Another year older but no further in debt

Happy new year folks

It almost makes me smile to think about those who will be struggling with their new years resolution to either give up smoking or cut down on drinking. I'm almost a full year ahead on both.

Have I smoked? Yes, there have been slip ups but I'm almost through the first year. My weakness has been the occasional, irrational cigar. Even one makes me dizzy enough to fall over but, every so often I have caved. The good news is that I have also been able to return to the world of non smoking without pain or cravings. As for the drink....

Lack of hard cash has meant that drinking has been reduced to one or two bottles of wine over a weekend. It's been a forced abstinence rather than voluntary and I did love the brief respite of Christmas when I drunk almost like the old days but, by and large, drink has been an area of my life where I've been able to save a fair bit and felt a lot better for it. If money ever returns to normal I think I'll still go without during the week.

Without smoking or drinking to torment me you may be worried that the blog will go all iPhone on you. Not so. I've fallen completely out of love with that device. It basically looked great and had a myriad of functions that should have made it the greatest phone on earth. The problem was that it didn't perform any single function well and sometimes didn't perform at all. I reset it to its factory settings back in November. It works as a phone and does some things well but is nowhere near the phone that it claims to be and from my point of view never will be.

Nope, this years blog will be about saving or earning money. I intend to share my fight to maintain a quality of life despite this painful recession. I'm considering renaming the blog to 'Make dough and mend'. What do you think?

I've already managed to earn £80 by changing my electricity supplier whilst the new supplier gave me a bonus of £100 for switching and promises savings of around £200 over the course of the next year. It has to be said that I haven't seen this money yet but I live in hope. As well as this I have saved on car tyres managing to replace two tyres for less than the cost of having one fitted by the dealer.

This month has been no different and I have a couple of ideas to share to help the savings mount. Back about September/October our dishwasher kicked the bucket. God she was sorely missed. My wife is a great cook and I'm lucky to eat fantastic food but..She likes to use every dish and pot in the kitchen to do so. For months I have been fighting a mountain of dishes that just doesn't seem to ever go down. She's accused me of having OCD because I go into a deep depression when I can't keep on top of the never ending pile of washing. Anyway Yahoo have site that is simply fantastic for such an emergency. Freecycle. Google it and you will be amazed. Based on your postcode or zip code you will find a freecycle community in your neighbourhood. The idea is simple. Got stuff you don't want? Give it away to someone that does. The person taking said goods doesn't pay anything but has to arrange collection and removal at their own expense. In the past we have given away items as diverse as gym equipment and feather cushions. I know of one woman who wanted the stone chips removed from her drive so she could re-surface it. She offered the chips to anyone who could remove them on a set date. The drive was cleared free of charge.

Anyway, once you have donated stuff to freecycle you can then ask for stuff. So we asked for a dishwasher. A guy about three miles away had just had a new kitchen fitted and wanted the old appliances taken away. We took the dishwasher. If it hadn't worked we could just have binned it but, no, it was a working dishwasher. I am delighted. The dishwasher is installed and working and it cost precisely nothing. It doesn't get better than that.

So how do I calculate the saving on this one? Well a new dishwasher would be £200+ but it's not a new dishwasher so it wouldn't be realistic to count that as a saving. A second hand dishwasher I imagine would be about £50 so that's what I'm adding this in as.

Total Saving on Dishwasher £50
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The next saving exposed a flaw in a previous saving that I thought I was making. My bank account comes with free breakdown cover amongst other things. It's not unusual now for banks to offer these types of benefit as there seems precious little else to recommend them. I've always seen breakdown cover as being essential as my first car was a banger and needed recovered more than once and my wife has a classic old car that really shouldn't still be roadworthy but is. So, despite hating the bank, one of the reasons I stuck with them was that I perceived this breakdown cover to be worth about £60 per year. I drive a newish car however and don't expect to break down.

Expect the unexpected. Between Christmas and new year we suddenly lost power and found ourselves stranded in quite a dangerous position at the side of a very busy country road. We phoned our breakdown cover. It turns out that all we had cover for was if we could get fixed at the roadside. Had the car needed towed it would have been taken to the nearest garage and we would have had to look out for ourselves over 100 miles from home. Fortunately it was started at the roadside and we got home without incident. My first thought however was to arrange a recovery service. Should this ever happen again I want the security of knowing that I will get towed home if needs be or to my forward destination.

I did a load of price comparisons and found someone at less than half the price of the big guys. I checked all their literature and read some reviews on them as there is no point them being cheep if they can't do the job. It's all good. They basically have links with loads of local recovery firms so will organise recovery with someone local to your breakdown. They will recover me home as well. If you are in the UK try Rescuemycar.com

Despite this I wanted a little more. You see no-one has been able to figure out why I broke down in the first place. The in car computer shows no faults, the battery is working and the engine has run like a dream before and since. This is good but is also a form of torture because I can't guarantee that the problem won't reoccur. For this reason I also wanted home start. This means that they will also come to your home and try to get you going, or tow you to garage if there is a problem. There are two main motoring organisations in the UK and both want over £100 to offer, repair, recovery and home start. I now have the lot plus piece of mind for £32. What's more I purchased this option via quidco so will get about £6 cash back. All in the a cost of £26 against £100. Cool or what?

Vehicle recovery. Total saving £80 approx
Time saving N/a

So I'm already doing pretty well with the savings. Tyres, plumbing, dishwasher, recovery it all adds up. The other angle of this site however also has to include making money. There will be caravan fees this year at approx £1200 and I have no clue as to where these will come from. We're both hard workers and will meet some of this cost through our wage rises however these are likely to be a lot lower than in previous years. I can feel some sort of part time work coming on. Watch this space....

T