This is always the worst week of the month. It's the countdown to pay-day and it's when I start to get worried about whether or not I'll have enough in my current account to cover all my commitments. I've been especially worried this month after a. the shit show of last month and b. my outgoings have gone up with buying a car. I don't have any padding, I blew all my cash savings last month trying to cover all my post-Christmas direct debits so if it goes tits up this month then I am in the shit because I have no bail out.
I'm usually fairly organised about stuff like this. I made a table that works backwards from pay-day. It's a countdown that shows me what my balance needs to be in order to make it to the end of the month safely. But it still doesn't stop me worrying about it. All it takes is a couple of bad experiences to imprint that fear into you.
When my partner and I split up in 2014 I hit a similar rockbottom. It was maybe worse because I had all the expense of setting up a new home on my own with about three weeks notice to prepare for it. I reckoned at the time I was maybe around four weeks away from declaring bankruptcy. Even now, six years down the road and with being in a totally different place financially, I am still terrified of opening my bank account homepage. When I am entering my password and waiting for the page to load my anxiety is through the fucking roof.
Weirdly, I get paid on the 4th of each month. I don't know why. But according to my table, I've got about £300 in cash in my current account and about £200 in direct debits until the 4th. In theory, I'm going to make it with 100 quid to spare.
There are a couple of apps that I've started using that have really helped. One is Chip. I think I might have mentioned it in a previous post. You register your bank account on it, it says it uses AI to analyse your spending and works out how much money you can set aside. Every now and again you get a message saying that it's moved ten or fifteen quid into its holding account. So far this month it has put away £83.50. It's my money, I've not magiced it out of anywhere but it is nice to know that I've got a little pot sitting there. It's my first month with it so I've been keen to see how it actually pans out, whether it would blow my budget or not, but it seems to be working OK.
The other is Money Dashboard. You register your bank account and credit cards and it shows you an instant snapshot of what each account balance is. It's not fantastic, it's a bit slow to update, but it's useful to have. My main current account is a bit shit, it's a long log in process and the site isn't optimised for phone or tablet (and there is no app). I'd avoid checking my account regularly because of that (and partly because of my anxiety as mentioned above), Money Dashboard makes it less hassle. Open the app, refresh the display and there it is.
I know there is a lot of fuckery with apps like these. They are free. Why is that? The obvious answer is that your data and spending habits are a commodity. I can only assume that my spending behaviour is being sold on for some sort of analysis. In all honesty, I'm a skinflint twat so I doubt my data has much to offer. But it is important to bear in mind.
The other financial news was finally getting a new credit card. For years I never bothered applying because I would always get turned down or hit with a massive interest rate. So I just gave up and managed without. That's probably worked in my favour, I've not had any searches, no hits on my credit record. Out of interest I did a soft eligibility check and Virgin offered a Mastercard with 24 months zero percent on balance transfers and a £7000 credit limit. It shocked me as I thought my rating was in the bog.
I've got an Amex card with £1500 on it. I've been paying 50 quid a month and it barely makes a dent. At 0% interest then I'd clear it in a couple of years by just paying an extra tenner a month. Seems like a bargain so I transferred the £1500 to the new card. I'm doing fuck all else with it, I don't even carry it with me. The card stays in my finances box where it belongs. A credit card with plenty of space on it is a poison. It's like a cheap whore sitting in the corner of your living room all day, every day. I'm really ambivalent about having it, on the one hand it means I get to clear one of my existing cards but on the other it's a temptation I just don't need. Too easy to say "I'll stick it on the good credit card and sort it out later". "Later" never comes.
I'm still doing good on not spending a load on food shopping. I've done my own lunches for work every day except today. I was lazy, I wanted an extra ten minutes in bed.
Matched betting is still ticking over. The profits are hardly rolling in. A couple of quid here, a couple of quid there. Still unimpressed. I think the excitement of tracking down the right deal is more enjoyable than the tiny amounts of money being made.
This week's spending is £25.07 under budget so that is me up to £114.69. I don't know if I will sustain that this week. I'm going to see my parents this weekend with my daughter and that's a 400 mile round trip on top of everything else. I hardly see them because of the distance and they hardly see my daughter so I can't complain about it.
I've got another job interview next week. Supposedly pays decently but it's a bit of a trek and looks like harder work. One of my big gripes about where I am is that I don't feel valued. To my mind, if I have to work harder for more money in another job then that isn't them valuing me more, that's just me working harder. Kind of defeats the purpose of swapping jobs so I think I've written it off in my mind already.
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Fitness On The Cheap #1
I love working out. I have suffered from depression, anxiety and maybe a touch of PTSD over the year and nothing has touched any of that like exercise has. I also just love how it helps me do my daily life better. I'm going to do a series of 'Fitness on the Cheap' posts about how to get or stay fit without wasting a ton of money on bullshit gyms or equipment. Fitness suffers when you don't have any money and there's no real reason for it. So here it is, post #1 of Fitness On The Cheap.
I made a post the other day about shop-bought pasta sauce in jars. How it is cheap enough that you don't notice it but expensive enough that the manufacturer makes a good profit.
This is a key principle in selling shit to you that you do not need. For a few days it's made me start noticing where else I'm seeing it. One of those places is gym membership.
I like exercise and the value of fitness is maybe something for another post. I used to be a member of a gym, DW Fitness. It was around £36 a month. You don't really notice it in amongst all the other bills. But if you sit down and think about it, that's quite a lot of money over the year. Enough for a holiday.
The gyms count on you not realising that. It's also kind of well known that most people who take out gym memberships rarely use them. The gyms also count on that too. They need people not to go because if everyone did go they'd need a building three times the size. To make a profit they need to sell as many memberships as possible and run a gym that is as small as possible. So they want people not to go. Gyms like to pretend they are selling fitness. They aren't, they want you to not train. They want you to not come. They want you to stay unfit and keep paying the direct debit because, well, one day I'll sort it out...
There is a simple answer. Train at home.
There really isn't a huge need to join a gym for the average person. Another thing gyms like to do is have massive variety. Every piece of equipment under the sun is crammed into some old done-up industrial unit. They make you think you need it. If you want to get fit you have to have a... whatever.
You know what you need? You need to be able to just get up. That's it.
I've trained fairly hard for twenty five years. To hit a decent level of fitness you need a way of doing strength trainging, a way to do some cardio and a way to do some flexibility work. You can get all of that at home for free.
Cardio is the easiest thing to start with. You need some way of doing slow and steady and another of doing fast and intense. No-one needs the dozen different cardio machines in a gym. You absolutely do not need a treadmill (unless you're rehabbing an injury).
