The Electricity/Energy Situation

 Like about a million other people I got caught up in the run of electricity companies going bust. I was with PFP and I only found out when I went on the website to check my bill.

And now energy prices are through the roof. At the time I got swapped to British Gas as "supplier of last resort". It sounds all very procedural according to OFGEM. But according to the very bitter email I received from PFP (which incidentally was a not for profit aimed at bringing reasonably priced energy to homes that needed it) this is not the case. According to them, the customers of failed energy companies are Dutch auctioned amongst the five big suppliers. It's a bidding process and in PFP's case British Gas "won".

From the start I was told not to swap supplier as it can cause "confusion". Well, I could not give a toss about confusion. The writing was on the wall: energy was soaring in price and the price cap was getting pushed up in October. So I totally ignored that advice and started looking for a reasonably priced deal.

The first bad sign was that quite a few of the better known "cheap" suppliers had already been gobbled up by the big suppliers while they were still in the black. Why would they do that if not to remove competition?

Next was that a number of switching websites were only offering deals from companies that they had "partnered" with. By that I can only assume they meant they were taking money from to direct their way.

Another issue I found with switching sites is that they are set up for a more competitive market than exists now. uSwitch and many others are designed to take your details, look at your current plan and show you who is cheaper. Great in a market working the way it is supposed to. That's just not today. So when no-one is cheaper you get a blank screen. As far as I could see there was no option to just show me the entire market and I'll make my own decision. If you don't have any supplier then you are screwed.

In the end I've gone with Neon Reef. They were the cheapest of what was on offer but by no way cheap. But even this is not straight forward. They will give you an estimate of what you will be paying a month based on your usage figures. Great, looks good.

But the next page is where you get the kick in the balls. What they actually showed you is the average over the year. The way they run payments is that for six months you pay 50% extra so that they can buy contracts for energy for the last six months of your deal. It turns out that instead of paying £40'ish a month like what they lured me in with, I am actually paying £65 a month for the first six months then £35 for the next six months.

That's a pretty big financial shock if you are running a budget where every penny is accounted for. An extra £25 a month needs to come from somewhere. It doesn't matter that my bill will drop in half next May, I need that money here and now.

I'm pretty lucky in that I can massage my budget so that it adapts to that. It still means cutting something else out of my budget for now (I've got a few options for that and not decided which is going). For a lot of people that is simply not affordable. I would guess that is how most energy suppliers are going to start operating. Charging you up front fees so that you can have cheap energy on average over the year. Trouble is, for people who are already facing fuel poverty that isn't going to happen. They can't just magic up an extra £25-35 a month for a short period.

So what happens to them? Stuck on the big 5 suppliers at their inflated prices because they have a captive market and shareholders to keep happy. Utility switching is something else that is now a privilege of the middle class.

This is something that has always pissed me off about "personal finance" experts that populate social media. They are almost always aimed at the middle class and are about getting more for less by using the leverage that being middle class brings.

It's about leveraging good credit scores. Having cash that you can afford to move around different bank accounts to get cheap deals. Two-for-one deals on dining out and hotel rooms. That kind of thing. If you can't afford a treat from your local chippy then none of this has any relevance.

It's sold as "advice" but the reality is it's more like school gate gossip. It's not about financial survival. The usual response for people like that is "speak to Citizen's Advice". They don't want you. This is about people who already have "stuff" getting more "stuff" while those that need it are shut out.

There is a lot about what is happening right now that I do not understand. There is a government that is performing dreadfully, one of the worst performing in modern history. Even if you factor out covid there is no getting away from how badly Johnson et al have done since they took power. No-one is opposing that. The other parties are dead in the water. The media is largely supportive of the government, including the BBC. But worst of all, there is no public backlash. Where are the protests? The only thing you see are a bunch of affluent London pensioners and trust fund students lashing themselves to the M25 over insulation. It is incomprehensible that the public, regardless of political leaning, should tolerate such utter incompetence and bad management.

We are also an affluent, stable democracy (and if you don't believe that you need to look at most of the rest of the world). But we have collapsing supply chains. Food shortages. Fuel shortages. Sky-high energy and utility prices. Massive inflation and a stagnating economy (a bounce-back to pre-covid levels is not growth regardless of how it is spun). These are the conditions you would expect to see in emerging economies.

It is baffling.

Update: 12th Sept 2021

It's been a massively long time since I've done an update so no idea if anyone still follows the blog. Apologies for anyone who does.

Financially, it's been a slow grind. Positives, my job is still going. The project I am working on supposedly will be running another couple of years. I was shocked by that because I didn't really expect there to be that kind of work still left to do on it. If that is a true estimate then that's fantastic news. I actually love what I'm doing and it's been a long time I've been able to say that. It's a good group of people and supportive management. It's incredibly flexible which really helps with childcare. They seem to like me too. The downsides, there doesn't seem to be much work in my sector coming in. If my project is still ongoing then who cares? But it would be nice to know that there was other stuff. My salary doesn't look like it is going to change but equally the agency that got me the job negotiated a rate that was probably at the top end anyway so I can't complain.

The big financial hit so far has been my car. I bought an old but reliable Skoda Octavia 18 months ago. And it has been really reliable so far. I love it, it was old but it's the high spec VRS version and such a great car. But... I never appreciated servicing costs would be so high on it. The parts are the same as on a VW or Audi, it needs a high spec oil and benefits from being serviced by people that know what they are doing. What I thought was going to be a cheap service by an independent VW garage turned into £400. Then last week it went through its MOT. It passed with nothing major on it. But it did need a set of tyres to get through. So again, what I thought was going to be a £40 job turned into £300. But at least I know I've got a set of safe tyres. Next is the timing belt needs doing. I can probably stretch that out until the end of the year as I'm not doing much mileage but still £3-400 I have to come up with at some point.

I got the news on Friday that my electricity supplier, PFP Energy, had gone bust. So now I need to find a new supplier. I had a quick look and there's nothing anywhere near as cheap. All looking like an extra £15-20 a month.

And this week the government announces the 1.25% NI hike for next April too. From what I've read I'm looking at another £30-40 a month on NI. On top of rising food, fuel and energy costs. More than likely a council tax rise too. And it will be coming up to 3 years since I moved here so I'm expecting a rise in rent around that time as well.

So this week I've felt a bit bleak about the next 6 months or so. I'd already felt like I needed to cut back a bit more so that I can put more cash aside. That was before all of this. I guess I'm lucky that I live fairly simple. I eat a fairly healthy diet so no processed foods or expensive junk. I don't really drink (a couple of cans of Aldi Rheinbacher a week is my main vice). My social life has been non-existent for the last 18 months and sadly I can't see that changing much even with lockdown ending. My hobbies are cheap.

Mentally, I've been up and down. I'm still struggling with monotony but that aside, I go through periods of highs and lows and not much in between. I work out and go for a walk everyday which really helps. I've started a beginner's BJJ course last week and it is such a high afterwards. It really makes me feel good about myself.

One thing that is getting me down is that state of my clothes. There has been no point buying anything new so everything I own is full of holes. I mean literally everything is worn out. I do not have a single t-shirt without a hole in it. I have two pairs of jeans and they are both falling apart. Even the shorts I use for training in fell apart finally last week. I realise how counterproductive this has been. Normally you cycle old stuff out and new stuff in as you need it and everything keeps going on an even level. But every item of clothing I own needs replaced. It makes me feel like a tramp because there is nothing I can even wear to go to do my late evening shopping runs that isn't worn out.

I managed to have a nice holiday with my daughter though. I'd booked an Airbnb (as much as I absolutely despise the company and the social damage it does) at the start of the year when things were still cheap. We got a week away by the seaside for £230 which I'd paid off over the last 6 months. Our tastes are simple so not spent a lot on that. Playing in the sea, fishing, rockpooling, walking, so not a lot of expense. She doesn't really like restaurants but loves going to the chippie for a treat. Some cheap, simple meals from the little Co-op there. That kind of thing. I was worried I'd spent too much but when I added it up it was around half of what I was expecting. And yet it was such a good trip. So much fun, beautiful scenery and lovely to spend time with my daughter.

I'm glad summer is now over. I'm looking forward to some wildcamping over the autumn and winter. I really miss travel but I've accepted that the hassle just is not worth it. It's not the risk, it's just the faff of tests, the cost, the potential for delays. And honestly, I think my mental state would benefit from wandering round somewhere nice like I used to do but I also think it's going to benefit as much from camping in beautiful places. I could not give a flying fuck that I'll be trespassing and I could give less of a fuck that our arsehole government is trying to criminalise it. I'm pretty sure I can disappear into any piece of wilderness and not be found.

So that's it. If I had to make a summary, I'd say that financially I'm not in the best position but I'm stable. I'm slowly building my savings. Through hard work I've gone from nothing to £9500 plus a few grand in my pension pot. That's been a real sacrifice and often tough to achieve but I'm proud of having done that over the last 3 years. The first big milestone was when I realised I had 3 months of cash. The next big milestone will be passing the ten grand mark. I want to try and do that by the end of the year. To finish the summary, I'm still up and down but my resilience is extremely strong at the moment. I know I need to address my self-esteem as we go back to normal. And my urge to take off and do things on my own. So not bad but not good. If I had to pick, I'd say I'm on the up-slope.
 

