October 23, 2008 – 3:42 pm
An article on the money website fool.co.uk list some of the traditional ways of saving money and concludes that - yes! they can save you money. Amazing…
Anyway, the best tip of all, I reckon is the one posted in the comments: DO NOT GO SHOPPING UNLESS YOU NEED SOMETHING! Amen brother! There’s lots of other useful advice in the comments section as well, like “…don’t buy expensive “so what” magazines full of so-called celebrities. Get on with your own life!” Yeah sister! Go over there and take a look.
October 23, 2008 – 3:04 pm
Supermarkets dislike wasting food even more than the rest of us - it costs them money to throw out stuff that has reached its sell-by date. So each day, a couple of hours or so before they close, they will all start selling perishable food items cut-price.
The exact time this sell-off starts varies from shop to shop, but if you start going to your local supermarket late in the afternoon each day, you’ll soon find out what the best time to find food bargains is.
October 21, 2008 – 11:52 am
I’ve believed for years that we, as a nation, as a culture, as a species, need to change our daily way of life NOW if we are to going to enjoy anything approaching a comfortable life and standard of living in the future. But I don’t want everybody to go back to living in huts and a hand-to-mouth existence. I appreciate and enjoy living in a warm dry house, sleeping in a comfortable bed, eating a good diet and not wearing myself to an early death with hard physical labour. Which is what quite a few Deep Greens like the Earth Firsters seem to want for everybody.
So I’m quite pleased to have found a group of sensible-sounding Greens, who want to explore ways of our society ecologically sustainable without requiring the entire population to live in huts and eat berries.
What about those of us who are excited precisely because the fight against climate change can help us push our economy, our democracy and lifestyles truly into the 21st century?
Those of us who want our lives to run on renewable power not just to save the planet, but because we’ll get to be part of the true Greatest Generation and get loads of cool new stuff in the process.
That’s me, all right. So I’ve signed up to Serous Change; will you?
October 16, 2008 – 2:55 pm
While the credit crunches all around, perhaps the best thing to do is smile:
What’s the capital of Iceland? - About £3.50.
How do you define optimism? A banker who irons five shirts on a Sunday.
Why have estate agents stopped looking out of the window in the morning? Because otherwise they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon.
What’s the difference between the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston and God? God doesn’t think he’s Robert Peston.
What’s the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker? A pigeon can still make a deposit on a new Ferrari.
Shares in one of Britain’s struggling banks have just shot up after the unexpected news that Santander is going to take them over. A surprised stockbroker admitted “Nobody expected the Spanish acquisition”
What do you call an ex Chief Executive? Anything you like!
What’s the difference between an American and a Zimbabwean? In a few weeks, nothing.
Following the problems with Lehmann Bros and in the sub-prime lending
market in America and the run on Northern Rock, HBOS and Bradford & Bingley in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.
In the last 7 days Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.
Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived.
While Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.
Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.
October 15, 2008 – 3:37 pm
Can you really save money on a night out in the West End (the West End of London, that is - apologies to all out provincial readers). This blogger thinks so:
I wonder, are you as sick of hearing the terms “credit crunch”, “economic climate”, “recession”, “banking crisis” and perhaps the most dramatic, “financial meltdown” as I am?
At the moment it seems that you cannot turn on the telly, radio or computer without some doom-sayer blustering on about what a terrible state our wallets are all in. Yes, we’ve all had to tighten our belts a notch or two, perhaps even downgrade from Heinz to Tesco’s beans, but the world is hardly ending is it? You can still have a jolly good time in the West End and not break the bank, all you have to do is follow a few little money-saving hints and tips.
Read more here.
September 3, 2008 – 6:13 pm
Mix together:
1 Cup Grated White Soap - plain unscented, such as Simple Soap
1/2 Cup Washing Soda
1/2 Cup Borax
For a light load, use 1 tablespoon. For heavy or heavily soiled load, use 2 tablespoons.
Other recipes for cleaning products can be found here.
August 10, 2008 – 2:23 pm
My news feed sent me to this blog post:
Now, when we’re going around the supermarket filling up the trolley, I know pretty well how much we’re spending. I don’t know the exact price of every item, but I can estimate it and keep a running total. When we reach the checkout, my estimate invariably comes to less than +/- two quid of the total.
Well, that’s how it used to be. This afternoon, we went around the Co-op with me doing my usual running price estimation. At the checkout, I was shocked to find that I was charged more than a fiver over my estimate. It could have been quite embarrassing, as I was left with only about 50p in my purse. Naturally, I checked the receipt, but all was as it should be - it was just that stuff was costing more……
It’s a story that is getting all too common nowadays. But it does illustrate something that every shopper should be doing routinely - keeping track of what they are spending as they push the trolley around.
You don’t have to note the exact price of each item - just round it up or down to the nearest pound; that should be easy enough to keeping mentally adding to a total (if not, use a calculator!).
Other ways of keeping your supermarket spending in check is to decide on an upper limit of spending before you go in the shop; then take this amount out in cash and use that instead of a card. Using cards is convenient, but you often don’t realise how much you’re spending until the bill comes in; using cash only for the weekly shop makes it impossible to overspend, and really brings home to you how much things cost.
Other shopping tips:
Write out a shopping list - and stick to it!
Eat before you shop - hunger pangs make it difficult to resist overspending in the foods aisles!
A common allegation levelled at green living is that it’s too expensive. In turn this gives rise to the new allegation that given the fiscally challenging times we find ourselves in, the first thing to be jettisoned will be the environment. Bizarre. I cannot think of two more compatible bedfellows than green living and credit-crunch survival. Their union positively reeks of symbiosis. Take food waste, for example - the issue on everyone’s lips, including Gordon Brown’s, but languishing in everyone’s bin bags. Were we to bin the expensive habit of chucking away a third of what we buy rather than the actual produce, then we could stop dispatching 4.1m tonnes of edible food to landfill, stop the inherent greenhouse gas emissions and save the cold, hard currency…..
Read the rest of the article here.
