargain-hunting, I hope these pointers help you to get even more money off. If you have tips and ideas of your own, I’d love to hear about them and share them: please comment below or chew my ear on Twitter.

And if you have a friend or loved one who likes to shop in the sales, or who is hunting for money off something big right now, please do share this post with them. At the risk of sounding like a certain supermarket: every little helps, right?

Let’s all save some money!

Image credit: IMLSDCC (CC BY 2.0).

Is it the End of Times or the Start of the Greatest Boom Ever?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Fri, 30 Dec 2016 16:00:00 GMT

2016 rolls to a close with the FTSE100 closing on all time high of 7142. So have we hit peak times in the UK or is this the start of something truly great?

When I started investing (or at least started keeping proper records of my investing) in 2007, the FTSE was at 6607. So in the 9 years since, it has crept up just 8%. Hardly an indicator of a booming economy. Of course, we've had the Great Financial Crisis in that time and several other mind-blowing black swans like Brexit, Euro Crises, wars, and terrorism.

Every bit of finance reading I do tells me that it is foolish to try and time markets or even worse do your own stock picking, yet if you had bought a FTSE tracker you'd be just 8% better off over those 9 years. That is truly awful performance for your money. No wonder cash still holds its appeal even with its derisory interest rates.

This year the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness finished up 24.7% - the best year for quite some time.

This result was all due to timing the market - going big with two chunks of money - once in January when markets were nervous about Fed tightening and immediately following Brexit. The rebounds after each drop have been huge and represented excellent opportunities. In January buying anything in the US market was the thing to do while in July buying anything in the UK was the correct option.

I got 'lucky' both times I guess. And so for this year, I can't help but feel we have hit the top and will probably bob around this level for a while. America seems massively over-valued and Trumptimism could be sadly mis-placed - how quickly can he genuinely make changes? And does anyone actually believe he knows what he's doing?

In the UK, there is no catalyst for a boom to come - everyone here is stretched massively by housing costs while business is equally poorly treated by appalling business rates and high rents. Meanwhile savers continue to be pillaged by Mark Carney's ridiculous behaviour at the Bank of England. How does he sleep at night while the pound is ravaged, companies and intellectual property are sold off to the world. Someone really does need to point out to him that currency / exchange rates are only useful to business when someone actually wants to buy your product / service. If you make something no-one wants, it doesn't matter how cheap it is in exchange terms.

This year's massive devaluation was the third one I've experienced here and every time, it provides only VERY short term boosts. Meanwhile it destroys savings, imports inflation, and reduces internal investment. Who knows how Brexit will turn out this year. Maybe that will be the catalyst for a boom? It's a fingers crossed time though and hugely reliant on people in the civil service and government actually caring and doing their best rather than feathering their nest. Maybe we'll see an actual real redistribution of income because of it but I doubt it.

My guesses for 2017:
Cocoa - it was destroyed in 2016 - bound to make a comeback eventually.
Gold - again decimated - got to be an option if inflation makes a re-appearance.
Any decent internet based world focussed company. eg. Boohoo, Superdry, Microsoft.
ITV to be taken over.
Samsung to fire a bunch of people and return from the ashes.

Is the Lidl Hot Air Fryer Worth £59.99?

Miss Thrifty — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 04:06:05 GMT

A Silvercrest Digital Hot Air Fryer, available from Lidl, landed on my doorstep the other week. It costs £59.99, is available for a very limited time and looks like this:

Now, I get lots of emails from PRs asking if I’ll review their clients’ products on the Miss Thrifty Blog. I almost always say no, because the products are too expensive, or they aren’t my thing (although you can’t blame the PR for female incontinence pads for trying). Also, I dislike clutter: if I don’t need an item or it doesn’t spark joy, I have no place for it.

Nevertheless, my kitchen seems to be permanently under siege from the latest “must-have” electronics and devices. I don’t want any of them. For goodness’ sake: I don’t even own a toaster or a microwave! I wouldn’t use them: I prefer the grill and the oven. The only gadgets I keep on the worktop are my beloved 1970s slow cooker and my Panasonic bread-maker, both of which get heavy use.

This time, however, I have made an exception. When a lovely PR lady called Sofie contacted me about the Lidl Hot Air Fryer, I was interested on a few counts. Firstly, the Lidl Hot Air Fryer is considerably cheaper than a lot of the other hot air fryers out there.

Secondly, I’d never used one or eaten food made in one, so I wanted to check it out. Until this arrived, my most hi-tech gadget was my bread-maker, which doesn’t exactly push the envelope. Hot air fryers have only been around for a few years, but suddenly they seem to be everywhere.

Thirdly, it’s healthier than frying in oil – and less smelly (the reason why I binned our old deep fat fryer). They resemble a deep fat fryer in appearance, with a detachable basket, but cook food by circulating super-hot air around it.

Lastly, one of the features of hot air fryers is that they cook food from fresh and frozen very quickly. That’s quite a draw if, like my husband and I, you work full-time with a household to feed in the evenings.

Also, I figured that once I’d tested and written about the hot air fryer, I could always send my review model onto somebody who loves kitchen gadgets more than I do…

…Well, that isn’t going to happen. It’s staying out on the worktop, alongside the slow cooker and bread-maker. I think my husband has used the hot air fryer more frequently in the past couple of weeks than he has used our slow cooker in the past couple of years (admittedly, I hog that damned beautiful slow cooker).

Weekend Lunch

Pictured above is a quick lunch I made using the Lidl Hot Air Fryer at the weekend: chicken and vegetables. I rubbed the chicken with some salt, pepper and soy sauce, then cooked them in the hot air fryer for 20 minutes at 180 degrees. The digital display features chicken legs as one of its preset options (along with frozen chips, fish fingers, steaks, sausages, muffins and more), so I jabbed the menu button until a little chicken drumstick lit up on screen, then pressed the start button. It was that simple. Twenty minutes later, the fryer beeped and the chicken was cooked perfectly.

Next I loaded the fryer basket with a few handfuls of chopped courgettes, pepper and tomatoes, added some chopped herbs, crushed garlic and a drizzle of olive oil, stirred it all up then set the temperature at 200 degrees, the timer for 15 minutes and pressed start again. The air-fried vegetables were cooked through but still crunchy on the inside – just how I like them.

Result: a weekend lunch cooked in little over half an hour, with little effort and minimal brain-power.

What I Don’t Like

The Lidl Hot Air Fryer isn’t perfect. I don’t know what its longevity is (perhaps I’ll report back in a year or so?) but my main gripe is that you can cook only one dish or side dish at a time. This is stating the obvious and it isn’t the fryer’s fault: just like a deep fat fryer, it comes with one basket. But it means that, invariably, you will double up on energy costs by end using the hot air fryer alongside your oven, rather than as an oven replacement. Even with the lunch above, I kept the chicken warm in a preheated oven while frying the vegetables.

The energy consumption isn’t amazing. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test the energy consumption for this model, but from what I can gather from researching online, conventional ovens are more energy-efficient than hot air fryers.

What I Do Like

You can cook meat from frozen in a hot air fryer. I buy much of our meat from the freezer aisle, because it’s cheaper, but safe defrosting can be a pain. For example, if I forget to take the pork chops out of the freezer the night before, I have to rejig my meal planning or spend time the next morning defrosting the meat in cold water. With a hot air fryer, I can just bung them in: out of the freezer into the frying basket.
Tasty leftovers. We had some leftover pizza last week. Normally I’d reheat it in the oven and the crust would be hard and dry. Other people reheat pizza in the microwave, and it comes out soggy. But when I chucked our leftover pizza slices into the hot air fryer for a few minutes, they came out fresh, crispy and tasty.
The hot air fryer takes up relatively little space on the worktop, but you can fit a lot of food in the basket.
The exterior remains cool to the touch when the hot air fryer is in operation, which gives me peace of mind with my four-year-old running around the place.
The hot air fryer comes with a decent manual, which includes a rundown of the cooking times and temperatures for a wide range of foods, from homemade chips to quiche.
You don’t burn food. Incinerated dinners become a thing of the past: the hot air fryer cooks with precision and turns off when the timer reaches zero.
It takes a lot of the stress and effort out of cooking early weekday dinners for tired and emotional children. Frozen fish fingers take 10 minutes max. Vegetables take 15.
As with a conventional oven, you can keep food warm by setting a low temperature.

All in all, it’s a keeper.

Two final points: the Lidl Hot Air Fryer is a Silvercrest model, and one of the attractions is its price point: £59.99. This is a snip compared to other models of hot air fryer, which retail at £200 and above.

Like all Lidl offers, however, the availability of the Silvercrest Hot Air Fryer is temporary and limited. At the time of writing they have already been in stores for a week, so if you want to buy one, don’t hang about. You can find your nearest store here. If you miss the offer, these hot air fryers do come back into stock periodically, so keep your eye out.

That said, I have also noticed that lots of hot air fryers have had their prices slashed recently. The Amazon page features deals and discounts galore. If you miss out on the Lidl offer or want to shop around, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Retirement Planning: Your New Year’s Resolution for 2017?

Miss Thrifty — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:17 GMT

It turns out I’m not the only one with pensions on the brain – or am I? A new study has found that almost half the UK population has an “ostrich mentality” when it comes to saving for the future.

The Skipton Building Society Retirement Tracker, which monitors the retirement savings behaviours of more than 6,000 people up and down the country, has revealed that 48% of us have our heads in the sand when it comes to the dreaded ‘P’ word (pensions), with retirement savings that are either meagre or non-existent.

Skipton Building Society asked me to team up with them to help raise awareness of the dire state of the nation’s retirement savings, and this is a campaign of which I am proud to be a part. Heck, I’ll shout from the rooftops about it! As regular readers will know, retirement is a subject close to my heart: I am currently taking (somewhat overdue) steps to boost my own pension pot.

I must admit, that 48% statistic made me gulp. With no private pension plan and no savings, that is a lot of Ostriches who, if their savings behaviours do not change, will be throwing themselves upon the mercy of the State Pension when they reach retirement. As I have written previously, this is a dangerous game: not only is the State Pension modest but, as hundreds of thousands of women born in the 1950s have discovered to their horror, governments can move the goalposts and change the eligibility criteria according to their whims.

What saver are you?

The Ostriches are one of five groups of retirement savers identified by the Skipton Building Society Retirement Tracker. The crème de la crème are the Wise Owls. Members of this group tend to have a “more sophisticated portfolio with a broad range of investments and savings.” Nearly half (47%) are saving to fund retirement through a Cash ISA, more than a third (37%) through a personal pension and almost a third (32%) through investments in stocks and shares.

Are you a Wise Owl? The five groups of retirement savers break down as follows:

Ostrich Mentality (48% of the sample)

· Not saving for retirement or their savings are falling short

· The majority have nothing saved to supplement the State Pension

Savings Snails (18% of the sample)

· Saving the minimum they can afford

· More than a third (35%) believe their retirement savings will be less than they need by the time they retire

· At the same time, they have no set target for retirement savings

· The majority have nothing saved to supplement the State Pension

Money Moles (21% of the sample)

· No set target for retirement savings

· They have at least one of the following: company pension, cash ISA, habit of making mortgage overpayments

Squirrel Savers (6% of the sample)

· Have a set target for retirement savings

· On track to meet or exceed that target

· May have taken financial advice

· Majority (72%) of this group are relying heavily upon company pension schemes to fund retirement

· Their portfolios may not be as “sophisticated” as those of Wise Owls

Wise Owls (6% of the sample)

· Have a set target for retirement savings

· On track to meet or exceed that target

· Have sought professional finance advice

· Possess a sophisticated portfolio that includes one of the following: personal pension, investments, stocks and shares

Could this be your New Year’s Resolution?