New Year Update

 Start of the New Year. I'm really forcing myself to write because I cannot be arsed at all. Mentally I'm stuck in that same old rut of nothing happening and my brain is turning to mush. Likewise, my mental state is following it. I can't say I feel stressed or depressed. It's something else. Bored, maybe? Just fucking chronically bored out of my mind with looking at the same four walls. Staring at a laptop screen all day. Nothing to do at night except watch TV.

It is driving me fucking insane. Before Christmas we'd been asked to start working out of the office again. I was really apprehensive and got stressed out of my mind about it. But it actually turned out OK. In the little section where I worked there were three of us. Tons of space, lots of ventilation. I felt pretty confident about being back. It was only when the post-Christmas lockdown was announced that I realised how much I was enjoying it.

It had made a massive difference to my mental state. Leaving the house and going to work brought a little bit of normality back. Seeing other people. Being able to have conversations about trivia rather than all work. I liked it and I'd missed it.

The other thing I missed was being warm. I'd forgotten how fucking hard to heat this house is. Luckily my daughter doesn't feel the cold. She's quite happy wearing fleeces and giant hoodies. But not me. Sitting in the spare room I use as an office I am absolutely freezing. A few times, today was one of them, I was physically shivering. One thing I only discovered today is how good a hot water bottle is. I stuffed it under my fleece against my belly and the difference was incredible. It made me feel so much better.

The other thing I do is work out at lunchtime. I've found that if I start at 8.30 then the cold starts to become uncomfortable around 11.30. I can push it another hour then at 12.30 I go and train. Sitting there in front of a screen for hours is the problem. The blood isn't flowing. But I find if I go and do a bit of hard exercise then I'm good for another few hours. Then by about 3.30-4pm I don't mind doing a few short blasts of my little fan heater.

Financially, Christmas was okay. I had to transfer about £100 from my savings to cover it all but other than that I survived alright. I'd tried to prepare in advance. When I was a kid my mum always had the Christmas Box. Whenever she was out she'd buy something extra, something that either we would need for Christmas or would just make a nice treat. So now I do that. Starting in October, every time I go to the supermarket I buy something extra for the Christmas Box. And by Christmas Day I've got a nice little supply of both Christmas essentials and a few luxuries. You don't really notice the cost and the end result is that my "big" Christmas shop isn't much different to my normal weekly one.

I get a Christmas dinner pack from the local butcher. It saves a ton of money compared to the supermarket. You get a 2.5kg turkey crown, a tray of their hand made pigs in blankets, a load of sausages and a big pack of bacon all for £30. There's about a good 10 meals of food that went into the freezer just from leftovers.

Presents. I only have my daughter to buy anything major for. In a normal year I wouldn't see my parents til January so their presents come out of that month's budget. This year? Who knows. I did some baking and sent them a few treats instead rather than presents through the post. But for my daughter I spent maybe £300? It wasn't far off what I'd budgeted. I started putting aside £20 a week starting in October so that when I came around to pay my credit card bill for December I had enough to cover her presents.

The big financial problem I've got at the minute is that one of my old fillings disintegrated at the weekend. I patched it up with one of those repair kits and went to see the dentist today. I was registered with an NHS dentist but, stupidly, I'd not been for a long time so got dumped. The only place I could get seen at was a local private dentist. Partly practices aren't taking on patients because of covid but it seems that no-one wants to do NHS treatment now either.
So I went, knowing that this is going to be a fucking disaster. I'd been stressing about it all week. I get there, she does X-rays and pokes around and starts telling me my options. Cheapest is an extraction at £80. The other option is a root filling at... £650. Then she starts talking about implants like we're talking about a new tyre for my car. £2000 and she's acting like it's nothing.

It really saddens me. I'm in a position where I could, in theory, slap the £650 on my credit card. But there is a hell of a lot of people who can't. It's fucking disgusting that in a country like hours that good dentistry is beyond the reach of people on even a decent salary. Who has £600 to spend on a fucking filling in one tooth?

So unless you are fairly affluent... bye-bye tooth. That's the reality for most people. It's incredible that if you are not wealthy then your only dentistry option is the same thing we were doing 200 years ago. I imagine for the average person who isn't with an NHS dentist then instead of the traditional "how much will this hurt?" they are worrying about "how much will this cost?".

That's been the reality of this pandemic for the average person. For most working class people the big worry has not been whether or not they get sick, it has been whether or not they will lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose everything. The inequality and the fragility of existence for a working class person in Britain is awful. It makes me both sad and angry.

Anyway, I think my next step is to try to find either an NHS dentist or someone willing to do something cheaper. I can't believe that the only replacement for a £20 filling is £650 of work or just take the fucking thing out. That's bullshit.

I've got a few financial aims for this year but I think I'll save that for another post.

Update October 2020

I can't remember the last time I did an update. I know I wrote one but never uploaded it.

As usual, everything has just disappeared into the pile of shit that this year has become. I guess like a lot of people I'm not in the greatest of places mentally. To be honest, I'm pretty down at the moment and have been for a while.

I wish I could say it was the toll of all the restrictions and anxiety over coronavirus. That would be the easy answer. But I know it isn't. I'm pissed off and I think I'd be pissed off if everything was normal.

It's back to money worries again. For a couple of months everything was great. There were no demands, it was summer, no need to spend any money. But that has all changed. My daughter has started high school and that transition has ended up costing the best part of a grand.

There's uniform. Apparently that is a cost effective, egalitarian system. The fuck it is. Schools tie up with a sole supplier who price gouge the fuck out of parents because they know they can't go anywhere. You want an egalitarian, cost effective solution? Tell them to wear what they like as long as it comes from Primark. Simple. You'd have a year's worth of clothing for a quarter of what these money-grabbing cunts charge and kids would all be wearing the same. I never wore uniform at all where I grew up. Ever. It caused me zero issues either then or as an adult.

There's all the shit that they need. PE kit. Maths kit. A particular model of calculator. A particular type of laptop. Laptop? Yes, a fucking specific laptop. And no, you can't just buy a refurbed £99 laptop from Ebay. It has to be a particular £300 Chromebook that isn't even half as powerful or durable as that £99 Ebay special would be. So that was August fucked.

Then my car needed MOT'd. Another £300 for that. Then the fucking battery died last week so another £75 there. And tonight it's started making a horrific clunking the moment it goes past 20mph and the steering wheel judders at anything past 40. Fuck knows what that is, I suspect a CV joint so that's probably another £200.

Now Christmas is coming and I'm dreading it because it's another drain. I know that makes me sound miserable but it inevitably becomes a pissing contest with my ex-wife. I'd happily have quite a modest Christmas and my daughter would be more than happy with it. But her mother doesn't see it that way. She'll spend to excess, buy her a shameful amount of stuff. And on Christmas morning I'll have my little pile of presents for after. I hate it on so many levels. I hate how materialistic it is. I hate how bad it makes me feel about myself. I hate how broke it leaves me.

Then there is the weather. I bought a load of logs at the end of spring when they were cheap thinking I'd be starting autumn with most of them. Summer was so shit that they were gone by September. Now I'm back to the fuel poverty of last year. I remember how bad it was, wondering if I should light the fire or just go to bed a bit earlier.

I'm worried about work as well. The project I am working on is due to finish around April/May time. At one point that was a year away. Now it doesn't seem that long. I don't know what there is at the end of it. I'm supposed to be a permanent member of staff but I'm the only person of my discipline in the company and there are no other projects that need my skill right now. I have no idea what they outlook is. Being isolated means you don't get to hear the office chatter and gossip, you don't know what is or isn't coming up. I've got this constant nagging in the back of my mind that come the spring I'm going to be out of work.

I'm so pissed of at the minute and it is all financial. Of all the anxiety I feel, none of it is coronavirus related. As a single parent I didn't exactly have a rich social life to begin with so the impact of these restrictions has been minimal on that. I was lonely and bored before any of this started. That was something else that got on top of me. I've been divorced for five years and my ex-wife still manages to have a significant amount of control over my life. If it wasn't for her I wouldn't have been living like this. I know I'm free to go anywhere but I also know exactly how she would react. If I think I am broke and depressed now then that's nothing compared to the misery she would go out of her way to generate for me if I moved far enough away that we wouldn't have our daughter for equal amounts of time.

My only escape is just getting away on my free weekends. Get out into the wilds, set up a little camp away from everyone and everything. But that's slowly getting eroded. I can't afford the diesel to go far. My car is fucked so I'm not going anywhere until that is fixed. The weather is shit. And the constantly changing restrictions have left me confused as to whether or not I'm even allowed to go anywhere.

I'm burnt out. I've noticed that the time I've been spending with my daughter has left me really mentally exhausted. I know that only happens when my anxiety levels are high. I feel constantly on edge, constantly like I'm on red alert. I walked past the back door last night and freaked out when I saw my reflection and thought it was some outside. I feel ready to go to war at a second's notice. It's exhausting me. I had PTSD in the past and I felt like that then: always ready to go into an aggressive defence mode when it was needed. Only it was never needed. Same as now.

