Thrift is a thoroughly old-fashioned word: one of those quaint virtues, like
chastity, sobriety and prudence, that we quite like to think of other people
practising – grand-parents, aunties, Chancellors of the Exchequer – but
which exude too strong a whiff of social mothballs for them to feel quite
right for us. Not now, maybe later, when we’ve got some living done, sucked
some of the sweetness from life. Then there might come a time when
self-denial feels natural. But not yet. Not just yet.
Besides, consider the myriad temptations to extravagance: the vastly extended
lifespan that means youth (with its confetti spending habits) stretches on
towards infinity. Plus cheap credit. Plus pensions are in such a muddle that
we’re all going to be ruined anyway, so might as well stock up on lovely
things now. Plus endless sales on the high street so really we’re saving if
we just spend now. Plus there is something about thrift that clashes quite
painfully with those easier-to-love, more open-hearted virtues of
generosity, hospitality, expansiveness, spontaneity.
Aesop’s nasty little fable of the Ants and the Grasshopper illustrates the
virtues of thrift and industry by contrasting the habits of some hardworking
ants with those of a feckless grasshopper which totters up to them in
midwinter and begs for a few grains of corn to keep itself from starving.
“May we ask,” say the ants, smug amid their well-stocked larder, “what you
were doing with yourself all summer? Why didn’t you collect a store of food
for the winter?” “I was singing,” pleads the grasshopper. “If you spent the
summer singing,” snap the ants, “you can spend the winter dancing.” And they
chuckled and went on with their work.
Some children, on first encountering this rather horrible little narrative of
good housekeeping, presumably think: “That’s me! I’m going to be an ant when
I grow up!” Those are the ones with a rational relationship with money, who
later go on to purchase, for cash, a manor house in the Cotswolds with their
City bonuses. The rest of us become martyrs to an emotional relationship
with our income that involves spending as reward, as celebration, as
proto-creativity (this bunch of nasty old £20 notes for that ravishing
lithograph expressive of my personality, world-view and exquisite good
taste), as a means of establishing identity (only when I own this Porsche,
this Chloé bag, these Kate Moss for Topshop hotpants, can I be fully myself)
and as a stratagem for warding off sadness (shopping to fill up the hole in
your heart, my spendthrift friends and I used to call it), combine ant and
grasshopper qualities in varying degrees.
Clever grasshoppers adulterate their frivolity with just as much formic
good sense as will keep income and outgoings in a reasonable state of
equilibrium. Even so, there tends to come a point when the chill of fiscal
reality suddenly makes one shiver. Myself, I combine the worst qualities of
grasshopper and ant. I am spendthrift (on clothes when young, these days on
pictures and assorted bric-a-brac) and prone to acts of ludicrous
extravagance when I chance upon something I imagine was “meant” for me.
(Earlier this year it took a powerful effort of will to stop myself spending
£800 in a Bond Street gallery on a very small picture of an honesty plant.
Only the thought of an imminent tax bill stopped me, and even now there is a
small, mad part of my psyche that despises the sensible rest of me for not
having the nerve to defy the Revenue and go for the picture.) At the same
time, I suffer from a high degree of antish anxiety about money and lie
awake worrying about the rackety state of our present finances, the penury
that awaits me in old age and the fact that my son will probably be living
with me for the next 20 years, since I can’t afford to help him to buy a
place of his own.
About 18 months ago something happened to jolt me out of my state of constant
but unfocused financial angst. Some work had to be done to the house. I
employed a respectable family firm of local builders who had worked for me
before. But things had gone wrong since I first employed them.
Respectable was no longer the word. What little work they completed was
terrible, and they made off with a fat chunk of my hard-earned cash,
ignoring with complete sangfroid a judgment against them in the Small Claims
court.
In the bleak aftermath of realising that the money had gone, I sat down to
work out how long it had taken me to earn, and how long again it would take
me to make up the loss. And in the course of my calculations I made a
disagreeable discovery. The amount I was earning had remained roughly stable
over the past few years, and I was spending it on the same sorts of things –
boring old subsistence, with fairly frequent flourishes in the form of
pictures, days out and a nice annual holiday. My income had always been
quite enough to cover all that and still put away a little emergency savings
fund. But while I hadn’t been paying attention, things had changed. Our
living expenses had increased so sharply that instead of a bit left over at
the end of every month, there was now a significant shortfall. By slow
degrees I had built up a nasty little debt: a bit on the overdraft, a bit on
the credit cards, a bit on the loan I’d taken out to pay the builders.