What jumps out at you about the lists above? What strikes me is that only a third of savers (Money Moles, Squirrel Savers and Wise Owls) are anywhere near having their acts together when it comes to funding retirement. In fact, the Retirement Tracker research shows that more than half (51%) of those who have yet to retire, have nothing saved at all.

With Christmas and the New Year coming up, I’d like to suggest something: for a New Year’s Resolution in 2017, how about ‘branding up’ your retirement savings plan?

We talk about branding down at the supermarket, to save money: opting for a supermarket own-brand in place of a premium brand product, or a value brand item in place of the supermarket own-brand equivalent. What about ‘branding up’ to save money for retirement?

Here is the challenge: determine which type of saver you are, as above. If you emerge as anything other than a Wise Owl, make the resolution to shift yourself to the next level up by the end of the year.

At the beginning of 2016 I was a Savings Snail: saving a minimal amount via a workplace pension scheme, with the uncomfortable feeling that it wasn’t enough. Fast forward to the end of 2016 and I am now a Money Mole, with larger contributions and better savings plans in place, but no fixed targets. Instead, I’m throwing what I can at it. My resolution for 2017 is to become an organised Squirrel Saver, on track to meet or exceed a fixed savings target.

I’m going to shift to the next level. What about you? Can you do it too? Why be a Snail or an Ostrich, when you can be a canny Squirrel or a clever old Owl?

This post was produced in association with Skipton Building Society. A payment for this post, made on Skipton Building Society’s behalf, is helping to fund the running costs of the Miss Thrifty Blog.

Image credits: Seattle Municipal Archives. All used under a Creative Commons licence.

Thrifty Christmas: How To Make Brown Parcel Paper POP

Miss Thrifty — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 22:35:47 GMT

This is how I wrap my presents every year: I like how it looks, and I also like saving money on Christmas wrapping paper.

When you tot up the costs of Christmas gift-buying, it is easy to forget to include the costs of Christmas gift-wrapping. It adds up though, the cost of the shiny sparkly wrapping paper and ribbon and gift tags and so on. In my experience, this additional cost is felt all the more acutely when your £2.99 roll of shiny sparkly stuff turns out to be roughly £2.89 of gift-wrap roll insert, with enough paper to wrap no more than a few gifts. And let’s not mention that year you thought you’d cleaned up in the discount store, with an armful of bargain-basement Christmas wrapping paper, only to find once you got home that it was so thin, you could see the presents through it…

Instead, this is what I do. Every year I go to the Post Office and I buy a 6-metre long roll of brown parcel wrap.

It’s cheap. Take a look here on the Post Office website: at the time of writing, a 6-metre roll of brown parcel paper is just 65p. I’ve linked to the Post Office website because if you have a lot of gifts to wrap, you can go all out here: at the time of writing, the website also sells 35-metre rolls for £3.49. I am tempted to invest: a 35-metre roll would last me for many Christmases to come…

Brown paper rolls are also available from supermarkets such as Tesco (here) and Asda (here), but tend to be more expensive: around the £2.00 – £2.50 mark.

It’s strong. After all, it is made for wrapping parcels. Brown parcel wrap is sturdy: it doesn’t tear easily and, in my experience, it is easier to wrap presents neatly using thick brown paper than it is using low-end gift-wrap, which can be flimsy and fragile.

It’s long – oh so long! To put it into context: that single 6-metre roll of brown parcel wraps as many presents as one of the 3-packs of 2-metre roll sold in shops up and down the UK. Parcel paper has no cardboard insert so, although it looks like a small roll, it goes on and on…

Then I make it look pretty. This is easy to do, even if you aren’t a crafty type. First, I wrap the presents. Next, Thrifty Kid and I stamp the paper with gold ink, or whatever else he has knocking around in his craft set.

If you need to buy a suitable stamp, by the way, there are a a couple of thrifty options. At this time of year, craft magazines often have them as freebies on the covers. If you don’t want to splash out on a craft mag, you can make a stamp for free: find a pencil with an unused rubber on the end, and use that to make polka dot patterns.

Finally, tie with string or ribbon. In the picture above, I’ve used a ball of string. Other years, I have used free ribbons, collecting them in a pot throughout the year. (It always surprises me how the jar is full by the end of the year, with slips and lengths of ribbon from gifts, delivery boxes and so on.)

One last thing I like about brown paper gift wrap? Zero waste. All the paper and string offcuts can go straight into the composter.

What’s not to love, eh?

Here’s some parcel paper-wrapped Christmas presents from a previous year when we made most of our Christmas presents, which you can read about here.

Management - is anybody worth 350x more than another person?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 09:53:00 GMT

You have to listen to this podcast by NPR on why CEO pay exploded in the 90s and has continued ever upwards ever since.

Episode 682: When CEO Pay Exploded

They go down, they go up

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:34:00 GMT

Spotted in a telegraph comment on the fractious stock market this week.

News from a week on the stock market.
Helium was up, but feathers were down. Paper was stationary, but pencils lost a few points. Lifts rose but escalators continued their slow decline. Switches were off and mining equipment hit rock bottom. The raisin market has dried up. Pampers remained unchanged while Sun peaked at mid-day. Andrex tissues touched a new bottom.

Awful Management, Horrible People

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 21 Dec 2015 08:17:00 GMT

The longer you invest in companies, the more you realise that management are the key to everything the business does. You don't have to look hard to see companies behaving badly in this world. From oil companies, banks, utilities, and retailers - it seems everyone is putting their hands in the till, robbing their customers, destroying the environment or mistreating their staff. Bad management has been mentioned before on the blog and its a theme that needs continuing.

What continues to surprise though is that at the top of companies and in management positions everywhere are PEOPLE. People just like you and me who wouldn't want to be treated poorly, paid badly, or provided an inferior service. As a shareholder, I want the staff in those companies to feel valued, paid fairly, and therefore be productive at work and in their communities. As a shareholder, I want the customers to get great service, buy more products / services and recommend the company to friends and families creating a growing business. As a shareholder I don't want either of the next two examples happening to me.

Just this week (and it's Christmas remember), we've got another couple of examples of terrible management making bad decisions for staff and customers.

First, there's Mike Ashley and his team of thugs who run Sports Direct. The Guardian have produced an expose on working conditions there and detailed how poorly staff are paid and treated. The share price of SPD.L has dropped to 570p after averaging around 700p during the last 6 months. Poor treatment of staff has not just affected Mike's workers but also the millions of people who have shares in Sports Direct in their pensions. This poor attitude to people has cost everyone money.

Secondly, NPower's customer service has been so bad they've been fined £26M. Mental! Had they bothered answering their phone, treating customers with dignity, and sorting out the problems they would have avoided having to pay this fine. As it is, behaving like a normal company would almost certainly have cost them less than the fine - spending a few million more on a customer service centre would have solved most of the issues. NPower is run by German company RWE and routinely loses money in the UK. It's a basket case that should probably be closed or be absorbed by someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm reminded of Seth Godin's writings here. Whatever you feel about Seth, his common sense posts may just be spouting the obvious a lot of the time, at least he's putting these observations into print. A recent post suggested the pursuit of perfection in companies was impossible, the resources required to make small incremental increases in service levels were unaffordable. He called it 'Understanding the Doublings'.

One approach, which some organizations use, is to redefine your usual systems so you are able to please most people without your team going through a Herculean sprint every day, and then (this is a key element as well), eagerly and regularly apologizing and giving refunds to the one in 150 where it just can't be done.

Common-sense stuff. Nobody's perfect. Trying to get there is impossible, but having a system in place to compensate when you can't meet impossible expectations is good business. Your customer isn't put out and your reputation stays intact. This just isn't happening in the UK at the moment. Everybody has given up on perfection - that's fine. But they've also given up on Good, OK, Average and Mediocre. I can think of only one place in the country that has any standards whatsoever in customer service and that's John Lewis.

No wonder people are beginning to seek local over national. Reputation is easier to to ascertain with a local company or person - a few phone calls and you've got the recommendations that you require. Locally a Facebook group helps with recommendations on companies that provide great service and products. A quick post to find out the best plumber, electrician, etc. gets plenty of replies in our community. How are the Sports Directs / NPowers of the world going to compete against that? Answer: They're not. They're dinosaurs that are going to die.

Bad management doesn't seem to be going away in the UK, despite numerous fines and general contempt now commonplace for industries that perennially offend (eg. Banks, Utility companies). Why do leaders behave this way? Would they want to be treated this way themselves? Are they so removed from society they no longer understand how the world works?

For more information on how to behave properly as a manager in an organisation see any of Tom Peter's books or his blog. Putting People First is basically his entire manifesto and would be a great place to start for any manager / leader of a bank, shitty retailer, or utility company.

Fundsmith - still delivering

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 14:03:00 GMT

Wrote about Fundsmith a few years ago and popped a few pounds into Terry's fund at the time. It's done ok....

Fundsmith at five: 'I naively supposed the financial crisis had taught investors a lesson'

The highlights:

17.2% annual returns over 5 years
121% up

Not bad.

Save Dat Money

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 09:02:00 GMT

Something a bit different this time but with the same ethos behind Investimouse's approach to life. This is a video by rapper Lil Dicky. Not being a mega celebrity superstar, Lil Dicky has no money to make his video so approaches those much wealthier for assistance to make his new video, $ave Dat Money.

I may not have sold it that well, but it's very funny. Watch as Lil Dicky goes door knocking in wealthy LA suburbs asking to use their swimming pool, gets rejected by multiple big name car brands, and is forced to beg to get into a swanky nightclub for filming.

Remember kids, Save that Money.

Lil Dicky - $ave Dat Money feat. Fetty Wap and Rich Homie Quan

What does Insider Trading look like?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Fri, 01 May 2015 14:30:00 GMT

This!

This is Creighton's share price for the last few months this year. You may remember I tipped them as my small cap guesstimate for this year in the year-end review post. See them plodding along doing nothing until April 19th this year. Then a steady week of increasing share price. For no reason whatsoever. Until an RNS on the 30th April about them selling their Real Shaving business.

How is it possible for the world to know of these events before they are released to the share market?

2014 Year End Review

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Sun, 04 Jan 2015 15:26:00 GMT

“I don’t like piggy banks – I’m afraid of change!”

That time again to tie it all up and see if it was worth having my money in equities, rather than sticking it in the bank.

Here's what happened:

FTSE100 fell 2.7%
FTSE100 up 1.3% (total return, GBP)
FTSE-All World up 12.69% (total return, GBP)

Investimouse's fund which is a holding of investment trusts, tracker funds, bonds, fixed interest, and individual company shares is called The Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness. The individual company shares are generally high yielding quarterly paying shares (income is everything) but occasionally I do have a punt on something little. It is compared to the FTSE All-World each year rather than the UK only indices.

The Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness is up 14.76% this year (total return, GBP).

So slightly ahead of its comparative index. Still feel it needs more international exposure, but very pleased to do so well when everyone else is having a bad year.

Slightly annoyed last year about:

- Tesco - Clarke should probably be in prison, along with many of his cohorts.
- Bankers - I hate them all. Crowdfunding and individual finance can't come along soon enough and kill off their corrupt industry.
- The US justice system which continues to pick on BP despite their having made all of Florida an infinitely better place to live. Quite how BP are continually blamed for something American companies and employees caused is beyond me.
- Russia and Putin - madness
- Crawshaw - on the day I had researched it, Crawshaws price was 6p. At the last second I bought Tangent instead as my punt stuck for the year. Tangent earned me 25%, however Crawshaw would have ten-bagged my money. Sleepless nights.