I'm tired. I'm depressed. And I don't even have the excuse of a pandemic to blame. If there was no coronavirus I'd be in the same place. It's payday and with all the bills paid I don't think I've got enough to get me to the end of November. I'm sick of this cycle and I don't know how to escape. Every penny is accounted for and I still don't know why I am skint.

I'm going to try to blog a bit more regularly in the hope that it actually makes me a bit more able to keep a handle on things financially. Talking into the void of the internet is also my only real outlet at the minute. I literally don't have anyone to talk to other than my daughter and that weighs heavy. I need this space to vent.
 

Weekly Update 23rd June 2020

I've felt a growing sense of sadness over the last few days. The world, or the UK at least, is starting to come out of lockdown. Normal life is beginning and things are starting to open up again. Soon we will be able to travel, to go to pubs and cinemas, to see other people. In theory, this is great. It means that Covid-19 cases are dropping and society, especially the economy, can start up at last.

Why do I feel so sad about it? Part of it is that all the bullshit is also now starting over. My daughter is back at school from Monday and the barrage of emails and, now, Whatsapp messages has started up from my ex-wife. My daughter has one month of school left. One fucking month. Not a single piece of uniform fits and for one fucking month I have to buy a load of shit that she will never wear again.

School has said they can wear their own clothes but oh no, that's not good enough for the middle class mothers. Yep, every fucking single one of them has gone out and bought new uniform for 4 fucking weeks. So now I have to do the same for 4 fucking weeks.

For three months I'd forgotten how much I despise these people. In the six years my daughter has been at the school I could count on one hand the number of conversations I've had with the other parents. It's not for want of trying, I'm a fairly talkative, sociable guy. But I'm not one of them. The know I am a single parent and they know, urgh, that I live in the village over the hill. You know, the one where the poor people live.

I sound really bitter. And I guess I am. It's not what I'd expected my daughter's primary school years would be like. It was great that she got into such a nice little village school but that comes with all the snobbish, judgemental, materialistic, entitled arseholes that live there. Considering that half of them inherited their places there and didn't do a stroke of work to achieve is entirely lost.

So that was that. I'd forgotten how much I cannot be arsed with all this bullshit. But the other thing that got to me is how big a lost opportunity this was.

For three months "normal" life shut down. Almost from day one I started noticing things that were never there. The constant, distant hum of the motorway was gone. Birds were singing. Wildlife was returning and the land was recovering. The air was clear. There were no planes in the sky.

And people were nice to each other. I remember reading about how, post-9/11, in New York it happened there. Normality went on hold and people acted decently towards one another. That's fading now, you can see that negativity start to sneak in, that selfishness start bubbling to the top again.

I've loved these last three months where all the pressure was lifted. I don't mean work, that was maybe even worse than normal. I mean socially. In three months I did not give a single fuck that I had a shit social life and a small circle of friends. The loneliness that I normally felt vanished almost overnight because there was no pressure to have a social life and no opportunity to do it. For the first time in a long time I felt normal.

We're also being encouraged to buy our way out of this, too. Advertising seems to have ramped up and I'm already seeing people going back to buying shit again. You can bet that a ton of that shit is being bought on credit. People losing their minds over not being able to consume can now go out and get sucked into a retail orgy presided over by utter scumbags like Phillip Green.

I feel really sad it is over. Really sad. One of my favourite writers, Edward Abbey, once said "there's something wrong with a system that can only either expand or fail". He's right. Lockdown has shown just how unnatural and fragile the world we have created is. If we pause, even for a moment, it starts to crumble.

I've thought a lot about what it must be like to live a tribal life. In a hunter gatherer community it takes a major disaster to threaten the tribe. You can always eat, you can always have shelter. It takes a lot to fuck that up. But in our world? Our "civilised" world? Three months and we are looking at the worst economic depression in modern history.

I feel very disillusioned and alienated right now. As we come out of lockdown, I feel even more out of place here than I ever did. I think if I was younger and if I didn't have a child then I would not be here. I'd pack a bag, I'd sell everything I had of any value and I'd split. Where would I go? To play in the fields of the Lord. Now there's an 1980's reference to look up.

Update 10th June 2020

End of the month so I can actually take a bit of a better look at my financial status. Most weeks nothing happens but when I get paid then I've actually got something to talk about.

I've managed to save a bit of cash this month. Last month, if I remember right, I was hitting a bit of a wall. It surprised me but when I thought about it, there was a lot of expense in the previous month which impacted it. At the end of May I was probably about £2-300 ahead.

I do my shopping once a week and I've got a fairly regular shopping list that I now buy. This was generally coming in at around £50 a week for me and my daughter. It's probably more than I would like but that is allowing for a few treats, some better quality produce and a bit more discretionary spending. I have no other real financial demands at the minute so I can ease up a little on the frugality in the supermarket.

But one thing I've noticed is that prices are going up. I don't know if reduced supply is starting to feed through into the system but there is a noticeable increase. I the bulk of my shopping in Aldi and there are a few things I've seen creeping up. Some quite dramatically. I get through a lot of nuts and I buy a pack of cashews every week. They are 85p. They have been 85p for as long as I can remember. Last week they shot up to £1.45. I noticed it on a lot of things.

It's a lot to just be price gouging. The jumps might be small on most things, 10p here, 5p there, but it's still significant. I suspect this is the reality of food shortages. At the start of the lockdown when people were panic buying, it seemed to be that they were expecting some sort of biblical famine. What was more likely, and what seems to be happening, is that there is still stuff available but just not as much as there was. The end result of that is increased prices. Makes you wonder which is more damaging, an interruption in supply when we're all living off tins and what's in the freezer or a situation where we are paying 25% more for what we'd normally buy. Either way, you can bet supermarkets, who have done extremely well out of the pandemic, are not going to miss an opportunity to take a profit. As much as Tesco and Asda and Morrisons want to shout about their charity work, they are not charities.

A positive is that my little pot of investment funds has started to recover. At one point it had lost about a quarter of its value. Considering it was only about three grand to start with (and that was hard won) that's quite a hit. When I checked yesterday, it was only down 2%. Not great (as it was about 13% up before the panic) but a hell of a lot better than 25% down.

Another savings issue that I've had is with Chip. For starters, it has not saved a penny for me in about six weeks. Nothing has changed in my spending or earning habits but it has pretty much died on its arse. It was a nice little app when I first started using it, squirreling away a couple of quid every few days until it had built a nice pot up. Now, nothing. And as it is adding in a monthly charge (in certain circumstances) it makes me question whether or not it is worth using. It has always niggled me that a. they get the benefit of holding my cash and b. they get the benefit of knowing my spending habits which can be turned into a commodity that can be sold on to third parties.

A second issue I've found with Chip is accessibility. My phone died a couple of weeks ago and I had to revert to an ancient phone I still had lying around which I could not install Chip on. But there is no other way to access your Chip account. There is no online access and you need a device with a phone number (so I couldn't install it on my tablet). That really pissed me off. Luckily I didn't need the money this month but if I did I would have been screwed. They say I can email the helpdesk but is that really the best option in this day and age? How hard is it to set up a web page to allow access? I think my love affair with Chip is at an end and I might be closing my account if it doesn't improve its performance this month.

I can't remember if I mentioned this previously, I've started using my credit card to pay more bills that will allow it. I've always preferred manually paying bills because it makes me feel like I have better awareness of what is going on. Anywhere that gives a direct debit discount I have been leaving alone. But places that don't, like my council tax, I've been using my credit card. I never thought about it until I heard someone mention it on a podcast: I get cashback on my credit card spending so why not use that for bills? Regular things like council tax I transfer the cash into my account and then pay it. It all adds to my pot. Now, as I've said before, it gets paid in Waitrose/John Lewis vouchers and those aren't places I would shop regularly. But it does mean that I get to give myself a bit of a treat now and again on something I wouldn't generally consider buying.

I think my main news is that I was finally furloughed on Monday. This has actually worked out really well because on the same day I was finally offered the job that I was interviewed for a couple of weeks ago. Same salary, same commute and a year's worth of work in the pipeline. I am putting my notice in today. So now I can happily sit on my arse for the next month. Taking a 20% hit is going to hurt but it is only temporary and then things go back to normal.

The way I look at it, if you are first to be furloughed then you are first to be made redundant. The scheme ends in October but what I didn't realise was that if you are not on it by today (10th of June) then you are fucked. The regs say you need to have been furloughed for at least three weeks before the 30th of June. I only found this out recently which is why I've been a bit anxious to get on it sooner rather than later. After today, you're facing the boot with no safety net if you haven't been furloughed already.

Getting the job offer could not have come at a better time. The government is increasing the amount employers have to contribute and I know for certain that the people I work for are going to start the cull the moment it costs them a penny. It won't hurt them, when things pick up they know they can get anyone they need and on a lower rate because it will be a buyer's market. So I am going on my own terms.

