The snow raises my blood pressure further (11-354)

This morning I have turned from snow lover to snow loather in one long bike ride. With snow still on the ground from the UK’s ‘Big Freeze’ of 2010 today is Monday and it was time to get back to work… or so I wanted (never thought I’d find myself saying that!!). There are a couple of deadline-approaching things that I really want to cross off my to-do list, and to do them I need access to computer files that I can’t access from home, so we were decided and were up before dawn as per our usual day and jumping on our bikes promptly at 7am to start our commute. 

After a 40 minute bike slide in which we made it precisely 1.1 miles (i.e. not even out of our town) of the 5 miles I needed to arrive at work and nearly fell over too many times to count, however, my 30 year love affair with snow came to a crashing end as I called it a day (well, what I actually said contained a lot more swear words than that) and walked back home instead (which actually took only 30mins, further illustrating that cycling was completely pointless) to work from home in a more time-efficient manner. Grr… am not impressed. The white stuff has got to go.

Snow brings food shopping chaos (9-356)

Ridiculous amounts of snow this week (by UK standards!) has brought complete chaos to the UK and after Monday and Tuesday’s success in cycling to work, 8inches (20cms) of snow over Tuesday night put paid to our bike commute on Wednesday. Luckily my boss was perfectly happy for me to work from home,  as we live down un-gritted, icy lanes that were completely impassable by bike, so I did so for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – saving both money and cycling effort!

Today we ventured out by car to Sainsbury’s, and the roads (once past our ungritted lane) were actually fine – although there were a number of idiot drivers around who clearly had no idea how to drive on snow. Still, we made it safely to Sainsbury’s for our weekly shop only to view in dismay the completely empty shelves in many of their aisles. Apparently their supply is down to just 40% of normal – which I find a little peculiar actually given the store is right next to a main dual carriageway, which has been snow-ploughed and passable the entire snow-time (according to the local radio – which has made for amusing snow-related listening this week). Perhaps their distribution centres are in the Pennines, or up an impassable 1:2 ice-covered hill?

Following our increase in debt-reducing financial knowledge last year, we never go near a supermarket without a shopping list complete with meal plan. Unfortunately, this proved completely useless under the no-food circumstances we now found ourselves in… ’stewing beef [check on shelf], nope… pork? [glance to shelf], nope… onion? nope, anything green? nope…’ and so it went on. The entire giant store was out of every single pre-packed bread loaf, and we ended up having to grab a made in-store, delicious but expensive, round loaf before the remaining 30 loaves or so of in-store bread went too and I was breakfast-less (never a good move for my morning crankiness levels). We have friends coming over for dinner tonight (they’re Swiss so 8inches of snow barely registers on their radar!!) and after the planned beef dish proved impossible we tried various other main courses we could think of, only to abandon our effort after the fourth still contained vital ingredients the store didn’t have (luckily we still had mince in our freezer at home so spag bol it is). Tempers frayed and arguments ensued as we trekked back and forth across the store, trying to stick to our £30 budget when all the cheap, and often even mid-range, options had vanished with earlier shoppers.

After the most fraught (and longest) food shop ever, we finally left the store with sky-high blood pressures but not too over-budget at £34.20, although missing a fair amount of the food we’ll need this week (on a positive note, however, I did at least finally find the correct colour hair-dye, which wasn’t in stock on our last three visits - and it was on offer so I bought two). It was interesting to discover just how much I take for granted that our supermarkets will contain all the foods we need, and got really irate when it didn’t - I can’t even begin to imagine how Zimbabwean’s coped when their currency depreciated and the shops were all bare for months on end - I needed a lie-down after just 1.5 hours of empty-shelved shopping hell.

Snowball update (5-360)

As it snows outside, I have been snugly indoors re-calculating our debt repayment snowball to find out if the money we’ve saved by cycling to work each day, rather than driving, will make a difference to our debt payment end-date. Simply adding the £85 savings to our debt repayments each month (from May 2010 onwards, after the money spent on our bikes is paid back to our savings) makes a MASSIVE difference! Currently we were due to finish our ‘bad’ debt repayments in December 2011, but adding our cycling savings takes us down by a whopping 3 months to September 2011!!!! What great news.

Back to work (4-361)

Today it was back to work for CJ and me and, after a lovely 3-weeks off, it was a bit of a rude awakening when my alarm went off at 6am. Fortunately I know myself well – I am not a morning person - so I’d packed my bag last night ready just to add my (pre-made) lunch in the morning, shove some toast and tea down my throat and hit the road.