Things I'm looking at this year:

- When exactly to go big on oil again. How long will Putin be happy with just fighting the Ukraine?More than likely his best option is to either rile the Iranians into attacking Israel (big risk) or start supporting ISIL and helping them create a larger conflict in the middle east, specifically by riling them up in Saudi Arabia. More unrest = higher oil price.
- Finger poised on the buy BHP button. Big divs, exposure to energy and all commodities.
- Creightons is my punt stock
- B&M European in retail looks good (I think...)
- Others which have me intrigued for 2015 are CityFibre, Telecity, Shell, Tungsten, Porta, Accumuli

Here's some share tips from round the media for 2014:

Daily Mail - This is Money tips
Guardian
Stockopedia - Top Naps
Independent - Top Ten to Follow in 2015
Telegraph - Questor share tips for 2015 (plus here's last year's results)
iii - Aim share tips for 2015

Some of the other blogger 2014 'year in review' style posts:

DIY Investor
Retirement Investing Today
Investing Sidekick
DIY Income Investor
Wexboy
Adventures in Equities
UK Value Investor

Good luck for the coming year!

And to end a superb cartoon from XKCD:

Poor share performance this year? It's all about bad management

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 13:53:00 GMT

It's been a year to forget for many big FTSE companies (Tesco, BP, Morrisons, Co-op, Barclays, etc.) Diving share prices for previous darlings of the sharemarket have made everyone a bit twitchy. Most of it can be blamed on bad management. The bastion of journalism that is the Daily Mail (hahahahahaha, ROFL) has gathered together a list of the retards and scum that control some of the UK's biggest companies.

It's not good reading and the biggest reason why the UK continues to flounder along. Bad management is endemic in the country. I can only guess why complete scumbags end up at the top of public companies. Here's a few reasons though:

- Clearly, almost none of management have 'skin in the game', you know real money invested in their companies so they all operate with a short term, scam-as-much-in-bonuses-as-I-can attitude. Fred the Shred Goodwin was the ultimate example of this.
- The Old Boys Network, nepotism, cronyism, etc. You name it the old pat on the back, you scratch me, I'll scratch you approach is rife in the UK. There's no meritocracy here and so the people who are least suited to leading are rewarded for their guile, cunning and poor behaviour.
- Bribery and Corruption - even companies which should be miles removed from bribery are well involved in it (GSK). You'd think the health and wellbeing of people would make you think twice about bribing people to use your products. Oh no, you thought wrong.
- The Class System - it still exists. It results in in-bred, backward idiots leaping ahead of the pack and gaining senior management positions.
- An inability of middle management to tell CEOs and corrupt boards to change their ways. Not sure why this exists but things are invariably too late when a 'whistle-blower' tells all.

I haven't even touched on the King of All Management Bastards, Bob Diamond, head of Barclays Bank who once paid himself £63M a year, decided that banks didn't need to apologise for their poor behaviours, and his bank while he was in charge was accused of rate rigging, money laundering, and tax avoidance.

These aren't just a few bad apples. They're everywhere. These are just the famous ones the media can be bothered to have a pot shot at. Every day you can check investegate and see the RNS of the public companies in the UK. I can't be bothered calculating it, but you can guarantee that about 10% of them each day are management awarding themselves additional share options, warrants, bonuses and other schemes to feather their nests.

I'm not sure why the UK tolerates it all and why workers don't demand better leadership.

Instead of whistle-blowing, rioting on the streets or burning down their offices they appear to be giving up and starting new decent companies. It's heartening to hear someone who actually might be a decent leader commenting on the growth of new companies. (it's in the last couple of paragraphs).

He adds: 'Last year there was a record number of new companies created. This year that record will be beaten. A recent survey by a quite serious authority rated Britain fourth best country in the world to start a business.'

'We've created more jobs in the private sector in this country over the last four years than the whole of the rest of the EU put together, which is an utterly remarkable statistic. It just shows that having a flexible economy with a culture that embraces entrepreneurship is a good thing.'

When Branson called 2014, the year of the Entrepreneur back in Dec 2013, it appears he may have been right.

Maybe we're heading in the right direction and these last seven years have been about getting rid of the blight that has infected the UK.

In the US, one company (Abbott Laboratories) seems to have the right idea and is training management not just on the job but in simulations too. You have to applaud the balls to try new things in management, you never know you just might find someone good. Besides they can't be as bad as the current batch.

A quick synopsis of stupid bloody Tesco

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 12:11:00 GMT

Unless your head has been buried in the sand (as mine was last week on a sunny island in the Ionian Sea) then you'll have noticed that Tesco has continued to add manure to the rather large fan it has constructed. The latest revelations? They can't add and just decided to guess how much money they had made in their latest interims.

While I'd like to think things can't get any worse, nothing at Tesco surprises me any more. They're the Barclays of retail now and consequently have the magnifying glass fully turned on them by the media and public. If something is afoot, it will definitely be found out, released and more damage will be done to their reputation, footfall, profits and share price.

I'd say it was time for drastic action. With a new CEO and CFO, take the time to clear the decks and release all the bad news as possible in one day. Sack the chairman who is clearly an idiot for allowing Clarke to eff everything up so badly.

The Previous Idiot

Take the hit, announce the new super plan (detailed below) the following week once everyone on the board of directors has announced they're buying £1m shares each themselves.

My SUPER PLAN of action would be this:

-Turn the Tesco mega boxes into Tesco property developments. Build houses around a typical small suburban shop area - have a Tesco Express, Tesco coffee shop, Tesco hairdresser and a couple of other shops. Make money by renting those and become Tesco Property. Easy.
-It's clear that the UK is now a mostly poor place to live in (outside London). Wages are low and being reduced on an inflation adjusted basis every few months. So it's time to compete with the cheaper end of the market (where Tesco began) and take on Aldi and Lidl, with a budget branded supermarket with limited range. Turn the stores that are in those areas and losing share into the cheaper brand. The rest of them can continue at the middle end in more affluent areas.
-Hire some people at the supermarket management level who actually care about them.
-Address customer service as quickly as possible.
-Tidy the stores up!!!!! Clean the aisles, stack at night, pick up the crap, put the rubbish away and not outside the door....

-Go back to being better than the rest as that's what made the difference to begin with. Competitive pricing, good stock levels, clean stores, helpful staff. This is so bleeding obvious.
-Are the little spinoffs of Tesco making money? ie. Blinkbox, Bank, Online, Delivery, etc.? If not, ditch them.
-Clean up the balance sheet. Start paying off some debt so you don't look like such a basket case.
-Is it possible to have some sort of employee ownership scheme like John Lewis - staff love working for them. Even just making a stand on short hours contracts - ditching them, getting the staff to love you, making yourself look good to the public again will help.

Morrisons and Co-op will eventually die. Sales and profits in the UK will pick up then with less competition. Globally Tesco should continue to do ok, so it's just a matter of time to see this out.

Will Tesco die like Woolworths? I don't think so, but it needs to kill off its weaker competitors as soon as possible.

I'm sorely tempted to buy more now...although to do so would be even more contrarian than buying Russia or investing in Syrian / Iraq housing.

Here's a roundup of everyone else's posts. They are all excellent pieces:

DIY Investor - Tesco Top Up Decision - he's all in again....
Under the Money Tree - Tesco Palaver - staying well clear for now...
Mark Carter - Tesco - keeps revising his valuation down (ahhh the benefit of hindsight)
Mark Ritson (marketing chap) - Tesco risks being famous for being broken - likens Tesco to Nokia, Blackberry, Woolworths and Northern Rock. Very pessimistic.
Expecting Value - Tesco, Yes Again - compares them to Man Utd's recent woes. Excellent.
Share Centre - Tesco's Comedy of Errors - thinks Dave will need to be bold and do something creative. Big fans of creativity here at Investimouse.

Oh well, it's only one company and nothing's permanent in this world. We'll move on to the next big thing I'm sure...

Portfolio - Half-Year Review 2014

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 07:35:00 GMT

Tiny bit late reviewing the portfolio as it's now September and not July 1st... oh well, that's the passive side of investing slowly winning over I guess.

Anyway, logged into i-Web this morning and ran a few reports to see what activity I'd made in the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness portfolio in the first half of 2014.

So the fund is up 10.8% in the first half of the year. Which is good and pleasing but how did the overall world sharemarket do as our benchmark?

The ishares World Index ETF (the only world tracker I can find with reliable long term figures) has a performance of 5.16% for the first six months of the year. So we're up on that. Positive stuff.

Here's the activity from the first six months:

Sold Monitise in Jan - it's going nowhere, keeps diluting shares, but a decent gain and profit from them. Since dropped back a lot.
Replaced with SPDR Emerging Markets ETF.
Finally sold RBS in Jan - after a decent rally up to 380 I thought it time to end the folly of it. Getting rid of it was like a huge weight coming off your shoulders. It's done nothing since, its 'profits' are 90% lies and I feel better for no longer supporting them.
Sold COMS in Feb - for an excellent doubling of money.
Put that COMS money into HSBC as it dipped under 600p - I like the quarterly dividends. Neil Woodford has since dumped his stake. Worrying.
Bought TESCO in Feb - mistake.
Bought Middlefield Canadian MCT in Mar - nice timing.
Sold Blackrock Emerging Markets Track which had been replaced by the SPDR one.
Bought Infinis Energy in March - poor timing. Since dropped 10%.
Sold L&G Technology Tracker - no idea why now. It made decent money though.

Far too much activity by the looks of things. However, what I've learned is that decent timing gets great results. The holdings in Monitise and Coms were superb earners. More money gained than years of passive investing. Buying on dips in massive companies has been semi-successful too with HSBC in particular being a decent effort on timing.

It seems the maxim of Mr Buffet is true - buy great companies at a fair price.

In all a good 6 months. Where's the next bit of out-performance going to come from though?

The TSB IPO - Fancy buying a pukka bank?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Sun, 15 Jun 2014 13:52:00 GMT

The 17th June is the final day to decide whether or not you're participating in the TSB IPO. Once you've downloaded and spent the rest of the day reading the 300pg load of nonsense document you'll be none the wiser about what to do.

TSB is being sold off by Lloyds as punishment for being shafted by Brown and being forced to save HBOS during the Great Financial Crisis, they subsequently went broke and had to ask the state for survival funds. TSB was previously a mutual, then a bank and then succumbed to the excitement of the big bank mergers of the 80s-90s. What we are seeing now is a reversal of those big mergers and a general expansion of the number of banking entities as the new regulators attempt to encourage more competition and fewer companies that are too 'big to fail'.

So TSB - any good?

Here's the GOOD stuff about it:

- It's supposed to be a purely retail bank so no mucking about in the filth of investment banking.

- It is supposedly being sold on the cheap, at least the PR tells us it is 'priced to go' at about .7-.9 of book value.

- It makes money - about £170M last year and on course for £200M this year.

- It won't be tainted with any mis-selling dramas from the last few years.

- Long term holders will get 1 share for every 20 held each year for the next three years.

The BAD stuff:

- It revealed last week 45% of its mortgage loans are interest-only. This is INSANE. That's about 45% of its mortgage loans that it will never get its money back on.

- Competition is heating up. Tesco, M&S, Metro, etc. are all chasing new business too.

- Interest rates are on the move up. Mr Carney says so. Expect default rates on loans to rise as they do.

- There is some confusion as to how much they are paying for IT which is a huge cost for banks. Lloyds are currently subsidising / paying for it - when that arrangement ends, TSB will have to pay full whack.

- No dividends until a long time away - 2018.

- They tried to sell it a couple of years ago to Co-op for a boat load less. It wasn't worth £900M then, it's not worth more than that now.

- The market is fairly high at the moment. IPOs are dime a dozen as private equity groups look to cash in at the top of the cycle.

- Only 25% of the shares are being sold. Lloyds will retain the rest and look to sell them all over the next 12 months (I think that's the timeline, they have to sell soon I know). This enormous overhang of shares means there will almost certainly be a better time to buy (if you're keen).

- It's a bank. They can't be trusted. They're almost certainly lying about everything.

Updates on the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness Portfolio

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Thu, 15 May 2014 10:28:00 GMT

With the FTSE ticking along well and no serious dramas kicking off in the world (except poor old Ukraine who everyone seems to have turned their back on) all seems quite serene in the portfolio.

