Thinking about money

From observations on people who seem to make the most of their money and those who don't and from personal experience there seems to be two ways to spend your time thinking about your money.

The first is to be thinking about it all the time, worrying you don't have enough, constantly moving it hither to thither trying to maintain a balance in the right account at the right time for bills to come out. Sound a pain? It is. I've been here, it's made worse by not knowing where you are, not knowing what your outgoings are, even worse if you don't know what your incomings are!

The other is the holistic approach, simplified accounts that you can leave to do there own work, and hopefully work for you. You don't have to think about it, so you can spend more time making money!

How do you get from one to the other. Well let's look into what makes the second option work.

Do your research:

This comes in several things - you need to know what's coming in and when! You need to know what's going out and when too!  This is called cashflow. Positive cashflow and everything's gravy, negative and you'll be stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Theres various ways to get to this, sift through your old bank statements, keep a spending diary (including Direct debits!), have a wall chart with different colours, try them all and whichever works for you carry on, this is one of the key steps to getting anywhere with money. A spreadsheet like this can help.


Research the accounts you can have, high interest (I don't think so!), savings, ISA, etc. I say can have for two reasons, you want to simplify as much as possible. try and have at most 3 current accounts, then savings, then ISAs (the savings and ISA accounts can be unlimited as you will need to switch to get rates, however closing an ISA is a bit more complicated due to losing out on tax free money so try not to do that). Then if your really down at the moment your credit score may be affected, which may limit which accounts you can open anyway.

So you have your money ins and outs plan, you have the right accounts for you. So you now know that everything's going to be cool right? Wrong.

There's one last things you need,

To stick to the plan, easier said than done - any cash plan is just that a plan, it can only go smoothly if you don't have unexpected expenses - I don't mean things outside of your control you should try and build an emergency fund to smooth those ripples - I mean don't go out on payday and spend all your money, I know it seems like the easiest thing to not do. But it isn't you need to be the responsible adult that you are and start letting those pennies sit idly by. Bored? Go to the library - free, do not go to the pub - if it's not in your plan.

4 kids? Why do that to yourself?

First of all I'd like to say that I'm not being hard on parents,  im a parent myself and I definitely believe it to be a growing  experience. The love I feel from that one child is enormous and since he came along my life has changed (for the better) in lots of ways.

I'm just not sure multiple children is a good idea. 

How have I come to this conclusion? A weekend with my nieces, plural, three of them.  They always say three is the magic number but the this seems to be more a kin to the beginning of the scottish play - "when will we threw meet again, in spring, in summer or in rain" or at dom's house!

So the plab was to take them to our local adventure farm, you probably have something similar nearvy you, you feed the animals, collext eggs and generally run around in the sunshine tiring out little legs to ensure they go to bed on time or maybe a little earlier, so one can enjoy a beverage perhaps before the sun goes down.

The tiring out of little legs (and big legs) worked perfectly. Unfortunately then the logistics let us down. We're entirly used to the nightly routine of food, bath then bed. But after a tiring day out things were a little more strained. It hadn't occurred to us that three showers aitnd a bath would be required. This turned the normal 20 min turn around into a 80 min slog to the finish line.

But gey there we did and now all is quiet on the ranch.

So beer has been drunk in triumph and thoughts are for tomorrow.

Early starts no doubt that once again will be filled with rushing.

If anyone can tell me how you could do this on a day to day basis I would be very grateful.  Thankfully it's almost done and then my sister owes me a night off!!

Comfort

I was reading a post on a friends site about the third stage of financial freedom. It struck quite a few chords.

I've got to the point where I'm comfortable, when an unexpected expense comes along it's now no big deal.

This feels like a million miles away from where I was a few years ago.

I think one of the biggest things that's helped me along the way has been getting a month ahead.

By that I mean, I planned out what expenses I have throughout the month and saved hard til I've got that amount in my bank. At this point I'm then all paid up for the follwoing month. As I'm then not required to contribute anything more for that months expenses, I can save for the next month.

This strategy then allowed me to start saving money. How I did this was by saving on the monthly expenses. This wasn't by reducing my usage of things necessarily (although this helped!) but by making savings in other ways. When you buy your home /car insurances for instance the helpful insurance companies often try to help you spread the cost by letting you pay by monthly direct debit. Some let you spread the cost for free, most charge you an APR (Annual Percentage Rate) for effectively loaning you the money over the year.

Once you have the cash to pay in a lump sum up front you save the extra expense of this APR. I always think of it as why go to all the lengths of searching out the best deal on your insurances (your using comparison sites right?), why would you then want to pay more just so you can spread the cost over the year, especially as the rates they charge are probably going to wipe out the savings you'll make.

With this strategy you can then plan further into the future. I'm currently working on getting a years worth of expenses saved up. A lot of people would call this an emergency fund. I think of it more of a cash float. This money is effectively already spent and needs constant replenishment.
It's hard to get to this stage, I've given up a lot of my old consumerist ways (not really a bad thing) and now I have comfort.

Comfort because if the roof comes in tomorrow it's not the end of the world and as a wise man said the sky will always fall tomorrow.


