I've run out of space in the freezer. I wrote about my disaster a while ago when I accidentally switched the power off to one of the freezers and had to throw a couple of hundred pounds worth of food out. I've slowly built that up again over the last few months. I hardly notice it, if I buy a steak then I buy one for me and one for the freezer. If I make a lasagne or a meat-loaf then, no matter how good it is, the last piece gets frozen. It doesn't take long to build up a good reserve.
But it means I have to turn down bargains. My local supermarket has a really good butcher section. The meat is really good quality (it's not one of the national chains, it's a small, local chain that supports local producers) but it's pricey. But if you hit it at the right time (Friday evening is usually good) then there is always a fridge for high-quality produce for a couple of quid a portion.
Normally, I'd freeze it but I have no space. So, I'm experimenting with preserving it in other ways. Refrigeration is a recent development and we've got 10,000 years of history we can learn from.
I do a lot of pickling and preserving of vegetables but I've never tried doing it with meat. I've always been a bit wary because of the obvious safety issues with it. A bad tomato is a bad tomato. A bad piece of meat can easily sneak under the radar.
I've started with doing jerky and biltong. I love both of these as a snack but they are expensive. A tiny bag will easily cost £2 and it'll probably be loaded with preservatives and additives that I really don't want to consume. So using bargain meat as a base for making my own seems like a good idea.
Youtube has been my best resource for this. I've sat through a lot of meat drying videos. For biltong, my favourite so far has been a South African chef called Ben Kruger. Biltong is beef that has been soaked in vinegar, spiced, then air-dried over the course of a week.
You need a lump of very lean meat (fat spoils quickly). Slice it into 1.5cm pieces, coat with vinegar, let it sit and then apply biltong spice (a mix of salt, coriander and black pepper). After that you hang it in a biltong box (a box that creates the right air flow and environment for safe drying) for anything up to a week. Slice thinly then eat.
Ben's video is here and he has instructions on how to make a biltong box.
Jerky is different. It starts sliced very thin, maybe 3-4mm. There is no vinegaring but it can be soaked in a marinade and then spiced. Or not. South Africans are very specific about what gets called biltong. Jerky is a lot more vague. The drying process is different as well. It can be air-dried but most people seem to do it in the oven. You hang the pieces from a rack (or lay them flat), put the oven on as low as it will go, prop the door open an inch or two to create air flow and leave for about four hours.
A good video is from Kent Rollins here.
I've had a go at jerky. My first batch I did using a piece of cheap salmon and it was beautiful. I marinaded it in worcester sauce, soy sauce, a little honey and some vinegar. I added a BBQ rub then dried it in the oven for 4 hours. Turned out really nice.
My next batch was some scrap silverside beef. I think the oven was either too hot or the air flow was too low because I ended up cooking it rather than drying it. The result was OK but it was just pieces of over-cooked roast beef rather than jerky.
I've currently got a batch of biltong on the go. I used the other half of the silverside that I turned into jerky and made a small biltong box out of a couple of 1 litre yoghurt pots stacked on top of each other and a little fan to drive air through it. If it turns out OK then I might scale it up. I priced up parts for making Ben Kruger's biltong box on Ebay and it came to about 20 quid.
To be honest, I don't know if I am beating the price of shop-bought biltong or jerky but at least I know what is going into it.
I'm also salting some salmon. Salting is one of the oldest ways of preserving fish there is. I got a cheap piece of salmon that was reduced, lay it on a bed of coarse sea salt and then covered it with more. It's been in the fridge for about 12 hours and a ton of water has come out already. I've drained it and resalted. I'll see how it turns out.
The next project I want to do is making an Armenian dried beef called basturma or arpukht. This starts with salting a chunk of lean beef until it is hard, air drying it until it is really hard then applying a paste of fenugreek, pepper and paprike.
The recipe is here.
I don't know if this is a realistic way of saving money but it is just another way of using scrap meat that doesn't involve freezing it. Sometimes money saving is not everything, it is as much about not wasting produce.
Showing posts with label saving money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label saving money. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Learning new skills: The Odin Project
One of the things people recommend to cope during lockdown is learning new skills. There are a lot of hacky memes about people learning Japanese and stuff like that. I'm sure there are probably people doing things like that just for the hell of it. Fair enough, good for them
But it makes sense to do something that is going to improve your employment prospects. I'd mentioned in my last weekly update that I had been learning to code. I've actually been doing it for a while, I started about a year ago and I'm getting near the end of the course.
Before I talk about what I'm doing, understanding the "why" is maybe more important. First thing to say is, I am not a coder. I am not involved in anything in the IT or technology industries. I've made a point of not saying what I actually do because it would make it really easy for my current employer to identify me from my posts. I like to shit on my employer and the company management (usually for good reason), I don't know if my posts could be used against me but I don't want to take that chance. It's better just to stay anonymous.
There were things I could do in my own industry. There are skills I could study and certifications I could do. But as I have said numerous times, I fucking hate what I do and the people I do it for. And it isn't just them specifically, the industry as a whole just seems to be run by arseholes. Things are changing slowly but it's still a largely old-fashioned, conservative, penny-pinching industry run by golf-club member-type twats.
What I did not want to do was get myself dug in further. Investing in skills related to what I do might bring advancement but it also gets me further into a world I despise. I've had a little taste of it before and it strikes me that the further up the ladder I got then the worse the job gets. The added financial reward did not make up for the sheer amount of hassle, stress and unhappiness it brought.
The other factor is that the industry I work in is very cyclic. It's one of the first to get hit during a recession and usually one of the last to recover. In fact, I'm still earning about 40% of my pre-2008 salary twelve years on. Getting new skills will do absolutely nothing for my prospects in another recession. It doesn't matter how skilled you are if there are no jobs.
So it made sense to be doing something that could lead in another direction. Coding has a lot going for it. Even junior positions are reasonably lucrative (compared to the industry I'm in), it tends to weather recessions well, there are tons of resources I can use without having to pay for courses, loads of opportunity for remote working, freelancing and self-employment, and long term it is a growth area. I've also got transferable skills like understanding engineering and design, project management and basic life skills like time management, social skills, team working, etc.
It came to me after I had a bit of flashback moment. I read an article about a year ago how where I'm originally from has become a bit of a European leader in technology. When I was a kid I was into home computers (Commodore 64's so that really dates me) and programming. I had a friend who was a couple of years older than me who went on to become the head of a big video game company in the US and I was easily as skilled and talented as he was. It really made me ask "how the fuck did I get here?". I made a couple of wrong turns when young, a couple of bad relationships as well and here I am, broke, in a dead end job, doing something that gives me zero satisfaction. I needed to course-correct or I was headed for doom.
That's what got me thinking about coding as a way of branching off my career. I did some searching around for resources and courses. I was even willing to pay for something like Open University (until I saw how much the bastards charge). That's when I came across the concept of coding bootcamps. Bootcamps are intensive, immersive courses designed to take you from know nothing to employable in a few months. But I couldn't afford either the time or the cost to do one so started looking at online.
From what I read, the most recommended options were Codecademy, Free Code Camp and The Odin Project. The general advice was just pick one and complete it, the main difference between them just comes down to the languages and technologies that are taught on the course. The skills you learn are more important than the details. So I picked The Odin Project based purely on their website being the most accessible. I signed up and a year later I am coming close to the end.
The Odin Project teaches "full stack web development". That means it teaches the "stack" of technologies necessary to create a web-based application. That means it teaches HTML & CSS for creating the visual look of web pages, Javascript for creating functionality within that web page and Ruby-on-Rails to build the code that does all the processing (like online shopping, blogging, booking hotels, etc) that exists on the server side that you never get to see.
Everything is broken down into 5 or 6 six courses which you work through at your own rate. Each course is made up of individual lessons which are usually either reading through info on external websites or watching selected videos on You Tube. Every few lessons you are given a series of projects to do that cement the learning of the previous lessons.
Some of the projects you can do in an hour, some longer. One of them, creating a chess game, took me around six weeks to finish. There are a lot of difficult concepts, too. The Odin Project says it is for complete novices but I think a bit of exposure to some basic computer science concepts wouldn't hurt before starting.