Updates on some of the holdings:
- Took the opportunity to top up HSBC when it dipped under 600p last week. Seemed wrong not to.
- Infinis has dropped 20% since purchase. Most of me says sell, but the reasons for buying in the first place stay sound - growth, industry consolidation. There has been no news. I think people are just bored. It has guaranteed to pay out big dividends this year and next so no reason not to be in it. Hope I haven't missed something. Maybe debt is too high?
- Schroder Real Estate had a successful placing which I contributed to. With shares at 50.25p, it was an instant 2p gain which has since gone higher. They are continuing to turn around this company and I'm hopeful that the problems of the past are behind them.
- Middlefield Canadian Income was bought at 98p. Seemed a no-brainer with 1.25p every quarter in dividends. The board thought so too and bought 50,000 shares at the same price along with a director who bought 100,000 at 102. The price has now crept back up to NAV at 108p. Nice one.
- Emerging markets seem to be recovering slowly and as I have quite a bit in two holdings (an ETF and
- Man Group continues to be the dog in my holdings. Only keeping it for the dividends now which I hope will be massive this year. They announced a second quarter of net inflows to their funds which means things are on the improve but it still feels like a basket case. I'm not sure any financial institution is investable other than HSBC at the moment. Even with RBS announcing make-believe profits again, there isn't any way you should be putting your money in any of them at the moment. Barclays unbelievably did another placing recently, announced sackings of 15,000 bankers and simultaneously reduced in real terms their dividend. More evil than any corporation that has ever bestrode the planet.
- the Saga IPO is uninvestable too. Too much debt, of which they are only paying back a tiny bit. Plus it will almost certainly list at between 17-20x earnings with no growth in the last three years. Madness - you can put your money in Beazley (or any of the other growing insurance companies), pay between 9-10x earnings and get fantastic dividends too. The only people getting rich at Saga are the private equity companies and the directors. Save your money people.

There's been no sales of any holdings for a while.

Are we getting toppy? Certainly the pull-back in tech and bio stocks in the US is a warning to them. At the moment though with the FTSE on an average of 14.5x earnings and paying around 3.5% in divs, there is no point having your money anywhere else.

Plenty of great things on the blogs around the world at the moment. As ever, I am in awe of the writing on Monevator and hang on everything Paul Scott has to say in his daily roundup on Stockopedia.

Book Review - 'Young Money' by Kevin Roose

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 14:16:00 GMT

Just recently finished this book so thought I'd share a few comments on it. You can of course read loads more reviews of it at Amazon if you like.

Kevin Roose is a New York magazine journalist and has a few other books to his name during his career, so has developed a style of writing that aims to give you the impression he has become embedded in his chosen field. In this book his target is to expose the world of investment banking from the viewpoint of the young graduates entering it. Following eight graduates over about three years during some of the most turbulent times ever in finance, we learn about their work lives and some small tidbits of the effect it has on them. It's an easy read, with small chapters that rock along very quickly following one of the participants at a time.

The majority of the graduates have come from ivy league universities at which investment banks tour in the year's preceding graduation to find their next crop of interns. Quite a bit of the book is given over to how the prospects are groomed at this stage, promises that are made, and the role of the university, the courses, and indeed the pupils role in expectations of a job after university. Kevin attends some of the career fairs at the schools to find out more about how the banks attract the highest talented students to apply for their roles. I've just done a quick troll of the internet for some of them and they seem super sophisticated affairs with huge websites devoted to them at each university.

What to wear to a Career Fair - Penn State advice

What's fairly frustrating with the book is that for the most part, none of the participants know each other so there's no chance to discover them as a group. Also with eight participants we don't really get to find out too much in depth about any of them. I guess Kevin has attempted to get a cross-section of new graduates and he has chosen people from different backgrounds (within what is obviously a limited scope, as the banks involved only select the creme-de-la-creme of society). In fact, really what you witness is how homogenous the group of supposedly disparate people are. They are all motivated by only one thing - money.

We learn that to get this money the investment banks require them to work ridiculous hours every week and that all of them work seven days a week. This un-written extreme hours contract exists between the bank and the newly hired graduate analysts / brokers for two years. At that point almost all the graduates are broken and exhibiting extreme behaviours, whether that be drink / drug related or stress disorders, and their relationships with family, friends and significant others has disintegrated. They are then expected to leave the banks and move to private equity, hedge funds or traditional finance companies. It's pretty short term based thinking that reflects badly on the banks and is fairly typical of their behaviour over the last 20 years. God knows how they think they're ever going to be stable entities without any long term thinking or career based occupations for their supposedly carefully picked graduates.

This short-termism is having an effect on the career goals of the graduates themselves. Most of them realise that they chose poorly at the beginning of their career and half of them leave to pursue other interests, specifically in the world of technology. I've written previously that the internet firms would steal the world's best minds from the other high paying jobs and this book confirms that this is happening. The world of startups, equity and being able to control your time involvement in the firm is extremely tempting after the jack-booted investment bank stereotypes many of them discover.

There's no ground breaking information here. I think everyone knew that i-bankers are expected to work mental long hours. However, as a book it romps along. Short chapters with interesting snippets of work behaviour. eg. crazy unreasonable bosses, excessive behaviour, amazing deals. We get snippets of the graduates outside life but don't get to know them terribly well, certainly not well enough to actually care about any of them. Most will recognise themselves in some of the characters - the inflated perception of one's abilities and talents when first leaving university and within weeks you discover that you know absolutely nothing about the real world can be disheartening, and the best bits of the book are when the individuals involved have that realisation.

The chapter on Fashion meets Finance is the most interesting; funny, clever and eye-opening. This is an event set up for hot girls to meet men involved in finance. It's as barbaric, money grabbing and sugar daddy seeking as it sounds and yet apart from one year at the height of the GFC its been a popular event. Unbelievably there has even been one in London last month. I have no idea it it was a success or not.

As a whole Young Money is worth a read.

Portfolio Adjustments - March 2014

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 11:44:00 GMT

Over the course of the last month Investimouse has sold out of Tangent Communications (TNG:L), the London based digital media and print company. Results are good, a better dividend is expected this year and they are starting a share buyback in the coming months. Bought at 9.1p, sold at 11.3p - so a rise of about 25%. I hope I don't regret selling early but a recent RNS which stated that there were over £3.5M in phantom options payable to two directors in the coming year spooked me. That would completely wipe out profits in the group and made it a bit uninvestable until those are gone.

Investimouse also sold out of Coms (COMS:L), a superb little earner, which in just over a month doubled in price. Suppose I could have held on for more of the recovery but feel that the valuation had started to get miles away from itself.

To replace these Infinis Energy (INFI:L) is now in the fund purchased at 246p earlier in the month. Think it could be an excellent long term hold for both yield and growth. As an energy play it's always going to be a little at the mercy of government whims but it has decent growth plans with new power plants expected to add another 500MW of generating capacity. It may also end up being an excellent consolidator of all the other little renewable energy firms in the UK.

In addition more money was put into Merchants Trust (MRCH:L) and new money was found for a small stake in Middlefield Canadian (MCT:L) which I hope will be a nice safe high yielding trust. Paying guaranteed 1.25p quarterly dividends it yields at around 5% at the moment which should do me fine for the next few years.

Portfolio Review - 2013

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 13:42:00 GMT

Man,its been ages since I posted on Investimouse. Shame on me. I've still been active in the market and trying to make more money through investing, saving and financial austerity, yet the real world, and work have intervened to stop me posting.

Anyway, how did 2013 go for the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness portfolio?

The fund ended up 20.51% in 2013. Damn pleasing and the best performance since 2010. Considering the number of fixed interest holdings and dividend income shares I have now this seems a very impressive performance. But how did it do against the benchmarks? After all, unless you compare yourself to the market, you may as well have been buying a single FTSE100 tracker or similar.

According to Google Finance:
- the FTSE100 was up 13.9% for 2013.
- the All Shares Index was up 16.2% for 2013.
- the S&P500 was up 38.1%
- the World Index was up 26%. (although I'm not sure if this is accurate - struggling to find a perfect measure).

Clearly the place to be was the US in 2013. I've been gradually reducing my exposure to the US (mistake!) as I felt it was incredibly over-valued. The PE for the S&P is a good 25% above the average and that has to mean that things are going to go wrong soon, or so I thought.

The continuing improvement in the World Index continues to nag me. My portfolio consists of a bunch of investment trusts and low cost emerging country tracker funds that could probably all be done away with and replaced by the iShares World Index ETF.

Investimouse holds its shares in the Team Dave Fund of Fun-ness ISA through the iWeb platform. Loads of changes are happening right now due to the implementation of RDR in the UK, basically meaning we all pay a bit more for buying funds, holding shares, etc in our ISAs. I'm sure this wasn't the intention of the good natured law makers but that's what is going to happen to me. I've investigated moving the ISA again but feel that overall iWeb will probably still be just about the best platform to stay with for the size of my holdings. Plus the drama of it all when moving last time from iii to iWeb has put me off ever wanting to do it again!

The last time I had to shift platforms I produced a Google spreadsheet that was a big online hit with people caught up in iii's platform fee charges. This time the good folks at Monevator have an excellent comparison tool that could help you with figuring out who to hold your shares with and place your transactions through.

Bogleheads - What's that all about?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:06:00 GMT

There's a thoroughly decent article which is worth a read over at Forbes magazine from last week on the cult of Bogleheads.

Bogleheads are a group of people (now numbering in the hundreds of thousands) who have adopted Jack Bogle's methods in their investing and everyday life. Their site is nothing to look at but is full of useful gems of information, tips and deals, and good wholesome advice. Most of it is focused on the Amerian market

Forbes has broken down their credo into the following 10 points. I won't elaborate further on them as they're explained in the article but the headings alone give decent advice for a prosperous life.

1. Live below your means.(Big fans of that here at Investimouse)
2. Cost matters.
3. Buy the market/diversify.
4. Don’t look at past returns to gauge future performance.
5. Never try to time the market.
6. Stick to your goals.
7. Save as much as you can, as early as you can.
8. Look at the big picture.
9. Automate good behaviours.
10. Minimize taxes.
Lots of good passive investing advice really. Keep your costs low, invest regularly and often, don't try to time the market and keep diversified.

Can we predict the next financial crisis?

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 08:41:00 GMT

Here's a recent TED talk from risk economist, Didier Sornette. Didier runs the Financial Crisis Observatory which has plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment when any bubble is about to pop. Not just bubbles in finance but all over the place throughout different systems in the world.

It's worth a watch if only so you can either:
a) marvel in amazement at his predictions,
b) shout bullshit at the screen, or
c) be astonished that there doesn't seem to be any actual science or presentation of what, how or why he declares anything a bubble and the mathematical point at which it will break.

The comments on the video are excellent and you should jump in and join the discussion there. Most interestingly, he puts up a slide on the bubble of human population and then doesn't actually talk about it. Clearly this is the biggest and most damaging bubble that mankind faces and it would be interesting to find out more at what point the human exponential population explosion bubble is going to pop...

Moving on...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:58:00 GMT

Hi Folks, you may have noticed I haven't posted here for a while, well, Well-lived-life is on it's final legs. It will stay here as a memorial, but my writing will now be taking place at www.moneybeta.co.uk , I hope you've enjoyed our time here, please come and see my new site. It will be along the same lines, but I thought it was time to get a proper domain.

Awesome, you've been great and I'm looking forward to seeing you at moneybeta.

Have a great day.

Dom

Portfolio review - April 2013 Update

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Wed, 29 May 2013 06:32:00 GMT

General boost from all markets heading upwards slightly in March so the team dave fund of fun-ness rose slightly too.