It was a terrifying discovery, because I couldn’t immediately see what to do
about it. Already our work/life balance was tipped in favour of work. With a
son approaching GCSEs, this wasn’t an especially good time to tell him to
shift for himself while I got on with remedying the Fortunes of the House of
Shilling. If I couldn’t earn more, we’d have to spend less. And so, like
some wicked old roué discovering the charm of abstinence after a lifetime of
dissipation, I began to explore the joy of thrift.
The first thing was to make a complete list of all our outgoings. I had a
vague idea of these, which I mentally subtracted from my incomings each
month to give me a rough idea of what was left as spending money, and I kept
an eye on my account balance, but I’d never set down a proper budget on
paper before. It took less than an hour to draw up two columns of money
going in and money going out, and it was an extremely revealing document,
for it showed that in theory, I ought to be breaking comfortably even each
month, with a tiny surplus. We weren’t in debt because I wasn’t earning
enough. We were in debt because money was leaking from my purse – not in mad
splurges on preposterous luxuries, but in almost imperceptible drips: £10 on
flowers, £25 on books (which don’t count as extravagance because books are A
Good Thing), £50 on an amazing sales bargain, another £20 on designer
cast-offs from Oxfam (also not extravagance, because it counts as charitable
giving), £50 or so on weekend lunches at Pizza Express or the pub . . . The
sums involved were small individually, huge when totted up. And it wasn’t
just money I was wasting, but food and energy as well. Every week I had to
clear the fridge of leftovers before I could find space for the new week’s
shopping, and a keenness for warmth on the one hand and fresh air on the
other meant that I quite often had the windows open and the heating on.
Clearly I had to stop spending: but something else had to change as well.
My attitude to money, I realised, was infantile. I was treating whatever was
left after the monthly bills were paid as pocket money, to be spent at once
on the grown-up equivalents of comics and sweeties. It was this childish
extravagance, just as much as the inflation or the rogue builders, that had
got me into debt.
What I spend my money on
Once the utilities bills are paid, my largest weekly outlay is on food.
Cooking is one of the pleasures of my life. I don’t do ready meals (because I
know I can make the same thing as quickly, better, and more cheaply) and I
don’t own a freezer (not for ideological reasons, just because there isn’t
room for one in my very small kitchen). So I spend what might be regarded as
quite extravagant amounts on fresh food. Even so, I’ve been able to make a
significant saving in my weekly budget, and reduce waste to almost nothing
by buying every couple of days, rather than weekly. Buying for a very small
family can be expensive if you treat every meal as a separate entity. But
getting clever with leftovers can have a dramatic effect on cost. Elizabeth
David is bracing on this subject: “Without allowing economy to get out of
hand to the point of hoarding things which should have been consigned to the
dustbin,” she writes, in French Provincial Cooking, “(leftover
dishes) should be cheap, quick and easy to cook and . . . as attractive as
if all the ingredients had been chosen especially for that dish.” There
follows a long list of what to do with your little bits of fish, mussels,
beef stew, chicken carcases and trimmings, roast meat and whathaveyou: an
appetising parade of soups, pilaffs and mousses, to which Claudia Roden’s
book of Middle Eastern Cooking adds a useful repertoire of meatballs,
tagines and Middle Eastern omelettes. Modern cooks are sadly reticent on the
rich subject of leftovers: you’d never guess, to read them, that the natural
end product of a roast chicken is chicken stock, chicken, leek and mushroom
risotto, chicken tagine with salted lemons, chicken and corn chowder,
Vietnamese chicken and prawn hotpot with glass noodles, lemon, egg and
chicken soup (and so on). But it is, and the satisfaction of wringing two
nourishing and elegant family meals out of a £6 free-range chicken or an £8
shoulder of lamb is not to be underestimated.
How to budget
Having worked out a budget, the first thing I did was to reacquaint myself
with the reality of cash. It felt a curiously archaic thing to do. Cards are
easy, cards are safe(ish). Only this week, a new card was announced, the
purpose of which will be to pay for goods less than £10, thus moving us ever
closer to a cashless society. The trouble is, that cards don’t really feel
like spending. Hand it over, tap in the PIN, here come the goods and somehow
I have no sensation of having spent any actual money at all. Having worked
out that our weekly living expenses come to about £200, I have started
taking that amount of money out of the cash machine on Friday afternoons,
just before doing the supermarket shop and filling up the car with petrol.
Having taken to heart the US Compact initiative to counter the negative
effects of consumer culture , I buy basics at the supermarket but shop
locally for fresh food and wine. I’m lucky enough to have a good butcher,
greengrocer (below), fishmonger, wine merchant and Italian delicatessen
within walking distance. I found I was wasting lots of food by shopping
weekly, so now shop more frequently and plan menus around leftovers.