The big problem with the lessons is that it uses other people's stuff. The Odin Project doesn't have a lot of its own content, instead for each lesson it gives you a curated list of web-pages to read through. The quality can be variable and the level they are pitched at isn't consistent. Some resources seem like they are written for school-kids, others for people who know what they are doing. On the plus side, it means that they can swap things in and out as they find better resources for a particular subject. But this can also be frustrating as I've found I'll be halfway through a lesson when the structure has been changed while I've been working on it. Really annoying.
The other problem is that you are on your own. When something doesn't work or goes wrong then you need to figure it out for yourself. That can be a great learning tool but a lot of the time it is really frustrating. You need to have tenacity and discipline to see it through. There are forums like Stack Overflow where there are always similar questions that have been asked but you still need to be happy figuring stuff out for yourself.
But there are lots of positives. The reliance on external material means you are getting the best info that's out there even if you have to do a bit of extra reading because you don't understand something. And the lack of support means you have to get very savvy at solving problems. I've learned techniques for doing things because I had to work it out rather than being handed a standard method to follow. Most of all, it is really satisfying. I know how to do stuff. I know how things work.
In terms of time, it varies. I aim to do at least an hour a day but I don't think that is enough. It's not just that it takes longer to get anywhere, it is harder. You lose momentum and it's easy to forget something you read yesterday or the day before. If I was doing it again I'd aim for doing longer chunks of time even if that meant doing it less often. Some stuff is more enjoyable. Personally, I'd rather read than watch videos. But I really enjoy the coding projects and would happily lose hours writing code. I liked to spend my lunch break coding on my laptop somewhere quiet whenever I could. Or wake up early and write for an hour.
It doesn't take much of an investment in technology, either. I use a really shitty, old laptop for doing all my coding projects on. One thing I'd say, The Odin Projects doesn't work well with Windows computers. There is a lot of dicking around to get it to work with the software you need (Ruby and Rails). It all works better with Ubuntu or on a Mac. I got a cheap, old laptop for £50 on Ebay, added some extra memory and installed Ubuntu and it works fine for the coding projects. But it isn't easy if you don't know what you are doing and I still don't find Ubuntu a particularly friendly system.
A year down the line and I've really enjoyed it. I'm glad I've done it. The scary part is that I am now approaching the part where I start talking to employers and recruiters. In a couple of months it is going to become real. That's when I find out if the time I have invested has been worth it. I need an escape from this industry and I'm pinning my hopes on this being it. If it doesn't work then I don't know how I will feel about that.
I don't know what else to say other than if you are looking for a way to learn to code then The Odin Project has been a really thorough and enjoyable way to do it.
But it makes sense to do something that is going to improve your employment prospects. I'd mentioned in my last weekly update that I had been learning to code. I've actually been doing it for a while, I started about a year ago and I'm getting near the end of the course.
Before I talk about what I'm doing, understanding the "why" is maybe more important. First thing to say is, I am not a coder. I am not involved in anything in the IT or technology industries. I've made a point of not saying what I actually do because it would make it really easy for my current employer to identify me from my posts. I like to shit on my employer and the company management (usually for good reason), I don't know if my posts could be used against me but I don't want to take that chance. It's better just to stay anonymous.
There were things I could do in my own industry. There are skills I could study and certifications I could do. But as I have said numerous times, I fucking hate what I do and the people I do it for. And it isn't just them specifically, the industry as a whole just seems to be run by arseholes. Things are changing slowly but it's still a largely old-fashioned, conservative, penny-pinching industry run by golf-club member-type twats.
What I did not want to do was get myself dug in further. Investing in skills related to what I do might bring advancement but it also gets me further into a world I despise. I've had a little taste of it before and it strikes me that the further up the ladder I got then the worse the job gets. The added financial reward did not make up for the sheer amount of hassle, stress and unhappiness it brought.
The other factor is that the industry I work in is very cyclic. It's one of the first to get hit during a recession and usually one of the last to recover. In fact, I'm still earning about 40% of my pre-2008 salary twelve years on. Getting new skills will do absolutely nothing for my prospects in another recession. It doesn't matter how skilled you are if there are no jobs.
So it made sense to be doing something that could lead in another direction. Coding has a lot going for it. Even junior positions are reasonably lucrative (compared to the industry I'm in), it tends to weather recessions well, there are tons of resources I can use without having to pay for courses, loads of opportunity for remote working, freelancing and self-employment, and long term it is a growth area. I've also got transferable skills like understanding engineering and design, project management and basic life skills like time management, social skills, team working, etc.
It came to me after I had a bit of flashback moment. I read an article about a year ago how where I'm originally from has become a bit of a European leader in technology. When I was a kid I was into home computers (Commodore 64's so that really dates me) and programming. I had a friend who was a couple of years older than me who went on to become the head of a big video game company in the US and I was easily as skilled and talented as he was. It really made me ask "how the fuck did I get here?". I made a couple of wrong turns when young, a couple of bad relationships as well and here I am, broke, in a dead end job, doing something that gives me zero satisfaction. I needed to course-correct or I was headed for doom.
That's what got me thinking about coding as a way of branching off my career. I did some searching around for resources and courses. I was even willing to pay for something like Open University (until I saw how much the bastards charge). That's when I came across the concept of coding bootcamps. Bootcamps are intensive, immersive courses designed to take you from know nothing to employable in a few months. But I couldn't afford either the time or the cost to do one so started looking at online.
From what I read, the most recommended options were Codecademy, Free Code Camp and The Odin Project. The general advice was just pick one and complete it, the main difference between them just comes down to the languages and technologies that are taught on the course. The skills you learn are more important than the details. So I picked The Odin Project based purely on their website being the most accessible. I signed up and a year later I am coming close to the end.
The Odin Project teaches "full stack web development". That means it teaches the "stack" of technologies necessary to create a web-based application. That means it teaches HTML & CSS for creating the visual look of web pages, Javascript for creating functionality within that web page and Ruby-on-Rails to build the code that does all the processing (like online shopping, blogging, booking hotels, etc) that exists on the server side that you never get to see.
Everything is broken down into 5 or 6 six courses which you work through at your own rate. Each course is made up of individual lessons which are usually either reading through info on external websites or watching selected videos on You Tube. Every few lessons you are given a series of projects to do that cement the learning of the previous lessons.
Some of the projects you can do in an hour, some longer. One of them, creating a chess game, took me around six weeks to finish. There are a lot of difficult concepts, too. The Odin Project says it is for complete novices but I think a bit of exposure to some basic computer science concepts wouldn't hurt before starting.
The big problem with the lessons is that it uses other people's stuff. The Odin Project doesn't have a lot of its own content, instead for each lesson it gives you a curated list of web-pages to read through. The quality can be variable and the level they are pitched at isn't consistent. Some resources seem like they are written for school-kids, others for people who know what they are doing. On the plus side, it means that they can swap things in and out as they find better resources for a particular subject. But this can also be frustrating as I've found I'll be halfway through a lesson when the structure has been changed while I've been working on it. Really annoying.
The other problem is that you are on your own. When something doesn't work or goes wrong then you need to figure it out for yourself. That can be a great learning tool but a lot of the time it is really frustrating. You need to have tenacity and discipline to see it through. There are forums like Stack Overflow where there are always similar questions that have been asked but you still need to be happy figuring stuff out for yourself.
But there are lots of positives. The reliance on external material means you are getting the best info that's out there even if you have to do a bit of extra reading because you don't understand something. And the lack of support means you have to get very savvy at solving problems. I've learned techniques for doing things because I had to work it out rather than being handed a standard method to follow. Most of all, it is really satisfying. I know how to do stuff. I know how things work.
In terms of time, it varies. I aim to do at least an hour a day but I don't think that is enough. It's not just that it takes longer to get anywhere, it is harder. You lose momentum and it's easy to forget something you read yesterday or the day before. If I was doing it again I'd aim for doing longer chunks of time even if that meant doing it less often. Some stuff is more enjoyable. Personally, I'd rather read than watch videos. But I really enjoy the coding projects and would happily lose hours writing code. I liked to spend my lunch break coding on my laptop somewhere quiet whenever I could. Or wake up early and write for an hour.