The choice is whether or not to start the new job sooner. According to the rules I can work for someone else whilst on furlough. It would almost double my salary for a month, that's a couple of grand I could just drop straight in the bank. I don't know if this is the right decision but I don't want to. I've been so stressed of late that I'm happy to pay 20% for a month's leave. Mentally, I'm really burnt out with everything that has happened and having this time to chill and just catch up has been great even after just two days.

I think it is time that I just sit down, relax and let my mental health come first. I've got plenty to fill my time. I will not be bored. For once, I am taking a fucking reward that I actually deserve. That's at the expense of the tax-payer (which I am one of) and maybe my current employer but I do not give a flying fuck about that.

On Furlough

I got the phonecall yesterday that I had been expecting for a while. I was told that as of next Friday I would be on furlough. I had work for this week but after that, game over.

I knew it was coming. I'd done fuck all this week and started every day pestering my manager for something to do. I'd be given a simple task and 7.5 hours to do it. I knew when there was no-one chasing it that this was just something so that both me and my manager could pretend I was busy.

It reminded me of the old Bill Hicks gag:

"Hicks! Can't you just pretend to be working?"

"You're paid more than me. Can't you pretend I'm working?"
So it was no surprise. I'd expected it about a month ago so the impact isn't going to be huge. I'd already thought it through in financial terms. It translates to losing £500 a month. I pay £165 into a savings plan which I can cancel and I'm probably spending about a quarter of my monthly budget so that's the £500 taken care of.

There are discretionary things I can cancel as well. I've got Amazon Prime because the free delivery was useful in lockdown but it's £7.99 that can go. I've got £6 for membership of a local nature reserve where I like going birdwatching. I hate to do it but that can go as well as it's shut for the duration anyway. I'm going to hit up my car insurer and see if I can get anything reduced there. Weather is getting milder so I can cut back on heating.

There are lots of things I can do to make this work financially. I can't get worked up about it. I fucking despise this government but surprisingly the Job Retention Scheme is an absolute godsend. And they've extended it to October. So worst case, I've got the summer with my feet up. My line manager says that all the work that was put on hold is coming back on stream in another month or so, we're an NHS supplier so in theory should weather this OK. And if everyone is still in this shit in October then we're all fucked.

The problem is the mental impact. I tried writing this post last night and I just couldn't do it. It hit me hard and I'm still pretty angry about it. I'm really good at my job and I'm really reliable. People ask for me to be assigned to their projects. There's a lot of people there that you honestly cannot say that about. So it is a real slap in the face that I get furloughed and they don't.

And it is ironic because I fucking hate my job. I have no end of things I could fill my time with and just having the break would do my mental health a power of good. But it's just that little, shitty niggle that says "you aren't as good as these people".

I know that's bullshit and that I am just inventing a narrative based on shit that has happened in the past. I have zero evidence that that is the case. I know that the likely explanation is that I am more skilled so more expensive. At the minute, they just need the office equivalent of a labourer. They don't need skilled. So if they get me off the books then it pays for nearly two "labourers". But I just can't shut that voice off that keeps asking "so why aren't they doing it to others? Why is it just you?". And the answer to that is "they hate you, you must be shit at it".

It's my brain fucking with me. I know it intellectually but I just don't feel it on a gut level.

I'm a big fan of Jocko Willink's outlook. I know what he would say. "Good". On furlough? Good, more time to train, more time to learn, more time with my daughter. Losing 20% of your salary? Good, you've still got 80%. You aren't on the dole. There is a big part of me looking forward to what is basically extended paid leave. I keep thinking maybe this is the push I need to start a business. There are a couple of things I could be doing to make a little extra money that I'd have the time to pursue. It'd just be getting some advertising and hoping that the demand was there.

Someone else I am a fan of is Ram Dass, a late American spiritual teacher. Ram Dass had this idea of "becoming nobody". He said that we build up an identity based on all these external things. Our careers, our hobbies, the clothes we wear, the stuff we own. But all of that can be taken away. So who are you underneath it all? Being "somebody" means having all these pointless trappings. Becoming "nobody" is who you really are without all that shit. I know that I hate work so why do I let it define me? This is an opportunity to let go.

We'll see. I'm bouncing along the edge of a depression. It's not how I saw this year playing out. I'm getting older but I don't feel like I'm getting further along the track. The things I'd hoped for like getting out of debt, getting on my feet, starting a new relationship, having more of a life outside of just work and childcare, it feels like they have gone. I wanted to finally put divorce and nearly going bankrupt in the past. What is worse is that it feels like the opportunity is gone. That door has closed and there's nothing on the horizon to get optimistic about. Even wars have an end, this seems to just be the normal state of human life from now on.

Cashing Out: The Pots of Money You Forgot You Had

It's pretty clear with the economic situation is that a lot of the companies which we know now are not going to be there after the coronavirus pandemic is done.

There are a few sick men on the High Street that always seem to be on the verge of going under. Department stores, like Debenhams. Mainstream travel agents and airlines. Bar & dining chains. It's always the same names, Debenhams, Marks and Spencer, some celebrity chef's restaurant chain, anything owned by Richard Branson or Phillip Green. But there are also going to be a lot of others as well.

It got me thinking about how much money I've got tied up in companies. I'm not talking about investments or pensions or anything like that. In case you missed it, I'm skint. No, I'm talking about things like gift cards, refunds, cashbacks. Little pots of money that are sitting in my account on some company's website.

It all mounts up to a decent pile of cash. And here's the problem: none of that is protected. If the company goes tits up then good luck getting it back. I had a ball-ache of a fight when my electricity supplier went bust and that was WITH protection under the law. Without it? You're money is as good as lost.

So over the last few weeks I've been working my way round all of these. The first step is to just take an inventory of where you are. Go round everyone you spend money with and just make a little list then check out your account. You'll be surprised. A good start is to go over your credit or debit card statements and have a look at where you spent money. Same with Paypal (or any of the other payment providers). Just go round them all and have a look at your account balances with them. If you are in credit with them, even by a couple of quid, get it out. That company may not be there in a few months and that cash is better in your pocket than being lost in the system.

Refunds are a good place to check. Usually you are going to get a refund paid back on the card you used originally. Make sure that refund actually happened. Sometimes they will credit the refund to your account, though. If it is then withdraw it. It is your money, they put it there because they know the chances are high you will spend it with them. It's worth keeping track of withdrawals and just double check it ends up in your bank.

Another area to look at is gift cards and vouchers. This is your money tied up in that company. Something like 6% of all gift cards never get used which translates as millions of pounds. Guess who loses that money? It isn't the company. They are winners, they've already received money for the card and the longer it takes you to spend it the better. Inflation means a £10 gift card bought last year buys you a lot less today than it did twelve months ago. Some gift cards have expiry dates, too. So if your gift card expires then they make even more on you. There are two things to remember with gift cards: they are YOUR money and their value decays as time passes. But there is also a third issue and that is the really important one right now: if the company goes bust then the gift card is worth zero.

I have a John Lewis credit card with a cashback deal on it which I use for my daily spending. Every four months they pay out the cashback. But here's the catch: they pay it out in John Lewis/Waitrose vouchers. I fucking hate Waitrose, you might as well just shop in Tesco and just throw an extra 10% of what you spent in the bin. But I actually quite like John Lewis, they're pretty good for some big ticket items like electricals.

However, John Lewis is also one of those "sick men" I mentioned at the start. They are always warning about losing money and being close to collapse. So having £150 mounting up in JL vouchers is a big risk and letting inflation erode their value is stupid. So, I spent a big chunk of them and if things seem to be sliding for them I'll spend the rest.

You have to kind of take a view on it. I doubt we'll see Amazon collapse any time soon so their cards are probably a safe bet. You can maybe hold on to these a little longer. Others, you might want to order something soon. But either way, inflation makes holding gift cards a really bad idea regardless of whose name is one the front. Same goes for goodwill payments, like when a company bungs you a few quid because they screwed an order up. A lot of payments will be in the form of a gift card or discount code and will be in the same boat.

So as a lesson for the future, here's some things to remember:

• don't buy gift cards. There's nothing socially awkward about giving cash. Nobody prefers to receive a gift card over cash. No-one.
• if you do, use a credit card to pay for it. At least there is a chance you can recover the payment if the company goes bust.
• if you get one, spend it as soon as you can to avoid inflation
• you can sell them. Card Yard buys and sells them for a fee (I think it was 10% on an Amazon card when I sold the one I got from work as a shitty Christmas bonus). You used to be able to sell them on Ebay as well but you have a high chance of being scammed

Another place I knew I had a lot of unprotected money was in Topcashback. I use it a lot for online purchases and over the last couple of years I've built up around £400 in my account. Again, that account is unprotected. I don't know what effect this whole situation is having on them but that money is still safer in my bank account than in theirs. Like gift cards, inflation is also eroding how much that is worth. Even with the current shitty savings rates the interest is still better than nothing. So, that is going to be moved from there to my savings account.