In a good week, I spend £50 at Sainsbury’s on basics, £35 on filling up the
car, which I do once a week, another £30 on fresh food and wine, which
leaves £85 for day-to-day living – newspapers, window cleaner, piano tuner,
MOT – all those sneaky little expenses that conspire to undermine the
virtuous budget. The great trick is not to panic if it all goes wrong. One
grim week, the hoover and the printer both broke, and the cat simultaneously
developed a horribly expensive abcess. By Tuesday afternoon I was already
£85 over budget and the temptation to abandon control of my spending was
immense. I tried instead to spread the deficit over the few weeks, taking
out £175 instead of £200. It didn’t work perfectly, but it wasn’t a complete
return to the old chaos, either. The discipline of a steadily diminishing
wad of cash, admittedly a bit Phil Mitchell, works well for me.
Monthly outgoings
Mortgage £640.00
Loan repayment £332.00
Pension £179.10
Car insurance £23.70
House insurance £46.64
Horse insurance £45.55
Life insurance £13.62
NICS £8.40
Electricity £41.00
Gas £65.00
Phone £45.00
Council tax £116.00
Broadband £28.00
Credit card £200.00
Charities £25.00
Savings account for son £50.00
Total £1,859.01
Check the interest you are paying on your credit card hasn't sneaked up.
I got the shock of my life when I found mine had crept up to 25.9 % following a simple call threatening to move my debts to another card, made them promise to change it down to 16.9 %, still not that low but 8% down is a start.
Nowhere on my statement did it seem to mention the interest rate and not being brilliant at maths I wasn't able to work out the rate for myself without help from my maths savvy husband.
There should be a law against omitting this information on the statement ,as a percentage. Trawling back through my credit card and bank statements I noticed leaflets on all kinds of financial offers including credit cards at 16.9%. Who has time to read these except when you have a spring throw out?
You can get lower interest rate cards if you look up a certain Martin Lewis (not the news reader) a very good money saving expert, on the web.Unless I missed something, all this advice is available for
I Chad, Derbyshire, UK,
Get rid of the horse, insurance etc and associated costs; get rid of the TV which is a waste of time. Check out switching buildings ins costs to cheaper - but as good in cover - providers. Life cover on the house - yes, review, and if single parent, add in critical illness cover as more important..who pays the mortgage if you cannot?
Mort Spriggs, Gloucester,
Dear Jane,
How you must suffer you poor youngsters in not knowing how to economise. We lucky ones learnt through wartime evacuation, rationing until 1952, and a Labour government.
We don't keep a horse or a cat either.
Try giving up the self pity by changing your attitude of 'self-denial' to 'sensible-denial'. I gave up heavy smoking 35 years ago by changing my thinking 'why shouldn't I smoke' to 'why should I smoke'. Haven't touched a fag since.
You can do the same with the word 'spend'!
Bill H., Rustington,
What kind of a person practices thrift when they own an insured horse. Surely that would be the unncessary expendtiure to cut out?
Sarah, London, UK
Anyone who has horse insurance really shouldn't moan about lack of money
Fred, Newcastle, UK
I realise the 'how to budget' section refers to weekly living expenses, but should not things like food, clothing and petrol figure on the monthly outgoings section? Your cri de coeur rang very familiar bells, but shouldnt we be watching all outgoings? Or will all be revealed in tomorrow's paper (more expense)?
Tony Bignall, Bradford on Avon, UK
Ditch the horse FTW. Also £28 is a lot for broadband. Virgin Media do cable, phone and broadband in one package for £30, and if you just want broadband you can get it a lot cheaper than this.
Johnny Spendsalot, Poole, UK
To Peter Smart:
You are counting Jane's mortgage (and possibly part of her loan, since she says that some of it was used to pay builders - how essential the building work was we don't know, but I'd rather have a non-leaking roof over my head) as "paying off someone whose lent you money for something you really shouldn't yet have because you can't yet afford it".
Are you seriously suggesting that one should keep renting until a house can be purchased in cash? Not only that is slightly impractical (assuming a saving compared to rent of £100/ month, before you reach £200,000 it's 2000 months or 166 years), but it actually makes no economic sense whatsoever. Please wake up to the fact that - for all the talk of multi-million pound bonuses and houses purchased for cash - a mortgage is still the only way 99.99% of people will ever be able to own a house, and that rentals are generally more expensive than that.