It doesn't take much of an investment in technology, either. I use a really shitty, old laptop for doing all my coding projects on. One thing I'd say, The Odin Projects doesn't work well with Windows computers. There is a lot of dicking around to get it to work with the software you need (Ruby and Rails). It all works better with Ubuntu or on a Mac. I got a cheap, old laptop for £50 on Ebay, added some extra memory and installed Ubuntu and it works fine for the coding projects. But it isn't easy if you don't know what you are doing and I still don't find Ubuntu a particularly friendly system.
A year down the line and I've really enjoyed it. I'm glad I've done it. The scary part is that I am now approaching the part where I start talking to employers and recruiters. In a couple of months it is going to become real. That's when I find out if the time I have invested has been worth it. I need an escape from this industry and I'm pinning my hopes on this being it. If it doesn't work then I don't know how I will feel about that.
I don't know what else to say other than if you are looking for a way to learn to code then The Odin Project has been a really thorough and enjoyable way to do it.
Sunday, May 3, 2020
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.
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.
Sunday, March 29, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
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.
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.
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Making stuff last: learning from a lost generation
When I was a kid, everyone's grandparents lived through the Second World War. Now, there can't be many people under 35 who grew up with either parents or grandparents who lived through that kind of hardship. Most people just have no idea what financial difficulty is. You saw that last week: the poor don't panic buy. I'd guess mostly because you can't. But equally, if you are living with little or no spare cash then you just know better. Welcome to the daily life of thousands of people in this country where uncertainty, lack of resources and lack of access to just the basic necessities of normality is how they live every single day. The people who panic-bought are some of the most privileged people on the face of the planet. And, arguably, some of the softest.
I grew up with grandparents who lived through the War and parents who grew up in the post-war shortages. That experience lived with them for a hell of a long time. Even in the 1980's when I was a kid, where the world was full of "greed is good" affluence and surpluses, that memory of austerity lived large in our lives. I still remember going on holiday and my dad keeping a ledger of what we spent so there would be no shocks when we got home. Now, I find myself doing that when I go on holiday with my own daughter.
For the vast majority of people in this country, we have been able to forget how to live with hardship. You see it everywhere and the atrocious behaviour of great swathes of society just highlight that. We forgot how to be frugal because we thought affluence would go on forever. Whatever else happens in the next 12 months, I hope that lesson is learnt by society. I know it won't be, though.
Anyway, rant over. This blog post is inspired by that generation that lived through the War. They didn't panic buy because there was nothing to panic-buy. So what did they do? They made do. And that is what this post is about. Making do.
The easiest way to have enough to last you is not to go out and buy it. The easiest thing to do is make what you have go further. One of society's big mental sicknesses is that we have no idea what a portion size is. That's clear from the level of obesity and all that brings. So...
Add a bit more fat. Pour some olive oil over some green veg or toss a knob of butter on. Bread and pasta fills you but an hour later you're hungry again. Fat makes you stop eating sooner and keeps you going longer. A rasher of bacon will keep you going longer than a bowl of cornflakes.
Drink more fluids. It's an old cliche but a lot of the time when you are hungry, you're just thirsty.
Or just get used to it. "Hungry" is not "hunger", you can't die from a feeling. If you got your nutrients and got your calories then live with it. It won't kill you. Be comfortable with a little bit of hardship. (Because there is a lot coming our way so you better get used to it now)
Get into calorie restriction or intermittent fasting. This is maybe one of the few things that has real evidence for significant long term health benefits and god knows we could all do with that right now. Skip breakfast and you automatically end up with 18 hours between meals. You might feel hungry but the health benefits are major. I'll leave you to do your own reading.
But it isn't just food. You can just use less all over the place. Here are a few tips that I use:
There are a shit load of things if you just stop and think: what else could I be using now? If you find yourself throwing out items after just one or two uses then you need to source something else. It's better on the wallet but it also helps the environment.
These are the basic principles I use all the time. Use less, reduce waste and find sustainable alternatives to disposables. It's no coincidence that these are exactly the same principles that are promoted to help the environment. In the developed world waste hurts us both economically and from what it does to our environment.
If nothing else, just cut down on stuff. Do not try to buy your way out of hardship.
I grew up with grandparents who lived through the War and parents who grew up in the post-war shortages. That experience lived with them for a hell of a long time. Even in the 1980's when I was a kid, where the world was full of "greed is good" affluence and surpluses, that memory of austerity lived large in our lives. I still remember going on holiday and my dad keeping a ledger of what we spent so there would be no shocks when we got home. Now, I find myself doing that when I go on holiday with my own daughter.
For the vast majority of people in this country, we have been able to forget how to live with hardship. You see it everywhere and the atrocious behaviour of great swathes of society just highlight that. We forgot how to be frugal because we thought affluence would go on forever. Whatever else happens in the next 12 months, I hope that lesson is learnt by society. I know it won't be, though.
Anyway, rant over. This blog post is inspired by that generation that lived through the War. They didn't panic buy because there was nothing to panic-buy. So what did they do? They made do. And that is what this post is about. Making do.
The easiest way to have enough to last you is not to go out and buy it. The easiest thing to do is make what you have go further. One of society's big mental sicknesses is that we have no idea what a portion size is. That's clear from the level of obesity and all that brings. So...
LESSON ONE: YOU NEED A LOT LESS THAN YOU THINK YOU NEED
That starts with food. We eat too much. And when you eat too much you also think you need too much. This wasteful, expensive and denies resources to people who need it. Just cut back what you put on your plate. Hunger will kill you but feeling hungry won't. There are tons of ways to make yourself feel satisfied without piling your plate up.Add a bit more fat. Pour some olive oil over some green veg or toss a knob of butter on. Bread and pasta fills you but an hour later you're hungry again. Fat makes you stop eating sooner and keeps you going longer. A rasher of bacon will keep you going longer than a bowl of cornflakes.
Drink more fluids. It's an old cliche but a lot of the time when you are hungry, you're just thirsty.
Or just get used to it. "Hungry" is not "hunger", you can't die from a feeling. If you got your nutrients and got your calories then live with it. It won't kill you. Be comfortable with a little bit of hardship. (Because there is a lot coming our way so you better get used to it now)
Get into calorie restriction or intermittent fasting. This is maybe one of the few things that has real evidence for significant long term health benefits and god knows we could all do with that right now. Skip breakfast and you automatically end up with 18 hours between meals. You might feel hungry but the health benefits are major. I'll leave you to do your own reading.
But it isn't just food. You can just use less all over the place. Here are a few tips that I use:
- buy one of those skin scrubber things. They look like a ball of net curtain material. Use it in the shower, you put a small blob of shower gel in it and wash with that. You get a ton more lather than you get with just using your hand and shower gel goes a hell of a long way. Just stick it in the washing machine every now and again
- if you take sugar in tea or coffee then try this. Stir it. Yep, as simple as that. Stir it a lot longer than you do normally and I guarantee you'll notice your drink becomes a little too sweet.
- laundry liquid and powder. Manufacturers love you to use more and those scoops and balls are sized so that you'll rattle through it. I'll use half or even a third of what the label says depending on what I'm washing and I have never noticed any difference.
- washing up liquid. Same thing, we grab the bottle and squeeze. Make an effort to squeeze a hell of a lot less. Again, you don't need anything like you think.
- if you aren't leaving the house then go without. I'm working from home so haven't shaved in a week. And I hate to say it, if you cut back on deoderant and you smell a little stronger than usual then who cares? And if I run out then I'm not going out just to get it. Time are tough.
- do what everyone's dad says: put a fucking sweater on. We're all going to be at home a lot more. Where I was using someone else's power and heating, I'm now using mine. Put on a fleece first.
LESSON TWO: SAVE STUFF
One of the main reasons I didn't panic buy was that I have a hell of a lot of food in the freezer. Freezing leftovers and stuff headed for it's use by date is basic. And if it needs repeating, if it hasn't come from an animal then forget what the date on the packet says. It's good until it either looks or smells bad. We need to stop wasting things. If you have too much and you have to throw it out then you really need to be ashamed of yourself. There's an old African saying, the best place for extra food is in my neighbour's belly. Failing that, the best place for extra stuff is in some kind of storage or preservation.- Instead of panic-buying milk, or wasting milk that is going out of date, freeze it. Here's what I've been doing: you get a litre of milk and you pour 330ml into three freezer bags. Tie a knot in the bag, put it inside another bag and stick it in the freezer. The great thing about this is that you can mould it to whatever space you have free. Bottles take up too much room. To defrost, put the bag in a bowl in the fridge. DO NOT LEAVE IT OUT TO DEFROST, it will go bad. And make sure you double bag it, old milk WILL contaminate anything it touches.
- Veg doesn't freeze very well and it's pretty bulky so I batch cook it into a big vegetable stew, portion it up into bags and freeze that. Takes up less space and fits anywhere like milk does. Defrost and use as a base for other things like curries.
- Learn traditional preserving techniques. Pickling is great, especially if you were stupid enough to clear the shelves of eggs. A glut of fruit and veg is perfect for chutney making. My favourite is ferment preservation. Basically storing fruit and veg in brine and letting its natural bacteria preserve it. I regularly make sauerkraut and fruit kvass. They take a bit of getting used to but I love the taste, earthy and acidic. I've got a big jar of salted citrus fruit that I made myself. These might not save a huge amount but they're fun experiments and you can end up with some lovely products.
- My parents and grandparents always used rags for cleaning. Old clothes, especially cotton, are great for cleaning rags. I have a bag of my daughter's old school socks in the shed that I keep for wiping up stuff, painting, etc.
- I have a wood stove and I save the bark from the firewood. It usually flakes off when chopping it. I keep it indoors in a mesh bag to let it dry out. Use it as kindling, either on its own or mixed in with dry wood. Stove always has charcoal in it which is great for kids' art projects. Amazon boxes make good fire lighters.
- I save egg boxes to start my tomato seeds off in. Last summer was shit but most summers I'm self-sufficient for tomatoes and salad.
- Anyone who grew up watching Blue Peter always had yoghurt tubs to hand. When my ex-girlfriend's dad died she found hundred of margarine tubs in the attic he'd saved for using for little jobs, mixing paint, storing nails, that kind of thing. Vitamin pill pots are brilliant for storage.
LESSON THREE: ALTERNATIVES
Find sustainable alternatives for things that are finite.- kitchen roll. I bought a big pack of microfibre cloths from Screwfix for a couple of quid and I use one or two of them every day instead. Just chuck them in the wash at the end of the day. Same with dish-towels.
- I invested in a Karcher steam cleaner a few years ago and it probably paid for itself in cleaning products not bought. It's sometimes a lot more hassle than spraying a chemical everywhere but at least I don't have that shit in the air. They are expensive but you can get them cheap on Ebay. Buy a decent make, though.
- Get rid of your tumble-drier. It's a pain hanging clothes on a drying rack, especially in winter, but it saves a hell of a lot of money. You can buy heated racks or ones with a built in fan heater that are really cheap to run. Or just get a little oil filled radiator, stick it under the rack and chuck a cotton sheet over it all to make a warm tent. Works fine (just keep an eye on it).
- I use stainless steel wool balls for washing the dishes. Every now and again soak it in some bleach. I get through maybe two or three a year at most, they will last forever. Word of caution, when they fall apart you can get slivers of metal stuck to plates and utensils. Don't push them this far.
There are a shit load of things if you just stop and think: what else could I be using now? If you find yourself throwing out items after just one or two uses then you need to source something else. It's better on the wallet but it also helps the environment.
These are the basic principles I use all the time. Use less, reduce waste and find sustainable alternatives to disposables. It's no coincidence that these are exactly the same principles that are promoted to help the environment. In the developed world waste hurts us both economically and from what it does to our environment.
If nothing else, just cut down on stuff. Do not try to buy your way out of hardship.
Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Running a car, saving money
I think my second biggest expense is probably running a car. The really annoying thing about that is that 70% of that goes to just getting to and from work. It pisses me off just how much I spend to enable myself to, basically, work for a couple of millionaires. I have to have a house near where I work. I have to have a car. I have to have a particular set of clothes that I wouldn't wear under any other circumstances other than maybe weddings and funerals. Seriously, when the fuck do you ever find yourself thinking "I know what I'll wear to the pub, a nice suit"?
Anyway, running a car costs a lot of money. Public transport here is non-existent: to do the 11 mile commute I'd need to cycle to the station, get at least two trains and then another 15 minute cycle on the other side. That's at least a 90 minute commitment before I even get into the shit-show of dropping off and collecting my daughter at school.
There are obvious things I try to do to keep costs low. I always buy a used car. Sure, I'd love a swanky, brand-new car straight off the lot. I've done it once and it was a financial disaster. After six years of instalments on my flash £20,000 car I now had something that was worth £1500. Eighteen and a half grand down the drain. It was nice to have a brand new car but eighteen and a half grand nice? I don't think so. A new car is only new for five minutes.
I also like buying sensible cars. At the minute, I've got a Skoda Octavia. It's practical, reliable and cheap to run. It doesn't turn heads but I don't care. What it does is save me money and provide a damn good service. When it does 60+ miles per gallon it makes me happier than some wank-machine that does 20.
I work the price comparison websites when it is insurance time as well. A couple of times my renewal has actually been the best price (that was with Co-op) which surprised me so maybe the market is finally becoming more competitive. But I still do comparisons. I also check which insurers or comparison sites will give me some money through Topcashback. If there is only a few quid in it then I'll go with the one that does cashback.
But how do you actually budget your costs for car ownership?
You need to know what your fixed and variable overheads are. Fixed overheads are the things that are not going to change. Your monthly finance payment, your road tax and your monthly insurance premium. These are simple to deal with, I know how much they are and I just set aside the right amount from my monthly salary. Easy.
Variable expenses are harder to account for. These are the things that vary depending on how much you drive. Do more miles, pay more money. Simple. Except that it is hard to predict. The way I do it is to work out exactly how much each mile I drive costs and then just count up how many miles I've driven (or planning to drive) this week.
Start with fuel. I always do a full tank when I fill up. I get roughly 600'ish miles from a tank so I generally fill up when I've done about 450 miles. So divide the cost of the tank of fuel by the number of miles you've driven. This gives me a price per mile and at the time of writing that is sitting at about 12.2p per mile. For the rest of the week I will knock off 12.2p for every mile I do from my weekly allowance.
Drive 100 miles, that's £12.20 off my pot of cash for the week. To make life easier, at the start of the week I make an allowance for my commute. That comes to 26 miles a day including the school run, 130 miles a week. I knock off 130 x 12.2p (£15.86). I know that I only need to account for anything over and above that 26 mile a day allowance.
Next thing is maintenance. Most cars have a fixed schedule for servicing and for bigger things like timing belts or gearbox services. If my car needs serviced every 10,000 miles and I know the service costs about £250 then that's another 2.5p per mile to add on. Timing belt is every 60,000 and is about £500 which is about 0.8p per mile. So looking at around another 4p per mile on top of whatever the fuel costs are. Usually at the end of the month I transfer whatever the maintenance costs are into a separate bank account so that I've got it safe if needed. It generally works out well so far.
What this doesn't cover is unexpected things like breakdowns. I know I should set some money aside for this but I end up never doing it. I think I need to make this one of my financial goals for this year. I don't want to get into the reactive mindset of "I've got the good credit card for emergencies". I want to have the emergency fund already there.
The final thing I do to try to save a little money is to just drive better. I've been really surprised how much a difference it makes just driving with a bit of thought. Not accelerating into red lights or queuing traffic, not hammering it up hills. That kind of thing. Just driving at the speed limit works as well. There are tons of websites on "hypermiling" if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
For me, I've found the best things are just be alert and show some common sense. Trying to drive so you rarely have to brake. Maintaining a steady speed so you aren't going up and down the gears. For urban driving I've found third gear is what wipes out my fuel efficiency so getting into fourth, and preferably fifth, as soon as possible and staying there is key. On the motorway just dropping to 60mph hikes up the fuel efficiency. In hill stretches I've found dropping to maybe 58 on the way up and 65 on the way down gives me the best balance of fuel consumption and journey time.
