When you’re coming to the end of your contract, don’t be tempted to upgrade. Have a look at your system settings, find out how much data you actually use and get a rolling one-month contract that matches your usage. Wait a year and with the savings, buy a ‘last season’ Android and keep on banking the difference. I have nothing against Apple; their iPhones are beautifully designed and have some great engineering features but I don’t agree with the rate at which they roll out new models that are essentially the same and the marketing that encourages people to spend a premium on something that most don’t really need. Iceland photography aside, Apple support is also excellent, and if you need it (and use it), then it’s worthwhile. My 80-year-old aunt has an iPhone and regularly rings Apple to remind her how to do something, which is great, but I’m not aware that any of my friends with iPhones have ever used this service, but they’re paying for the luxury of having it there.
Utilities
Pretty much all you need to do here is to use a price comparison website (many are listed on moneysavingexpert.com) but do keep track of when each contract is ending and, rather than waiting until the last minute, do some research to see if you can get a better deal in advance.
Insurance
Buying insurance is a bit of a gamble. You buy it because you want to be protected but equally hope you won’t need to use it, so it’s a sunk cost. I’d never skimp on house or car insurance but I tend to decline extended warranties or product insurance. Whatever insurance you take out, be clear about what’s covered and that you’re insuring at the right level. Again, comparison websites are a good resource.
Life insurance needs to be treated slightly differently. If you’re employed, you often get ‘death in service’ as part of your pension, so you have an element of cover anyway. Just after we were married, we took out a £200,000 20-year joint life insurance policy, paying out in the event of one of us dying. It was principally to cover the mortgage and became useful down the line when remortgaging, as rather than taking the insurance included with the mortgage, we found it was invariably cheaper to arrange it independently.
If you do take out life insurance, you’re likely to hit one of two scenarios. Coming to the end of your term, and in good health, you realise you’ve spent a load of money and got nothing for it. In our case it cost in total just over £5,000, and yes, I felt a little cheated. If you have an ongoing policy, the other option is when you hit 70 or thereabouts. You usually receive a letter saying your provider can continue to provide the same level of cover but your premiums will double. Alternatively, you can keep your premiums the same but the level of cover will be halved. This happens again at 75, 80 and so on. Basically, the odds of you dying are increasing and your cover is reducing or becoming prohibitively expensive. It’s a horrible feeling, as you might stop the policy, drop dead tomorrow and you’ve wasted all that money; or you’re enjoying good health, yet the cost of cover is ratcheting up.
As with critical illness cover, the decision to take out life insurance is a personal one. I’d suggest that, if you have dependents, it’s a good idea to protect them if the worse should happen but if you don’t need it, I wouldn’t bother. We cancelled our life insurance policy after 18 years as we’d paid off the mortgage and didn’t need the protection it offered (to pay off the mortgage), so we decided to write off the cost rather than continuing to pay premiums.
Cooking from scratch
Data from a 2022 YouGov survey suggests that the majority of Brits can cook, with only 12% classing themselves as poor chefs and 3% admitting to being ‘very bad’. While 11% claimed to be ‘very good’, nearly half (47%) only rated themselves as ‘fairly good’, so there’s potentially an opportunity to review the cost of eating, which is something we all do!
Cooking, and specifically cooking meals from scratch, is one of the key skills I acquired at university. We were a house of six and all put £20 in the kitty every month, taking turns once a week to cook a meal for the whole house. We also paid for bread, butter, toilet roll and milk out of the kitty, so it was feeding six for approximately £4. This figure does need adjustment for inflation but you get the gist. It taught me not only how to cook but what to cook, and how to create a filling, nutritious meal on a small budget. It also helped that I grew to love cooking and now do most of it at home. We still have meals cooked from scratch most days and minimise ultra-processed food and ready meals. It’s a simple as going back to my parents’ era (or more likely your grandparents, or even further back) – cook a roast chicken on Sunday with lots of vegetables, have risotto on Monday, make a pie on Tuesday and soup on Wednesday.
Also, you can forget most fancy kitchen gadgets: the two that offer the best value are a slow cooker (£20) and a stick blender (£15). They’re cheap, readily available and low tech so rarely go wrong. If you’re not great at cooking, don’t buy expensive celebrity cookbooks. If you must, pick one up at a charity shop – there are always plenty. I have two large hardback Jamie Oliver books (presents, I didn’t buy them) – and while they’re lovely, the recipes are all available online. If you’re not that confident, try cooking ingredient packs. We like Simply Cook but there are several others. It costs just over £10 a month and you choose four meal packs. You get the instructions and spices posted monthly and just need to add the basics – chicken, mushrooms, cream, pasta or potatoes, whatever. They are simple to follow (only a handful of steps and ready in less than 20 minutes) and it’s easy to double up, add more base ingredients and bung some portions in the freezer. Lou says she can burn water but she can follow these, so I’m sure you can too. If you overindulge on takeaways, this is worth a try. You can get the family involved, you know what’s gone into it, they’re extremely tasty and more to the point you’ll save money. Almost every week we have a ‘freezer bingo’ meal that we take out in the morning and microwave for an easy and quick dinner.