If you've been into matched betting then you've probably got pots of money scattered all over the place with bookies. There is nothing to bet on so I cleared mine out. I wasn't hugely enamoured with matched betting, I doubt I'll continue with it after this all recovers so not bothered about my accounts going dormant or whatever. I think I only made about £150 profit but the big thing was that I had a lot of my own cash tied up there to leverage it. Some bookies are going to go bust, there is no question of that. Take it out now.

Your money is your money. You need to be really proactive with it right now. Companies will go bust, companies that you use. Sure, cashing out your gift cards and clearing out accounts might be the push some need to fold. It's a tough decision but there was no question for me. I don't have the money to spare just so I can feel like I did the ethical thing.

Weekly Update: 3rd May 2020

April has disappeared and I have barely even noticed its passing.

I haven't bothered doing a weekly update because there hasn't really been anything to update. Like a lot of people, I'm saving a shitload of money because I'm not driving, I'm not going anywhere, I'm not doing anything. By the end of the month my spending was something like £250 below my budget. I basically spend about £50 on my weekly shop for me and my daughter and that's it. I occasionally buy something for the house from Amazon. Like I have a leaking pipe and needed some materials to repair it with.

It's great but is it worth reporting? It's all artificial. I'm only saving money because of circumstances, I've not done anything to "earn" it. There's no real opportunity to do anything particularly productive.

A few people at work have been furloughed. I get the feeling that there was more to it than simple lack of work. The people chosen, if someone asked you who were either the most lazy or least competent in the place you'd probably choose them. One of them, worryingly, had had mental health issues in the past and mentioned to his line manager that he hadn't been doing too well in the last week. And, sure enough, by coincidence he was the first furlough announced.

That really spiked my anxiety and depression when it happened. There was a little bit of relief when the Job Retention Scheme was extended to the end of June. That relaxed me. But it still hasn't eased the low level anxiety that I've got burning in the background. I deal with it by just not thinking about it.

I don't know if "depression" is really what I've felt. It's more a general melancholy brought on by the loss of liberty, the endlessness of it, the uncertainty, the lack of anything to differentiate one day from the next. I'm filling my time with housekeeping and jobs that don't really need doing. Minor repairs. Tidying. A lot of exercise, I've been training really hard.

I think the key to this is remembering that tomorrow is not today. We tend to get into the mental habit of thinking that how today goes is the template for the future. But it isn't, we learn to deal with things, situations change, we make progress. That really keeps me going.

Not looking deeply at the news helps keep my mental health in check. I don't need to read the biographies of the dead that sites like the BBC love to post. I get it that some people see this as humanising the Covid victims but you have to ask what it is doing to you mentally. Especially when they love to post about the people that don't fit the normal victim profile. When fit and healthy people, people who look not dissimilar to you, are dying then that sets my nerves on edge.

Everyone says "wash your hands" but we need to bring that same hygiene standard to our minds as well. You need to be aware of where your attention is. It might seem disrespectful to the dead but you need to ask yourself: is reading all this stuff helping? The same with posting to social media: is what you write helping either you or others? Usually the answer is "no".

I had a month long break from Facebook and I've applied that principle to anything I post or get involved in. Is it helpful? Is it funny? Is it useful? If not, then I don't bother. I don't need to reply to other people. I don't need to get into discussions about who thinks who is right.

I listened to a financial podcast the other day. The guy on it said the best thing to do in situations like this is to over-react but not panic. I think what he was trying to say is that panicking means making decisions where your judgement is clouded. Over-reacting means taking steps that are maybe more aggressive than they need to be but done with conscious thought and planning.

I think I've done that. My "over-reaction" has been shut down all unecessary spending. It's fairly easy because there's nowhere to go and nothing to do. But my outlook right now is to act like I have already lost my job. I've been through my monthly bills and I know what my spending is. I know what I need to pay and when I need to pay it. I am trying to set aside cash as much as I can. I've rebuilt a decent stash of food in my freezer after the disaster a few weeks ago. Maybe it isn't the most nutritious (a lot of Aldi frozen stuff) but it's food and isn't what I'm going to be living off forever.

If I am wrong then so what? It doesn't hurt to have pared everything down to the minimum. If I am right then I am starting from a better position.

Mentally, that will be the real challenge. It makes me wonder about what this will do long term. After the last recession and then through a divorce I did the same thing. I got into the habit of being extremely tight with money and it took me a long time to get out of that. For the last year (at least) I was financially back on my feet and didn't need that same level of extreme money-saving but I just could not snap out of it because I'd been living it so long. I had to literally remind myself not to be so mean and spend a little cash now and again. Like when I was out with my daughter or on holiday or something. Yes, you can afford to go into a cafe without it bankrupting you...

And now I am back in that mindset. I don't know, I think because the circumstances I've been living in (job worries, lack of money, lack of opportunities, etc) that this hasn't been much of an adjustment. The only thing that I've really struggled with so far has been the lack of physical touch. I'd been single for a while and just got around to getting back into dating again when all this happened. Knowing that it will be a long time before people are going to start feeling like they can be physical with another person, especially a stranger, really bothers me.

But like I said, tomorrow is not today.

Saving money when working from home

So week one of working at home done for me. A few things I've been thinking about over the last seven days that might be useful. The big thing is that I'm not using my own power, heat and internet as opposed to my employer paying for it so I'm going to start with the financial aspects then maybe look some of the mental wellbeing points I've come up against.

Save, Save, Save

Looking at some of the numbers that have made it to the news and it's pretty apparent that the chance of a recession has become very real. Now is the perfect time to start ratcheting back your spending. Normal life is on hold and the opportunity just is not there for any of the big draws on your spending. You can't go to the pub, you can't go to restaurants or the cinema, you don't (or at least shouldn't) have much chance of any social life. There's no point booking a holidaybecause even without the travel restrictions there's nowhere to go.

Then there's commuting. Unless you're someone that still has to go to a workplace then, again, make the most of this. You aren't spending money on fuel or public transport. Some companies are offering to refund unused season tickets and passes. You aren't putting any wear on your car and MOT's have been extended by 6 months.

If you are sensible then you should already be giving yourself a weekly allowance that you need to keep within. If you are really sensible then it makes sense to cut that allowance back. What am I going to spend money on other than a trip to the supermarket now and again?

The money that you are not spending needs to go to good use. The two main choices are either as cash or to reduce debt (or a combination of both). Each have their own advantages. If you use this money to pay down debt going into a recession then it puts you in a better position. And if you need some emergency spending then your credit line has a little bit more capacity in it. Equally, cash has advantages. There are a lot of things you can't pay with a credit card, like rent, mortgage, childcare, that kind of thing so having some extra cash in the bank makes sense. Cash is also something they cannot take away from you. There is the chance that if you have, say, a credit card that you aren't using but keep for emergencies then it isn't unknown for the company to reduce your credit limit. I had a card that I kept clear in case I ever got hit with a big bill, never looked at it for a couple of years until one day I did and saw they'd reduced my credit limit from a few thousand to a few hundred.

It's up to you. Most financial bloggers say pay debt first but personally, I like cash. My own strategy right now is to pay down a little more but I want most of it going into savings.

Reduce

Go through your spending and make a list of all the things you can pull the plug on right now. We all have a ton of non-essential stuff. I might be skint but I've got a monthly charity donation, I'm a member of the SNP and have monthly membership subs for that. I've got a Netflix subscription that's "only" 6 quid a month. If I dumped all these little discretionary commitments then that frees up £25-30 a month. Most people probably have more. Subscriptions are the way of the world now, especially with things like entertainment but it seeps into everything. Everybody wants you to take that monthly plan and it's a massive black hole for your money if you allow it.

I'm not saying dump them now but you need to know a. What you can get rid of and b. How much that saves. If conditions worsen then you know where you can liberate a little more money from. Personally, though, I'm dumping what I can right now and those savings are all going into the pot.

Staying Warm

The big thing I noticed on my first day was how cold I was when I was working from home. If I'm at home normally then I'm doing stuff and I never notice it. But sitting at a desk all day then I get really fucking cold. Now, obviously there is the discomfort of that but it also puts an unnecessary load on your immune system as well which you really don't need.

The first move is obvious. Put some extra layers on. There's a limit to that, though. My hands get cold and working with gloves at a computer isn't practical.

Another thing I found is: choose your workplace wisely if you can. One side of my house gets the sun from morning until about 1pm and the rooms on that side are really warm. I put my computer right in my front window and I've timed my day to make the most of it, start at 7am and I've done a good 5-6 hours before it starts to get cold.

At some point you need to put the heating on. My recommendation is: only heat where you are working. Central heating is fairly efficient when you are heating the whole house but do you need the whole house to be warm?

At the end of Monday I was so cold that I went to Screwfix and bought a little fan heater. You can pick one up for a tenner. I have it on the lowest setting, pointed straight at me, so it's only burning maybe 17p an hour and I don't run it the whole time.

Power

Get yourself on the lowest electricity deal you can. Now is also the time to do a price comparison and switch if you can get a better deal. Nobody knows how long this will go on for so get the best electricity rate there is.

Again, don't use power in rooms you don't need to. I've got a habit of just automatically switching on the toilet light when I go in that I've forced myself to stop. If it is daytime then you can probably do without lighting.