I like to turn regular journeys into a game where I see how good I can get my consumption on the trip computer. I don't care if I'm driving like an old man. Old men are usually good at saving money.
Anyway, running a car costs a lot of money. Public transport here is non-existent: to do the 11 mile commute I'd need to cycle to the station, get at least two trains and then another 15 minute cycle on the other side. That's at least a 90 minute commitment before I even get into the shit-show of dropping off and collecting my daughter at school.
There are obvious things I try to do to keep costs low. I always buy a used car. Sure, I'd love a swanky, brand-new car straight off the lot. I've done it once and it was a financial disaster. After six years of instalments on my flash £20,000 car I now had something that was worth £1500. Eighteen and a half grand down the drain. It was nice to have a brand new car but eighteen and a half grand nice? I don't think so. A new car is only new for five minutes.
I also like buying sensible cars. At the minute, I've got a Skoda Octavia. It's practical, reliable and cheap to run. It doesn't turn heads but I don't care. What it does is save me money and provide a damn good service. When it does 60+ miles per gallon it makes me happier than some wank-machine that does 20.
I work the price comparison websites when it is insurance time as well. A couple of times my renewal has actually been the best price (that was with Co-op) which surprised me so maybe the market is finally becoming more competitive. But I still do comparisons. I also check which insurers or comparison sites will give me some money through Topcashback. If there is only a few quid in it then I'll go with the one that does cashback.
But how do you actually budget your costs for car ownership?
You need to know what your fixed and variable overheads are. Fixed overheads are the things that are not going to change. Your monthly finance payment, your road tax and your monthly insurance premium. These are simple to deal with, I know how much they are and I just set aside the right amount from my monthly salary. Easy.
Variable expenses are harder to account for. These are the things that vary depending on how much you drive. Do more miles, pay more money. Simple. Except that it is hard to predict. The way I do it is to work out exactly how much each mile I drive costs and then just count up how many miles I've driven (or planning to drive) this week.
Start with fuel. I always do a full tank when I fill up. I get roughly 600'ish miles from a tank so I generally fill up when I've done about 450 miles. So divide the cost of the tank of fuel by the number of miles you've driven. This gives me a price per mile and at the time of writing that is sitting at about 12.2p per mile. For the rest of the week I will knock off 12.2p for every mile I do from my weekly allowance.
Drive 100 miles, that's £12.20 off my pot of cash for the week. To make life easier, at the start of the week I make an allowance for my commute. That comes to 26 miles a day including the school run, 130 miles a week. I knock off 130 x 12.2p (£15.86). I know that I only need to account for anything over and above that 26 mile a day allowance.
Next thing is maintenance. Most cars have a fixed schedule for servicing and for bigger things like timing belts or gearbox services. If my car needs serviced every 10,000 miles and I know the service costs about £250 then that's another 2.5p per mile to add on. Timing belt is every 60,000 and is about £500 which is about 0.8p per mile. So looking at around another 4p per mile on top of whatever the fuel costs are. Usually at the end of the month I transfer whatever the maintenance costs are into a separate bank account so that I've got it safe if needed. It generally works out well so far.
What this doesn't cover is unexpected things like breakdowns. I know I should set some money aside for this but I end up never doing it. I think I need to make this one of my financial goals for this year. I don't want to get into the reactive mindset of "I've got the good credit card for emergencies". I want to have the emergency fund already there.
The final thing I do to try to save a little money is to just drive better. I've been really surprised how much a difference it makes just driving with a bit of thought. Not accelerating into red lights or queuing traffic, not hammering it up hills. That kind of thing. Just driving at the speed limit works as well. There are tons of websites on "hypermiling" if you want to go down the rabbit hole.
For me, I've found the best things are just be alert and show some common sense. Trying to drive so you rarely have to brake. Maintaining a steady speed so you aren't going up and down the gears. For urban driving I've found third gear is what wipes out my fuel efficiency so getting into fourth, and preferably fifth, as soon as possible and staying there is key. On the motorway just dropping to 60mph hikes up the fuel efficiency. In hill stretches I've found dropping to maybe 58 on the way up and 65 on the way down gives me the best balance of fuel consumption and journey time.
I like to turn regular journeys into a game where I see how good I can get my consumption on the trip computer. I don't care if I'm driving like an old man. Old men are usually good at saving money.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Fitness On The Cheap #1
I love working out. I have suffered from depression, anxiety and maybe a touch of PTSD over the year and nothing has touched any of that like exercise has. I also just love how it helps me do my daily life better. I'm going to do a series of 'Fitness on the Cheap' posts about how to get or stay fit without wasting a ton of money on bullshit gyms or equipment. Fitness suffers when you don't have any money and there's no real reason for it. So here it is, post #1 of Fitness On The Cheap.
I made a post the other day about shop-bought pasta sauce in jars. How it is cheap enough that you don't notice it but expensive enough that the manufacturer makes a good profit.
This is a key principle in selling shit to you that you do not need. For a few days it's made me start noticing where else I'm seeing it. One of those places is gym membership.
I like exercise and the value of fitness is maybe something for another post. I used to be a member of a gym, DW Fitness. It was around £36 a month. You don't really notice it in amongst all the other bills. But if you sit down and think about it, that's quite a lot of money over the year. Enough for a holiday.
The gyms count on you not realising that. It's also kind of well known that most people who take out gym memberships rarely use them. The gyms also count on that too. They need people not to go because if everyone did go they'd need a building three times the size. To make a profit they need to sell as many memberships as possible and run a gym that is as small as possible. So they want people not to go. Gyms like to pretend they are selling fitness. They aren't, they want you to not train. They want you to not come. They want you to stay unfit and keep paying the direct debit because, well, one day I'll sort it out...
There is a simple answer. Train at home.
There really isn't a huge need to join a gym for the average person. Another thing gyms like to do is have massive variety. Every piece of equipment under the sun is crammed into some old done-up industrial unit. They make you think you need it. If you want to get fit you have to have a... whatever.
You know what you need? You need to be able to just get up. That's it.
I've trained fairly hard for twenty five years. To hit a decent level of fitness you need a way of doing strength trainging, a way to do some cardio and a way to do some flexibility work. You can get all of that at home for free.
Cardio is the easiest thing to start with. You need some way of doing slow and steady and another of doing fast and intense. No-one needs the dozen different cardio machines in a gym. You absolutely do not need a treadmill (unless you're rehabbing an injury).
Slow and steady, just go for a walk. Putting one foot in front of the other for forty minutes is maybe the single greatest exercise ever devised. If you want to run then run. I'm not a fan of running but it's still great cardio. For intense, find a hill. Or some stairs. If you live in a house that has an upper floor then you have my favourite piece of exercise equipment: the staircase. Run up them and walk down, repeat. Do that 30 times and see how you feel. I guarantee no piece of gym equipment comes close to that workout.
Strength training is another gym con. All the shit that they have, all the machines, all the crap with cables and pulleys, none of that does you any real good. Most of that is fitness industry invention. The movements are unnatural, you need so many machines because each one only ever engages a tiny muscle group.
Take a look at a picture of maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world. Who wouldn't want to look like that? Well, maybe most women but you know what I mean. Ali never lifted a weight in his life. He was a testament to how you can build strength lifting nothing other than the weight of your own body.
Just to reiterate, you do not need all that crap in a gym to get strong. You won't become The Mountain but you can get strong enough for doing daily life for absolutely free.
There are hundreds of bodyweight training programmes out there. One I've used for years is Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym system. You can buy a secondhand copy for under 4 quid. It's great, it's simple and it isn't even that hard. Everything is done slow and controlled.
Another great resource is Onnit. They are an American company part-owned by Joe Rogan. They make supplements and exercise equipment but they also have a massive archive of articles on fitness. Go to the Onnit Academy page and you'll find tons of stuff on bodyweight training, all for free.
Flexibility is the third, and I think the most important part, of fitness. It doesn't matter how strong you are or how far you can run, if you can't turn your neck or stand up without your knees crunching then you are in trouble.
I love doing yoga. This is where I might actually break my mantra of "train at home": yoga classes are usually piss cheap. They are everywhere, from yoga studios to community centres. Spunking 4 or 5 quid once a week on a class is a nice treat. A little bit of coaching really is worth the money.