Slow and steady, just go for a walk. Putting one foot in front of the other for forty minutes is maybe the single greatest exercise ever devised. If you want to run then run. I'm not a fan of running but it's still great cardio. For intense, find a hill. Or some stairs. If you live in a house that has an upper floor then you have my favourite piece of exercise equipment: the staircase. Run up them and walk down, repeat. Do that 30 times and see how you feel. I guarantee no piece of gym equipment comes close to that workout.
Strength training is another gym con. All the shit that they have, all the machines, all the crap with cables and pulleys, none of that does you any real good. Most of that is fitness industry invention. The movements are unnatural, you need so many machines because each one only ever engages a tiny muscle group.
Take a look at a picture of maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world. Who wouldn't want to look like that? Well, maybe most women but you know what I mean. Ali never lifted a weight in his life. He was a testament to how you can build strength lifting nothing other than the weight of your own body.
Just to reiterate, you do not need all that crap in a gym to get strong. You won't become The Mountain but you can get strong enough for doing daily life for absolutely free.
There are hundreds of bodyweight training programmes out there. One I've used for years is Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym system. You can buy a secondhand copy for under 4 quid. It's great, it's simple and it isn't even that hard. Everything is done slow and controlled.
Another great resource is Onnit. They are an American company part-owned by Joe Rogan. They make supplements and exercise equipment but they also have a massive archive of articles on fitness. Go to the Onnit Academy page and you'll find tons of stuff on bodyweight training, all for free.
Flexibility is the third, and I think the most important part, of fitness. It doesn't matter how strong you are or how far you can run, if you can't turn your neck or stand up without your knees crunching then you are in trouble.
I love doing yoga. This is where I might actually break my mantra of "train at home": yoga classes are usually piss cheap. They are everywhere, from yoga studios to community centres. Spunking 4 or 5 quid once a week on a class is a nice treat. A little bit of coaching really is worth the money.
If that isn't an option then try You-Tube. One of my favourite channels is Yoga With Adrienne. She can be a bit annoying, does a bit too much of that yoga-speak bullshit, but she puts out a lot of decent content. Her 30 days of yoga beginners programme is great. I'll cycle through that a couple of times a year. You can pick up a mat for a couple of quid at Decathlon or Aldi or just use a towel. You don't really need anything else.
Sure there are downsides to training at home. The biggest is the lack of feedback. There is no coach but yourself. You need to really give attention to form and how you are doing everything. It is easy to get into bad habits. There's always the risk that you get injured on your own with no-one to help you out. What you'd need to be doing for that to happen I don't know but it's a risk. Maybe blow out a disk in your back or something, I don't know. You need to be really disciplined with it as well. For some people, and I was one of them, going to another place to train was a big part of gym membership. Especially when I was in a relationship I wasn't enjoying, going to the gym was my escape for a long time.
But I think training at home brings a lot more advantages than downsides. You save a ton of money. £35 a month is about average for a decent gym, that's £420 over the year. But you also have everything else associated with it. Three miles each way adds £150-£200 a year if you're driving and going to the gym five days a week. And as manky as it is, you don't necessarily need a new outfit for each day. Train at home and nobody cares if you wear the same t-shirt you did yesterday.
I really like the flexibility. I've got a garden with high hedges so I can go outside when the weather is nice. I can train whenever I want. I have less excuses: it's never a busy time, it doesn't matter if the traffic is bad. There's no hiding place, either. Gyms give massive opportunity to dick about, to wander around talking to people.
I love training. Fitness is sadly one of those things that tends to suffer with income: it's a rich person's game. Or at least portrayed that way. When you don't have a lot of spare cash then you end up with a lot of other baggage. Stress, depression, anxiety will all come your way at some point. It's too easy to medicate them with alcohol and shit food. Even just the food that is marketed to you encourages lethargy: pasta, rice, bread, sugar, processed shit. Hit you with an insulin spike so that all you want to do is sit in front of the TV. Maybe there is also the lack of good examples. If all you see around you is people living the same way then chances are you will live the same way.
I grew up in a fairly poor, working class area. Nobody went to a gym. When I was little, people had active, manual jobs. As I got older that changed and you saw the impact of that. More sedentary work, more unemployment. Sky TV, Playstations and the internet just hammered more nails into the coffin. Cheap, shit food and drink. Everything about having no money encouraged you stay on the couch. Everyone got fat and looking back that's really fucking sad.
But it really does not have to be like that. There is so much marketing bullshit to make you think that you need money to be fit. You don't, you absolutely don't. In fact, it makes me really fucking angry sometimes when I see how things like this get sold to the public.
You don't need money to get and stay fit. You can very easily achieve a really good level of fitness with absolutely no investment of money whatsoever. For me, I'd recommend the Mark Lauren book I mention above, do some walking, running or cycling and do a little bit of stretching or yoga from You Tube.
If you want to, you can also kit out a decent home gym for less than the cost of a year's membership to a commercial gym. I think my next fitness on the cheap post will be on that.
I made a post the other day about shop-bought pasta sauce in jars. How it is cheap enough that you don't notice it but expensive enough that the manufacturer makes a good profit.
This is a key principle in selling shit to you that you do not need. For a few days it's made me start noticing where else I'm seeing it. One of those places is gym membership.
I like exercise and the value of fitness is maybe something for another post. I used to be a member of a gym, DW Fitness. It was around £36 a month. You don't really notice it in amongst all the other bills. But if you sit down and think about it, that's quite a lot of money over the year. Enough for a holiday.
The gyms count on you not realising that. It's also kind of well known that most people who take out gym memberships rarely use them. The gyms also count on that too. They need people not to go because if everyone did go they'd need a building three times the size. To make a profit they need to sell as many memberships as possible and run a gym that is as small as possible. So they want people not to go. Gyms like to pretend they are selling fitness. They aren't, they want you to not train. They want you to not come. They want you to stay unfit and keep paying the direct debit because, well, one day I'll sort it out...
There is a simple answer. Train at home.
There really isn't a huge need to join a gym for the average person. Another thing gyms like to do is have massive variety. Every piece of equipment under the sun is crammed into some old done-up industrial unit. They make you think you need it. If you want to get fit you have to have a... whatever.
You know what you need? You need to be able to just get up. That's it.
I've trained fairly hard for twenty five years. To hit a decent level of fitness you need a way of doing strength trainging, a way to do some cardio and a way to do some flexibility work. You can get all of that at home for free.
Cardio is the easiest thing to start with. You need some way of doing slow and steady and another of doing fast and intense. No-one needs the dozen different cardio machines in a gym. You absolutely do not need a treadmill (unless you're rehabbing an injury).
Slow and steady, just go for a walk. Putting one foot in front of the other for forty minutes is maybe the single greatest exercise ever devised. If you want to run then run. I'm not a fan of running but it's still great cardio. For intense, find a hill. Or some stairs. If you live in a house that has an upper floor then you have my favourite piece of exercise equipment: the staircase. Run up them and walk down, repeat. Do that 30 times and see how you feel. I guarantee no piece of gym equipment comes close to that workout.
