White Friday – Quietly Keeping My Money

Here in the UK we love importing American phenomena from over the pond and it appears the shopping frenzy known as Black Friday is the latest. For the UK press it’s a great spectacular that allows them to present all sorts of stats about how much retailers are selling, picture the mad crowds, increase their advertising revenues and this year in particular give Tesco a bit more of a bashing.

The BBC article above states that the masses are whacking £360,000 a minute on credit cards today.

Now I’m not sure what the “usual” figure is, but that’s a lot of credit. What strikes me is that none of these people fighting over flat screen TV’s in supermarkets are at work. Maybe all these shoppers are all working flexi time or have taken the day off? Or maybe it’s all the FI Baba’s like Ermine and TEA out there upgrading their audio visual in time for the Queen’s Speech?!

Anyway while the masses are out there going mental for bargains, spending what many of them don’t have, I’ve been sitting quietly reflecting on some of the ways over the last month or so I’ve driven down my expenses.

There’s a few obvious ones in the list, and some I’ve touched on before but hopefully a few other that you may find useful:

Wear glasses. Using daily disposable contact lenses costs me approximately £1.22 per day. By wearing my glasses on 15 days per month I can save £18.33. I also argue that it makes me look more intelligent, however my wife thinks it would take more than glasses to do that!

Save 1% on almost every £1 you spend. So long as you have the discipline to pay off your credit card bill every month to avoid interest get yourself an American Express Platinum Everyday Cashback Card. After a few years collecting air miles we’ve recently switched to this card instead. We use one for all of our day to day spending. It gives you 1% cash back on everything you spend and there is no annual charge and as a bonus they give you 5% cash back for the first 3 months. A doff of the chapeau is due to TEA for reminding me to get on this boat!

Save 1-3% on everything else. There are certain things that you can’t pay for with an [amex] credit card (see above). Sign up for a Santander 123 account and you can get between 1 & 3% cash back on most of your utility bills. So long as you fund the account with £500 each month you get cash back on your direct debits for water, gas, electricity, council tax, mobile/land line phone bills. Also the account pays more interest (between 1-3% depending on the balance) than most savings accounts currently do, which is worth having. The account fee of £2 per month is easily recouped  by the above benefits. I typically “make” about £40 per month from this account.

Make your own coffee. I can still drink great coffee and save myself roughly £50/month (conservatively). More details here.

Insulate the loft. Do you know how deep your loft insulation is? Install the recommended 270mm of loft insulation and you’ll instantly feel warmer, have a much happier wife AND potentially save yourself hundreds of pounds a year. What’s not to like?

Cycle to the station. I live 4.5 miles form the station where I commute to London. An annual car park permit costs £1,000 so bicycling to the station and using the free bike racks I’m able to save £83 per month in car parking (let alone fuel). I don’t just stop there 4.5 miles isn’t really enough for me so I’ll typically go the long way making it between 12-20 miles each way. Save money and drastically improve you fitness.

Charge things at work. Come to my desk during the week and you’ll usually find me charging a Blackberry, iPhone, bicycle lights (front and rear) and personal laptop. I’m not sure how much it saves me but it’s convenient and I feel like I’m maximising my work benefits 😉

Shave the old school way. Forget Mach 3 disposable cartridge razor blades. For a while now I have shaved with an old school double edged safety razor. At the time of writing an 8 pack of Mach 3 blades works out to roughly £1.90 per blade. I buy 50 double edged blades instead which work out to roughly £0.10 per blade.

Make Breakfast at Home. Two pieces of toast, jam and a yoghurt in my work canteen costs £1.80. I can make my overnight oats for approximately £0.20 per portion (recipe here). Over the month (20 working days) that saves me approximately £32 per moth

Power through the night. We have an Economy 7 electricity meter fitted which means any electricity we use between 11pm and 7am is roughly 1/2 of the price of that used during the day. In order to maximise the benefits of this all washing of clothes is done overnight. We use simple plug timers to ensure any charging of electronic devices is done at the cheaper rate, if they’re not charged at work (see above).

Don’t carry cash. By minimalising my wallet I encourage myself not to carry cash with me. This helps me avoid frittering money away on impulse purchase such as unnecessary snacks, drinks and treats.  My records clearly show I withdraw on average £37 less cash out of the bank each month since switching to this type of wallet!

Stick it in the Diary. Whenever I sign up for a contract (mobile phone, utility provider, insurance, savings deposit account, mortgage etc) the first thing I do is add the expiry date of the tie in or any fix/discount period to my Google Calendar. I’ll also set an email reminder so that the calendar emails me 5 days before the contract expires. By doing this I never fall in to the trap of not being on the cheapest/most suitable deal.

So there, I’ll go to bed tonight safe in the knowledge that I’ve resisted this shopping frenzy and I’m a little step closer to FI. How about you, did you snag any bargains?