Aligned with learning to cook from scratch is to plan your food shopping. I know it’s dull but every week, work out what you plan to eat, make a list of what you need and buy accordingly. Randomly picking up stuff from the shops on frequent trips leads to food waste (which equals money waste). We have a magnetic weekly grid stuck to the fridge and every weekend we jot down what we’re doing and what we plan to eat. It doesn’t matter if you don’t stick to it 100% (we normally fail at least one day a week) but it really does help you plan. Only buy what you really need as well as making sure you actually use what you’ve bought.
Finally, a bit of brand awareness. Where do you shop? Again, it’s not a new idea but try downshifting – from Waitrose to Sainsbury’s or from Tesco to Aldi. Alternatively try supermarket-own brands – you’ll be surprised at the similarity. And trust me, a lettuce is a lettuce. I should know, as one of my school holiday jobs was picking celery and lettuce at a local market gardener. We supplied the same lettuce to all the major supermarkets; the only one we treated differently was Marks & Spencer. They had a requirement that all lettuces should be above a certain weight. They would take all of them; we just had to segregate the underweight ones. However, they would spot check and weigh a sample of lettuces and if any failed, they’d reject the entire lorryload. So what did we do? If the weather had been poor and the next tranche of lettuce looked a little small, we watered it before picking, adding a few extra grams to each. So, I mean it, there’s no difference in your supermarket lettuce but you might be getting a pre-washed one if you pay extra at M&S!
Loyalty cards
If you regularly use a particular retailer, make use of their loyalty programme if they have one. Tesco revolutionised this sector with the launch of their Clubcard way back in 1995, and most major retailers now offer something similar. While some offer more benefits than others, choose whatever’s convenient for you. We use Lidl purely because there’s one in town and the nearest big Tesco is ten miles away – it’s not worth driving there just for the Clubcard.
Look out for other opportunities too; I travelled quite a bit with work and nearly always stayed in a Holiday Inn as I rated their loyalty programme, and we’ve had many free nights and upgrades out of it. Remember they are ‘buying’ your loyalty, offering you discounts or rewards so that you’ll use them in preference to others. My only caveat would be don’t be tempted to buy anything because you have a discount voucher – if you weren’t going to buy it, don’t buy it just because it’s cheaper.
A slight twist on loyalty cards are cashback or affinity credit cards, which accumulate rewards against regular spending but aren’t tied to a particular retailer. These can be great but you need to pick one you know you’re going to use and have the flexibility to meet the terms and conditions of cashing in the rewards. Pre-Covid, we chose an airline affinity card as we knew we wanted to travel more and we’ve just bought first-class tickets to the Caribbean and only paid the airport taxes, saving us in the region of £5,000. So they’re definitely worth it if you can be flexible with your travel dates – don’t expect to be able to exchange them for cheap flights during the school holidays.
Discretionary spending
This means spending money on stuff you don’t need to survive. You might think you need another pair of shoes but you probably don’t. As with the previous section, if there’s finance involved, you need to look at the total cost you’re paying, the length of the agreement and how much interest or fees you’re paying over and above the base cost of the item.
Technology and gadgets
As a society, in the UK I believe we’re falling prey to increasing commercialism and ‘greed’ for many products, which is exacerbated by products that are replaced ever more frequently and with higher specifications or additional features. Although there are technological advances, many product releases don’t really provide any real step-change in functionality over an older model, yet we’re encouraged by marketing to replace technology before it fails. Additionally, some perfectly serviceable technology becomes obsolete when maintenance is no longer supported, in essence forcing you to upgrade to continue using it. Not only is this bad environmentally, it can also be a big drain on your finances.
Sorry to be a killjoy but I’d suggest you really don’t need most of them, or at least you don’t need the latest version! If you’re getting yourself out of a financial hole, hold back on anything that’s not life critical and take at least a year to get yourself stable. Air fryers come into this bracket; they’re marketed as the solution to the current energy crisis but in reality it’s a marketing gimmick and you can do better than splashing out on yet another gadget that ends up in the cupboard under the sink. In the 1970s it was yoghurt makers (my parents bought one and used it twice) and I’ll admit we also have a couple of relics in the kitchen that we don’t really use – but nobody’s perfect. However, I have been tempted, and recently bought an air fryer in the sales. I wasn’t totally convinced but watched a TV documentary about them and together with a recommendation from a mate, I decided to try one. But don’t pay more than £100; a reasonable one costs around £70. I recognised I could use it for chips from the freezer, crisping up jacket potatoes, salmon steaks, etc, and potentially use it once a fortnight in place of heating up our conventional fan oven and therefore saving a few quid. Time will tell how often we use it but at least I’ll know I’ve not wasted more than £200 on a ‘top of the range’ model. But I’m still not convinced about cooking a full roast dinner for four in an air fryer. As for other gadgets, look around your home and see what you’ve previously bought, with all good intentions, and don’t really use. Yes, I’m going to suggest selling them but in most cases you won’t get much for them.