Strength training is another gym con. All the shit that they have, all the machines, all the crap with cables and pulleys, none of that does you any real good. Most of that is fitness industry invention. The movements are unnatural, you need so many machines because each one only ever engages a tiny muscle group.
Take a look at a picture of maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world. Who wouldn't want to look like that? Well, maybe most women but you know what I mean. Ali never lifted a weight in his life. He was a testament to how you can build strength lifting nothing other than the weight of your own body.
Just to reiterate, you do not need all that crap in a gym to get strong. You won't become The Mountain but you can get strong enough for doing daily life for absolutely free.
There are hundreds of bodyweight training programmes out there. One I've used for years is Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym system. You can buy a secondhand copy for under 4 quid. It's great, it's simple and it isn't even that hard. Everything is done slow and controlled.
Another great resource is Onnit. They are an American company part-owned by Joe Rogan. They make supplements and exercise equipment but they also have a massive archive of articles on fitness. Go to the Onnit Academy page and you'll find tons of stuff on bodyweight training, all for free.
Flexibility is the third, and I think the most important part, of fitness. It doesn't matter how strong you are or how far you can run, if you can't turn your neck or stand up without your knees crunching then you are in trouble.
I love doing yoga. This is where I might actually break my mantra of "train at home": yoga classes are usually piss cheap. They are everywhere, from yoga studios to community centres. Spunking 4 or 5 quid once a week on a class is a nice treat. A little bit of coaching really is worth the money.
If that isn't an option then try You-Tube. One of my favourite channels is Yoga With Adrienne. She can be a bit annoying, does a bit too much of that yoga-speak bullshit, but she puts out a lot of decent content. Her 30 days of yoga beginners programme is great. I'll cycle through that a couple of times a year. You can pick up a mat for a couple of quid at Decathlon or Aldi or just use a towel. You don't really need anything else.
Sure there are downsides to training at home. The biggest is the lack of feedback. There is no coach but yourself. You need to really give attention to form and how you are doing everything. It is easy to get into bad habits. There's always the risk that you get injured on your own with no-one to help you out. What you'd need to be doing for that to happen I don't know but it's a risk. Maybe blow out a disk in your back or something, I don't know. You need to be really disciplined with it as well. For some people, and I was one of them, going to another place to train was a big part of gym membership. Especially when I was in a relationship I wasn't enjoying, going to the gym was my escape for a long time.
But I think training at home brings a lot more advantages than downsides. You save a ton of money. £35 a month is about average for a decent gym, that's £420 over the year. But you also have everything else associated with it. Three miles each way adds £150-£200 a year if you're driving and going to the gym five days a week. And as manky as it is, you don't necessarily need a new outfit for each day. Train at home and nobody cares if you wear the same t-shirt you did yesterday.
I really like the flexibility. I've got a garden with high hedges so I can go outside when the weather is nice. I can train whenever I want. I have less excuses: it's never a busy time, it doesn't matter if the traffic is bad. There's no hiding place, either. Gyms give massive opportunity to dick about, to wander around talking to people.
I love training. Fitness is sadly one of those things that tends to suffer with income: it's a rich person's game. Or at least portrayed that way. When you don't have a lot of spare cash then you end up with a lot of other baggage. Stress, depression, anxiety will all come your way at some point. It's too easy to medicate them with alcohol and shit food. Even just the food that is marketed to you encourages lethargy: pasta, rice, bread, sugar, processed shit. Hit you with an insulin spike so that all you want to do is sit in front of the TV. Maybe there is also the lack of good examples. If all you see around you is people living the same way then chances are you will live the same way.
I grew up in a fairly poor, working class area. Nobody went to a gym. When I was little, people had active, manual jobs. As I got older that changed and you saw the impact of that. More sedentary work, more unemployment. Sky TV, Playstations and the internet just hammered more nails into the coffin. Cheap, shit food and drink. Everything about having no money encouraged you stay on the couch. Everyone got fat and looking back that's really fucking sad.
But it really does not have to be like that. There is so much marketing bullshit to make you think that you need money to be fit. You don't, you absolutely don't. In fact, it makes me really fucking angry sometimes when I see how things like this get sold to the public.
You don't need money to get and stay fit. You can very easily achieve a really good level of fitness with absolutely no investment of money whatsoever. For me, I'd recommend the Mark Lauren book I mention above, do some walking, running or cycling and do a little bit of stretching or yoga from You Tube.
If you want to, you can also kit out a decent home gym for less than the cost of a year's membership to a commercial gym. I think my next fitness on the cheap post will be on that.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
The great matched betting pay-out...
My free sign-up bets have completed. Grand total of £12.89 by using 50 quid of my own cash to leverage 30 quid in free bets. That 50 quid is still currently sat in my accounts at Ladbrokes, Coral and Betfair. It took me about 30-60 minutes every evening to earn that so fuck knows how much time I'd need to drop to make anything bigger.
I've made some pocket money. Wow. I'm going to stick with it for a month and see how far it goes. Like I said in my previous post I am distinctly unimpressed with matched betting. You can definitely make money at it but it doesn't appear to be the golden goose pissing cash into a bucket while you sit back.
I've made some pocket money. Wow. I'm going to stick with it for a month and see how far it goes. Like I said in my previous post I am distinctly unimpressed with matched betting. You can definitely make money at it but it doesn't appear to be the golden goose pissing cash into a bucket while you sit back.
Pasta Sauce, another step in beating the factory food scam to keep you poor
Probably one of the best ways of pissing your money up the wall is spending it on pre-made sauces. It looks like it's good value, cheap enough that you don't notice it and expensive enough that manufacturers make a tidy profit on it. A couple of quid on a jar of Dolmio is a nice little earner.
I haven't bought one in years. Why? Because you can make decent pasta sauce for peanuts. I'm not a big pasta eater but my daughter is so it's a regular tea for her. She loves this sauce and I love it because it is piss cheap. You need:
- a small onion (12p)
- a tomato (22p)
- a clove of garlic (I'd guess around 3p)
- half a tube of tomato puree (25p)
- some dried oregano and basil (maybe another 10p)
- a couple of spoonfuls of oil (no idea, let's call it 15p)
That's 87p. And you know what is in it. There's no shit in it, no flavour enhancers, preservatives, sugar or salt (unless you want to add some, I don't usually).
Chop the onion fine, fry it in the oil on a low heat until soft. When nearly done add the garlic, also finely chopped. Chop the tomato and add that. Let the whole thing cook at a low heat into even more mush. Meanwhile, make your pasta. When it is ready drain it but keep a cup of the cloudy water. Squeeze half a tube of tomato puree into the onion and tomato. Add the dried herbs. Mix. Add the pasta water until you get the consistency you like.
Piss easy, cheap and tastes great.
I have been making an effort to get away from our reliance on pre-made or processed food. Sure, there are all the health issues assorted with eating crap made in a factory but it's also a damn sight cheaper and better to make. There might be a little bit of upfront cost involved like buying the herbs and the oil. But you can do this cheaply: I just got a bottle of really good olive oil in Aldi for £2, about half of what it costs in Asda or Morrisons. But you need to bite the bullet on things like these because once you've got them you've got them. A bottle of oil makes god knows how many meals. A jar of herbs lasts forever, or at least until it stops smelling of anything. Again, Aldi and Lidl are great for stuff like this.
One of the single best money-saving skills anyone can develop is learning to cook. I was lucky that I grew up in a kitchen where both my mum and dad cooked really well (my father was in the RAF catering corps). You pick up what you grow up around. If you see jars and packets then that's how you cook. If you see fresh food then the same applies when you are an adult. I've always really made the effort to cook around my daughter and she never sees me reach for a jar of Dolmio.
I think a big part of the problem is the way that food is marketed. Fresh produce is always shown as almost a luxury item. It's always some middle class couple in their Hygena kitchen with a bottle of wine. If you ever see a skint parent then it's usually alongside a jar of Homepride sauce and a packet of Uncle Ben's. What message does that send? If you're on a budget then forget about eating fresh food. What you need, the only thing you can afford, is this nice packet of shit that we made in a factory out of horse dicks and potato peelings...
My parents grew up piss poor in post-war Britain. They learned out of necessity how to make food work for you. I am very grateful that I grew up seeing that.
It's not particularly impressive but if you want to see a picture then have a look at my Instagram account @skintlife2020
I haven't bought one in years. Why? Because you can make decent pasta sauce for peanuts. I'm not a big pasta eater but my daughter is so it's a regular tea for her. She loves this sauce and I love it because it is piss cheap. You need:
- a small onion (12p)
- a tomato (22p)
- a clove of garlic (I'd guess around 3p)
- half a tube of tomato puree (25p)
- some dried oregano and basil (maybe another 10p)
- a couple of spoonfuls of oil (no idea, let's call it 15p)
That's 87p. And you know what is in it. There's no shit in it, no flavour enhancers, preservatives, sugar or salt (unless you want to add some, I don't usually).
Chop the onion fine, fry it in the oil on a low heat until soft. When nearly done add the garlic, also finely chopped. Chop the tomato and add that. Let the whole thing cook at a low heat into even more mush. Meanwhile, make your pasta. When it is ready drain it but keep a cup of the cloudy water. Squeeze half a tube of tomato puree into the onion and tomato. Add the dried herbs. Mix. Add the pasta water until you get the consistency you like.
Piss easy, cheap and tastes great.
I have been making an effort to get away from our reliance on pre-made or processed food. Sure, there are all the health issues assorted with eating crap made in a factory but it's also a damn sight cheaper and better to make. There might be a little bit of upfront cost involved like buying the herbs and the oil. But you can do this cheaply: I just got a bottle of really good olive oil in Aldi for £2, about half of what it costs in Asda or Morrisons. But you need to bite the bullet on things like these because once you've got them you've got them. A bottle of oil makes god knows how many meals. A jar of herbs lasts forever, or at least until it stops smelling of anything. Again, Aldi and Lidl are great for stuff like this.
One of the single best money-saving skills anyone can develop is learning to cook. I was lucky that I grew up in a kitchen where both my mum and dad cooked really well (my father was in the RAF catering corps). You pick up what you grow up around. If you see jars and packets then that's how you cook. If you see fresh food then the same applies when you are an adult. I've always really made the effort to cook around my daughter and she never sees me reach for a jar of Dolmio.
I think a big part of the problem is the way that food is marketed. Fresh produce is always shown as almost a luxury item. It's always some middle class couple in their Hygena kitchen with a bottle of wine. If you ever see a skint parent then it's usually alongside a jar of Homepride sauce and a packet of Uncle Ben's. What message does that send? If you're on a budget then forget about eating fresh food. What you need, the only thing you can afford, is this nice packet of shit that we made in a factory out of horse dicks and potato peelings...
My parents grew up piss poor in post-war Britain. They learned out of necessity how to make food work for you. I am very grateful that I grew up seeing that.
It's not particularly impressive but if you want to see a picture then have a look at my Instagram account @skintlife2020
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Weekly Update: Matched Betting
This week I gave matched betting a go. It's everywhere, damn near evey financial blogger goes on about it and is either selling you their product or an affiliate link to someone else's. I'm not going to do that.
Matched betting is, at its, simplest, taking advantage of all the free bets that online bookies give you to sign up as a new customer. Coral is the site most suggest you start on: they give you 20 quid in credit if you open an account and bet £5. BUT... you can't just withdraw that 20 quid in cash. You have to gamble it. Matched betting works by offsetting that bet with another one on another site. So if Man U is playing a match, you bet your £20 of credit on them to win. On another site you "lay" the bet: you do a matching bet that they won't win.
In theory, that means win or lose you make back that £20 credit in cash. In theory. Bookies are not daft. Someone, somewhere, needs to get a cut and the blogs suggest counting on getting about 75% of the free credit back in cash. And by working your way round all the online bookies then you can earn from £800 to £2400 depending on who you read.
The reality is that I've made about £7 profit so far this week. Better than nothing, a couple of pints for free. But I've also got £50 of my own cash tied up in bookie's accounts to leverage that. Not so great. And it has probably taken me an hour a day of work to achieve that. A pound an hour? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'll see.
My first mistake was making my first deposit with Coral by using Paypal because I had £50 in it from some Ebay selling. And I didn't read the T&C's, because only deposits made with a credit or debit card qualifies for the £20 credit. I only found this out after making my first bet. Duh.
My second mistake was trying to do it on the cheap. The "lay" bet, the bet you make that something won't happen, is an expensive bet. A simple £10 bet could require you to have £40 in your account for an easy 3/1 flutter (because you lay the bet on a betting exchange rather than a true bookie; don't ask me, I have no idea how or why this all works). By keeping my bets small and my exposure small I ended up with really small margins on the maths behind extracting the free cash.
Whatever, the end result is that I really don't think it is worth my while. Most bloggers seem to rave about it and I wonder if that is just so you'll click through their affiliate links. I'm going to give it another couple of goes but I'm really cynical.
You make money but it's hassle and you also open yourself up to a big loss if you screw up the calculations or the betting process. Ask me again in a few weeks.
On the heating front, only heating the rooms I am using with an oil filled radiator is working well. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight and see how it has impacted my electricity bill. The wood I bought from a local sawmill is top notch. Burns well and heats the place nice. I posted on Instagram my views on firewood merchants. A bigger bunch of utter fucking chancers I am yet to meet outside of used car dealers. The amount of shit I've wasted money on in the name of "premium seasoned hardwood logs" is shocking.