Internet

Same goes for broadband. Scout around for the best deal. And, importantly, talk to your current supplier. I'm with Sky and every time I tell them I'm leaving then miraculously they find a way to bring my bill down. Every time it ends up beating the best deal I can find.

Another tip, do a line check. Sky have a service check feature on their website, I'd guess most others do too. I checked mine last week and it turned out that the speed can be improved by an engineer's visit rather than upgrading my package.

Telephone

You do not need the data that you think you need. Even at the best of times. But right now you're going to be connected to the wifi 95% of your day at least. I always aim for the least amount of data I can get away with, I think I pay for 6gb and never come close to that limit. You do not need massive or unlimited allowances right now. Unless your broadband shits the bed but I'd wait until that happens before looking at upping my phone's data allowance.

I almost never make calls these days unless it's to companies, amongst friends and family it's almost exclusively text. Again, if you're at home on wifi then use a messaging service like WhatsApp and you won't touch your text allowance.

If you need to make calls for work then it might work out better to use the landline. Check your broadband package to see what you've got and compare it to your call allowance on your mobile.

Food & Drink

One of the big benefits is that I've no excuse for not making my own lunch now. Buying shit I don't need was always my downfall. Take this time to get into the habit of meal planning, batch cooking and making the most of the freezer.

I use my teabags twice. It's not just money-saving, I want to avoid needing to go out so if it makes my teabags go further then great.

I also make two brews at the same time. One in my normal mug, one in an insulated one for later. Boiling a single cup of water seems inefficient so I do twice what I need and save the other half. I've read about some people that make a big pot of tea or coffee in the morning and either put it in a flask or just reheat it in a microwave later.

Working Hours

When I start work I set a countdown timer for 7.5 hours (my contracted day) and I pause it when I take lunch or have any longer breaks (like the days my daughter was here). It is way too easy to over-work or lose track of time. I also physically unplug everything at the end of the day so there is no temptation to go back and work some more later. Keep really good track of your hours worked and what you were doing, I keep a written diary. People will take this chance to screw you, I guarantee it.

Personally, I found I do a lot more at home than I do in the office in the same amount of time so I have zero guilt about doing this. And time is money, if it isn't in your pocket then it is in someone else's.

I think that's about all the money saving stuff I can think of right now. I'm going to do a post on the mental wellbeing aspects later.

Weekly Update 25th March 2020

First real week of the UK lockdown. I saw it announced on Monday night and I just shook my head. How stupid are people? You brought it on yourselves and honestly, I'm really glad they did it. At the weekend I left the house to buy some milk (and waited til late on Saturday evening when I knew the shop was quiet) and Sunday I went for a walk just out my front door. I never saw a soul, presumably because all these morons were travelling all over the fucking country.

The longer this progresses the more I despair of some people. I wanted to see my parents. I wanted to go somewhere nice. But I didn't. And this is what annoys me, probably the vast majority of people did the right thing and sat on their arses and it came down to a bunch of bellends to fuck everything up.

Rant over. This is supposed to be my weekly update. There's a few things I want to talk about that cropped up. The first is the possibilit of losing my job. I work for a supplier to the NHS, not a vital supplier but a supplier all the same. I'm probably in a better position than a lot of people but losing my job is still a possibility.

That kind of uncertainty puts my anxiety through the roof so I've learned that the best cure is to gather intelligence and make a plan. My big worry is losing my home. I rent so there's no mortgage holiday for me. I'd be reliant on benefits. First step was to try to find out what I'd be entitled to. There are various calculators suggested by the gov.uk website. Trouble is, they aren't particularly easy to use, especially if you aren't in the benefit system and don't know what is what. The one I found my way around suggested that I could get £272 a week, so about £1088 a month. Take off rent and council tax and that leaves £360 a month to cover everything else. Not the end of the world but not great either.

The next thing I wanted to do was understand what outgoings I had other than rent and council tax. This included utilities, road tax, car insurance, car loan and card payments. Worryingly, that comes to £650, so £290 short before I even buy any food.

It got me thinking that I need something just to protect my rent. If I could do that then it makes everything else possible. I'd looked at income protection insurance in the past but I'd rejected the idea because I was planning on switching jobs and there's always an exclusion period built into the policies. But right now I'm not moving so a policy might be a possibility.

But it was a struggle finding anything. It seems the entire country has had the same thought and the insurance companies pulled the ladder up. No deal. Some sites were closed. I applied to a couple and got rejected. I got an email on Friday that the last one I tried had actually accepted my application. I've not had any paperwork through so we'll see.

But... I actually got some good news. When I was going through my monthly outgoings I came across a monthly payment for £29 that I'd missed. I'd no idea what it was for so called the company, gave them the reference and it turned out to be an unemployment policy that I'd taken out during the last recession. Entitlement of £500 a month if I lost my job and the policy is still in place. I can't believe it, it really is such good luck. On the downside, I've paid about £3500 in premiums over the years. The benefit could be anything from £500 to £6000. Normally, I hate insurance policies like these as they prey off fear but for once I'm very grateful for it.

Spending, I've spent fuck all this week. I did my weekly shop on Monday and that's it. I bought some compost and some veg seeds which came to 20 quid. Usually that's enough that I'm self-sufficient in tomatoes, cucmbers and salad for most of the summer and into the autumn. I bought a packet of bacon from the local butcher as a treat. I've done about 10 miles in my car since Friday. I've not been anywhere or done anything.

Mentally, getting out of work and staying at home has helped my mental health massively. I was very anxious this time last week, I was getting really short-tempered at work and, stupidly, I got to the point I was threatening to walk if they didn't stop fucking around over working from home. On the downside, I'm finding working from home a lot harder than I was expecting. There are no distractions, no one to talk to so the days are really long. It's lonely. I'm surprised at that as I'm quite a self-reliant person. And it's boring. I thought I'd love having so much more time but having all that time to fill can be a curse.

But mostly, I'm feeling good. I think I've got stuff under control at the minute. I'm feeling OK about work for the next month or two. I'm working out hard and eating really well, I'd lost six pounds over the last couple of weeks and look like I'm still losing fat. I'm aiming to have a six pack by the end of this. I'm posting my daily workout on Instagram if anyone cares, I try to tailor it for people with minimal equipment and no access to a gym. Working out is maybe the best thing I've found for controlling my depression. It's @skintlife_2020 on Instagram. I don't do any other social media.

As I've been working from home I've been thinking about ways to save money and help you cope mentally. I'll draft these up over the coming days and post.

Weekly Update 18th March 2020

What a fucking week.

It is totally crazy and I'm really having a hard time dealing with it. I realise that I'm drifting away from personal finance and into mental health more so I'm going to pull it back first.

Work have actually been incredibly good at pulling a strategy together to get everyone working from home. This is great. Apart from the safety aspect, it represents that, for now at least, they have a commitment to continuity. Almost all of our projects are to the NHS and despite everything else, these still need to keep going. They might slow down but hopefully they will keep going. As opportunistic as it sounds, there may even be additional stuff that we get involved in as a direct result of coronavirus. I'm not looking to profit, I'm looking simply to stay employed. If that can happen then fantastic.

My savings got hammered this week. I've not got a huge amount, I've been squirreling away £150 a month for the last couple of years. I had around £3200 put away. I'd followed all the advice that said, put into tracker funds because they grow well and they're safe as houses. Tracker funds buy blocks of shares in the FTSE100 companies. They are great because you are buying into solid companies for low amounts of money and you don't have to think too much about the technicalities of share dealing. But this week they got hammered. My £3200 nest egg turned into £2500. The "smart" advice is to hold on and ride out the volatility but watching very hard won savings vanish is tough.

I think I have probably blown my budget for the week, too. Like I said in my previous post, I haven't done any panic-buying. I already have about 3 months food stashed in the freezer that I built up over the last year or so. But I don't want to start eating into that. If the shops have stocks then I want to make the most of that. I also realise that I didn't have much stashed for my daughter who is vegetarian. So, as much as I didn't "panic buy", I did a bigger than normal shop this week.

The thing that worries me is getting vegetables. They don't freeze well if bought fresh and with being at work it wasn't practical to buy pre-frozen. So I just bought a bunch of the veg no-one was going crazy over and I'm going to cook that into a basic stew. I'll portion that up and freeze so that I can at least have a base for maybe chilli or spag-bol for my daughter.

Working from home will probably bring a lot of savings as well. I'm not spending £25 a week on fuel. I'm not putting miles on my car. There's no opportunity for spending money at dinnertime. At weekends I'll usually have a trip out somewhere and maybe go walking or visit a castle (I have an English Heritage membership) or do something active but cheap. I rarely spend much, occasionally a pint or a cup of tea, and the main cost is fuel. That's going to be gone.

I'm probably going to cash out my matched betting pot. I don't know if there is much opportunity to pursue it right now. I did a tally tonight and there is £250 cash tied up in it, £140 of which is profit. I'd rather have the cash in my bank in case the bookies fold.