Clothes
This is a contentious one for many as clothes are very visible to others. Brands (or lack of a named brand) can lead to assumptions about the wearer, both positive and negative. They also provide us with a perception of ‘feeling good’ about ourselves. To be clear, I’m talking here about designer brands over regular store clothing. My challenge is whether a pair of designer jeans that cost three times as much as an own-brand pair from Next, for example, really is ‘three times as good’? Will they last three times as long or be three times more comfortable? I still like to wear nice clothes, and by this I mean clothes that are comfortable and ‘look good’ on me (ie they fit well), but thinking about clothes as more of a functional purchase can save you a lot of money.
The trick is knowing which brands are worth it and which aren’t. I’m a fan of Barbour as a robust outdoor coat, particularly as you can have it reconditioned and rewaxed (waterproofed) at a fraction of the cost of a new one, therefore it can last you 20 or more years, but sadly this is an exception. For most of our clothes, we apply a ‘pound a wear’ approach. Whatever you spend on an item of clothing, allocate a virtual £1 against the cost for every time you wear it. Once you’ve virtually ‘paid yourself back’ then it’s OK to recycle (or sell, or give to charity) and replace it. For example, if you pay £20 for a nice work shirt and wear it two days a week for a year, you’ve got your value out of it. Another way of looking at it is to ask how much it costs you to wear. I needed a dinner jacket for a formal occasion and knew I wasn’t going to use it that often. I couldn’t find one second hand, so I bought one from Matalan for £100. Partly because I attend more charitable events these days, I’ve worn it (to date) 12 times, so just over £8 a wear. I have a couple more events coming up so this will improve, the only risk being that, having lost a bit of weight, it won’t fit me – but I’ll take that on the chin! And no one has ever made any comment that it doesn’t look as good as one from Savile Row or with a well-known label inside.
It’s one thing valuing what you buy and working out how often you use it but a slightly more important element is understanding whether a particular brand is anything special. After graduating, a friend of mine from university worked for a major textile company. She was seconded to north Africa where many of the garments were made. Much like contract manufacturing, several brands were made in the same factory, with the same machines and staff, with maybe a difference in material. At the time (in the late 1990s) we’d get a call every so often to say ‘Give me your sizes, I’ll bring some seconds’. We all duly drove across the country to try on what was available and if the clothes fitted and we liked them, we’d hand over £10 per item. The labels were crudely cut out but I bought a lovely dark grey Gieves and Hawkes suit, a cashmere blazer (believed to be Hugo Boss) and a Christian Dior blazer. I know it was Christian Dior as even though the label was chopped out, the branded lining gave it away. Fortunately, I’m still wearing these items and on current use I’m also now way below £1 per wear. So the moral of this story is, when it comes to brands, it’s the marketing that tells you it’s different but nine times out of ten, it’s really not. Invariably, it’s manufactured in the same factory as ‘lesser’ items.
It’s also worth buying on reselling platforms. My current favourite is Vinted. While you might not get top dollar as a seller, there are bargains if you’re a buyer. Since stopping work, I’ve started going to the gym again as I have more time, and I’d estimate about three quarters of people there wear branded clothing, with Nike and Under Armour the most common. It’s also fair to say that many at my gym are not top athletes – they’re regular people like me who just want to get a bit fitter. Those big brands are expensive and don’t offer most gym-goers any advantage over cheaper brands other than how they feel wearing them. There’s always the argument, particularly with shoes, that the more expensive trainers are better for your feet but aside from the fact that most high-end trainers never see a gym, I don’t buy the argument. I do some running and have a pair of trainers made by a lesser-known brand. I tried several on before buying, but these fitted well and cost less than £40.
I do understand the allure of branded clothing and how it makes you feel better, irrespective of whether it’s actually better quality – and I’m not totally immune to it myself. It’s just that I refuse to pay the full ticket price for it – whether it be Vinted or TK Maxx, I’m much happier paying less than 50% of the list price than others who value the brand more highly. Therefore the three ways to reduce your spending on clothing are to challenge your perception of brands and whether they really offer good value, get good use out of your clothes – and if you can’t resist some branded items, look at buying them when they’re discounted.
The textile industry is also a major contributor to global emissions, particularly fabrics made from synthetic materials, which is increasingly common. According to 2017 research from WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Program), increasing the active life of all clothing by nine months would reduce the annual carbon, water and waste footprints of clothing by 20–30% each and cut resource costs by £5 billion, so it’s not just your wallet that you’re helping.