Image by Darnyi Zsóka

The Easy Life

If you've read my previous post, I've been feeling pretty tired. My old friend coffee has me in an embrace usually felt only by smokers and crack addicts. But I'm a positive person I will win out in the end no matter what.

So last weekend I thought I would kick the caffeine addiction, easily done I thought, don't have coffee. By 2pm Saturday I was struck with one of the worst headaches of my life, caffeine withdrawal is a bitch. But a bitch that was my bitch after I drank some water and had a paracetamol.

Woohoo I thought, that was easy. But was it too easy? Yes it was. After waking up three times in one night, with a very grumpy baby who's teeth will not stop popping through his gums, I felt tired again. In the morning I still managed to stay away from the caffeine, but as soon as I returned to work I was brought back in to the fold of the daily coffee round cycle. Oh well I'll just have one I thought. It DOESN'T WORK LIKE THAT, so 4-5 coffees a day later, I'm having trouble sleeping again. Ho hum.

So I'm going to tackle it from another direction. 

Exhausted from doing so much? Do less stuff!

So I thought: What do I do on a daily basis that could be simplified or the time taken to do that thing shortened or where in my life can I remove stress.

Then this got me thinking what are the main causes of stress in my life.

I don't like being late, so when I'm running late I get stressed.
If I'm being rushed to do something for a deadline I get stressed due to not wanting to break the deadline (be late for something, see above).
When my son is hungry he get's hangry, he normally gets hangry when we are running late, as he's in a pretty strict routine and is used to getting fed at  certain times of day.

There's a pretty consistent theme in all of this. So how do i combat it. 

So I can give myself more time to get to places - for work this would mean waking up earlier, meaning reduced sleep, so I think this would be against the whole point.

Remove or stretch deadlines. This is not always possible, ever tried asking your CEO for an extension of a deadline, you won't do it twice!

So hungry son, this maybe an easy win, carrying snacks should tide him over when I'm really stuck trying to get somewhere. He's always at his worst when the food is being cooked though. To combat this I really need to shorten the time it takes to cook his evening meals.


A couple of solutions spring to mind when looking to shorten cooking times.

Batch cooking, cook 5, 10, 20 meals at once and freeze the extra for another day. These excess portions can then be reheated quickly, usually in the microwave or hob. Some good recipes for this are chilli, spag bol, risotto. Off the top of my head these all seem to be pasta or rice based dishes.

I love batch cooking however, overall you aren't really saving any time as all the time you save you have to put in at the beginning to make the batch.

So maybe outsourcing the cooking would be an idea, this would rid me of the time I'm taking to cook in the first place. 

You can outsource cooking in a few ways.

Get a chef! Umm... I'm not made of money!

Takeaway meals. With pizzas, Chinese food, Indian food etc all coming in at around £20-30 per meal this would add up very quickly to be a proper budget buster. Also these kinds of foods are usually quite fatty and not really suitable for children.

Ready meals. This would be quick, reasonably cheap, they seem to be around £2-3 per meal, so say £4-7 per night for an evening meal (family of 2.5 people). If this was eaten constantly that puts it at around £120 - 210 a month. The downsides of these are that often they aren't very tasty, again are unhealthy and are possibly too small a portion for someone with my appetite.

So I'm thinking of trialling this last option for tastiness sake. On maybe two days a week, my two busiest days (10-11 hour day).

This will hopefully get me focusing on my food budget a little more which seems to have GONE crazy over the last few months. Although I think it's probably increased due to baby sundries bought at the supermarket (I'm looking at you nappies / baby wipes) as I put all my supermarket spend under the food category (for ease) rather than splitting it into my baby specific category.


If you have any other ideas to help me move into the easy life please feel free to comment, you can also tweet me at @moneybeta! 

See ya!

Dom

Utter Tiredness

Tired Frankie

As the title shows I have been suffering recently. 


What with our little man's antics, various friends weddings, new work deadlines and life as usual I have neglected the old blogging.

Anyway onwards and upwards. 

As I say I've been feeling pretty wiped out recently. Usually it's just a case of going to bed a little earlier to get over this, but with all of the above this just hasn't happened and when it has I don't feel any the better for it.

So I'm looking for ideas to combat tiredness. Obviously a break from my usual duties would be nice but with no holiday time on the horizon until September it looks unlikely this will happen (along with the fact that when I am on holiday my fatherly duties don't stop!).

I've previously used a phone app to check on my sleeping patterns and done some (brief) research into circadian rhythms. I have to say I have completely forgotten what my results were with this so I think I will look into this first.

The long weekend is looming and along with some gardening I really need to get done (please don't rain!) I will try and put some time aside for a little relaxation. Now in the past relaxation has always been a code word for Netflix and wine, but I'd like to change my tactic on this and move towards a healthier type of relaxation. I'm thinking something along the lines of a bit of exercise and some meditation.

I've not tried meditating for a long time and then I'm not sure if I quite got it. I'm willing to give it a shot again though.

So off for little ones bath time now. 

How do you relax? Do you wind down with a glass of something nice? Or do you take a healthier approach?