I've also just realised I've got about £150 in John Lewis vouchers that I've earned through cashback. It's harsh but they might end up being a casualty and I don't want to lose the vouchers.

Today I started looking at buying an income protection policy. I'd looked at it a while ago and held off because I was looking for a new job. There's usually an exclusion period on the policies so it made sense not to bother if I was going to be moving anyway. For what I wanted, £1500 a month, it was coming in around £38 a month.

To be honest, I can't really afford £38 a month when I'm already cancelling everything that I don't need already. But if I am going to be working from home then the saving in my fuel costs will pay for it. But the big unknown is whether or not it's worth the paper it is printed on. A lot of insurers' websites are saying no new applications being accepted. I tried calling them and they said they did not know if it was even going to get processed as they've been overwhelmed by applications.

I had a look at the benefits calculator at [entitled to] just to see what I'd be looking at if I lost my job. £272 a week, a little over a grand a month. I pay £625 in rent, there's a chance I could make that work on its own if I cut everything back, make some deals with companies I owe money to, etc. I've got a little cash and whatever my index funds are going to be worth.

I think what has really hit me (and presumably everyone else) so hard mentally is the suddenness with which it hit. We all watched it in China like it was a spectator sport. There were daily stats on what was rising and what was falling. It was an event.

But from the moment that coronavirus touched down here it all kicked in in what feels like days. I'm sure it must have been weeks since the first cases but all the escalation feels really fast. It's a fucking lot to deal with.

There is the basic existential worry. What is going to happen to me and those that I love? Pure and simple, will we survive? That's got to be everyone's first thought. But then comes everything else.

There's the practical shit like being indoors for an unknown period of time and all the preparation involved. There's what is going to happen with work. What about money? How do I survive financially? One of the really saddest facts about the way this has unfolded is that I bet a hell of a lot of people are more worried about their financial wellbeing than physically. There are times I am more worried about keeping a roof over my head than anything else. School closures, working from home, cancelled travel. The list goes on.

Now, most of that is financial and some smug bastard is probably going to say "you just need to get your priorities right". Well, for most people that is their priority. We don't live in a wonderful, egalitarian paradise where we all pull together to make sure our neighbour isn't living a harder life than us. Sorry, but capitalism doesn't stop for a virus. If you can't pull your weight you are dumped on the heap as fast as if it was a mediaeval plague outbreak. Evictions and repossessions aren't stopping just because of a pandemic.

Maybe when we are all living in isolation we'll be able to take some time and deal with everything. I know I need that. More than likely in a couple of weeks things will have settled down and we have a better idea of what the next year will look like. Maybe we get a sense of normality back.

Weirdly, I have kind of enjoyed the mobilisation stage of the last week. You hear people who have served in the military talk about that. You're doing stuff, you are being proactive. You are raising the defences and filling the sandbags. Night-time is what scares me. That's when I stop having things to do and the nightmares start. Literally. My anxiety has rocketed and my sleep app says I'm getting about 60% sleep quality and around 6 hours in bed.

There were a couple of nights I got caught in the whirlwind of cycling between social media, links, the news, Google and back again. I was fucking terrified. One night I was in tears. It worries me about spending the next few months in isolation. My social circle is small enough as it is and I'm liable to not see anyone for long periods of time. Strangely, if I was in the woods in a tent I'd be happy, it's the fact that I'm having to do isolation but whilst doing all the shit of daily life as well that is freaking me out.

I made the decision to quit social media. Specifically, Facebook. There was shit everywhere that we don't need to see or hear. There's a guy at work who is obsessed with all that "friend-of-a-friend" horsehit conspiracy theory crap who insists on showing it to me. I don't care and I don't want to know. I want to treat my mind with the same level of hygiene as I do my hands. I am still using my Instagram account because I can post what I like without having it come the other way.

In order to keep my mental health on an even keel I am working out every day. I've been posting my daily workout on Instagram. I don't know if anyone reads it or follows it but it's a discipline I want to keep up, especially if I am at home alone for long periods.

Tonight I needed to get the house tidy(ish) because the landlord is sending an energy performance surveyor round tomorrow. I put the radio, listened to some music and got on with it. Later I ventured out into Zombieland to get a Mother's Day card and when I got home I watched some comedy and finished my blog. I feel so much better tonight than I did last night or the one before. I've avoided the media as much as possible. There is nothing new to be said. It has been my least anxious night so far.

Well, I'm tired and I think that will do me for this week. I suspect my posts will increase in frequency and I'm considering doing a podcast. This is really for my own sanity and just gives me a way to vent.

Why I Did Not Panic Buy

There is one simple reason I didn't panic buy. I didn't need to.

I'd bet a lot of people who live through hard times on a daily basis didn't, either. We're used to resources being tight. Panic buying is a privilege of the affluent. I'd love to be in a position that I can just run out and buy a van load of shit I didn't need yesterday and probably don't need today either. But I'm not.

For the past few years I've been living in a state of not knowing what next month brings. There were weeks when I thought I was days away from bankruptcy. I'm in a position that I know that if I lost my job then I'd be screwed financially.

So you take a few little steps when you don't need to. In the supermarket and you see a few chicken fillets in the reduced section? You can either buy them and stuff yourself silly or you can buy them and stick them in the freezer. I do the latter.

For the last few years I've been squirreling stuff away whenever I've seen cheap food. If I've got leftovers it goes in the freezer. The times I throw away food are the days I feel like I've lost points in the great game of life. To the point that I now have two freezers full to the brim.

In the north there is a supermarket chain called Booths. Booths is an upmarket shop, makes Waitrose look like Lidl. There's not much I can afford to buy in there regularly. What makes them great is that they have a fantastic reduced section. Hit the right time and all the leftovers from the butchery and fishmonger counters are piled into the fridge, usually with a massive discount. I've filled the freezer with venison, pheasant, ribs of beef, loins of pork that were all going for peanuts. When I go to my local butchers I maybe buy an extra chop or a few sausages. All goes into the freezer.

A lot of financial advice sites say have three months cash in the bank. But do they ever say have three months food in the freezer? It's the same thing, saving a little something for a rainy day.

I'm not some crazy prepper. I'm not waiting for the end of the world, it's losing my job (or the ability to work) that I'm preparing for. It just so happens that when what seems like a miniature apocalypse happens like the covid-19 outbreak I can draw on that.

It's not just food. I decided to stop using disposable shit months ago. I bought a massive pack of microfibre cloths from Screwfix so I wasn't reliant on kitchen roll. I use one or two fresh every day and then they go in the wash when done. Same with teatowels. Same with lots of other stuff. I fucking hate all the shit that marketers pretend we need. Here's an example, in Lidl last night I saw a woman with about 40 tubes of Berocca. No, apart from what the fuck are you going to do with 40 tubes of Berocca, what does it actually do? If it was a viable anti-viral don't you think they would be raining it out of the fucking sky on people? But no, the marketers make you think this crap does some good.

The other reason I didn't panic buy is that I'm not a prick. There's no two ways about it. If you panic-bought, you're a prick. I get it, if you've got a baby or a sick relative or whatever, maybe there's no harm in being prepared. But if you're some arsehole filling your car with bog-rolls then you don't really have an excuse.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to feel like I'm in some sort of control to make myself feel better. I don't care, I've not panic-bought anything. Cut it out, you aren't being heroic, you're just being a prick.

Coronavirus 15th March 2020

I think this is maybe the strangest time that I have ever lived through. I went on my trip to Scotland last week and the world seemed fairly normal. I came back and the apocalypse seems to have happened. It's surreal.

From the outset I wanted this blog to be about both recovering from financial problems and about the effect that money has on mental health. In the last few days, I've seen both suffer.

For years I've always thought that being alive here and now is maybe one of the best times and places for it to happen. The world is safe, stable and fairly comfortable. And you just assume that it is going on forever that way. When 9/11 happened the think that made me really sad was that my parents had to watch that. They had both been children during the Second World War, the most destructive era of modern history. 9/11 was the end of the big span of peace that had come out of that. And bad as it was, and all the subsequent attacks have been, I never once felt like my entire way of life was under threat. And I never once felt like that would ever change.

Like everyone, you just think that progress goes on forever. Then Covid-19 happens. It's a surreal situation that most of Europe is shut down and that here you can see shelves stripped of goods in supermarkets. It feels like we are really living through something major, some massive event that is totally changing our way of life like 9/11 never did.

Financially, it's terrifying. It's not unlikely that workplaces are going to close. There might even be mass redundancies. I don't know what effect illness is going to have on my pay. I don't think I can afford two weeks of statutory sick pay. If my daughter has to stay home from school then what happens? How do I manage that with work? They've said that for the moment they will give full pay for a government-advised self-confinement of two weeks. But what if I have to do that twice? Once for her, once for me? Nobody even knows if you can be reinfected if you get hit. What happens then?

It's crazy but for most of the people I've spoken to it is the financial aspect that worries them more than health. That is the fucking world we live in and if you want to see symptoms of a sick society then there you go. People care more about being able to pay the bills than they do about survival. We don't have our priorities wrong, society dictates our priorities. How many landlords or banks or creditors are going to say "yeah, fine, you just take your time and get well again before you worry about payment"?