This week's budget saving is £19.52 which brings me up to £89.62 since the start of the year. The Chip app has auto-saved about £20 for me. I also got £75 compensation paid into my account this week from the AA because I complained about shit service I'd received. Starting to feel like I'm in control of my finances after Christmas but this is also the shittest period of the month in the run up to pay day.
Matched betting is, at its, simplest, taking advantage of all the free bets that online bookies give you to sign up as a new customer. Coral is the site most suggest you start on: they give you 20 quid in credit if you open an account and bet £5. BUT... you can't just withdraw that 20 quid in cash. You have to gamble it. Matched betting works by offsetting that bet with another one on another site. So if Man U is playing a match, you bet your £20 of credit on them to win. On another site you "lay" the bet: you do a matching bet that they won't win.
In theory, that means win or lose you make back that £20 credit in cash. In theory. Bookies are not daft. Someone, somewhere, needs to get a cut and the blogs suggest counting on getting about 75% of the free credit back in cash. And by working your way round all the online bookies then you can earn from £800 to £2400 depending on who you read.
The reality is that I've made about £7 profit so far this week. Better than nothing, a couple of pints for free. But I've also got £50 of my own cash tied up in bookie's accounts to leverage that. Not so great. And it has probably taken me an hour a day of work to achieve that. A pound an hour? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'll see.
My first mistake was making my first deposit with Coral by using Paypal because I had £50 in it from some Ebay selling. And I didn't read the T&C's, because only deposits made with a credit or debit card qualifies for the £20 credit. I only found this out after making my first bet. Duh.
My second mistake was trying to do it on the cheap. The "lay" bet, the bet you make that something won't happen, is an expensive bet. A simple £10 bet could require you to have £40 in your account for an easy 3/1 flutter (because you lay the bet on a betting exchange rather than a true bookie; don't ask me, I have no idea how or why this all works). By keeping my bets small and my exposure small I ended up with really small margins on the maths behind extracting the free cash.
Whatever, the end result is that I really don't think it is worth my while. Most bloggers seem to rave about it and I wonder if that is just so you'll click through their affiliate links. I'm going to give it another couple of goes but I'm really cynical.
You make money but it's hassle and you also open yourself up to a big loss if you screw up the calculations or the betting process. Ask me again in a few weeks.
On the heating front, only heating the rooms I am using with an oil filled radiator is working well. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight and see how it has impacted my electricity bill. The wood I bought from a local sawmill is top notch. Burns well and heats the place nice. I posted on Instagram my views on firewood merchants. A bigger bunch of utter fucking chancers I am yet to meet outside of used car dealers. The amount of shit I've wasted money on in the name of "premium seasoned hardwood logs" is shocking.
This week's budget saving is £19.52 which brings me up to £89.62 since the start of the year. The Chip app has auto-saved about £20 for me. I also got £75 compensation paid into my account this week from the AA because I complained about shit service I'd received. Starting to feel like I'm in control of my finances after Christmas but this is also the shittest period of the month in the run up to pay day.
Friday, January 17, 2020
I decided to set up an Instagram account for the blog: @skintlife2020
Not sure what use it will be but hopefully post maybe something daily.
Not sure what use it will be but hopefully post maybe something daily.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
How I Work Out If My Weekly Shopping Is Good Value
One thing I struggled with last year was coming out of Morrisons with two big bags of crap and 40 quid down the bog and there was nothing I could make a meal out of in amongst it. It pissed me off and it happened all the time.
So this year I decided to be more organised. Not going into a shop without a list. Not eating meals that need twenty ingredients (nineteen of which you can't taste). But I still didn't know whether what I was spending was giving me good value or not.
Maybe this is the most obvious thing in the world to everyone else. What totally changed the way I thought about my shopping was trying to see it for what it gave me rather than seeing it as two bags of individual items. It came about by accident, I wrote myself a little explanatory note as to what it was.
I'd been fretting about what I spent and had no clue if it was good or bad. Just by chance I wrote a note like I was trying to justify the spend to someone else.
I can't remember of the top of my head but it went something like:
So this year I decided to be more organised. Not going into a shop without a list. Not eating meals that need twenty ingredients (nineteen of which you can't taste). But I still didn't know whether what I was spending was giving me good value or not.
Maybe this is the most obvious thing in the world to everyone else. What totally changed the way I thought about my shopping was trying to see it for what it gave me rather than seeing it as two bags of individual items. It came about by accident, I wrote myself a little explanatory note as to what it was.
I'd been fretting about what I spent and had no clue if it was good or bad. Just by chance I wrote a note like I was trying to justify the spend to someone else.
I can't remember of the top of my head but it went something like:
Four dinners for me
Dinners for all the nights my daughter was with me
A Friday treat
Everything I need to clean the kitchen
£17
It's ridiculous but it really altered my perception. When it was just a list of individual items then it meant nothing. I had no way of telling whether I'd spent too much or too little or if I'd even got what I needed.
It is important to think of your weekly shop in terms of what it actually is. It is the means to make X number of meals. It is a job around the house. It actually means something, I can picture it. It also focuses my mind as well because I'm thinking oh, I'll have a piece of chicken left over that I can freeze or whatever.
When you see what you can make or do with it then you can judge whether or not it is good value. If you look at your bill and see that there isn't much that you can do with it then you know you screwed the pooch.
I don't think supermarkets want you to think that way. I think they want you to just wander round grabbing things from the shelf. If you start thinking about what you would actually use a particular item for then they are going to lose money. When I was a gym member it was a real epiphany to me when I realised that gyms made their money off the people who don't go. In the same way, supermarkets make money off the stuff that you don't need and won't use. They want you picking up things that catch your eye. If you bought only what you needed they'd be in deep shit.
And that is what I love about Aldi and Lidl. They don't have all that scope for buying shite. They just have what you need. They don't have twenty different types of tomato or a range of artisan cheeses. You can't wander aimlessly, what's on offer doesn't allow it and I hope they don't change.
So, my lesson that I have learned is be answerable. Take a minute after you get home to justify what you have bought. This is not a collection of things, these are your meals for the week. See it that way and you change how you look at your shopping.
Basically you need to make yourself accountable for what you spend. You have to justify it to someone. I live alone so it will be easy to slack off. I heard an interview with a guy who was an engineer talking about how he comes up with good designs. "I have a rubber duck on my desk and I have to explain everything to the duck. If I can't come up with an explanation that is simple enough for the duck to understand then I have failed". That's the attitude I need to take with my spending habits. I need to find someone, even if it is imaginary, that I need to explain my behaviour to.
I think part of the whole reason for starting this blog has been to make myself accountable. If I am honest about what I am doing on here then I have to stand by it.