If that isn't an option then try You-Tube. One of my favourite channels is Yoga With Adrienne. She can be a bit annoying, does a bit too much of that yoga-speak bullshit, but she puts out a lot of decent content. Her 30 days of yoga beginners programme is great. I'll cycle through that a couple of times a year. You can pick up a mat for a couple of quid at Decathlon or Aldi or just use a towel. You don't really need anything else.
Sure there are downsides to training at home. The biggest is the lack of feedback. There is no coach but yourself. You need to really give attention to form and how you are doing everything. It is easy to get into bad habits. There's always the risk that you get injured on your own with no-one to help you out. What you'd need to be doing for that to happen I don't know but it's a risk. Maybe blow out a disk in your back or something, I don't know. You need to be really disciplined with it as well. For some people, and I was one of them, going to another place to train was a big part of gym membership. Especially when I was in a relationship I wasn't enjoying, going to the gym was my escape for a long time.
But I think training at home brings a lot more advantages than downsides. You save a ton of money. £35 a month is about average for a decent gym, that's £420 over the year. But you also have everything else associated with it. Three miles each way adds £150-£200 a year if you're driving and going to the gym five days a week. And as manky as it is, you don't necessarily need a new outfit for each day. Train at home and nobody cares if you wear the same t-shirt you did yesterday.
I really like the flexibility. I've got a garden with high hedges so I can go outside when the weather is nice. I can train whenever I want. I have less excuses: it's never a busy time, it doesn't matter if the traffic is bad. There's no hiding place, either. Gyms give massive opportunity to dick about, to wander around talking to people.
I love training. Fitness is sadly one of those things that tends to suffer with income: it's a rich person's game. Or at least portrayed that way. When you don't have a lot of spare cash then you end up with a lot of other baggage. Stress, depression, anxiety will all come your way at some point. It's too easy to medicate them with alcohol and shit food. Even just the food that is marketed to you encourages lethargy: pasta, rice, bread, sugar, processed shit. Hit you with an insulin spike so that all you want to do is sit in front of the TV. Maybe there is also the lack of good examples. If all you see around you is people living the same way then chances are you will live the same way.
I grew up in a fairly poor, working class area. Nobody went to a gym. When I was little, people had active, manual jobs. As I got older that changed and you saw the impact of that. More sedentary work, more unemployment. Sky TV, Playstations and the internet just hammered more nails into the coffin. Cheap, shit food and drink. Everything about having no money encouraged you stay on the couch. Everyone got fat and looking back that's really fucking sad.
But it really does not have to be like that. There is so much marketing bullshit to make you think that you need money to be fit. You don't, you absolutely don't. In fact, it makes me really fucking angry sometimes when I see how things like this get sold to the public.
You don't need money to get and stay fit. You can very easily achieve a really good level of fitness with absolutely no investment of money whatsoever. For me, I'd recommend the Mark Lauren book I mention above, do some walking, running or cycling and do a little bit of stretching or yoga from You Tube.
If you want to, you can also kit out a decent home gym for less than the cost of a year's membership to a commercial gym. I think my next fitness on the cheap post will be on that.
I made a post the other day about shop-bought pasta sauce in jars. How it is cheap enough that you don't notice it but expensive enough that the manufacturer makes a good profit.
This is a key principle in selling shit to you that you do not need. For a few days it's made me start noticing where else I'm seeing it. One of those places is gym membership.
I like exercise and the value of fitness is maybe something for another post. I used to be a member of a gym, DW Fitness. It was around £36 a month. You don't really notice it in amongst all the other bills. But if you sit down and think about it, that's quite a lot of money over the year. Enough for a holiday.
The gyms count on you not realising that. It's also kind of well known that most people who take out gym memberships rarely use them. The gyms also count on that too. They need people not to go because if everyone did go they'd need a building three times the size. To make a profit they need to sell as many memberships as possible and run a gym that is as small as possible. So they want people not to go. Gyms like to pretend they are selling fitness. They aren't, they want you to not train. They want you to not come. They want you to stay unfit and keep paying the direct debit because, well, one day I'll sort it out...
There is a simple answer. Train at home.
There really isn't a huge need to join a gym for the average person. Another thing gyms like to do is have massive variety. Every piece of equipment under the sun is crammed into some old done-up industrial unit. They make you think you need it. If you want to get fit you have to have a... whatever.
You know what you need? You need to be able to just get up. That's it.
I've trained fairly hard for twenty five years. To hit a decent level of fitness you need a way of doing strength trainging, a way to do some cardio and a way to do some flexibility work. You can get all of that at home for free.
Cardio is the easiest thing to start with. You need some way of doing slow and steady and another of doing fast and intense. No-one needs the dozen different cardio machines in a gym. You absolutely do not need a treadmill (unless you're rehabbing an injury).
Slow and steady, just go for a walk. Putting one foot in front of the other for forty minutes is maybe the single greatest exercise ever devised. If you want to run then run. I'm not a fan of running but it's still great cardio. For intense, find a hill. Or some stairs. If you live in a house that has an upper floor then you have my favourite piece of exercise equipment: the staircase. Run up them and walk down, repeat. Do that 30 times and see how you feel. I guarantee no piece of gym equipment comes close to that workout.
Strength training is another gym con. All the shit that they have, all the machines, all the crap with cables and pulleys, none of that does you any real good. Most of that is fitness industry invention. The movements are unnatural, you need so many machines because each one only ever engages a tiny muscle group.
Take a look at a picture of maybe one of the greatest athletes of all time: Muhammad Ali. Heavyweight champion of the world. Who wouldn't want to look like that? Well, maybe most women but you know what I mean. Ali never lifted a weight in his life. He was a testament to how you can build strength lifting nothing other than the weight of your own body.
Just to reiterate, you do not need all that crap in a gym to get strong. You won't become The Mountain but you can get strong enough for doing daily life for absolutely free.
There are hundreds of bodyweight training programmes out there. One I've used for years is Mark Lauren's You Are Your Own Gym system. You can buy a secondhand copy for under 4 quid. It's great, it's simple and it isn't even that hard. Everything is done slow and controlled.
Another great resource is Onnit. They are an American company part-owned by Joe Rogan. They make supplements and exercise equipment but they also have a massive archive of articles on fitness. Go to the Onnit Academy page and you'll find tons of stuff on bodyweight training, all for free.
Flexibility is the third, and I think the most important part, of fitness. It doesn't matter how strong you are or how far you can run, if you can't turn your neck or stand up without your knees crunching then you are in trouble.
I love doing yoga. This is where I might actually break my mantra of "train at home": yoga classes are usually piss cheap. They are everywhere, from yoga studios to community centres. Spunking 4 or 5 quid once a week on a class is a nice treat. A little bit of coaching really is worth the money.
If that isn't an option then try You-Tube. One of my favourite channels is Yoga With Adrienne. She can be a bit annoying, does a bit too much of that yoga-speak bullshit, but she puts out a lot of decent content. Her 30 days of yoga beginners programme is great. I'll cycle through that a couple of times a year. You can pick up a mat for a couple of quid at Decathlon or Aldi or just use a towel. You don't really need anything else.
Sure there are downsides to training at home. The biggest is the lack of feedback. There is no coach but yourself. You need to really give attention to form and how you are doing everything. It is easy to get into bad habits. There's always the risk that you get injured on your own with no-one to help you out. What you'd need to be doing for that to happen I don't know but it's a risk. Maybe blow out a disk in your back or something, I don't know. You need to be really disciplined with it as well. For some people, and I was one of them, going to another place to train was a big part of gym membership. Especially when I was in a relationship I wasn't enjoying, going to the gym was my escape for a long time.
But I think training at home brings a lot more advantages than downsides. You save a ton of money. £35 a month is about average for a decent gym, that's £420 over the year. But you also have everything else associated with it. Three miles each way adds £150-£200 a year if you're driving and going to the gym five days a week. And as manky as it is, you don't necessarily need a new outfit for each day. Train at home and nobody cares if you wear the same t-shirt you did yesterday.
