How to spend £2000 a month

Hi,


So it's been all about saving money on this blog so far, why don't we take a step back and have a look through what really happens in life.

So let's have a look at Average Joe, he's a pretty cool guy. 10 years out of university and he's got himself a great job that pays the average wage for the UK (currently £447 per week), this gives him a lot of freedom. It's not like the old days of minimum wage jobs that let you barely scrape by, oh no. He's got money to burn!

In fact it's burning a hoe in his pocket right now. Let's have a look what he's spending it on over his average month.

That £447 a week turns into:

£1937 monthly gross - sounds pretty impressive, over a year that's £23,244. Not bad when you think we have only just got ourselves out of this double dip recession.

To make things easier let's look at a typical month.

So let's knock the tax off - £385.03 (I'm counting National insurance as a tax - because it is), this is 19.9% of his total, gone before it hit's his bank. Oh well, we do get loads of free stuff like the NHS to make up for this and schools and stuff too!

Woops, forgot about his student loans (he's 10 years out of University remember), which he technically had to pay for, although not as high as his cousins over the atlantic it's nonetheless a cost. It's not even taken out of gross earnings, oh well - there goes £51 - 2.6% of the gross.


So what kind of job has he got? Oh he definitely works in some kind of marketing/sales/HR/finance role probably in an average growth sector, that is approximately 10.2 miles for this man (6.7 miles if he was a she).

How does he get there? Well 10 miles is a bit of a pain you see, too far to walk/cycle safely (he assumes) and getting the bus is just lame right? So car it is. He obviously bought it with a loan, what 28 year old has £14,000 in spare change? So that's costing him £270.66 (I know it's not technically a loan calculator, but it works for my illustrative purposes), he also needs road tax and some insurance for this vehicle, £175 tax and £814 insurance (obviously he lives in the mid(dle)lands).

The last two are yearly figures so let's divide by twelve to be all good about it - £82.42 (rounded) per month for both.

Then some fuel for those 10.2 miles x2 per day - £3.47 (35MPG) so he goes to work mon-fri for 4 weeks a month (20 days), that's £60.94.

Then while he's at work he gets hungry so he has a nice lunch time sandwich, drink and crisps coming to a deal price of only £3.50 - so that's £70 a month, one of the lunches he goes with a few mates to his local nando's (or other chicken restaurant), because it's a Friday and  that's what everyone else is doing - this adds (probably more than this!) £6.50 to his normal £3.50 so a nice round tenner. So lunch total comes to £76.50 per month.

Clothing - he's gotta look sharp at the office to woo customers/clients/the boss/that girl in the other department so he get's some nice suits from a well known high street retailer 2 suits will cost £128 each so over a year, because he'll have worn them out by next year he will spend £256 and say £15 a week dry cleaning (that's probably really cheap haven't been to a dry cleaners in years!), so for a month he's spending £81.33 all in.

Then after work drinks each Friday, maybe a round each with two other mates at £3 a pint, that's £9 a week and a taxi home afterwards another £10. Over the month this comes to £76.

Then it's Saturday, lad's night out. This means Xbox / Playstation at home with a few drinks - Xbox £300 + xbox live membership £32, then a few cheap beers for say 5 friends, on a rotating monthly cycle so only 15 beers a month, that's about £10 for a large pack. Then the night out, taxi in and out of town, 4 bars with a drink in each, and two drinks in the club with club entry of £5 (cheap one I know!), average drinks of £3.50 each so total of £21 on drinks. Taxi come to £20.

Then mutiply this by 4 so £21+ £20 +£5 + £10 = £56 x 4 = £224 per month.

Then on Sunday he treats himself to a greasy spoon/ Mcdonalds breakfast at £4 = £16 a month.

All this socialising has got him somewhere at least - in the bad books with his Girlfriend! For spending too much time with his lad mates, so he promises to take her out for a date night during the week, which is discussed further over a Sunday lunch at their local carvery restaurant £8 a head (on a Sunday), not including large Soft drinks (still nursing the hangover a little) at £2.50 each, total £21 x 4 weeks = £84.

Oh no the weekends over, back to the grindstone Monday morning, Joe will definitely need a coffee to get htis week started and he deserves it right, he's getting into the office early after all. £3 per coffee - twice a week as a treat = £24 a month.

The Tuesday night blues come along once more, maybe a takeaway will help alleviate the drudgery, £15 for a local Chinese = £60 per month.

He'll also need normal food shopping for the rest of the week - say £50 for the week including some hair products, shower gels etc. that's £200 a month.

Let's give a quick check as to where we are

Income: 1937

Taxes: (£436)
Car (£352)
Fuel (£61)
Work Clothes (£81)

Entertainment:
After work drinks (£76)
Saturday night (£224)

Dining/Food:
Sunday Breakfast (£16)
Sunday Lunch (£84)
Coffee (£24)
Takeaway (£60)
Supermarket Shop (£200)
Work Lunch (£76)


Now you think I've forgotten about housing haven't you, but look at the list of abundance above, it's terrifying. If this is what average Joe's life is like he has something like £245 a month left after all this. With heating and electricity prices at an average of £108 a month, water at £20, how the hell is he going to afford to even rent a shack? He would have £117 a month available for housing.

Yes there are many asssumptions in this but I know plenty of people this age who are doing exactly this and renting a house and living in London(!), or nearby or in any of the other major cities in Britain with their much higher than average cost of living.