Weekly Update: 15th January 2020
So, another week without gas. I'm trying an experiment to see if I can get by with just electric heating and how much it will jack up my electricity bill. I've got a 2kW fan heater that I use to take the chill off the living room quickly while either the central heating (non-working) or wood-burner kick in. I've also got a 2kW oil-filled radiator for my daughter's room.
The little radiator works fairly well. I stick it in, leave it running and pretty quick her room is comfortable. The actual central heating radiator does fuck all anyway: it's under the window and it is blocked by her bed so you never feel like it makes a difference. The small radiator I leave just inside her door. Run it full blast for an hour then dial it down. It has a thermostat so it isn't running all the time so should actually be pretty cheap to run.
The problem is my bedroom. I don't have a spare electric heater to put in it. It is fucking freezing. I'm sleeping really badly because of it, even with two duvets on the bed. It takes ages to fall asleep then I wake up loads because I'm too hot with the extra duvet. I've been using Sleep Cycle, an app on my phone that tracks your sleep pattern. It listens to how much noise you make through breathing and moving and it shows that I'm waking up every hour or so.
This worries me because I switch off my daughter's radiator when I go to bed. If she's similarly cold in the night then she is going to be sleeping really badly. This makes sense because she's been really tired in the mornings. Might have to bite the bullet and leave it running on a low setting all night.
The nights she is not here I've been nicking the radiator and warming my room with it. I sleep loads better on these nights. Might also have to bite the bullet and buy myself one as well.
The other heating related news is that I am running out of logs. Probably got enough to last me to the end of the week. So that's where I am at with heating. It's cold as fuck and I can't wait to spring. People who say "put a jumper on" are fucking idiots. I've got a jumper on, I've got the fan heater running and I'm still cold.
I got a letter from school about unpaid bills for breakfast and after-school club. I swear I've never met such a bunch of self-important bastards as those who work in the admin of primary schools. They beat GP receptionists hands down for just shear cuntishness. I've battled with them since last year to actually tell me what they have been charging me for, how many days they think I owe them. Well, I finally get it and guess what? The 600 quid bill they say I owe them is actually £250 because they've been charging me for services I've never used.
It pisses me off. Not a word of apology, fuck all. How many people just pay this stuff and don't question it because these people act with just utter conviction that they are right. God forbid you question one of them. It also pisses me off that their attitude has been to go straight "pay this or we take legal action". In the six years my daughter has been there not once has anyone said "we know you are a single father, is there anything we can do to help?".
Not once. I never ask for help. I'm proud as fuck that I get by. It's a struggle but I shut the fuck up and get on with it. I don't expect help, I expect to have to do all this myself. But it's nice to be asked. I'm not too proud to appreciate that. I might say no but I'll respect you for asking. So it's like this bill. No "if you are struggling then we can do something to help". Nope, straight nuclear.
I have to point out that this is a middle class village school in an affluent area (my ex likes to pretend she's a character from The Archers). Anything that tarnishes the image is severely frowned upon. Single parent? That smells of scumbag and we don't want your type here.
Anyway, I'm happy that the bill is now manageable and I have got one up on the smug bastards.
Some bad news, I thought I was doing well on the work front. I'd lined up a job interview for a new job that potentially was going to give me a 3 grand increase on my salary. That would make a huge difference right now. I fucked up, I got caught in traffic on the motorway and missed it. They were pissed off and I get the impression I have screwed the pooch here. I've asked the recruiter to try and talk them round but I don't have a lot of hope.
Wednesday night is my weekly financial catch up night where I sit down and look at what I've spent over the previous seven days. I'm going to do a post on how I budget but basically I give myself an allowance from which I pay everything other than rent, utilities and car insurance. Food, diesel and any other non-bill spending comes off that allowance and when it is gone it is gone.
For the last two weeks since the start of the year I've managed to save about £35 a week. That's just from being a bit more conscious about food shopping, not buying my lunch every day and not driving all over the place without having a plan. So that would have been £140 a month that I've pissed up the wall, £1680 over the course of the year. That really annoys me because I could have put it to my savings or I could have paid it against the 5 grand debt on my credit card. That would have been more than a third of it. For fuck sake, it's such a stupid thing.
I want to keep this up as much as I can. Running total so far is £70.10. I will update next week.
The little radiator works fairly well. I stick it in, leave it running and pretty quick her room is comfortable. The actual central heating radiator does fuck all anyway: it's under the window and it is blocked by her bed so you never feel like it makes a difference. The small radiator I leave just inside her door. Run it full blast for an hour then dial it down. It has a thermostat so it isn't running all the time so should actually be pretty cheap to run.
The problem is my bedroom. I don't have a spare electric heater to put in it. It is fucking freezing. I'm sleeping really badly because of it, even with two duvets on the bed. It takes ages to fall asleep then I wake up loads because I'm too hot with the extra duvet. I've been using Sleep Cycle, an app on my phone that tracks your sleep pattern. It listens to how much noise you make through breathing and moving and it shows that I'm waking up every hour or so.
This worries me because I switch off my daughter's radiator when I go to bed. If she's similarly cold in the night then she is going to be sleeping really badly. This makes sense because she's been really tired in the mornings. Might have to bite the bullet and leave it running on a low setting all night.
The nights she is not here I've been nicking the radiator and warming my room with it. I sleep loads better on these nights. Might also have to bite the bullet and buy myself one as well.
The other heating related news is that I am running out of logs. Probably got enough to last me to the end of the week. So that's where I am at with heating. It's cold as fuck and I can't wait to spring. People who say "put a jumper on" are fucking idiots. I've got a jumper on, I've got the fan heater running and I'm still cold.
I got a letter from school about unpaid bills for breakfast and after-school club. I swear I've never met such a bunch of self-important bastards as those who work in the admin of primary schools. They beat GP receptionists hands down for just shear cuntishness. I've battled with them since last year to actually tell me what they have been charging me for, how many days they think I owe them. Well, I finally get it and guess what? The 600 quid bill they say I owe them is actually £250 because they've been charging me for services I've never used.
It pisses me off. Not a word of apology, fuck all. How many people just pay this stuff and don't question it because these people act with just utter conviction that they are right. God forbid you question one of them. It also pisses me off that their attitude has been to go straight "pay this or we take legal action". In the six years my daughter has been there not once has anyone said "we know you are a single father, is there anything we can do to help?".
Not once. I never ask for help. I'm proud as fuck that I get by. It's a struggle but I shut the fuck up and get on with it. I don't expect help, I expect to have to do all this myself. But it's nice to be asked. I'm not too proud to appreciate that. I might say no but I'll respect you for asking. So it's like this bill. No "if you are struggling then we can do something to help". Nope, straight nuclear.