Free money from the following companies:

Raven Russia prefs (RUSP)
Natwest prefs (NWBD)
Beazley (BEZ)
Real Estate Credit Investments (RECP)

for a total of £97.03 in dividend income (a new monthly record). Thanks mostly to the good chaps at Beazley who seem determined to make sure I get rich. Nice one them.

No other action this month. I have a tiny amount of cash sitting on the sidelines awaiting buying opportunities but I can't see anything obvious at the moment.

The importance of reading to get smarter

noreply@blogger.com (dave) — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:06:00 GMT

picture borrowed from an aussie paper

Just found this really nice article on a blog I hadn't previously heard of called Farnam Street. It's an easy read so won't take up too much time in your life, but has quite a few salient points.

The Buffett Formula — How To Get Smarter

My take from it:

- Nothing is easy in life. You don't get to become some of the wealthiest people in the world without a lot of work.
- Reading and continuing to read is the source of their knowledge. Munger and Buffett don't have supernatural investing powers, they just have a capacity to read vast amounts to gain knowledge.
- Read the facts not the opinions of others on those facts.
- Find the time to read even if it means sacrificing something that you gain pleasure from or might otherwise derive some greater short term value from. It's the long term that counts.
- Using that knowledge wisely is what separates them from others.
- Surround yourself with smart people

I'm Selfish

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 21:12:00 GMT

I'm not one to let opportunities slide by without a thought to why and how they will increase my happiness. In fact it can be a painful process working out whether the next opportunity is a goer or not.

Mostly the opportunities I come across are for new jobs. I am on the cusp of obtaining a new qualification and this has highlighted to me that maybe my current work isn't progressing as quickly as it should.

Although I will be working in the same field (finance), I am thinking of moving to something with a little more difficulty rather than the daily grind which is currently my day job, although I am very aware that this may just be that the grass seems a lot greener as I stick my head above the parapet.

So I was flicking through a few job boards as you do, looking at jobs the next step up from what I'm doing at the moment, when I came across one that seemed quite nice. The job description seemed not a great distance from what I'm currently doing, other than I would be running the team rather than working in it.

It seems like a nice company, a charity organisation that arranges grants for disabled kids. I'm not specifically looking to work for a charity, but this seemed like a good cause.

Then I saw the pay, twice what I'm on at the moment, this was a Neo like, woah moment for me. This sounds great. Then the bad news, it's 25 miles away. Bad times.

Bad times indeed, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed I HATE COMMUTING.

So because of this I ran the numbers, I took off the extra expense for commuting, along with a little money for my wasted time.

It's still overall pretty positive, a net increase of over £500 a month.

So, why I am telling you about all this? You don't care.

Well, even though this would be a great increase in pay for me and would definitely speed up my route to early retirement, I HATE COMMUTING too much.

I can't live with the fact that I would be driving 3 hours a day, rather than my current 30 mins. It just doesn't sit with me. So I didn't apply for it.

Am I a fool? Yes, this is more money than what me and my partner earn combined. But it's unfortunately just not the right time.

Anyway, what do you think? Should I dust the CV off and get it sent, or is this commute just ridiculous

Dom

Image: Selfish (fish for sale...geddit?)

Do it for her

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:31:00 GMT

Finding the right motivation can be pretty difficult. I tend to look back at what I've learnt in the past, usually from cartoons!

The cartoon I've watched the most of is definitely the Simpsons. It has made me as outspoken as Bart, a dreamer like Lisa and lazy like Homer (I didn't say they were all good things!).

One episode that always stick in my mind is "and maggie makes three", as IMDB says it's about how Homer recounts Maggie's birth in an answer to why there are no photos of Maggie in the family album.

It turns out to be a heart warming story of how, before Maggie was born Homer had his life set. He was working in his dream job, the Bowlarama, earning just enough money to support his family. Then suddenly with the news of Maggies imminent arrival, he knows he must return to his old job at the power station, where he come crawling back to Mr Burns. His superiors then add insult to injury by adding a banner in front of his workplace. You can see it at the top of the page (image: deadhomersociety).

To soften the blow Homer cover's up certain words to create, what I think was the first motivational poster I ever saw (this was when I was in school!). He does this to make the his life a little more bearable, I've copied it below.

Image: Bloggiusmaximus

I think we can all see the message they're trying to convey, but to my then 10 year old brain I didn't really get it (well not fully). Homer is sacrificing his happiness for that of his child's, short term pain for long term gain. It's something we all come across at some point in our lives and the less selfish amongst us are probably involved in something right now that isn't to there liking but either helps their partner, friend or child.

It also resonates through to finance. If we want to be able to retire on our own terms, we need to start putting money away now. Yes, it's difficult, not many people out there are going to help you. But if you can see past all this short term rubbish, the hedonism and hangovers, you could start living a better, easier life in a lot shorter time than you think.

So do it for her, or him or you!

And get it done. You'll love it.

The 40 year plan

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:18:00 GMT

Being frugal is for life not just for easter.

But why bother? You can't take it with you! It won't make you happy!

I know its odd for someone who works with and blogs about money, but I completely agree.

Money is for spending. I just prefer to spend less so that I don't have to work as much. Maybe I'm just lazy.

This means whereas some people think they need millions to retire, I'm a little more streamlined. A bit more efficient perhaps.

My number is more like £400k - at 4% return this would give me 16k a year. Great! I should have paid my mortgage off by then, so I would comfortably be able to live on this amount.

So next question? Where the hell am I going to get 400k from? Well, I've heard compound interest is pretty cool! So according to mr Monevator I need to sock away £375 a month. Well I'm certainly not doing that at the moment.

So what can I do to help, I could increase the time frame? Nope! I want to retire early!! Not later!

I can increase the amount I put away, hmm a toughie this, is there anything else I can give up? Or maybe I need to earn some more. A possibility.

Another way could be to increase my return. Now I don't know much about investing, what I do know is that it's best to maximise tax free investments, e.g. pensions and ISAs. As for anything else, like fund / stock picking I pretty much suck at, because I've never done it, other than a couple of cash ISAs.

But at least I have a plan! It's a lot more that a lot of people.

Please don't be like these people, start saving now, live frugally and you can make it. You don't need as much as you think.

What's your number?

Why do you need that much?

Is there a different way I haven't thought of??

Living Differently

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 14:43:00 GMT

My wife to be and son are napping at the moment so I thought I would take the time to type something up that I've been thinking about over the last two or three days.

It all started with Maria's post over at the Money Principle, a great article that made me look differently at the Marxist theory. I then stumbled upon the art of non-conformity, another great article about how people don't understand, from flicking through Maria's "Money blogs" links.

I still love the fact that Maria is flustered by my milk and caviar comment from one of her old posts. I still can't understand how she thinks £120k is "enough". That's where the second article came in. Maybe she just doesn't understand the route a lot of people are now taking.

People aren't just looking to make small changes anymore, a lot of people really want a wholesale upending of everything they do. Maybe because they're bored of their work, or where they live or they are just sick of the day to day of broken Britain.

So maybe it's time to take the advice of the non-conformists. Maybe looking at life from a different angle is required.

A zero based budgeting approach comes to mind, whereby we scrap the budgeting tools we've used before and start with a blank page. What do we really NEED in our lives.

Humans usually need a few basics, water, food, shelter. Everything else are things we add for comfort or at the extreme greed.

So maybe we shouldn't start looking to reduce our mortgage rate, or look to save on our car insurance, we should probably look at cheaper places to live other than houses and maybe start thinking about getting rid of the car altogether.

These are the kinds of changes that can turn an ordinary person into an early retiree or at least someone that is not forced to go to work to fund a lifestyle beyond their own means.

That is the kind of person that for me has really got life sorted in their own head, they’ve no need for superfluous items and their comforts come from within.

This kind of lifestyle leans itself to one where families spend more time with each other and learn how to do things for themselves rather than outsourcing at higher costs. Where skills are nurtured from an early age and progress with each passing project, without being put aside because we’re “late for Corrie”!

I looked at my own budget took out mortgage, car, and media costs and immediately my spending went from 80% of my wages down to 42%. This budget still leaves room for luxuries. With a savings rate like that I could retire in 11 years, which seems like a long time, but I am earning a sixth of that £120k and supporting 3 people!

Sounds pretty awesome to me, just imagine if I could double my salary… it drops to 6 years! As Paul Whitehouse once said… BRILLIANT!!

Of course this is unfortunately a pipe dream until I can convince the other half to move to a narrow boat and cycle everywhere ;)

Gaining some reflectionment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:23:00 GMT

Look around you, it's not just a wacky TV show with Peter Serafinowicz, it's a way to reflect on what you do and have.

I don't know about you but I like to do this at times of change in my life and at specific intervals, usually my Birthday and New year (it helps that my Birthday is half way through the year).

So I've just had quite a major change in my life, I've become a Dad.

I have to say it's great so far*. I could never have thought I would love anyone this much. It has also made me feel a lot closer to my partner (maybe it's because it feels like it's me and her going through it all together).

It also brings with it financial pressures and this requires some refocusing.

Gaining some refocusment.

I've reassessed some of our goals and think some new ones are in order along with rejiggling my priorities.

As you may have noticed this blog has taken a bit of a back seat since January. I'd like to focus more on it, but I simply haven't had the time. I think my original goal of posting once fortnightly is acceptable. I have a growing list of posts I want to write and want to get these started and done asap.

As for publicising this blog, it seems to be going ok. I had a bit of trouble setting up a Facebook page. So that's definitely somewhere I could improve. As you can see to the right, the tweeting seems to be going ok.

The only other thing I'm not doing is learning any html / programming. I have been looking into courses in coding and hope to give it a go soon.

My new hopes.

Firstly I hope to encourage the health, education and happiness of my child and family. It cannot be understated how much this is paramount for me.

Next the pursuance of a higher income, whether that is through my day job, blog income, or another side hustle. This is mostly to counter the reduction in income from moving to a one income family, although with our spending habits aligned and refocused I am happy that we can live on our current income. It’s just that it doesn’t leave much room for fun, or investing in our future. So an extra bit of cash would definitely help to push this forward.

I’m looking forward to and already enjoying the longer days we’re having. Although damn you British weather if you’re not inconsistent! Snow last Monday! Then looking outside today it’s incredibly sunny, yet step outside and you immediately need some kind of fleecy wrapping to ensure all the warmth isn’t stripped from your t-shirt wearing body.

And Finally…

There’s a lot things I’ve been doing right for a long time now, I don’t have any out of control costs to kill my savings. This is a massive change from where I was 6/7 years ago. It’s nice to look back and see a change for the positive.

It’s also nice to have a lot to look forward to. So let’s go get em and hit them where it hurts.

* Apart from the sleep deprivation, that is one thing I don’t think I will ever get used to.

Photo: Paul Anderson

In the long run, you're going to be ok

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:46:00 GMT

I've noticed a bit of a theme on a couple of blogs, house buying and it's associated costs. I agree with them both, buying a house is one of the biggest decisions you'll make in your life. That's why you should take your time over it. Don't be put off if someone swoops in and buys the one you had your eyes on from under you.

It's not the end of the world. Also, although it is relevant to have a sizeable deposit and cash available for fees. This isn't the most important thing.

So what is? You have to make sure your buying a HOME, put aside the money for a few minutes (it won't make you happy anyway), this building you're buying is going to be the place you spend most of your life in from now on. Yes a lot of it you'll be asleep for but nonetheless it needs to be right.

Growth

So your buying a place with your new husband/wife, maybe your going to want an extra room or two? What's that I hear the distant patter of footsteps?

Got a love for cars / building insane stuff make sure you have access to a garage. Or even better some space to build one!

Training to become an Olympic swimmer? Maybe an indoor pool would be of use.

The point

Anyway the point is don’t get too wrapped up in the price you pay for a home. Yes, ideally you get it at market rate, but paying a few extra thousand isn't going to break the bank, as long as you are happy to stay there for a long time.

