Money Talks

Money-saving challenge: How small cutbacks make a big difference

Last newsletter we revealed our weekly spending habits and were shocked with the results. So, in a bid to cut down on our weekly spending we spent a week trying to live frugally. Here’s how we got on.

Lois: I had an idea that I could be a bit of a spendthrift at times. But it wasn’t until I totted up my spending over a working week that I realised how much I was frittering away.

In 5 days I spent £136 just on food, drink and entertainment. Read more about that here. So as the next part of our challenge my colleague Steve and I decided to monitor our spending again, but this time make cutbacks wherever we could.

A big chunk of my money in the first challenge went on food. I rarely do a big supermarket trip so I found myself spending a lot buying food daily.

So, this time I decided to take a trip to the supermarket.

I spent £25.48 and bought enough food to make meals for at least a week.

I also spent about £10 on food for packed lunches to take to work – another of my big expenses. So, when you consider that I was spending £3 a day on lunch this is a significant saving. And it’s lasted me more than one week so that’s an even bigger saving.

And when I needed a top-up on ingredients for meals I made an effort to get what I could in the reduced section. One evening I managed to pick up some carrots for 35p and some sausages for 99p. And they weren’t even out of date.

So although my weekly spend on food was higher than the previous week it’s lasted much longer, saving in the long run.

Entertainment was also a big proportion of my weekly spend and although it’s Christmas party season I’ve managed to cut back here too without ditching my social life.

Eating out is something I enjoy and probably would be loathe to sacrifice, so I decided to take my own advice and use a voucher to get a 2 for 1 meal. And when it came to a takeaway I used a voucher to get 25% off the total bill.

Also, to cut back on the cost of a night out I convinced my housemates to have a festive gathering at home, so we all chipped in for food and drink and had a good night for about £8 each.

Here’s how it added up:

Entertainment: £49

Food/drink: £43.25

Clothes: n/a

Other: n/a

Total: £92.25 (£44. 36 less than last week)

Stephen: Even though I was ahead of Lois by just over a tenner last time round, I still had a funny feeling it would be a lot tougher to win this time around. Looking across the desk, I could spy that steely look in her eye as she clutched her latest print-out voucher for something or other.

In fairness, the weeks before Christmas are, probably the worst possible time to try to save money, and I knew it would take something special for me to come out on top this time around. Endless parties and the siren’s call of mulled wine are all tough to resist and, being of a pretty weak consistency when it comes to that kind of thing, I caved in on more than one occasion.

As a result, my entertainment bill did climb ever-so-slightly compared to the previous week. Nonetheless, I did make some progress on my daytime expenditure.

I always have an eye for a bargain when it comes to food shopping, and so I simply focused my efforts on cutting back and getting craftier with my spending.

That meant utilising what I already had in my food cupboard, shopping around for cheap dinners, packing lunches for myself and making the most of benefits like Clubcard points that I had been neglecting.

In the end, though, it all wasn’t enough. My party lifestyle caught up with me, and my big spends on evening food and drinks just proved too much to come back from.

Before Lois gets too smug, it’s worth noting that, if I hadn’t left my hat in the pub one night, I would have been spared the cost of a replacement. Ultimately that extra £7.99 was what tipped me over the edge. Blasted cold weather.

Here’s my total:

Entertainment: £68

Food/drink: £24.16

Clothes: £7.99

Other: n/a

Total: £100.15 (£22.79 better than last week)

Money-saving challenge: think you know what your weekly spend is?

Well you may need to think again. See what we found out when we monitored our spending habits for a week.

In my last blog, I told you my colleague Steve and I would be watching what we spend for a whole week in order to work out who’s the biggest spendthrift. This was after he accused me of being frivolous.

Last week, we counted up everything we spent on food, drink, socialising and general frittering to see who has the worst spending habits. In the interest of fairness we left out bills and travel and just counted what we spent our money on during the working week, but the result still made us both gasp.