I really like the flexibility. I've got a garden with high hedges so I can go outside when the weather is nice. I can train whenever I want. I have less excuses: it's never a busy time, it doesn't matter if the traffic is bad. There's no hiding place, either. Gyms give massive opportunity to dick about, to wander around talking to people.
I love training. Fitness is sadly one of those things that tends to suffer with income: it's a rich person's game. Or at least portrayed that way. When you don't have a lot of spare cash then you end up with a lot of other baggage. Stress, depression, anxiety will all come your way at some point. It's too easy to medicate them with alcohol and shit food. Even just the food that is marketed to you encourages lethargy: pasta, rice, bread, sugar, processed shit. Hit you with an insulin spike so that all you want to do is sit in front of the TV. Maybe there is also the lack of good examples. If all you see around you is people living the same way then chances are you will live the same way.
I grew up in a fairly poor, working class area. Nobody went to a gym. When I was little, people had active, manual jobs. As I got older that changed and you saw the impact of that. More sedentary work, more unemployment. Sky TV, Playstations and the internet just hammered more nails into the coffin. Cheap, shit food and drink. Everything about having no money encouraged you stay on the couch. Everyone got fat and looking back that's really fucking sad.
But it really does not have to be like that. There is so much marketing bullshit to make you think that you need money to be fit. You don't, you absolutely don't. In fact, it makes me really fucking angry sometimes when I see how things like this get sold to the public.
You don't need money to get and stay fit. You can very easily achieve a really good level of fitness with absolutely no investment of money whatsoever. For me, I'd recommend the Mark Lauren book I mention above, do some walking, running or cycling and do a little bit of stretching or yoga from You Tube.
If you want to, you can also kit out a decent home gym for less than the cost of a year's membership to a commercial gym. I think my next fitness on the cheap post will be on that.
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Pasta Sauce, another step in beating the factory food scam to keep you poor
Probably one of the best ways of pissing your money up the wall is spending it on pre-made sauces. It looks like it's good value, cheap enough that you don't notice it and expensive enough that manufacturers make a tidy profit on it. A couple of quid on a jar of Dolmio is a nice little earner.
I haven't bought one in years. Why? Because you can make decent pasta sauce for peanuts. I'm not a big pasta eater but my daughter is so it's a regular tea for her. She loves this sauce and I love it because it is piss cheap. You need:
- a small onion (12p)
- a tomato (22p)
- a clove of garlic (I'd guess around 3p)
- half a tube of tomato puree (25p)
- some dried oregano and basil (maybe another 10p)
- a couple of spoonfuls of oil (no idea, let's call it 15p)
That's 87p. And you know what is in it. There's no shit in it, no flavour enhancers, preservatives, sugar or salt (unless you want to add some, I don't usually).
Chop the onion fine, fry it in the oil on a low heat until soft. When nearly done add the garlic, also finely chopped. Chop the tomato and add that. Let the whole thing cook at a low heat into even more mush. Meanwhile, make your pasta. When it is ready drain it but keep a cup of the cloudy water. Squeeze half a tube of tomato puree into the onion and tomato. Add the dried herbs. Mix. Add the pasta water until you get the consistency you like.
Piss easy, cheap and tastes great.
I have been making an effort to get away from our reliance on pre-made or processed food. Sure, there are all the health issues assorted with eating crap made in a factory but it's also a damn sight cheaper and better to make. There might be a little bit of upfront cost involved like buying the herbs and the oil. But you can do this cheaply: I just got a bottle of really good olive oil in Aldi for £2, about half of what it costs in Asda or Morrisons. But you need to bite the bullet on things like these because once you've got them you've got them. A bottle of oil makes god knows how many meals. A jar of herbs lasts forever, or at least until it stops smelling of anything. Again, Aldi and Lidl are great for stuff like this.
One of the single best money-saving skills anyone can develop is learning to cook. I was lucky that I grew up in a kitchen where both my mum and dad cooked really well (my father was in the RAF catering corps). You pick up what you grow up around. If you see jars and packets then that's how you cook. If you see fresh food then the same applies when you are an adult. I've always really made the effort to cook around my daughter and she never sees me reach for a jar of Dolmio.
I think a big part of the problem is the way that food is marketed. Fresh produce is always shown as almost a luxury item. It's always some middle class couple in their Hygena kitchen with a bottle of wine. If you ever see a skint parent then it's usually alongside a jar of Homepride sauce and a packet of Uncle Ben's. What message does that send? If you're on a budget then forget about eating fresh food. What you need, the only thing you can afford, is this nice packet of shit that we made in a factory out of horse dicks and potato peelings...
My parents grew up piss poor in post-war Britain. They learned out of necessity how to make food work for you. I am very grateful that I grew up seeing that.
It's not particularly impressive but if you want to see a picture then have a look at my Instagram account @skintlife2020
I haven't bought one in years. Why? Because you can make decent pasta sauce for peanuts. I'm not a big pasta eater but my daughter is so it's a regular tea for her. She loves this sauce and I love it because it is piss cheap. You need:
- a small onion (12p)
- a tomato (22p)
- a clove of garlic (I'd guess around 3p)
- half a tube of tomato puree (25p)
- some dried oregano and basil (maybe another 10p)
- a couple of spoonfuls of oil (no idea, let's call it 15p)
That's 87p. And you know what is in it. There's no shit in it, no flavour enhancers, preservatives, sugar or salt (unless you want to add some, I don't usually).
Chop the onion fine, fry it in the oil on a low heat until soft. When nearly done add the garlic, also finely chopped. Chop the tomato and add that. Let the whole thing cook at a low heat into even more mush. Meanwhile, make your pasta. When it is ready drain it but keep a cup of the cloudy water. Squeeze half a tube of tomato puree into the onion and tomato. Add the dried herbs. Mix. Add the pasta water until you get the consistency you like.
Piss easy, cheap and tastes great.
I have been making an effort to get away from our reliance on pre-made or processed food. Sure, there are all the health issues assorted with eating crap made in a factory but it's also a damn sight cheaper and better to make. There might be a little bit of upfront cost involved like buying the herbs and the oil. But you can do this cheaply: I just got a bottle of really good olive oil in Aldi for £2, about half of what it costs in Asda or Morrisons. But you need to bite the bullet on things like these because once you've got them you've got them. A bottle of oil makes god knows how many meals. A jar of herbs lasts forever, or at least until it stops smelling of anything. Again, Aldi and Lidl are great for stuff like this.
One of the single best money-saving skills anyone can develop is learning to cook. I was lucky that I grew up in a kitchen where both my mum and dad cooked really well (my father was in the RAF catering corps). You pick up what you grow up around. If you see jars and packets then that's how you cook. If you see fresh food then the same applies when you are an adult. I've always really made the effort to cook around my daughter and she never sees me reach for a jar of Dolmio.
I think a big part of the problem is the way that food is marketed. Fresh produce is always shown as almost a luxury item. It's always some middle class couple in their Hygena kitchen with a bottle of wine. If you ever see a skint parent then it's usually alongside a jar of Homepride sauce and a packet of Uncle Ben's. What message does that send? If you're on a budget then forget about eating fresh food. What you need, the only thing you can afford, is this nice packet of shit that we made in a factory out of horse dicks and potato peelings...
My parents grew up piss poor in post-war Britain. They learned out of necessity how to make food work for you. I am very grateful that I grew up seeing that.
It's not particularly impressive but if you want to see a picture then have a look at my Instagram account @skintlife2020
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
Weekly Update: Matched Betting
This week I gave matched betting a go. It's everywhere, damn near evey financial blogger goes on about it and is either selling you their product or an affiliate link to someone else's. I'm not going to do that.
Matched betting is, at its, simplest, taking advantage of all the free bets that online bookies give you to sign up as a new customer. Coral is the site most suggest you start on: they give you 20 quid in credit if you open an account and bet £5. BUT... you can't just withdraw that 20 quid in cash. You have to gamble it. Matched betting works by offsetting that bet with another one on another site. So if Man U is playing a match, you bet your £20 of credit on them to win. On another site you "lay" the bet: you do a matching bet that they won't win.
In theory, that means win or lose you make back that £20 credit in cash. In theory. Bookies are not daft. Someone, somewhere, needs to get a cut and the blogs suggest counting on getting about 75% of the free credit back in cash. And by working your way round all the online bookies then you can earn from £800 to £2400 depending on who you read.