It was lucky that we left over an hour to get the 5 miles to my work as it turned out we needed it!! Setting off at 6.50am in the dark, it felt a bit like an adventure – but then that’s just me and my love of anything novel! I’m not sure CJ saw our early departure on our new bikes in quite that way – and the novelty will probably wear off for me soon (maybe with all the snow forecasted this week for instance!). Today, however, I found our commute quite exhilarating; everything was sparkling in a frost-jacket and we saw the sunrise as we zoomed along the cycle paths (ok, so we weren’t really zooming, but it was quicker than walking at least!); we can do 95% of our route on bike paths, which is great – much more peaceful, and less dangerous. I was pleasantly surprised not to find our ride that tiring either, and it was CJ who called a halt halfway through for a leg-breather (hence our long travel time!!).

My work’s on the top of a massive hill so I will confess to walking up part of it (it was great on the way home – downhill – though!!), but I thoroughly enjoyed our commute (must be a first!), and I certainly arrived at work more awake than normal! And relievingly, not even that red, sweaty or frizzy-haired either

P-p-pick up a bicycle (3-362)

Today we picked up our new bikes and I have to confess to being a bit excited when we finally finished rigging up my odometer (my little luxury – I want to know how far we cycle!), and blanketing ourselves in 300 (ok, only 6) layers and jumped on our bikes to try them out. We cycled for around an hour, part of the way up our commute and back, and actually cycling is quite fun! And I didn’t even get cold or sweaty – much better than I thought. Now I’ve just got to plan how to look decent at work after a 5-mile cycle that started at 7am…

We stop procrastinating and make a decision – bikes it is! (1-364)

The new year has only just begun and already we’re making decisions that will save money! Nice. In 2009 CJ and I commuted by car together, parking at CJ’s work after dropping me off en route. Unfortunately, I can’t get a parking permit at my work – and now CJ’s work have changed their permit rules and we live too close to a bus route to qualify. We could get a bus from a stop about 10mins’ walk from our house that goes via my work to CJ’s, but whereas we used to spend £20 per week on petrol (plus £6.25/month for the permit), we would now have to spend £30 per week for 2 bus passes. It doesn’t sound like much, but that £8.44 extra each week works out at an extra £438.75 over the year and frankly, as money-saving converts, we don’t like to waste that kind of money on our commute to work, so today we bit the bullet, stopped procrastinating on the decision and hit the sales for 2 bicycles and all the kit (having been a driver who noticed how difficult cyclists are to spot, I am no longer worried about being cool (unlike as a teenager, when I’d cycle round the corner and take my helmet off out of view of my parents) and am suddenly keen to wear a helmet and psychedelic bands/jackets/anything not to get run over).

We came back from Halfords £393 lighter but having saved a considerable amount of money by a) buying in the sales, and b) haggling. We pick up our bikes fully kitted out on Sunday, and start our first bike-commute to work together on Monday! I have to confess that I’m rather nervous as I haven’t ridden a bike in about 15 years and I always found it knackering, sweaty, uncomfortable and not much fun – but after 19 weeks (early May) we’ll have paid back our investment and be saving money on our commute. Actually, it’s kind of scary how much you save: over one year we’ll be £1,115 better off than if we drove, and £1,560 better off than if we took the bus (although we have to subtract our £393 initial outlay for this year - but this is still a £722 saving on driving and £1,167 on the bus). It also gives us more freedom if one of us is off work, or if one of us changes job, as we’ll be independent from each other’s commute, rather than having to share the car. In the meantime, however, it’ll be great to cycle-commute together.

The best thing of all was that it was only possible for us to buy our bikes because I’ve been squirreling away money each month – yes, we actually have savings for the first time ever! I can now see what my father always meant about savings being useful… No going into debt or having a massive money shortage for the month when we bought our bikes today :) And the money we save on petrol each week is now going back into our savings to repay the bike borrowings. Fantastic!

The end of year debt round-up: how did we do? (365-0)

Unbelievably, today is the last day of 2009; how time has flown since I started this blog at the start of the year.

So, no more days are left – how did we do with our debts in 2009?

Let’s recap where we started back in January 2009:

Lloyds a/c 1: £ -1,994.45
Lloyds a/c 2: £ -1,778.81
Alliance & Leicester a/c: £ -2,096.00
Halifax a/c: £ 450.13
Capital 1 c/c: £ -5,993.93
Capital 1 c/c (2): £ -400.46
Tesco c/c: £ -640.85
Barclaycard: £ -2,262.39
Sony c/c: £ -3,028.42
Egg loan: £ -3,223.65
HFC loan: £ -400.00 (approx)
Student loan: £ -7,703.81
Parent loan: £ -7,350.00
Total debt at 1 Jan 2009: £ -36,362.64

Frankly, looking at it now – what an absolute mess we were in!