I have to point out that this is a middle class village school in an affluent area (my ex likes to pretend she's a character from The Archers). Anything that tarnishes the image is severely frowned upon. Single parent? That smells of scumbag and we don't want your type here.
Anyway, I'm happy that the bill is now manageable and I have got one up on the smug bastards.
Some bad news, I thought I was doing well on the work front. I'd lined up a job interview for a new job that potentially was going to give me a 3 grand increase on my salary. That would make a huge difference right now. I fucked up, I got caught in traffic on the motorway and missed it. They were pissed off and I get the impression I have screwed the pooch here. I've asked the recruiter to try and talk them round but I don't have a lot of hope.
Wednesday night is my weekly financial catch up night where I sit down and look at what I've spent over the previous seven days. I'm going to do a post on how I budget but basically I give myself an allowance from which I pay everything other than rent, utilities and car insurance. Food, diesel and any other non-bill spending comes off that allowance and when it is gone it is gone.
For the last two weeks since the start of the year I've managed to save about £35 a week. That's just from being a bit more conscious about food shopping, not buying my lunch every day and not driving all over the place without having a plan. So that would have been £140 a month that I've pissed up the wall, £1680 over the course of the year. That really annoys me because I could have put it to my savings or I could have paid it against the 5 grand debt on my credit card. That would have been more than a third of it. For fuck sake, it's such a stupid thing.
I want to keep this up as much as I can. Running total so far is £70.10. I will update next week.
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Hot and Cold (mostly cold): Fuel Poverty
You can go about your day and not really notice that you are skint. But when you come home to a freezing cold house then there is no getting away from it. If you have to ask "should I be warm or not?" then there is no avoiding how skint you are.
On the nights that my daughter isn't here I don't put the heating on. I put a fleece on instead.
I'm lucky that I've got a woodburner, I can light that and heat just the living room and it doesn't really cost an awful lot. It gets hot fast and stays warm all night.
When my daughter is with me then I have to put the central heating on. Part of that is obviously wanting her to be comfortable. But the other big part is that I don't want her seeing that I have no money. I hate weekends when I've got her because if we are home then the heating is on. It's one of the things I really hate. It's maybe one of the most demeaning things there is. You can eat cheap. You can buy decent clothes second hand off Ebay. You can bike or bus where you need to go. But the one thing you can't really do much about is heating.
What really brings it home to me is that my house isn't on mains gas. It runs off propane tanks and they are a total ballache. For starters, they cost a fortune. At the minute, the cheapest round here is about £64 for a 49kg bottle (the big, tall ones). Then add a delivery charge to that which is another £5-10. Plus you've got to be here for them, so if you're working full time then you are screwed.
So maybe 75 quid plus time off work for a bottle that'll last 5 weeks if I'm careful with it. Careful means using it only for heating so no hot water. If I want hot water to do the dishes I boil a kettle. When it's bath night for my daughter we go to the local pool for a swim instead. That is about £60 a month just for gas, electricity is another £35. In my old house I paid around £50 a month for both, here it costs nearly double and that's not even using it as much. If my house was as warm as it should be I'd be looking at about £120 a month easy.
I went into my daughter's room one morning during the Christmas holidays and she was asleep with her coat on and her hood up. It breaks my heart and I don't really know what to do about it. It feels like living in another time when I'm hoping for spring to come and things will warm up.
One thing that has really helped is trying to cut down draughts. The stairs are in the living room so any heat just vanished upwards. I put up a curtain across the top of the stairs at the weekend and that's helped a lot. You can actually feel a definite temperature drop when you go through it now. It's a pain in the arse, I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck one day, but I think it is worth the effort. The night after I did it was actually the first night I'd felt warm all winter.
The back door is also off the living room so I put a pair of curtains over that as well to try to make some insulation, too. It's making the place a bit claustrophobic but if I stay warm then I can live with that. I'm in the arse end of nowhere so there's nothing to look at anyway except trees.
The bastard gas also ran out at the weekend. I absolutely fucking dread when it happens because it is such palaver trying to get a refill. If I could just chuck a bottle in the back of the car then it would be fine. But they weigh about 100kg when full so no chance of moving it. I've got a small one, 19kg, that I could swap for a full one but they are loads more expensive and I'm lucky if it lasts two weeks.
I'm doing an experiment to see if electric heating is going to work out cheaper. I've got a little fan heater that I use to take the chill off the living room and I bought an oil filled radiator for my daughter's room today. It was only 30 quid from B&Q and they have a 5% deal at Topcashback (which I'm a big fan of) right now. Came to £28.50. It's on the low setting which seems to warm her room up nice and according to the Bulb (my electricity supplier) website it will only cost about 9p per hour to run at night. A quick calc looks like about £7-8 a month. That has to be cheaper than gas if it works.
I'm lucky enough that the house came with a wood-stove in the living room. When I'm here on my own I use that. I make a rule that I don't light it before 8pm and if I haven't lit it by 9pm then I don't bother. It is only small but it kicks out a decent amount of heat and holds it well. Most of the time I light a small fire and just let it burn down and that's enough. I sit right next to it like I was a Victorian peasant.
Doing some exercise is good, too. When I come in from work and the house is freezing then I do a workout and have a quick shower. With your blood moving you don't notice the cold for maybe an hour or so. Usually I'll be in the kitchen making tea anyway.
Being cold is shit. It really is. It definitely is one of the worst parts of having no money.
On the nights that my daughter isn't here I don't put the heating on. I put a fleece on instead.
I'm lucky that I've got a woodburner, I can light that and heat just the living room and it doesn't really cost an awful lot. It gets hot fast and stays warm all night.
When my daughter is with me then I have to put the central heating on. Part of that is obviously wanting her to be comfortable. But the other big part is that I don't want her seeing that I have no money. I hate weekends when I've got her because if we are home then the heating is on. It's one of the things I really hate. It's maybe one of the most demeaning things there is. You can eat cheap. You can buy decent clothes second hand off Ebay. You can bike or bus where you need to go. But the one thing you can't really do much about is heating.
What really brings it home to me is that my house isn't on mains gas. It runs off propane tanks and they are a total ballache. For starters, they cost a fortune. At the minute, the cheapest round here is about £64 for a 49kg bottle (the big, tall ones). Then add a delivery charge to that which is another £5-10. Plus you've got to be here for them, so if you're working full time then you are screwed.
So maybe 75 quid plus time off work for a bottle that'll last 5 weeks if I'm careful with it. Careful means using it only for heating so no hot water. If I want hot water to do the dishes I boil a kettle. When it's bath night for my daughter we go to the local pool for a swim instead. That is about £60 a month just for gas, electricity is another £35. In my old house I paid around £50 a month for both, here it costs nearly double and that's not even using it as much. If my house was as warm as it should be I'd be looking at about £120 a month easy.