Other stuff you probably don’t need
Technology is great. Some of the things you can do with it nowadays are truly amazing and the stuff of the science fiction of my childhood, when the most technically advanced gadget was James Bond’s magnetic watch. The trouble is, we’re building so much into products that we don’t actually need, which increases cost and complexity and ultimately shortens lifespan. As an engineer at heart, I watched a documentary about building the new Land Rover Defender. The original Land Rover was a brilliant, functional design and lasted for decades. The narrator was talking about the new model and waxing lyrical about the new model’s ability to drive through 90 cm of water, which, he assured us, was one of the key features that distinguished it from rivals. Not only this, but the wing mirrors have built in wading/depth sensors so you know how much of the 90 cm you’re driving through. I would put money on the fact that none of the Defenders bought this year will ever use this facility, yet it’s there and you’ve paid for it – approximately £85,000! I’m sorry if I’m starting to sound repetitive but it’s time we woke up to the rampant consumerism we’ve got ourselves caught up in, which is the fault of those marketing departments (or ‘the colouring-in departments’ as Lou likes to call them). There’s more insight into how they’re hoodwinking you in a later chapter.
A word about functionality. Not only should you focus on buying the specification you need (ie functionality), you also need to be clear on the technical specification (the actual numbers) and if it does actually save you money. There’s plenty of data relating to how much appliances cost to run. It’s a straight calculation from the wattage or power rating of an appliance: at current electricity prices a 3kW kettle costs 17p for 10 minutes, a 2.1kW fan oven 71p per hour and a 1kW microwave 6p for 10 minutes. Our friend the air fryer comes in at around 30p per hour but the advantage over a conventional oven is that it also shortens cooking time as well as using less power. Let’s say three hours for cooking a small roast chicken in the oven for £2.13 and in an air fryer one hour or 30p, giving you a saving of £1.83. If you’ve just fallen for the overspecified model at more than £200, you’re going to have to cook 109 roast chickens to break even! Yes, it can cook other things too but you could also cook a lasagne or stew in the oven alongside the chicken so there are arguments for both. The fact remains that, as soon as you’ve bought your new gadget, the money’s gone and will only slowly pay you back over a long period of time, assuming of course that you do actually use it as much as you tell yourself you will. It’s not complicated maths but it often gets overlooked when looking at the glossy adverts. As I commented previously, a more economical bet would be a slow cooker at £20, which costs 5p per hour to use, so 30p would go you a chilli con carne or stew to feed four and a portion or two for the freezer – it’s a no-brainer.
One positive thing to come out of the European Union is better labelling regarding energy efficiency on many appliances but you still have to do the maths to see if it’s worth it. By all means buy a more efficient model (when you need to replace it) but make sure you understand the cost differential between an A- and C-rated fridge in terms of running costs. If it saves you £10 per year for the A-rated model, would it be worth paying £200 more for it than the C-rated one?
As with all big purchases, two common sense rules apply. First, look at where to buy it from as the cost can vary dramatically, particularly if there are different brands to choose from. Second, if you can, wait. Put it on a wish list and wait until there’s a sale or until you’ve sold a couple of things on eBay to fund it. This second approach works for me, as I feel I’ve ‘earned’ whatever it is I’m buying (well, to be honest, I feel less guilty!) but invariably the urge to buy goes away and you realise you don’t really need it after all. Of course, if something breaks and you need to replace it immediately, you can’t wait – but don’t skip doing a bit of research first. The TV in my office failed a while ago and as much as I love Amazon, I looked at several options and picked one up from Argos that afternoon, partly as I didn’t want my TV being lobbed around parcel hubs. The price was comparable and, in this instance, convenience and speed were the winning factors.
Tattoos
Tattoos are another contentious issue but there’s a reason why I’m including them, not least because they can be expensive, generally permanent and you can’t sell them on like clothes! It would be easy for me to be flippant and say just don’t do it but I’m not going to. Similarly, I could be accused of ‘finger-wagging’ or taking a pop at someone with an armful of tattoos, Oakley sunglasses, iPhone and AirPods, wearing Nike trainers and supping on a Starbucks – or, put another way, someone with a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of visible discretionary spend.
However, my point is that, if it’s large, a tattoo is a big expense, especially if you have several. I have nothing against them and even have a small one myself (Lou and I both got inked on our honeymoon) but I’d suggest thinking about when and why you’re getting a tattoo, particularly an extravagant one. In my mind, it’s a totally discretionary expense and therefore if you’re prioritising your spend, it should be quite a long way down the list.
I’ve talked a lot about bigger purchases and we’re now tailing into smaller stuff but it’s important to cover off as they can build into a significant cost saving over time. Plus, it still follows the principle of changing your mindset about how you value purchases.
Over-the-counter medicines