And so, at the end of 2009, one year on, our debt now stands at [drum roll please]…

Lloyds a/c 1: £ -1,993.30
Lloyds a/c 2: £ -1,037.47
Halifax a/c: £ 370.47
Capital 1 c/c: £ -4,572.38
Tesco c/c: £ 0
Barclaycard: £ -1,050.83
Mum’s c/c: £ -3,980
Egg loan: £0  
Student loan: £ -7,372.57 (despite repayments this will stay here till April 2010’s yearly update)
Parent loan: £ -8,850

Total debt at 31 December 2009: £ -28,486.08

Total debt paid off since January 2009: £7,876.56

% of debt paid off since January 2009:
21.66% of our total debt
42.45% of our ‘bad’ debt (debt excl student and parent loan)

Final debt repayment date:
Jan 2009 – was predicted for May 2012 (41 months)
Now predicted for Dec 2011 (36 months)

——

OK, so it’s not that much better than where we were at the start of December 2009 but we have been hosting CJ’s mum all month, and it’s Christmas so I’m just pleased we haven’t gone backwards. I have to say that I’m really impressed with our efforts throughout the year – we’ve done extremely well. We’ve paid a considerable amount of our debts off, and passed some big milestones such as finishing our Egg loan and paying off our Tesco credit card. I’m quite proud of our achievement – yes, being a perfectionist I always think we could have done better, but we could also have just ignored our debt and carried on our old spending habits and we’d be sat here now on over £40k of debt instead. So a pat on the back is well deserved… and bring on 2010; let’s get the whole of our ‘bad’ debt nailed!

Happy New Year!

Home-made yoghurt (364-1)

I am amazed – I got an excellent budget cooking recipe book for Christmas (Sam Stern’s Student Cookbook) and I have just found out how easy it is to make your own yoghurt by making my first ever batch. Unbelievable. And so cheap. Who’d have thought it. No more forking out for shop-made yoghurt for me from now on.

I hit the ‘January’ sales (360-5)

Normally I hate clothes shopping and there is nothing more dreadful than shopping in a scrum and then queuing for hours to try things on and/or pay so, usually, I avoid the January sales like the plague. Not this year though. I needed some new work clothes and I had a Christmas present budget of £100 and the thought of getting more clothes for my money by hitting the sales proved too tempting an opportunity to miss.

So it was with great trepidation that CJ, my two sisters plus one fiance, and I drove to Woking town centre’s shopping mall at 10.30am this morning. Expecting tides of manic shoppers of epic proportions we braced ourselves for the shopping experience from hell… only to find that clearly everyone else thought it would be so awful that we had the place pretty much to ourselves!!

From potential nightmare to dream shopping experience, the two lads went off for their ‘yeah, it’ll fit, no need to try anything on’ shopping technique, while us three ladies hit Debenhams and went crazy picking up pretty much anything nice and in the sale across the vast majority of the store.

Arms laden with clothes we found ourselves a hidden-away changing room which we had all to ourselves for our private trying-on extravaganza of delightful proportions. As we’re all the same size (well, except for trouser length where I’ve got a good 4 inches on them!) but slightly different builds, when something didn’t suit one of us, the others tried it on instead. We were each other’s personal Trinny and Suzannah and I am delighted to say it was great fun - and I went precisely 60p over my £100 budget, resisting the temptation to buy everything that looked vaguely ok, and instead picking only those items that fit extremely well and looked excellent.

So my clothes shopping is over for the year, but it was well worth the potential risk of trying the sales – I saved £77 on the clothes I bought, giving me essentially 40% more for my money! Not bad going really.

Being paid to be a patient (352-13)

This afternoon I earned an extra £50 (minus tax) being a pretend patient for the University’s medical student exams. I have to say it was good pay for the 4 hours’ work  – particularly as I just had to sit there answering and asking questions according to my ‘history’. I was the head that the students talked to while they had to perform the physical examination on a plastic torso, which was rather surreal!! It’s very useful that I now know all the potential causes of intermenstrual bleeding while on the pill, but I have to say that by the 27th student I was beginning to lose interest in the answer to my 27th asking of what a polyp is (the worst thing being that my degrees were in biology so I knew the answer in the first place!). Still, the examiner in the room with me was highly amusing, most of the students were brilliant so I could mark them well, and we were topped up with cake, tea and mulled wine throughout - and fifty quid is fifty quid! Best of all, I may be re-employed in the future, which would be very useful.