I went into my daughter's room one morning during the Christmas holidays and she was asleep with her coat on and her hood up. It breaks my heart and I don't really know what to do about it. It feels like living in another time when I'm hoping for spring to come and things will warm up.
One thing that has really helped is trying to cut down draughts. The stairs are in the living room so any heat just vanished upwards. I put up a curtain across the top of the stairs at the weekend and that's helped a lot. You can actually feel a definite temperature drop when you go through it now. It's a pain in the arse, I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck one day, but I think it is worth the effort. The night after I did it was actually the first night I'd felt warm all winter.
The back door is also off the living room so I put a pair of curtains over that as well to try to make some insulation, too. It's making the place a bit claustrophobic but if I stay warm then I can live with that. I'm in the arse end of nowhere so there's nothing to look at anyway except trees.
The bastard gas also ran out at the weekend. I absolutely fucking dread when it happens because it is such palaver trying to get a refill. If I could just chuck a bottle in the back of the car then it would be fine. But they weigh about 100kg when full so no chance of moving it. I've got a small one, 19kg, that I could swap for a full one but they are loads more expensive and I'm lucky if it lasts two weeks.
I'm doing an experiment to see if electric heating is going to work out cheaper. I've got a little fan heater that I use to take the chill off the living room and I bought an oil filled radiator for my daughter's room today. It was only 30 quid from B&Q and they have a 5% deal at Topcashback (which I'm a big fan of) right now. Came to £28.50. It's on the low setting which seems to warm her room up nice and according to the Bulb (my electricity supplier) website it will only cost about 9p per hour to run at night. A quick calc looks like about £7-8 a month. That has to be cheaper than gas if it works.
I'm lucky enough that the house came with a wood-stove in the living room. When I'm here on my own I use that. I make a rule that I don't light it before 8pm and if I haven't lit it by 9pm then I don't bother. It is only small but it kicks out a decent amount of heat and holds it well. Most of the time I light a small fire and just let it burn down and that's enough. I sit right next to it like I was a Victorian peasant.
Doing some exercise is good, too. When I come in from work and the house is freezing then I do a workout and have a quick shower. With your blood moving you don't notice the cold for maybe an hour or so. Usually I'll be in the kitchen making tea anyway.
Being cold is shit. It really is. It definitely is one of the worst parts of having no money.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
Skint
I'm skint.
Absolutely fucking potless. I'm a single parent, I'm in a job I hate, I'm struggling just to keep the lights on and December totally wiped me out.
Over the last year I've followed other people's finance blogs and podcasts because I need to do something about it. There are some really good ones, some that I've found some really good tips on. But the thing that stands out is that they are all written from the point of view of middle class, affluent people either trying to get things for less or trying to get more than they need.
It really irritates me. Rather than talking about how you pay all your direct debits this month it's shite like get five pounds off a forty pound box of wine. Does that make you feel good? Does that keep the lights on for you? Then this is probably going to be the wrong place.
A few days ago I didn't know if I was going to have enough cash in the bank to meet all my bills before January's salary came in. I was absolutely terrified. I can't describe how anxious it made me. Rather than Getting the Best Deals in the Boxing Day Sales I was trying not to freak out in front of my 10 year old daughter.
Nobody tells you about that. No one ever mentions how you keep smiling and laughing so that your kid enjoys Christmas whilst you put a mental lid on everything that is going wrong in the background. I have to learn for myself that having a day out somewhere cheap is better than being at home because I'm not running the boiler when I'm out. Are ISA's Still A Good Investment? That's what you get. If you're affluent then you have people queuing round the block to tell you how to get more. If you are skint then nobody wants to know.
I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while because I've been so frustrated. I'd love to have the cash to worry about where the best place to put it is. Right now I am more worried about my daughter sleeping in a bedroom with no heating in January. I want someone to cater to me and my issues. So this is it, this is my first post.
I'm aiming to get out of the hole that I am in. I'd actually been doing OK over most of 2019 but in December I made the mistake of buying a new car (mine was close to death) which coincided with Christmas. It took out what cash I had in reserve, I'd ended up paying more than I expected for after-school and school dinner bills and I burnt through my overdraft and emergency fund.
I am going to try to do at least one post a week, more if I can justify it. I want 2020 to be about getting back on my feet again and getting into a good financial position. I learned a lot over 2019, despite screwing up, and hopefully I can help someone.
If I can figure out resources then I've been considering a podcast as well. I don't know how much I've got to offer but I think the voices of people in my position need to be heard. I never expected life to be this hard at this stage and what really shocks me is how isolating it is. If I can reach just a handful of people then great.
Absolutely fucking potless. I'm a single parent, I'm in a job I hate, I'm struggling just to keep the lights on and December totally wiped me out.
Over the last year I've followed other people's finance blogs and podcasts because I need to do something about it. There are some really good ones, some that I've found some really good tips on. But the thing that stands out is that they are all written from the point of view of middle class, affluent people either trying to get things for less or trying to get more than they need.
It really irritates me. Rather than talking about how you pay all your direct debits this month it's shite like get five pounds off a forty pound box of wine. Does that make you feel good? Does that keep the lights on for you? Then this is probably going to be the wrong place.
A few days ago I didn't know if I was going to have enough cash in the bank to meet all my bills before January's salary came in. I was absolutely terrified. I can't describe how anxious it made me. Rather than Getting the Best Deals in the Boxing Day Sales I was trying not to freak out in front of my 10 year old daughter.
Nobody tells you about that. No one ever mentions how you keep smiling and laughing so that your kid enjoys Christmas whilst you put a mental lid on everything that is going wrong in the background. I have to learn for myself that having a day out somewhere cheap is better than being at home because I'm not running the boiler when I'm out. Are ISA's Still A Good Investment? That's what you get. If you're affluent then you have people queuing round the block to tell you how to get more. If you are skint then nobody wants to know.
I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while because I've been so frustrated. I'd love to have the cash to worry about where the best place to put it is. Right now I am more worried about my daughter sleeping in a bedroom with no heating in January. I want someone to cater to me and my issues. So this is it, this is my first post.
I'm aiming to get out of the hole that I am in. I'd actually been doing OK over most of 2019 but in December I made the mistake of buying a new car (mine was close to death) which coincided with Christmas. It took out what cash I had in reserve, I'd ended up paying more than I expected for after-school and school dinner bills and I burnt through my overdraft and emergency fund.
I am going to try to do at least one post a week, more if I can justify it. I want 2020 to be about getting back on my feet again and getting into a good financial position. I learned a lot over 2019, despite screwing up, and hopefully I can help someone.
If I can figure out resources then I've been considering a podcast as well. I don't know how much I've got to offer but I think the voices of people in my position need to be heard. I never expected life to be this hard at this stage and what really shocks me is how isolating it is. If I can reach just a handful of people then great.
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