A week in the life of Lois

A big chunk of my money went on food. I rarely do a big supermarket trip so I spend a lot just popping into Tesco or wherever on my way home to pick up dinner. Tesco Express is conveniently located but ever so slightly over inflated in price because of this. For example, I noticed that 250g of cheese is £2.99 in a larger store, but is £3.05 in a Tesco Express, so with a basketful of food, I probably end up spending a few f quid more than I need to on the everyday essentials.

Another unnecessary spend was how much I shelled out for lunches at work. Whether it was a coffee, a bargain sandwich from the lady who delivers to the office (£1) or a boots meal deal (£3.29), I spent at least £5 everyday.

Entertainment was another big proportion of my weekly spend. One night, my housemates and I had a pizza and a few drinks (we did use a 50% voucher for the pizza) and I went to the cinema and ate out another night.

Clothes were another outlay. I had a party to go to at the weekend, so I bought a skirt and a necklace, both cheap and both essentials, of course.

And as for the rest, well that went on boring everyday stuff like toiletries.

My grand total came in at £136.61. Don’t forget that it’s just on lifestyle spending over 5 days – Monday to Friday. That was a big enough total, but I dread to think how it would have soared if I’d counted the weekends as well, or had included rent, bills and travel costs.

Here’s how it totted up:

Entertainment: £65

Food/drink: £33.36

Clothes: £28

Other: £10.25

Total: £136.61

Steve’s spending habits

Even though I should have known the ease with which I wave my plastic about, I was still pretty shocked to see quite how much I’d spent in the space of just five days, particularly on, erm, ‘entertainment’. Nothing seedy, I just had a few too many beers in celebration of payday. Must do better.

Unlike Lois, I’ve managed to stay out of the clothes shops so far this month, although there’s nothing I like more than some sharp threads (I can almost hear my colleagues’ grunts of disagreement as I type).

Food and drink-wise, I also went ‘large’, so to speak. This involved an ill-advised – but nonetheless very tasty – venture to a popular Pizza outlet to punctuate a late night in the office. At £7.50, that made up around about a fifth of my overall food and drink spending. Nonetheless, I’ll be pointing my Nan to this list the next time she claims I’m not eating enough.

As we’re not including non-discretionary spending, you can’t quite get the full impression of what a painful week this was for me, I’m broke-  so our money-saving challenge really couldn’t come at a better time.

If you’ve got any tips for me, they’d be very well received.

Entertainment: £ 70

Food/drink: £37.78

Other: £15.16

Total: £122.94

Knowing now how much money we’re wasting we’ll be doing another weekly spending monitor - but this time we’ll do everything we can to cut back on our weekly total. So, vouchers, packed lunches, whatever we can do to save some money. Find out here how we got on.

How Take That tickets set me a money-saving challenge

I’m always claiming I can be better at budgeting, but after I was accused of being extravagant, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and kick my spending into touch. Read on to see how i'll be doing it.

Following my admission in last week’s blog that I spent almost £400 on Take That tickets, my colleague Stephen Jones snottily accused me of being frivolous with my money, claiming that the tickets cost more than his monthly rent!

Obviously he doesn’t share my sentiment for the UK’s number one man-band, so I naturally disagreed entirely. But, in a bid to prove my frugality, I set about challenging him to a money-monitoring test to see what our spending habits are and how they compare.

The big money challenge

This week, we’ve been taking note of everything we spend - from a Boots meal deal to a pint down the pub - to see if it shocks us into changing our ways (well mine in particular).

Then, to follow this up, we’ll be doing everything we can to try and shave some pounds off our weekly spending wherever possible. This could come in particularly handy with Christmas creeping up.

Whether it’s a voucher code here, or a BOGOF there, if we see a chance to save, we’ll be taking it.

But it would be really helpful to go into this armed with some of your money saving tips too. How do you make easy cut-backs that don’t affect your lifestyle dramatically? Packed lunches? Travel discounts?

Steve and I are after as many top money-saving tips as possible to help us keep our spending to a minimum, and we’ll mention those that helped us most in our quest for savings.

If you have any suggestions that you think will help us then comment below, email me at lois.avery@confused.com or get in touch on Twitter @confusedlois.

We’ll report back in the next newsletter and let you know who came out on top with the healthiest saving at the end of the week.