This is the kicker. If you are forced to sell the house due to having / wanting to move in a short space of time you open yourself up to a whole host of bad things.

Like the market moving in the wrong direction, or having to lower the price to bring a quick sale.

Moving again will also add on the transaction costs. Mortgage fees, removal vans, solicitors, it all adds up. It can really be a drain on your short term finances and stop you getting where you want to be.

Holding on to the property for a bit longer can help you increase your net worth as well. Paying down your mortgage will reduce your liability whilst the general increase in the value of property over the long term will increase the value of your asset.

At the end of the day, your probably quite intelligent and you know this all ready, so it’s really down to me to say, don’t take the first quote given for anything, always shop around and remortgage to a lower rate whenever it is viable to do so.

These methods will help you to reduce your mortgage expense as quickly as possible. Then when your mortgage free, the fun begins!

Well that's the plan anyway :D

Do you have any other tips I've missed?

If you got stuck having to sell at a loss what would you do?

Picture by: The truth about

The Banter Requirement

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:44:00 GMT

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It's a time of opportunities! So having this in mind I made a few changes.

The small win first. My broadband / phone. I'm currently with Sky for both of this. There service is alright, I've never had much downtime on anything. There prices aren't too bad either.

One thing that has annoyed me though, they continually raise their prices! Mine has increased by 21% this year! That is a little bit above inflation.

Then they have the audacity to ring me to try and sell me other services! Don't they know we're in recession?!

Well, I'm having none of this. So I asked the nice lady if there was any way to reduce my bills. So she puts me through to a nice guy who turns out to be from just down the road from me, he goes through my bill with me and as I already knew, he can't give me any savings either, not without reducing my service anyway. Which isn't good enough realy is it. Considering they are shafting me for an extra 21% more a month! The nice man mentions that using the good old, "I'm gonna leave unless you give me some money off" tactic might help. Then puts me through to cancellations, the lovely Juliet in Edinburgh. Again after five minutes of going through my account she offers me 10% off my bills for the next 12 months. Not exactly the best thing considering the 21% INCREASE! But hey, I've already been on the phone for half an hour and am getting bored. So I wished her a happy new year and moved on with my life.

The good thing about letting them ring me and using this opportunity to reduce my bills is that I don't have to pay for the call! Normally I'd have to ring an 0845 number which from my mobile can be up to 45p a minute. This call could have cost me £13.50! This money is better off in my pocket and I'm happy to keep it there.

The other bigger win was with my mobile. I'm probably the same as most of you and had a mobile phone for a long time now. To be honest I've been paying over the odds for the service I get. So I thought I'd shop around. My contract actually ran out on Christmas Day which is handy and I've seen quite a good deal, with a free spanking new phone - OOOH! So I rang T-mobile my current provider, they said they can't compete with that and put me through to disconnections. Fair enough I thought, and was planning my trip to Tesco.

The helpful lady at disconnections asked what the deal was, again repeated that they couldn't compete but asked for 5 minutes to speak to their third party provider chitterchatter, she then duly rang me back and announced that the deal could be beaten, they will do more minutes, more texts, more internet for less a month. Ermmm....ok!

So end result I'm saving almost £10 a month from my mobile alone. To make this money I'd need £5628 ( basically a full cash ISA) earning 2% interest.

To get these savings I've just had to do a bit of research, then ring them (or let them ring me), being willing to leave makes it easier. Then just have a chat, make sure they realise your a person, not just a phone call - ask them how they are. Have some Banter with them - calling the guy from Derbyshire a sheep shagger on New Year's Eve seemed to help! Relate to them, they called me at work, so I asked if it was busy, I told them I was at work - I knew it wouldn't be we could both relate to this.

The fact that just having a bit of banter with someone on the end of the phone has saved me this much money is a huge win for me.

I'm going to be doing more of this, think home/car insurance, mortgage. hopefully these larger expenses will bring larger rewards.

Here's to the new year, bring it on buddy!

Stay well

Dom

Image: By Jon Sullivan

Awesome

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:10:00 GMT

If you know me or if you've read much of this blog, you'll understand how awesome I am. I'm not perfect but I'm well on the way.

One of the biggest things to help me along this path to (near) perfection has been to change the way I think about things.

I've mentioned before that finding the right motivation is key. But also you have to have a belief in yourself - sometimes this may come off as bravado (see above), this is usually the result of achieving a lot of your goals. I've found that this feeling multiplies with every goal achieved until you have your very own shield of self belief.

Do you have some nay sayers that are always bad mouthing your frugal ways? HA! Watch them eat their words as your next self-made project comes to fruition and watch your shield grow. Be careful not to rub this new found awesomeness in any ones face, in fact take time to help people grow their own ego shield. It will give you an enormous sense of well being.

I'm currently looking at my next project. Project wedding and baby. They seem to be coming along okay. But I think they need a shot in the arm. One of the more ambitious aspects, making and sending out the 100+ invites has come to an inescapable impasse. Unfortunately this is wholly my fault. The only limiting factor is my laziness.

Yes, I freely admit I'm almost perfect however not all the time. When I'm on my game I can beat anyone, but when I'm in a lazy mood, well, nothing get's done. In fact this whole blog has really been a productivity drain. It is pretty enjoyable though.

Anyone got any tips to get me off my arse?

Stay well,

Dom

Well done!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 12:26:00 GMT

Source: Wikimedia commons

A lot of bloggers this time of year are doing their yearly reviews. I think I've already covered most of my good news and my plans for the coming year. So I guess I'll cover current affairs.

You may or may not have realised that the end of the world didn't happen yesterday as "predicted". I'm glad because I wouldn't have been able to read Monevator's great round up, the highlight for me - "Everyone likes money" - I think we can all at least agree on that.

The other blog I wanted to point out was mortgagefreeby30, who not only completed his challenge in amazingly quick time, but was also one of the inspirations behind this blog. Well done! Mike has worked really hard on a side hustle, to help him pay off his mortgage. What's next for him? Holidays and a well earned rest I think!

Make it count.

So what's the next step? I've been thinking a lot about whether retiring early is really what I want to do. I think it's a difficult decision to make with the thick end of 70 years in front of me. So I'll just let future Dom worry about it.

For now I'm still going to concentrate on living well and on a lot lower level of consumerism than the average Joe.

The new focus will be making each pound count. This thought came to me after talking about Christmas shopping.

Someone told me I was a scrooge for setting spending limits on peoples presents. I tried to educate them in the ways of frugal living. Obviously they didn't get it, FI/RE didn't appeal to them (how would I afford my trip to Disney Land?! WAH WAH).

So I tried a different tack - not wasting money - squeezing every penny from every pound. Getting exactly your money's worth, if not more! This means not wasting and maybe accepting all the good stuff that comes with this.

Another benefit of living this way is the change in mindset. You are no longer thinking oh I'll get so and so this jokey gift, they'll think it's hilarious. You start thinking, this joke gift would be hilarious but after 5 mins it would be binned, maybe this useful gift would help them out with that problem they were talking about, or maybe even - hmm, they don't really need anything maybe I'll just focus on cooking a really excellent meal that will be enjoyed by all. Or get a good board game that can get all the family involved in some banter and maybe even let us turn the TV off for half an hour.

Installing this kind of thought pattern has really helped me so far. Or should I say reinstalling? I believe this is what we all grow up having then as consumerism grinds down our conscious thought into the "what to buy nextathon" that is Christmas / sale shopping.

Anyway, hopefully this will be a little food for thought.

Enjoy your holidays.

Stay well.

Dom

Waste

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 22:16:00 GMT

Pic: By Tilo Hauke,

Waste, pretty much all of us are guilty of some kind or another. Whether it be the Christmas wrapping waste that piles up after all the presents have been ripped open.

Or maybe your just printing out some useless report at work which you don't really need.

When I think of waste I think of two things. Wasting time and wasting effort.

My time is very important to me, using my time usefully rather than sitting in traffic or working late for no benefit makes me happy. Happiness is what it's all about. So I want to waste time less.

I thought I had reached an impasse, I had become uber efficient, not just at work but at home. I was keeping up to date with the housework, I was seeing friends/family regularly. Then BAM! It hit's me again. Cold and flu like symptoms. I immediately feel terrible, my efficient ways get shoved to the side and I just want to curl up in bed and let the world pass me by.

A couple of paracetamol based lemon drinks and I'm feeling better but still not over it quite yet. So how to get rid of the build up of wasteful ways and waste items.

Firstly, clearout time - RECYCLE! Get rid of some crap, that always makes me feel better, even better shove it on ebay, get a couple of quid for that book/cd etc. It's worth the walk to the post box alone.

Get creative, spice things up in the kitchen, this time of year the winter veg can really start getting on your tits, so bust out some Mexican flavour! Get some fajitas on the go, they're easy - cooked chicken in a bit of chilli powder and whack them in some wraps with a bit of lettuce and some tomatoes. Hey grate some cheese on it for an exuberant finish (I must be hungry).

Walk / jog / run / cycle - EXERCISE! Get your arse out of the house, I know it's cold, wrap up! Walk to the local shop/pub treat yourself to a quick half, you'll walk off the calories on the way home and it won't break the bank. If you cant indulge at Christmas when can you?

Stop procrastinating, you've been putting off the washing up / hoovering because you've been feeling all poorly, well suck it up boyo, stop thinking about doing it and JUST DO IT. It won't be half as bad or take half as long as you think it will.

See, now do you feel better? No? Well at least you'll sleep.

Stay well

Dom

Is one income for a family enough?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 17:38:00 GMT

I've been thinking more and more about the past recently. Mainly on how it has affected my family.

After having a few conversations with my Dad over the last week or two, it became apparent how little I know about the country and even the town I grew up in before I was about 16-17 years old and started paying a bit more attention (not a lot of attention).

The growth of standards of living have gone up enormously. I would say most people in Britain now live in houses that have some kind of heating. This wasn't so up to even 20 years ago.

I couldn't even fathom this. I took it completely as a given that everyone had heating, electric lights and a power shower*!

Then you start thinking about other "technologies" that have bedded themselves in just in my lifetime (I'm still young I tell thee!), think of mobile phones, solar panels, efficient cars.

I remember growing up, not that long ago, in the mid 90's having to wait for my sister to finish her phone call on the landline so I could ring my friend. This is completely unheard of now. You just whip out your mobile and bam, text your friend, send them a picture of a particularlly long cat or whatever.

You can even speak to a friend in Australia whilst walking through the countryside of Cumbria (if you can get signal). Come on, that is amazing.

I guess we take these things as read now.

Anyway, back to my point. Have these technological advancements increased the costs of the standard persons life.

Well there's one thing I can see stick out like a sore thumb. How many couples do you know now, where both of them work full-time, I would say over 95% of the people I know do and hate it!

Do they do it because they are chasing Financial independence and want to retire early? No, is it because they love their work and wouldn't give it up for BILLIONS OF DOLLARS? Nope.

It's because if they didn't both work they couldn't afford to live. It's as simple as that. You now have single mums working full-time to fund their child care costs. Couples working 80-100 hours a week between them to try and afford the wedding they just have to have.

So are we better off than my parents generation? Yeah! We live in comfy ass homes where you flick a switch for heat, with fancy insulation that retains the heat and drive a car EACH to our jobs that we want to try and excel in because goddamnit I am good at this.

But if I could swap for one of us working a 40 hour week, not having a mobile/laptop/internet/abroad holidays and having every weekend free, to give my other half a rest because the kids have been running riot all week. I would in a heartbeat.

I think as much as possible, I'm going to cut out that excess crap until I'm at the "bare minimum" for living a modern life. But am riding a rocket ship compared to peoples lives in the 80-90's.

Hopefully, these technological advances that seem to have turned us into a nation of workaholics can be kept at bay with a little effort and a little thought and I can live well, because really that's all that matters.