The reality is that I've made about £7 profit so far this week. Better than nothing, a couple of pints for free. But I've also got £50 of my own cash tied up in bookie's accounts to leverage that. Not so great. And it has probably taken me an hour a day of work to achieve that. A pound an hour? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'll see.
My first mistake was making my first deposit with Coral by using Paypal because I had £50 in it from some Ebay selling. And I didn't read the T&C's, because only deposits made with a credit or debit card qualifies for the £20 credit. I only found this out after making my first bet. Duh.
My second mistake was trying to do it on the cheap. The "lay" bet, the bet you make that something won't happen, is an expensive bet. A simple £10 bet could require you to have £40 in your account for an easy 3/1 flutter (because you lay the bet on a betting exchange rather than a true bookie; don't ask me, I have no idea how or why this all works). By keeping my bets small and my exposure small I ended up with really small margins on the maths behind extracting the free cash.
Whatever, the end result is that I really don't think it is worth my while. Most bloggers seem to rave about it and I wonder if that is just so you'll click through their affiliate links. I'm going to give it another couple of goes but I'm really cynical.
You make money but it's hassle and you also open yourself up to a big loss if you screw up the calculations or the betting process. Ask me again in a few weeks.
On the heating front, only heating the rooms I am using with an oil filled radiator is working well. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight and see how it has impacted my electricity bill. The wood I bought from a local sawmill is top notch. Burns well and heats the place nice. I posted on Instagram my views on firewood merchants. A bigger bunch of utter fucking chancers I am yet to meet outside of used car dealers. The amount of shit I've wasted money on in the name of "premium seasoned hardwood logs" is shocking.
This week's budget saving is £19.52 which brings me up to £89.62 since the start of the year. The Chip app has auto-saved about £20 for me. I also got £75 compensation paid into my account this week from the AA because I complained about shit service I'd received. Starting to feel like I'm in control of my finances after Christmas but this is also the shittest period of the month in the run up to pay day.
Matched betting is, at its, simplest, taking advantage of all the free bets that online bookies give you to sign up as a new customer. Coral is the site most suggest you start on: they give you 20 quid in credit if you open an account and bet £5. BUT... you can't just withdraw that 20 quid in cash. You have to gamble it. Matched betting works by offsetting that bet with another one on another site. So if Man U is playing a match, you bet your £20 of credit on them to win. On another site you "lay" the bet: you do a matching bet that they won't win.
In theory, that means win or lose you make back that £20 credit in cash. In theory. Bookies are not daft. Someone, somewhere, needs to get a cut and the blogs suggest counting on getting about 75% of the free credit back in cash. And by working your way round all the online bookies then you can earn from £800 to £2400 depending on who you read.
The reality is that I've made about £7 profit so far this week. Better than nothing, a couple of pints for free. But I've also got £50 of my own cash tied up in bookie's accounts to leverage that. Not so great. And it has probably taken me an hour a day of work to achieve that. A pound an hour? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'll see.
My first mistake was making my first deposit with Coral by using Paypal because I had £50 in it from some Ebay selling. And I didn't read the T&C's, because only deposits made with a credit or debit card qualifies for the £20 credit. I only found this out after making my first bet. Duh.
My second mistake was trying to do it on the cheap. The "lay" bet, the bet you make that something won't happen, is an expensive bet. A simple £10 bet could require you to have £40 in your account for an easy 3/1 flutter (because you lay the bet on a betting exchange rather than a true bookie; don't ask me, I have no idea how or why this all works). By keeping my bets small and my exposure small I ended up with really small margins on the maths behind extracting the free cash.
Whatever, the end result is that I really don't think it is worth my while. Most bloggers seem to rave about it and I wonder if that is just so you'll click through their affiliate links. I'm going to give it another couple of goes but I'm really cynical.
You make money but it's hassle and you also open yourself up to a big loss if you screw up the calculations or the betting process. Ask me again in a few weeks.
On the heating front, only heating the rooms I am using with an oil filled radiator is working well. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight and see how it has impacted my electricity bill. The wood I bought from a local sawmill is top notch. Burns well and heats the place nice. I posted on Instagram my views on firewood merchants. A bigger bunch of utter fucking chancers I am yet to meet outside of used car dealers. The amount of shit I've wasted money on in the name of "premium seasoned hardwood logs" is shocking.
This week's budget saving is £19.52 which brings me up to £89.62 since the start of the year. The Chip app has auto-saved about £20 for me. I also got £75 compensation paid into my account this week from the AA because I complained about shit service I'd received. Starting to feel like I'm in control of my finances after Christmas but this is also the shittest period of the month in the run up to pay day.
Thursday, January 16, 2020
How I Work Out If My Weekly Shopping Is Good Value
One thing I struggled with last year was coming out of Morrisons with two big bags of crap and 40 quid down the bog and there was nothing I could make a meal out of in amongst it. It pissed me off and it happened all the time.
So this year I decided to be more organised. Not going into a shop without a list. Not eating meals that need twenty ingredients (nineteen of which you can't taste). But I still didn't know whether what I was spending was giving me good value or not.
Maybe this is the most obvious thing in the world to everyone else. What totally changed the way I thought about my shopping was trying to see it for what it gave me rather than seeing it as two bags of individual items. It came about by accident, I wrote myself a little explanatory note as to what it was.
I'd been fretting about what I spent and had no clue if it was good or bad. Just by chance I wrote a note like I was trying to justify the spend to someone else.
I can't remember of the top of my head but it went something like:
So this year I decided to be more organised. Not going into a shop without a list. Not eating meals that need twenty ingredients (nineteen of which you can't taste). But I still didn't know whether what I was spending was giving me good value or not.
Maybe this is the most obvious thing in the world to everyone else. What totally changed the way I thought about my shopping was trying to see it for what it gave me rather than seeing it as two bags of individual items. It came about by accident, I wrote myself a little explanatory note as to what it was.
I'd been fretting about what I spent and had no clue if it was good or bad. Just by chance I wrote a note like I was trying to justify the spend to someone else.
I can't remember of the top of my head but it went something like:
Four dinners for me
Dinners for all the nights my daughter was with me
A Friday treat
Everything I need to clean the kitchen
£17
It's ridiculous but it really altered my perception. When it was just a list of individual items then it meant nothing. I had no way of telling whether I'd spent too much or too little or if I'd even got what I needed.
It is important to think of your weekly shop in terms of what it actually is. It is the means to make X number of meals. It is a job around the house. It actually means something, I can picture it. It also focuses my mind as well because I'm thinking oh, I'll have a piece of chicken left over that I can freeze or whatever.
When you see what you can make or do with it then you can judge whether or not it is good value. If you look at your bill and see that there isn't much that you can do with it then you know you screwed the pooch.
I don't think supermarkets want you to think that way. I think they want you to just wander round grabbing things from the shelf. If you start thinking about what you would actually use a particular item for then they are going to lose money. When I was a gym member it was a real epiphany to me when I realised that gyms made their money off the people who don't go. In the same way, supermarkets make money off the stuff that you don't need and won't use. They want you picking up things that catch your eye. If you bought only what you needed they'd be in deep shit.
And that is what I love about Aldi and Lidl. They don't have all that scope for buying shite. They just have what you need. They don't have twenty different types of tomato or a range of artisan cheeses. You can't wander aimlessly, what's on offer doesn't allow it and I hope they don't change.
So, my lesson that I have learned is be answerable. Take a minute after you get home to justify what you have bought. This is not a collection of things, these are your meals for the week. See it that way and you change how you look at your shopping.
Basically you need to make yourself accountable for what you spend. You have to justify it to someone. I live alone so it will be easy to slack off. I heard an interview with a guy who was an engineer talking about how he comes up with good designs. "I have a rubber duck on my desk and I have to explain everything to the duck. If I can't come up with an explanation that is simple enough for the duck to understand then I have failed". That's the attitude I need to take with my spending habits. I need to find someone, even if it is imaginary, that I need to explain my behaviour to.
I think part of the whole reason for starting this blog has been to make myself accountable. If I am honest about what I am doing on here then I have to stand by it.
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