You know exactly what is going to happen. People are so shit-scared of losing money or endangering their jobs that they are going to try to plough through. Instead of taking time at the first signs or symptoms, they are going to wait until they cannot get out of bed but have spluttered over half the office in the meantime.

Where I work everyone could easily work from home. Each person could pick up their PC, plug it in somewhere in the house and work quite happily. But no. The directors are not shitting it that their workforce might be wiped out by one person's sneeze. They are more scared that someone might be watching Bargain Hunt instead of working. We are going to penny-pinch our way into a total fucking disaster of endemic disease and recession. Every single SME I have worked for behaves in exactly the same way. Maybe in the tech or creative industries things are different but in traditional employers, they just cannot get away from that miserly, conservative attitude and a belief that every employee is out to fucking rob them.

I've put my job search on hold for the minute, too. It's madness to swap, walk into somewhere where I might be on probation, won't have any entitlements to company benefits and might not even have any security. Where I work is a supplier to the healthcare industry. OK, we don't do drugs and equipment but it is still some fairly important stuff. Stuff that still needs to be done. It might contract, that possibility exists, but for the minute it seems a safer place to be than anywhere else that was on offer.

Mentally it has been taking its toll. Honestly, I freaked out last night. I got caught up in just a whirlwind of what might happen. I got stuck in a cycle of reading the news, searching the internet, reading social media, back to the news, repeat. My anxiety rocketed and I got myself really terrified. I had nightmares, a lot of them, and slept really badly.

The news is dog shit. When it was something happening somewhere else we treated it as entertainment. Reality TV. We were quite happy to be spectators on the crisis in China and Italy. There were play by play reports, what figures were rising, which stats were falling. It was like a fucking sick sporting tournament.

But when it hit here it all changed. The analysis just seems to have gone and the news report changed from the big picture to this zoomed in, tight focus view of events that were happening. Here's who died, here's how many are sick. The thing I have to keep reminding myself is that these numbers mean nothing. There is no context, nobody explains a damn thing. What do these numbers mean? Nobody seems to want to publish anything like that or even look at it.

It just adds to the horror. Without meaning, it is deaths and sickness and terror. Perfect food for anyone with anxiety.

So what to do? I don't know. There's a book I love called Tribe by Sebastian Junger which is about how groups of people triumph in bad times. I keep thinking about what Junger says: everyone expected those who survived WW2 to be deeply traumatised and for there to be a generation with mentall illness. There wasn't, it just didn't happen. People rose to the challenge and flourished in amongst hell. Mental illness dropped during the Blitz.

I was also reading about the five stages of grief recently. Denial, when you pretend it isn't happening; anger, when you rage against it; bargaining, when you try to talk or buy your way out of it; depression, when it all hits home; and acceptance, when you finally reconcile the reality of it. I look back at my progress over the week and I've definitely worked through those stages and am sitting at the depression stage. Acceptance, maybe, is next.

What can you do? I've been thinking about ordering some St John's Wort. It's worked in the past for me as an anti-depressant. It gives me just enough of a little fire of happiness and confidence in the back of my mind to get through whatever shit was coming. I've done cycles of SJW when I knew a particularly hard time was approaching and it almost always works.

I've been really mindful of fitness and nutrition. I've been working out hard every day and really upped my intensity. I do the Crossfit WOD each day and supplement it with other stuff so I'm getting about 40 minutes of hard exercise. I'm also eating as healthily as I can, cut out shit and sugar and eating simple, non-processed food. A little bit of meat, a lot of vegetables and plenty of fats.

I'm making an effort to get off of the news cycle and keep away from social media. I think my blog is a good outlet because it is one way. I can write what is on my mind and I don't have to read through all the other shit. I'm restricting my news exposure as well. It just ramps up my anxiety. I found this during the financial crisis of 2008-2010. I religiously listened to PM on Radio 4 on the way home every night. I got balls deep into what was unfolding. But I also had a new baby and a wife who also had her own issues as well. Terrible combination as it drove me out of my fucking mind with stress. I can see that same cycle happening again and I need to avoid it.

I've been choosy about what I watch on TV. I don't watch much at the best of times but now I'm really picky. Nature programmes. Comedy. Art and history on BBC4. BBC Scotland does some really good reality TV, like the lives of people on fishing boats and farms and that kind of thing. I don't want to watch drama or anything dark. I want to see the good in the world.

I fucking hate uncertainty at any other time. I freak out in situations where I have no control. So I try to make myself feel that I have as much control as possible through attending to things like hygiene, cleaning the house, etc.

I will not lie. I am incredibly scared. I kind of live alone (apart from the few days I have my daughter) and this fucks up social interaction. I'd just thought I wanted to join Match or something and meet a woman as I'd been single too long. But I don't see many women being eager to date during an epidemic. There's going to be a lot of loneliness and it is in the loneliness that I feed my anxiety. The pornography of news and science websites. Of ruminating. Loneliness is not something I figure is going to go away any time soon. Probably get worse.

All I can hope for is that some good news breaks in the next few days.

Weekly Update 27th February 2020

So back into the long pull towards pay day. Like every month, I've got the usual paranoia about whether or not I'm going to have enough spare cash to make it. I've mentioned before that I've got a day to day countdown of how much I need to have in my current account to meet my direct debits. But I never trust it and I do the same thing every month. It gets to this time and I shit myself that I've not got enough. It kind of looks like I am going to make it. Just. Whatever, doesn't matter how much I scrape by with as long as I make it.

Every month. I just can't seem to ease off and relax and have faith that it will happen. Every month my anxiety shoots through the roof. But I suppose I am lucky, my anxiety is just in the last week. People live with this every single day. I guess for a while that was me but slowly, like over the course of years, I've managed to stretch it out so that the anxiety only happens in the final week. I suppose that is something.

I keep hoping for good news. I keep believing some day my luck is going to change. I did a PPI search just before the deadline last year and I keep thinking I am going to come home and there is going to be a nice, fat cheque waiting for me. It's dragged on and on, apparently there are two accounts that qualify but I've still not heard a thing.

Instead, I came home the other day and it's a final demand for my tax bill. I don't know why but every year I have to do a self-assessment. Again, that is another thing the blows my stress levels through the roof. I work a normal, PAYE job. Straightforward. For some reason I cannot figure out they change my tax code every year and every year I seem to end up under paying when I submit the assessment.

Most years it hasn't been a problem. I'm usually a few hundred quid under. I have a direct debit set up to the government and pay a little every month. But not this year. This year they are up one their hind legs and making final demands for the same few hundred quid. And instead of just letting the direct debit run like always you have to go through a big fucking palaver on the website. OK, it's maybe not that complicated but it's the wording of it. It is written basically as if you are asking them to consider being merciful and you have to acknowledge your unending gratitude to these cunts.

There is a real change in tone when it comes to tax. The cynic in me suspects the change in government. They are not going to chase Amazon or Virgin, they are going to fuck you and me. You can really see it coming in anything that involves you interacting with the government about anything financial. It doesn't bode well, it feels like we are headed to a good old fucking on the village green.

I've run out of credit on my daily credit card again as well. It happened with about 10 days to go and I'm not really sure why. I suspect I might have underpaid last month. So while I was celebrating having a little more cash in the bank that month I was actually headed towards maxing out my card. I've been having to pay for food and the basics of daily life on my debit card. Cash straight out of my bank. Hence why the panic about having enough til the payday.

I've fucked up this week as well. I've been coming out of the depression I was in last week. I was feeling in a celebratory mood so been buying lunches every day. Not much, maybe 3 quid a day, but it still mounts up. Food is how I medicate my moods sometimes. It's the thing that surprises most as I tend to eat really healthily and I'm fanatical about exercise. But I also know I do that as I have a really addictive personality and if I didn't I would be a fat fuck.

Last week seems like a lifetime ago. My depression phases are always like that. After my divorce it was long, sustained lows but now it tends to be 3 or 4 days, maybe a week, of intense low followed by a clear ramping up the other side. When I climb out of the pit it always feels like it was a very long time ago and I don't know what the fuck I was ever complaining about.

Work is still pissing me off and I am still on the lookout for a new job. I have grown to fucking despise the place. My salary hasn't changed in six years and now I'm being moved to a new location about 15 miles further away. It's not everyone, just a handful of people and I am one of that handful. It is going to cost another 20 quid a week or so in fuel. It also fucks up my childcare obligations as I can't make my drop off and pick-up times any more. I'm looking at either cutting my hours (and therefore salary) or paying for extra childcare.

Not a fucking question about whether this causes me problems, whether it is manageable. Just told to live with it or fuck off. And sure enough my contract has a clause in it that allows for this.

I fucking hate these people. I am paying for four millionaires to get richer. There will be no thanks. I might get another £50 Amazon voucher (I buy fuck all from Amazon) but that's it.

So at the moment I am doing my best to find another job that pays better and treats staff better. But I can feel myself teetering on another depression over it because those two things don't seem to exist in the same place.

Weekly Update: 5th February 2020

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.