Stay well,

Dom

* A power/electric shower is one of my necessities for life, along with double glazing and love :D

picture: longcat

Save Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 16:51:00 GMT

You may have noticed a theme to my recent posts, that's right Christmas has arrived in my house!!

For a few reasons, you might be able to spot one above. We put it up this weekend. I know, it's not even December! But still it's fun isn't it. I've also set up my Christmas playlist and have been listening to that pretty much none stop.

Love the waitresses:

(not the official video)

Anyway back to the topic at hand MONEY.

At this time of year we all start thinking of gifts. Well some of us do, the rest have been thinking about them ALL YEAR!

That's right, I set my budget for this Christmas back when the snow was falling last January. So I'm not exactly sure how realistic it will be.

What I do know is I put a measly £15 - 20 a head into the budget. Too tight? I don't think so!!!

Let's see what we can do.

Well as it turns out I'm not the only one in the family thinking frugally. We were invited round to my in-laws (to be), after a lovely meal with the family we got round to talking about what the plans were for Christmas. Sometimes we go to them, or my parents or we have them to us.

Anyway they have been a little down on their luck this year, with some injuries causing them to take extended sick leave and various changes of jobs also between the family members. So it turns out that they have decided instead of buying everyone gifts they are going to do Secret Santa. Which means instead of me and my partner buying for the whole family, we've been secretly nominated to buy for just two of them.

To cap it off they have imposed a spending limit of £25 per person. This has helped immensely! So instead of 4 presents at ~£20 each, its now £50 total.

I think this is a fab idea, not only does it help cut down on all the over enthusiastic consumerism surrounding Christmas, but no one is left out AND because each person is only buying one gift they can concentrate on making it the BEST GIFT EVER!

So I was all set to go shopping. Had a few other errands to do which just about made taking the car a respectable decision.

Spoke to my sister on the way in for gift ideas for her, she said she wants me to go halves with my brother on a DAB radio, she knew how much the one she wanted was and still insisted on it.

YES! Finally frugality has come to the forefront of everyone's thinking. It's been one of the cores of my thinking for over a year now. How I wish i could have found it earlier.

Any way. Back to buying thoughtful gifts and wishing well.

On a broadening your mind note before I go, Charles Dickens a Christmas Carol is currently free on amazon for kindle / kindle apps. So get out that ereader / smartphone and get some reading done. It's surprisingly short but massively heart warming!

Update: For those without kindle/ smartphone you can get a christmas carol in various formats on project gutenberg, including an audio version. Both are free downloads, that Gutenberg project is totally mega and I would definitely say it's worth having a look through. Can't hurt if it's free can it?!

Stay well ("and know me better man!")

Dom

5 things to get your significant other for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:30:00 GMT

So continuing the 5 things series, let's get all Christmassy. I have the fire turned on, I am in my dressing gown. So let's all snuggle up together and think of lovely gifts that can be enjoyed by that special person in your life.

Obviously I am not going to encourage you to increase the gruesome level of consumerism that is already upon us, these will be more esoteric gifts. Ones to stimulate their brains rather than to satisfy a passing whim.

1. Encourage their passion.

There is nothing better than someone getting on your side and thinking about what you really want. So if your significant other (SO) loves to read, or paint or whatever, encourage it. Positive progress is always good.

2. Help them make a change.

Is your partner stuck in a job they hate? Still smoking 20 a day and getting a bad cough? Maybe they can't bring themselves to ask for a pay rise or simply tell that idiot in the office to shut the fuck up. Help them, a small gesture of goodwill like telling them you believe in them and that you know they have it in them to make that change can be all the encouragement they need.

3. Inspire them to save money

I believe saving money is the cornerstone to leading a well lived life. It brings with it freedom, freedom from consumerism, freedom from debt and freedom to spend money actively. This will help them to relieve stresses caused by money niggles (interest charges on credit cards) and give them a better nights sleep. Making them a happier and more positive person.

4. Encourage work on a side hustle

As I mentioned above saving brings freedom with it. Having a side hustle can give you extra money and provide that longed for purpose that your day job doesn't fulfil. Maybe someday you'll earn enough from this side income to quit the day job and take it up full time. Or it may just come as a nice little add on to the usual paycheque helping to pay for lifes emergencies / indulgences.

5. Tell them the goals that you want to achieve with them.

Sometimes sharing with your SO the things you would like to do with them can be the best thing of all. Always wanted to see Uluru? How much better would it be with her/him right by your side. Creating memories for you to share til your grey and old. If your grey and old already you can always tell the grand-kids!

I hope this helps you realise that the best part of Christmas giving isn't really the gifts. It's really down to the love that you try to embody in presents. You don't really want to give gifts, you just want to see the look on their face as they open it.

5 Things series, starter for 10!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 12:21:00 GMT

I've always wanted to have a nice little series of posts that can have awesome bullet points (Love bullet points).

So here we go the 5 things series.

Starter for 10 as Paxo loves to say, isn't actually ten things I hope that hasnt confused you.

Let's start of small hey. Maybe.... 5 things that would make the world brilliantly awesome and save the planet!!!!!!

1. Stop all motor sport.

Why? Think of all the fuel / money wasted and technological advances that have come about through just F1 racing. If this amount of thought had gone into solar panels I think there wouldn't be an energy crisis.

Why it's unrealistic. People LOVE motorsport. My first thought whenever someone says this, is it really a sport? I think it's more of a competition. There's skill yes and you have to be physically fit, but surely there are better ways of spending BILLIONS of pounds each year.

2. Don't allow private jets to fly.

Why? Does it matter that you get somewhere that much quicker? Can you not just get a 1st class flight? Again think of all the wasted BILLIONS on flights for one or two people, how inefficient and wasteful. There doesn't seem to be any reason to have a private jet.

Why it's unrealistic. They see me rollin' they hatin' . This mentality is so basic. If you have no idea what that means, basically the rapper thinks people are jealous of him because of his money. Well just to let you know, I don't care.

3. Have more national holidays.

Why? Holidays are awesome! In a lot of families the holidays (Christmas/Thanksgiving) are the only times that everyone gets together. There should be more of this! Spread the love.

Why it's unrealistic. Businesses want Money, to get more money they work longer hours or more days. This means less holiday, boohoo.

4. Free broadband for all.

Why? BROADBAND IS AWESOME, wi-fi is awesome. It should be available to everyone, for free.

Why it's unrealistic. Rolling out broadband is pretty expensive. Someone has to pay for it unfortunately. So either you can pay your monthly subscription, or the government could pay for it and tax you more. BOO!

5. Your only allowed to get one present at Christmas (in total).

Why? Everyone is uber-spoilt over the Christmas period. There is a lot of pressure to get EVERYONE the BEST presents ever. People even go into debt to be able to afford to buy their family presents. Enough is enough, 1 present for each person. It's like secret Santa but for the world is how I envisage it. I can tell your worried that this one present will be crap right? Well no, if everyone only has one person to buy for, then they can put all the thought into that one.

Why it's unrealistic. People are stupid, they think that Christmas is a time for treats and not a time for thinking. STOP BUYING STUFF YOU CAN'T AFFORD! Even if it is a present! It doesn't matter.

So once I am KING OF THE WORLD, I will implement these 5 things and the world will be sorted in a jiffy.

Or maybe we could all just be a bit more thoughtful in life, cut down on the amount of fuel we waste, reduce our fancy pants holidays to reduce wasted plane journeys, prioritise our family above sitting in front of the tv and cut down on the number of people we buy superfluous gifts for.

Is it that difficult? Not really if we think about things a bit more.

Stay well.

Dom

P.S. Did you spot I didn't use bullet points? Maybe I don't love them that much.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boklm/486646486/

Thinking Net

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT

It's a common mistake and something I've only recently come to. Thinking net is really the big concept behind all things purchasing / income generating.

To explain more I saw a post a couple of weeks back either Retweeted by the savvy scot or by Elaine. I can't seem to find it at the moment so if you know of it please drop me a comment.

Anyway, it was all about how you must to think about how much your life will improve by overall not just the initial hit, which normally leads to buyers remorse or impulse buying.

I'm not explaining this very well let's get an example going:

Rob over at SEI (who is great btw) was rather candid about his wages recently. So I'll use him :D. He says he earns £18k a year, not too shabby for his first job out of Universtiy I thought, but I bet some of you are thinking - how the hell does he live on that.

So maybe Rob goes looking for another job. At the moment he has quite a low cost of living. But he goes chasing the big bucks (possibly with $ / £ signs in his eyes?) in the big old city of London. He can easily get a job here earning £25k say. Wow you might be thinking or kerching at least! But let's think this through a second.

At the moment he saves £7.5k a year, a phenomenal amount! But say he's now living in London, his after tax on £25k will be £19532 , his student loan contributions will knock him down to £18632.

He's put accomodation down as ~25% of his total costs. This will unfortunately skyrocket. London prices are ridiculous. A room in a house will cost you £500 a month or more (source: rightmove.co.uk). This will push his costs up from ~£3600 (which includes gas/elec/council tax!) to say £35 a month gas/elec (if he's sharing a house I think that's fair enough) + £500 for the room + his share of council tax/water say £50 a month. Which is £7020 a year. Crikey! Almost doubled.

So we're down to £11,612, if we say a 5% increase on the other costs/ food costs that's £3055. That leaves him with £8557.

Woohoo! He is Just over £1000 better off A YEAR!

If you can't tell that's sarcasm it's time to start watching blackadder again.

Don't forget this means he has no transport costs. After speaking to a friend he averages £30 a month, which seems to be about right, although I'm sure Rob would walk or cycle half the time at least. So say £15 a month for him. This brings that £7k payrise down to a paltry £877. Yes he has increased the amount he saves a year.

But only by £73 a month. In the mean time he has had to move house, misses all his great northern friends and will probably have to learn cockney. I feel sorry for him and he hasn't even done it!

This is what thinking Net really is, taking into account the total of the costs that changes in your life make. Not just the initial savings or increases in income.

Obviously this thought process ignores the fact that Rob is awesome at saving money. Also that you will probably start earning more as you get more experienced at work, sometimes you have to pay your dues first.

But this thinking net holds true for other items in life that are supposed to save you money. Like wood burning stoves.

Stay well

Dom

What's it for?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 08:00:00 GMT

There are several reasons I have started myself on a path to financial independence. But above all I would say that it is my own pursuit of happiness.

I first became aware of the real meaning of happiness when I read Aristotle's ethics. I have to say at 15 I didn't really get it. Why would I want to not pursue the latest gadget like the (then) newly arrived mobile phones. Why would I waste my time exploring nature and learning; when there are pretty girls to ~~be turned down by~~ woo.

But now I still don't fully get it, hey I'm no philosopher! What I have got out of it and what it's taken me so long to realise is that happiness is really all there is in life. If you are doing something that is not making you happy or inversely not doing something that would make you happy, something has gone wrong.

It finally dawned on me about 7 years ago that this was the case. I was sitting at home with a hangover after yet another night on the town ~~being turned down by girls~~ wooing young ladies. I realised that it isn't worth it.

Not the wooing young ladies part. But wooing these particular ladies. They haven't realised yet that the bar scene is ultimately completely unfulfilling and just moves your hard earned cash from your pocket into the local pub/club's. Whilst leaving you dehydrated and with a slightly larger beer belly than when you started.

Then I decided to think about the things that are really important to me.

Family
Friends
Partner
Children

Not necessarily in that order. So I thought what can I tackle first. Being single I couldn't really start thinking about children so I started actively trying to spend more time with my friends and family. Before I always let myself be approached, now I try to arrange meet ups, especially if I haven't seen people in a while.

What really got me was the quote: "Never let the grass grow long on the path to your friends house" I don't know who said it but it's awesome. Love it.

