Monday
Tuesday
I love food. I come from a family where we start talking/planning dinner when we wake up. I rate holidays/foreign locations based on how much I enjoyed my food there – so I didn’t care for Prague but I absolutely adored Bologna. In my previous incarnation as a spendthrift, I also thought nothing of spending £30-50 on a nice meal out with a friend or romantic interest or £20 on take away. I’ve obviously been forced into frugality so have no room in my budget for such things but want to maintain my passion for food. What better way to spice things up that to start learning how to make new dishes? Last night the person of interest asked for loaded potato skins. Continue reading
Having read this article by Mr Money Mustache, I’ve become quite fixated on figuring out what the average monthly spend (for a house sharing, child free Londoner) would be so that I could work out what the 25% spending level I should be aiming for might be. I scoured the interwebs for hours on my mobile (with its spider web crack that makes reading a pain) and on my laptop at work and came up with the following. Please note that the numbers below assume an average take home amount of £2000 after tax, saving just over 10%, eating out or having lunch a few times a week and going out once a week, a weekly round trip taxi, and getting around zones 1-2 by public transport. Continue reading
This was my first week of tracking all my spending religiously. I’m trying to get a baseline, a sense of what I’m OK at, what needs improving as well as a way of tracking change over the next 2 years or so that I think it will take me to become totally debt free.
Monday
Tuesday
I met a friend of mine I hadn’t see for ages for a drink and a bite to eat last night. I was working near Aldgate and we met in Croydon, a bit in the middle for where we both live. Croydon is a balls ache to get to in terms of my zone 1-2 travel card budget but it was totally worth doing because fostering relationships is one of the things that gives me joy. I promised myself that I would evaluate all the non-essential spending I do because the things I’m spending on make life a hell of a lot better in order to get a grip on how much I’m spending and how I can rein in that cost. Continue reading
I have been writing this piece for over a week, since last week Friday when I crunched up the numbers and realised that 5 years on from when I acknowledged that I had racked up a massive amount of debt and decided to do something about it, I’m pretty much still in the same place. I am worth around -£30,000. The craziest thing about this situation is not how much I owe but the fact that this figure is speculative. I don’t actually know how much I owe for sure. Continue reading
Diary of a reforming spendthrift 