No wonder the young can't afford to get on the property ladder!

Data:  Google docs

I've split this down to wants/ needs and it breaks down like this: 47% wants / 53% needs.

Again there are a few assumptions in here, so it's not 100% accurate - the data is on the google docs above if you want to have a look.

If Average Joe simply cut out his spending on the weekend he would save £324 a month, cutting out work related expenses (clothes, drinks and lunch) a further £234 a month.

These costs all seem to be terribly trivial and easily replaceable, yet time after time I see people overspending in these areas every month and then being surprised that they have no money left at the end of the month.

It's such a waste and can be quite dangerous, especially if an emergency comes along and you don't have the cash to cover it.

This road can take you into the languishing feeling of debt spirals eventually ending up with some kind of payday loan, where more and more of your paycheck each month goes to the interest rather than getting you anywhere near clearing your debt.

Hopefully me pointing this out is helpful, if not to you to someone close to you. Feel free to use the data provided or input your own to try and figure out where you may be overspending.

Take it easy.

Dom

Cider insider 2: the cider strikes back

So after my somewhat brief description of home cider making without an apple press today we'll be finishing off.

You'll need some bottles handy and the bungs or a straw (more on this in a minute).

So if you leave your pulp in the muslin hanging over a bucket overnight the weight of the pulp will squeeze most of the juice out a bit like cheese making.

Give the muslin another squeeze then discard the pulp (any ideas for uses other than recycling/ animal food?).

You should then have a bucket of icky apple juice probably with a lot of bits still in it and very cloudy.

Taste it. It should taste like the most Appley thing ever. (Better than a 5s anyway!).

So you're going to want to pass it through another sheet of muslin, just to get rid of most of the bits.

Then decant into some bottles.  

At this point you can dilute it if you feel its a little strong. You can also add shop bought apple juice if you think you haven't made enough.

Then grab a hydrometer. This piece of kit tells you the gravity of the situation (the Apple juice). You dunk it in a sample of the juice and record the reading somewhere.  This is your original gravity (og) and we'll use it later to calculate the alcohol content.

I then added a crushed campden tablet (read the instructions for quantity). This kills off any bad bacteria. Shake it!

You can then add your yeast. I'm using a champagne yeast, although cider yeasts are readily available.

Then add a bung and an airlock* and you're ready to go.  I couldn't find one of my airlocks so I fashioned one by making a hole in the bottle cap, feeding a straw through then connecting it to a pipe which leads to a cup of water.

*The airlock is there to let carbon dioxide out of the container which will be produced by the yeast, whilst not letting anything into the bottle like flys, bugs etc. If you don't put an airlock on and screw the lid on the bottle will expand with the trapped gas and explode! If you just leave the cap off crap would fall in and spoil it.

So then just leave to ferment.  It'll probably take a week or two,  I'll do another hydrometer test in a week or so, if it's the strength I want 4%+abv then I'll decant to smaller bottles to try and remove most of the sediment and then chill and drink!

If you're thinking of trying this at home here are a couple of resources and links to where I bought stuff,  I'm not affiliated with these companies/people I just used the stuff and liked it.

The Brewmart - got my starter kit from here, great site but the basket is a bit naff

Beer-kits.co.uk - got my champagne yeast from here worked quite well

Basic cider recipe (you need a cider press) 

Have fun!

Dom

Update:

The cider is great, if a bit on the sharp side (should that be cide?), so I have diluted it down with about 1:4 ratio of apple juice to the cider. I did this much after a few tasting tests also that was how much room I had left at the top of the bottles I used.

Good luck if your going to try it and let me know how you get on!

Making do with two

I've heard three is the magic number, however I've found two to be more than ample.

I'll explain what I mean. I've been getting interested in brewing recently.

I haven't quite taken the plunge into buying a barrel and some yeast yet. But for my birthday my significant other bought me a book on the subject. I had a great time reading through it and feel much more educated and ready to take the plunge.

There were various helpful hints in the book, I now know what a mash is and that getting bladdered isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The best tip I got from the book was contained within a sloe gin recipe, as a lot of good things are, as you can imagine it went through the process of making the sloe gin (basically adding the sloes to a jar, covering them in some gin and leaving it to steep for a year), it was the last part that caught my eye. You have to leave it for a year!

This is where it added a handy tip, if you can't wait that long for your sloe gin, why not make two, then you can leave one to steep for the year and drink one pretty quickly to alleviate the pain of waiting.

I know this seems dumb, but I'd never even thought of doing this and then it hit me, some kind of internal revelation rushed through me, a resonation of sorts. This tip could be applied throughout life.

Looking to build up a handy store cupboard / freezer stock? Cook up double the amount for dinner one night, it's no more hassle than usual, then freeze/store half of the finished product.

Looking to create a savings pot, every time you go shopping for something, put the same amount into a savings pot (maybe it falls down a little here, as it's probably a little too aggressive, perhaps putting the change you get from the purchase into savings is more likely).

Looking to get ahead at work, create your monthly reports in one batch, then simply fill in the relevant data when you get to that period, rather than completely recreating the report each time.

So I'm going to look to put this into practice in other ways.

Any others you can think of just whack them in the comments, I'll admit this is not an exhaustive list!

if you'd like to pick up the book I got this from, it's here on amazon - but I think you can get it cheaper in your local  "The Works" bookshop.

Enjoy!

Pic by Malcom Murdoch