David, Wallingford,
The car, the car! Don't you folks have a monthly transit pass system? The wine... Where I live it's taxed to death, and women are not supposed to drink much anyway, for health reasons. Newspapers? I read the Times Online every day for free, plus innumerable other news sources. Broadband? Dialup is cheaper, and a fast computer means not so much waiting time. Horse insurance??? Neigh, neigh. I gave my horse away a long time ago.
Brigid Elson, Toronto, Canada
I'm amazed at some of the waste / excess food that is generated from a lot of the fashionable cook books that suggest twice as many (and often difficult-to-find) ingredients in a recipe without any context as to how these ingredient fit in with modern household day-day meals. These recipes are often designed by professional cooks who don't need to think about the cost, or leftover ingredients, or washing up!. I really recommend Rose Prince's cook book 'New English Kitchen' as well as the classics like Elizabeth David for getting a bit of sense & frugality back into family kitchens.
Ella, St Albans,
Thank you for your honesty and openness in revealing a predicament that I suppose most people are in, but are either in denial, or embarrassed silence about. Our family, certainly, is constantly juggling to maintain our budget. Keeping a budget is not 'struggling to make ends meet', but rather, being empowered to control ones own spending. I can't say yet, that I've mastered the art of self-denial, or that my first instinct is to save. However, though my first instinct is to 'play now, pay later', it is encouraging to know that one is not alone in seeking a better way.
ML, Ascot, Berkshire
A really good article. I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoy not spending - or is that wasting - my hard earned pennies. Life is about spending. What you need to do is realise that you don't need to spend money on stuff you don't need, just on the stuff you do need. The rest you try to save for the important purchases we all have to make at some time. A budget is vital and I agree with others that it is easily possible, with a little effort, to make changes. It is a question of willpower. I prefer saving to spending because I know that when I do need to spend I'll be able to without worrying - this at least is some form of financial freedom.
Michael Bell, Rotherham,
I found your article really interesting and helpful, Jane, thanks. Even though I am very envious of your much-larger-than-mine-horse-insurance-incorporating budget! Try not to be so bitter, Lucy J and co!!
Ellie, Barnsley,
Dear dear Jane,
Saving £10 on your flowers is a good step. As Tesco says, "Every little helps" BUT looking at your Monthly outgoings you must see that £1172 of your £1859 budget - a whopping 2/3rds - is paying off someone whose lent you money for something you really shouldn't yet have because you can't yet afford it.
The two golden rules of personal economics are (1) "Don't spend more than your income" and (2) "If you can't pay for it from existing funds, don't buy it".
Ask some bigger questions of yourself to really make a big difference to your finances.
Peter Smart, Guildford, UK
Peoples spending habits are amazing. This political shift to be eco efficient could teach a lot of people some good home economics lessons. Waste not, want not is the saying. Watch the pennies and the pounds look after themselves, you dont become wealthy by spending freely. But then theres our society, one of neon lights and spend your money here signs. And pitfalls of exploitation in markets of the come to be bare essentials, housing, transport etc. Hard not to spend, especially with long working hours, need to find a reprive somewhere, right? Unfortunately it takes a change of life style to change spending habits. Sport helped me, time spent doing something is less time spent spending. With standing orders and a savings account linked to the current account, it suddenly seems relatively easy to grow a small bag of money to tuck away. Just need to watch that inflation rate now, make sure the interest rate ensures that i do save.
Dave, London, UK
85 quid left over a day? I wish. That's my left-over for a month, and I haven't even got a pension because I can't afford one. The depressing thing about this article is that I'm -already- thrifty, and have a budget. So I can't go "wahey, wouldya look at that, I've got 200 quid extra a month when I drop the takeaways", since I don't buy those in the first place.
Mind you, I'll send the link to your article to my ex, who truly doesn't understand the concept of "small amounts add up" and is permanently broke (despite having 4x my income).
starling, Lancaster,
I always thought that people over 30 were rather dull, but this confirms it - other than wine in the weekly shop (probably only for cooking anyway!) there is no mention of money for going out for a drink, cinema, theatre or any social activity. Perhaps the writer sits at home every evening, but then surely she would at least need Sky TV! Perhaps this week's columns could be adequately shortened to 'Don't go out at all = money saved'!
Will, Oxford,
I have three different accounts which I use to monitor/curtail my spending: a main account into which my salary gets paid and any fixed costs come out (mortgage, utilities all direct debit), a savings account and a spending account.
The savings account is topped up everything with whatever is remaining in the main account after paying off last months credit card bill which normally only has travel on it.
I transfer x00 a month into the spending account which goes on food, going out and shopping.
Works reasonably well, allows me to see how much I've spent that month and what I've got left.
SHon, London, UK
Jane, you can buy several boradband deals that'll cost under £20 per month. Ditto for phones. As a Times employee, do you really have to buy newspapers? Surely your horse (many of us would consider to be a luxury) must cost a lot more to keep than the monthly insurance premium. Speaking of which, why are you spending three times as much on the horse than you are on your own life? (Pulic liability, vets' bills etc. I'd guess). If you must run a car, I find that by never letting the fuel tank dip below three-quarters full, you won't have the expense of filling up an empty tank on a regular basis. Provided you are not scared of heights and assuming you have sash or modern 'tip' windows, you can save a few quid there, too. And I bet you've not got the best deal on car insurance. As a female driver, you would qualify for Sheila's Wheels or another company that specialises in deals for the fairer sex.
Andrew Gallant, Leicester, UK
I agree with Mark Thomas that without too much digging around you can get a number of Broadband deals for under £20 a month for start off. And, as a Times employee, do you really have to buy newspapers? Or does Mr Murdoch make his staff pay for the organs they write for? A dual fuel deal might save a few quid against paying separately for gas and electricity. I would wager that your horse is costing you way more than the monthly insurance premium (which, incidentally, is over three times what you’re paying for your own life insurance! Whose going to look after the kids if the unthinkable should happen? The horse?). Finally, thrift is a lifeskill that really should be taught in schools, because in my experience, few kids know the value of money these days.
Andrew Gallant, Leicester, UK
Another excellent article Miss Shilling; painfully honest, well written, and of genuine real-world interest. Oh, and ignore any carping remarks, there'll always be someone desperate to indulge in a little Schadenfreude.
John Gregory, Cambridge,
Jane have you any idea our revoltingly self-indulgent and ridiculous you are? We are supposed to feel sorry for someone who includes 'horse insurance' and 'piano tuning' in their monthly expenses, it would be laughable if it wasn't so insulting to all the people who actually do survive on a limited budget.
Lucy John, London, UK
Horse Insurance??
SJ, london,
Jane, do you see any irony in bemoaning your lack of funds but at the same time running a car, and (surely you must be pulling my leg) paying for a window cleaner and a piano tuner. Even buying newspapers (can you not read them using your £28 a month broadband? Or at the library?). And there are still many families for whom things like hoovers are luxuries (hence the manual roller sweepers).
James MacAonghus, London,
Family budgeting should be considered a basic skill, shouldn't it? I find this kind of financial self-analysis to always be revealing and worthwhile. It is always the simplest adjustments to lifestyle that yield the most impact: do I really need to drink four pints of beer on a Friday night? If I knock it down to three that's 2 quid a week, or over 100 pounds a year without any real discernible change to my weekly routine.
Just one very quick observation, which is that you can do a LOT better than 28 quid a month for broadband. I expect it's an essential requirement of a journalist's career to have, and not just a frivolous luxury, but there are a great many reliable and reputable providers out there that will save you at least a tenner a month for a similar service.
Mark Thomas, Biddulph, Staffordshire
bloody hell
things must be bad if a Times journalist is struggling to make ends meet. Welcome to the real world dear.
degsy bunny rabbit, liverpool,
I find having a savings account linked electronically to my everyday account really helpful when economising. Any transfer of funds requires 24 hours notice, so it gives me time to rethink my impulse purchase. Transferring over all of my salary post-mortgage payment means it's safely out of harm's way, until I need to pay a bill.
I also recently counted up how much I spend on take-away coffees, take-away sushi, water in plastic bottles and all those other sneaky little purchases that all add up. I then arranged for an automatic savings plan to deduct the total from my everyday account and put it into another on-line savings account. I now make my coffee myself, take my lunch most days, use a water filter etc; at the end of 12 months I'm buying some shares with the money I've saved.
Sally O'Keeffe, Sydney, Australia
I am doing this in order to buy a house here in Portland, Oregon. The thing is to devloped what is called a spending plan- not a budget. Track the expenses, and see if you can do better. If you go over, make adjustments accordingly. I was able to save $12,000 over the past year doing this. If I keep doing this after I buy my house, I can save $8000 a year- all that, while eating good food, giving to charity, wearing good clothes ( key- suits and accessories for work, a few pieces for going out, one or two swell dresses from last year- or make your own) and yes, gooing on a thrifty vacation ( excellent aifares and guesthouses help!) The idea is to have thoughtful consumption- truly see what is important to you, get the best you can, and pass on crap.
Edith Spencer, Portland, Oregon, USA