Maltpress

A money saving EXTREME!!! update.

An update on extreme money saving, that is; not an extreme update.

I think my plan is failing. £250 a month just isn’t enough if I include petrol, which takes about £30 a week; that’s about half my budget gone at a single stroke. That would probably be fine if I didn’t also then factor in expensive expenses – the non-food items you kind of take for granted but which come along with surprising regularity. Or maybe this is the month during which everything has run out.

I’m talking deodorant, toothpaste, toilet cleaner. Prescription charges. When you’re living on limited resources, £5 here and there makes a big difference; when £30 of your £50 budget has gone on petrol and you’re in the supermarket, a couple of extra pounds on the bill can mean the difference between having paper money to last the week and not.

With that kind of pressure on petrol bills, you’re also very aware of every trip you make. Is it really necessary? Is someone else heading in that direction you can cadge a lift from? Buses, sadly, are vastly overpriced, and would make even more of a dent in the budget. So how can you reduce your petrol bills when you still need to get to work?

Cycling would, I suppose, be an option. It would certainly be good for me, apart from the somewhat increased risk of mangled painful death under a truck (especially at this time of the year). Running would be possible; it’s 10km to work along the river, and I know I can do that distance in about an hour. But then I’d have to run home too, in the dark, along cow-pat (and angry cow) strewn paths near a river which I would undoubtedly fall in.

And so I am forced to one conclusion: petrol should be removed from the monthly budget, or the monthly budget should be increased. I think the former; reducing the cash spending budget to £150, roughly what I thought it would be (and giving me £30 a week + £30 emergency fund) for food and going out. The £100 I thought I would spend on petrol is absorbed into unavoidable monthly costs, and I save less that £250 a month.

Still, I am spending a lot less than I have been. Making my own lunch, planning meals and shopping carefully, and watching what I spend on the fripperies of modern life has been very good for me. As it stands at the moment, my ISA holds 1% of my planned total. This will, hopefully, soon increase to 10%, and then I can truly feel I’m on the way.

I’ve started bookmarking sites with fancy things I want to put in my new house, so I’d better be.