Finally reached pay-day. It seems like a fucking long trek between my last pay and this one. As far as I know, I've managed to make it without blowing any of my direct debits. But it has been hard work.
For starters, I'm still cold. I'm not convinced about my strategy of using electric heaters just to heat up individual rooms that are being used rather than running the central heating. It works great in my daughter's room, she's got an oil filled radiator in there and running it on half power with the thermostat on halfway means her room is comfortable.
I've accepted my bedroom is unheated and, therefore, really fucking cold. It's probably a good thing that I'm not sharing it with anyone at the minute because I doubt anyone in their right mind is going to put up with those conditions. Except for maybe some survivalist nut, I don't know. On the plus side, I'm actually sleeping better. When I was trying to keep it warm over Christmas I found I was waking up all the time. With it being cold, I tend to sleep right through.
The fan heater in the living room doesn't even make a dent. It takes the chill off and that's about it. I still remember being a kid in Scotland and getting up in a freezing house in the morning. I used to eat my breakfast sitting in front of a calor fire. Thirty years on I would have hoped that my life had moved on from that but apparently not.
Unless I light the woodstove then the living room is still like a fridge. I've got pretty good at managing it now and I can get by on 2-3 logs a night. By that reckoning, I've got about another week of wood. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight as well and see what sort of impact running electric heating has made on my bill. If it's less than an extra £50 (what Calor gas was costing me a month) then it's fine. Fuck it, spring will be here soon.
I started using an app called Chip. I've mentioned it before, it squirrels away a few quid here and there from your current account as the month goes on and it sees how you are spending. Last month it put away £109 for me and I didn't even notice it. The reason I mention it is that I finally got my £10 welcome bonus that I signed up with.
I'm still ploughing on with matched betting despite the hassle and, in my opinion, fairly low reward. I think I'm up to about £60 of free money and god knows how much cash tied up in accounts. I've taken a 10 day trial of Oddsmonkey today and just when I went to use it tonight the website is on its arse. Great.
Once again I managed to come in under budget on my weekly spending. I think there have been two things that have helped. The big one is cutting back on my supermarket spending. I do most of my spending in Aldi now and only go to the bigger shops for stuff I can't get there. I've swapped a lot of the branded products that I normally bought, like laundry liquid and shower gel, to Aldi's own brands. Nobody has died yet so can't complain. I actually quite like the smell of their laundry liquid. Algodon or something? Whatever.
The other thing has been trying to cut my fuel costs. I'm regularly averaging 5-6mpg more on my daily commute now that I've got used to my new car. That's good, I was shitting it that I'd bought a car that was pissing money down the bog. I'm also trying to not use my car as much. I've been walking and cycling to local places that I would normally have driven to. Taking my lunch to work has cut down on my trips at dinnertime as well. If I don't take anything? Fuck it, go hungry. It's not the end of the world and strangely I think my energy levels might stay a lot more steady over the day.
So that's it. One of my financial aims for this week is to start rounding up my spending. For example, if my shopping comes to £15.70 I'm going to round it up to £16 and stick the 30p in the savings pot. I'll give it a week and see how I get on. There's a new bank, Monzo, that does that automatically but I figure I can do it just as well myself. Will it make a difference? I don't know. I'll see over the course of the week.
I've saved £36.53 on my weekly budget this week. That brings me up to £151.19 now. Chip has £109 in the savings account and there's maybe £50-60 in the matched betting fund. So that's quite a healthy little pot that I've managed to build up in just a month. If I can do that every month then I'll be happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment