New Year’s resolution: spend less

Jan 12 2008 Western Mail

Feeling the weight of your overdraft after Christmas? Merryn Somerset Webb, author of Love Is Not Enough: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Money, takes a lighthearted look at how you can save the pennies this year

1Drink less coffee out. One latte a day will add up to nearly £500 over a year.

2Breastfeed your babies.

3Never order cocktails. Stick to wine or beer in bars. Better still, never buy your own drinks!

4Keep your weight constant: if you rarely change size you can buy quality pieces of clothing and wear them for years.

5Wash more, dry-clean less: whatever it says on the label, woollens don’t really need dry-cleaning. Even pashminas come out of the woollen cycle just fine as long as you iron them when a little damp. Wash cashmere on a gentle cycle and lay it flat between two towels to dry.

6Pack lunches. We all know it’s the right thing to do so why do so few of us do it? Spending £4 on lunch out every day adds up o £1,044 a year.

7Ignore your hairdresser’s insistence you get your hair cut every six to eight weeks. Do it every 10 instead.

8Do your own nails: it really isn’t complicated.

9Buy sports equipment – skis, golf clubs and the like – on eBay. And if you have them and have never used them, sell them on eBay and use the proceeds to pay down your credit card debt.

10Stop going to the gym and walk home from work instead. If you aren’t a professional body builder you don’t need to go to a gym. Recent research also shows that doing light exercise for five to six minutes five times a day will do you just as much good as a big gym session.

11Do your own cleaning (do it properly and you really, really don’t need to go to a gym).

12Never buy anything in a sale that you didn’t long for before the sale.

13Go public: if you live in a city you don’t really need taxis. Make them a treat.

14If you are flying on a budget airline, book as far in advance as possible.

15Cook from scratch. It’s cheaper and nicer than having take-aways or ready meals and comes with an added bonus: once you aren’t eating all those disgusting additives and sugars you’ll lose weight too.

16Never spend money on whale music CDs or aromatherapy scented candles. They won’t make your life any better.

17Dump your home phone – aren’t you always on your mobile anyway?

18Check your statements every month. Banks make endless mistakes and odds are, over the course of a year, you’ll catch a few that are working against you. Did all your deposits make it to your bank account? Are all your direct debits as they should be? Have you been charged fees you can challenge?

19Get all your condoms free from family planning clinics.

20If you must have designer clothes, call the designer and ask for invitations to their sample sales. All designers have them and the discounts are huge.

21If you can’t go to sample sales, shop in TK Maxx. Lots of designers. Low prices.

22Stop drinking bottled water. Britons spend approximately £915m a year on bottled water – around £25 each. Yet, according to Oxfam, it only costs an average of £15 to provide clean water for life to one of the one billion people in the world who go without.

23If you won’t drink tap water, don’t buy bottled water. Distil your own at home and take it to work. A three litre filter jug costs about £15 so given that a 1.5 litre bottle of water costs 80p you’ll only have to use it 19 time to get value.

24Never leave a hotel without a bar of soap.

25Stop smoking: if you smoke 20 a day, your habit is costing you around £1,700 a year – that’s not far off 10% of the average person’s income.

26Overpay on your mortgage as much as possible – it could save you thousands in interest.

27Watch out for Christmas: studies have shown that as many as half of all gifts given are never used – they go straight into the bin or off to the charity shop, so make sure that you aren’t throwing your money away as you buy: ask people what they want before you shop. Also make budgets and stick to them; you might think they will, but your children will honestly not suffer long-term psychological damage if they don’t get the exact trainers they want.

28Buy next year’s Christmas presents in the January sales.

29Never do your grocery shopping when you are hungry. We throw away hundreds of pounds of food each every year. The less hungry you are when you shop the less you will buy and the less you will throw away.

30Always buy own brands when you are supermarket shopping. They are very often made by the same manufacturer as the higher priced goods, they are just labelled differently.

31Never buy anything that comes with a free gift in order to get the free gift. I’m talking about cosmetics. Beauty brands up the ante on free gifts every year. It used to be you got a nasty nylon make-up bag. Now it’s specially designed make-up bags by the likes of Mulberry, properly nice handbags and beautifully designed umbrellas. But you don’t need them and you very probably don’t need the overpriced cosmetics you have to buy to get them either.

32Switch to low energy lightbulbs. This will cut your electricity costs by about £7 a year for each bulb that is on for more than three hours a day.

33Buy your bike from www.bumblebeeauctions.co.uk. The site auctions property that the police have either seized from burglars and the like or had handed in and not been able to find the owners for.

34Turn your heating down by a few degrees. One degree down will save 10% off your heating bill, says the Energy Saving Trust.

35Buy your champagne in Netto and your clothes in Primark. It isn’t embarrassing. It’s clever.

36Use www.petrolprices.com to find the cheapest petrol in your area. Enter your postcode and how far you are prepared to travel and it’ll tell you where to go.

37Don’t buy detox products. Every January we are nagged by retailers to “detox” our bodies with weird mixtures of seaweed, wheat grass and nettles. But, according to scientists, there is no need. In fact the best way to sort yourself out after a period of indulgence is simply to have a good night’s sleep and drink plenty of water (and tap water at that).

38Don’t buy diet books or go on celebrity diets. Just eat less (reduce portion size, never eat anything refined sugar in it, give up snacking) and exercise more. Giving up 500 calories a day will mean you lose around a pound a week. Not bad. If you are tempted by a diet book visit Amazon and find it there. Then look underneath at the “customers who bought this book also bought” section. You’ll find that they bought other diet books. If any of them actually worked why would they have done that? Same goes for fitness videos.

39Declutter. Once you know what you have you won’t find yourself buying it again. Keep your jewellery, shoes and the like on display so you use what you have.

40Don’t buy “snack packs” of fruit or veg. An Evening Standard survey in 2006 showed that if you bought an 80g bag of carrot batons from Sainsbury’s it would have cost you 10 times the price of buying carrots loose. Buying ready-to-eat pineapple from Waitrose would have cost you 750% more than buying a pineapple and cutting it up yourself.

41Give up chocolate. I don’t really advocate this one but it’s worth noting that four bars a week at 50p a bar adds up to £104 a year.

42Use coupons. You might think you will look silly and that you’ll be embarrassed as you hold up the queue but you’ll be saving money as you do it.

43Don’t have therapy unless you are seriously unwell – your doctor can tell you the difference.

44Keep a budget book for a few weeks. It seems boring (and it is) but it will show you how your money disappears. Once you’ve written down how much you spent on pointless muck you may stop doing it.

45Move the junk out of your garage and put the car in it. According to Saga Motor Insurance we miss out on £100m worth of discounts a year by leaving out cars in more vulnerable positions on the road.

46Skip the luxury face products and go old-fashioned: Pears’ Soap, Vaseline, Nivea and so on. If you insist on having expensive products, don’t buy and then try. Go to the shop and get a free sample first. If you really love it then buy it.

Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money by Merryn Somerset Webb is published by HarperPerennial. The paperback version is out on Monday and is available priced £8.99 from all good bookshops