I also realised that none of these things were necessarily to do with money. Yes, I might need to be able to buy petrol to get around. But it's not like I buy my friends or I can buy a loving partner.

So as money is not a big thing for me, I decided to try and utilise it as best I could.

Long story short, it didn't work for years!!! Not because it was the wrong thing to do but because I wasn't being conscious of my spending. So I started tracking my spending. To some degree it worked. I cut back a little. It really wasn't until I started reading Mr Money Mustache that I realised how much I was wasting. Not just my money, but my time as well.

So I have renewed myself, I am stringent and conscious of my spending at all times. It makes me realise all the alternatives available to me and how much better they are. Just a little thought before purchasing can create a lot of spare cash.

Which can then be saved, compounded and used to become financially independent. This will then allow me to spend more of my time on the things I love. In the mean time I'm going to do all I can to use my time productively to increase my happiness whilst minimising my unnecessary spending to the reduce the time it will take to reach the FI milestone.

This life is now the norm for me and I have to say that I feel a lot more content than with the one I had before.

Stay well.

Dom

Great Work!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:43:00 GMT

Goals. I'm sure we all have a lot of them.

As you may have seen, I've been tracking mine for a while now and I think it's about time I started celebrating. Sure, it's no the time to indulge myself. But I have hit a lot of my (short-term) goals.

It's been about 6 months maybe more since I started the £250 challenge, and I have to say it's going great.

For the first time in my life I have savings - (maybe only for a short time) but it's enough to make me think that if I carry on like this, with improvements in my still quite unfrugal budget (Mobile phone!!) then I could really make that big life changing step and retire before I'm 50.

So how have I done it? Well to be honest I couldn't really tell you, it's the little things. Shopping around for car/ home insurance saved me ~£300, getting a cheaper gas/electric contract probably another £200 and other things I can't even remember.

But the biggest change that's really been with me from the start (so I guess not a change?) is just trying to live below my means. I've always shopped at Aldi rather than the big super market (own brand beans taste loads better!!). I've always rather put a jumper on than stick the heating on, it's just the way I am.

Not to say that I don't enjoy treating myself, I love a good quaff of beer now and then. It's not such a big priority to me anymore as it used to be.

So if you're struggling with reaching your financial goals, give yourself a little credit for how well your doing. It is definitely worth it to keep going. Hey guess what it can make you find things about yourself you didn't even know (I'm now a pretentious blogger, who knew?!).

Stay well

Dom

Indulgences / Temptation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:00:00 GMT

It seems Briton is spending itself rotten at the moment who would have thought we're only just out of recession.

So I thought I'd get involved!! But in my own way. I love indulging my thoughts having a look through the latest gadgets, or maybe some new shoes. But the difference is I have the mindset that I can't afford these things.

Why can't I afford them? Am I really poor. Well no, I have a good job. I earn a decent amount, I've worked hard to get where I am and I hope am going to get further up the career ladder.

So? What's the problem? Why aren't you busting down the road in your brand new puma's or writing this on the new ipad 3 with 4G technology?

Well... there is a problem I have to admit. I cannot bring myself to spend my hard earned on such frivolous things, especially when I have much more important things in my life.

Like what? You might be thinking, you've worked hard, treat yourself go on! Worked hard? How can you measure that. Yes I think I have worked hard, maybe a little too hard, but I always think I could have done so much more. How can I justify treating myself? I don't think I can. I already have so much.

Come on people. When you were 8 would you have ever believed that you would be walking round with a star trek style communicator that allows you to talk to someone on the other side of the world!!!! If I think about it I kind of can't believe it now. I think it works through pixie dust though!!

Maybe I am already treating myself, I cook up yummy meals for myself every night and get to hang out with really cool friends and my life is generally pretty awesome. Would it be improved with the latest gadget? I think not.

I love looking though.

How to solve Burnout: describe, identify - resolve

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 21:04:00 GMT

Burnout has occurred. It crept up on me over a couple of months.

It's multiple things that have added up, work, money, home (keeping house - tidying up etc), crappy weather. So I've decided to rest, recuperate (hibernate?).

Really I should be looking as this as an opportunity. Something isn't working in my life!

So describe the problem:

Working late = makes me tired
Come home late = too tired to tidy house
No cleaning = compounding mess
Massive clean up on weekends = less time to relax and catch up on rest
Less rest time = more tired
This becomes cyclical with less and less time to rest.

So identify the actual problem(s) from this:

Working late
Too much stuff to clean in house

Now I just need to work out how to fix it.

1. Working late - we're a bit hectic at the moment, this will calm down over the next couple of weeks. Taking regular breaks will help as well.

2. Too much stuff - we're in the process of reinventing our lives as we are becoming parents. For us this means clearing out a lot of old junk (think an entire rooms worth!) and giving ourselves new wants/needs. Like millions of nappies!

Then implement.

Easier said than done I guess. But let's see how it goes.

Pic: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burnout.jpg

Looking for a side hustle

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

What a weekend it's been. The weather has been crap, mostly. So like a lot of people it has made me look inward.

I've pretty much got my budget in order, so what next?

Well as MMM says, it's spending and income or income and spending. So income then. I'm pretty settled in my job. Ha guess what I'm not paid enough though! So I could either work harder on cutting my costs, or get a side hustle!!

Side hustles can range from a fully blown part-time job, which works well for some, to earning a few quid filling in questionnaires.

I've done both in the past and enjoyed neither very much. Probably because I have this little thought constantly ticking along in my head that I'm worth more!! $25 doesn't seem like that much though, I was thinking more like £50.

So what side hustles could stand up to my (probably inflated) sense of worth? Well £50 translates to £104k a year. I think earning that much is probably a little out of my league at the moment. Unless I break it down.

So today I did some painting. No, I'm not the new Van Gogh, it was more for decoration purposes. So what's this got to do with side hustles? Well I had a look on myhammer and to paint a four bedroom flat they were quoting £1000! Shit I thought, I effectively saved that much today. Although we did only one room, so only £250, but how long did it take us? 5 hours, woohoo that's £50 an hour! Where's the champagne?

Yes, this is simplistic, it ignores the cost of the paint we bought and there was two of us doing it.

So maybe not quite living the dream yet, but I guess it depends on your dream.

Crazy rates

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I don't have much experience in buying houses, I've bought one in my life and I didn't even get that totally right. I probably paid a little too much for it, it's not in the best location in the world and it still needs a bit of work doing to it.

I do feel at home here though. I've lived here for almost 2 years and I thought I got a pretty decent mortgage rate when I got my 2 year fixed deal.

But this was back before I realised all the stupid mistakes I was making with money. So I thought I'd start looking around for new mortgage rates.

So what should I go for? With rates so low it's tempting to try and lock in a long term deal. But this strategy seems to mean I have to pay a premium in the short term to possibly protect me IF rates rise. Is this the best way to go? Then you have to ask yourself when will the base rate rise, this article says 2018!!

So why not a tracker? It will let me take immediate advantage of the low rates, allowing me to pay more capital and knock a few years of the mortgage. Sounds good! But then I would have to pay more if rates rose.

As the above article "guesses" rates aren't going to rise dramatically (although it also shows that they have done by 6% or more in just a matter of years), so a tracker would seem to be the way to go. It allows me to take advantage of the current low rates, gain more capital and not be affected if rates rise slightly over the next few years.

The problem is I hate having that little stress bug sitting on my shoulder constantly getting me to check what the swaps rates are doing, also with my present situation of a baby on the way and a possible job change in the short term a bit of stability could be exactly what I need (although extra cash would be handy too!).

All it really comes down to is me being a big wussypants and preferring to protect myself against the downside risk rather than take the risky short term profits.

Damn you possible regret!

Benchmarking

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Benchmarking is a process whereby you would compare a process in a company to the same process that another company undertakes. This could be any part of the customer experience, logistics, reporting methods, etc etc. It's done to find efficiency savings and hopefully money savings!

It's a complicated process which can be undertaken by getting companies to work together (unlikely!) or by using an independent agent to assess the companies that would like to take part without any of the possibly sensitive company information being leaked to rivals.

It is assumed that both parties will benefit equally from the process. Although I always believe one company will always benefit more than the other.

So what's this got to do with me I hear you asking. Well... after reading Maria's post on how comparing one person's budget to another is dumb, I was a little shocked! I have always found looking at other people's budgets quite enthralling. You can really get a feel for someone's passions from what they spend their cash on. You can sometimes learn a thing or two, or be inspired. The last one is where I normally sit, because I go, how the heck do they spend that little on that.

It's not just budgets either, it's when I'm speaking to people. A few months ago my Dad told me about how his gas/elec bill is less than £40 a month. I was flabbergasted as mine has kept rising and rising over the months. So I pressed him for details and picked up some great tips in the process.

It's really this enquiring that brings about the results. So don't feel your being too nosy I'm sure plenty of people would love to share!

If you really want a kick up the backside why not compare yourself to Mr MoneyMustache, I exported the table to Excel and then divided all expenses by 1.6 to turn $'s - £'s I then noticed that in most cases I am pretty crap and the ones I was better than MMM were ones out of my control like the property taxes - although comparing taxes across different countries is probably silly anyway :D

For more information on benchmarking see wikipedia or check out your local library.

If you like this why not follow me on Twitter @domliveswell

Laugh

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 18:21:00 GMT

I had to laugh today, quite a few people were late into work today due to some bad traffic that had closed a road nearby. People were saying "oh dear, it took me over an hour longer to get into work today" so I asked how long in total they were in the car "oh, two hours, so I guess it wasn't that much more".

I sort of lost my cool and started laughing at them (very not cool of me I know, I'm sure karma will kick my ass for it later!)

Don't these people realise how much of their time they're wasting?

One person I talked to him and his wife commute over an hour each, each way! These people are incredibly intelligent people, they have both progressed in their careers to quite senior positions, what the hell do they think they're doing?

I also love the fact that they complain about how little time they get to spend with their kids. Or how they don't seem to sleep very well and don't know why!!

I must admit before I had my epiphany, I was the same as them. Now I've realised what a huge waste it is it actually gets me a little angry that these actions are allowed to take place.

Now I've realised don't get angry I can't force these people to do what I want, so instead I just laugh. Although I'll try not to do it right in their faces next time!

Oh well, we live and learn.

How to save 10 days a year

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I did something different today. I got stuck in traffic. It was the first time in ages, I was stuck for about an hour due to a burst water main.

As I sat there I got to thinking, this is a massive waste, not only are all these people stuck in cars unable to be productive, with all their engines running burning fuel, costing them more money, the environments being damaged, causing people to be late for meetings and getting them more and more stressed because they're late for the meeting or late home and miss seeing their kids before bedtime.

Why don't we stop it?

Why don't we all just say no to traffic jams. Why don't we say no to traffic full stop. Yes I realise people live far away from work. But I don't understand why they live far away? Why can't they just move closer so all this commuting malarkey would be at least reduced somewhat.

I was able to cut my own commute from 45 mins each way to a 15 minute car journey. Although I have to say I am being incredibly lazy at the moment and not cycling. It would only take me 20mins cycling and save me almost a thousand pounds in petrol alone a year. But on the bright side I've saved an hour a day that I don't have to commute. Doesn't sound like a lot does it? Well... if there are 250 working days a year and I have 22 days annual leave that saves me 238 hours a year! Is that a lot it just sounds like a random statistic there. Well... It's the same as 9.92 days. I have in effect increased my holiday time per year by almost 50%!!!

So what have I done with this extra time? Well I've spent it with loved ones, or catching up with old friends, occasionally I've worked late and still got home at the same time as I used to.

This all sounds very dull you might think but what if you had this much extra free time? You could volunteer, start a new part-time business, read to your kids, cook dinner with your significant other, just take some time to de-stress after work and chill the hell out. Hey you could start your own microbrewery (something I'm thinking of doing).

The possibilities are almost endless. So why not rethink where you live.