Tom Hodgkinson | How to live well and save money | Idler

[Music] frugality I want to talk a little bit about that about the words and and and some of its greatest fans in some previous sessions we've talked about the ancient Greek philosophers and one of the central when their central ideas was basically frugality so they they demonstrated it in their everyday life Socrates went around without sandals on he wore very simple clothes he went into the marketplace and he looked all the olive oil that was on sale and he said who knows there was who knew there were so many olive oils out there that I don't need and he inspired even more extreme anti-consumerist like Diogenes the cynic and do you remember the cynical philosophers were the doglike philosophers so-called because they live like dogs without anything so the famous paintings of Diogenes because the theme with the picture of the theme of our talk this evening famous pictures painted throughout history of dodging these in his barrel which was actually sort of upturned wine cask which he lived in perhaps quite briefly and it was put in the shadow of the temple and he lived in it as a sort of piece of conceptual art I'm going to show you what it's like I'm going to show you that I don't need anything you know all this stuff that you have all this stuff it though it's all vain fripperies the stuff around the edge he was inspired by Socrates who as I said wandered around apparently with nothing although Socrates had a relatively conventional life he was married he had children he didn't earn much money and this is actually a source of great annoyance to his wife Sam tippy he would throw sort of water on his head when he came in late from drinking and staying up late with his friends and he crystallized this habit of his of not really putting bread on the table so but the the Greek philosophers were lived pause of demonstration if you like against the valency of riches now this ideas been around since at least - 505 BC many philosophers throughout since that time have prayed the value of thrift and frugality and people still want to be rich and it's perhaps we like the idea that you know yes I'd like to be frugal I know happiness doesn't make you happy I've been told that many sorry I know that riches don't make you happy and I've been told that many many many times but it'd be nice to test it out for myself just to see whether what they're saying is true or not because I'm sure what you do in my case if I was rich I would still carry on being happy but we we constantly told this you know and it's a theme in most religions it's certainly a theme in a philosophy the the truly wise person doesn't need a lot of money to be happy and in fact Aristotle said the the rich man is beset by worries the the kind of equivalents of the hedge fund guys of those days you know the merchant was taking their corn from one side of the world for the other we're always worrying that their boat was going to sink and that they might lose their riches so the Greek philosophers started this kind of like you know live frugally thing it was also felt philosophically a good idea to be frugal or self-sufficient and you see poverty talks about particularly by the Epicureans as well so the epicurean said led by Epicurus said okay you know this kind of striving for stuff that you don't have is the source of great unhappiness all the philosophers were saying why are we unhappy why are we anxious and one of the things they are isolated because exactly same today is we're anxious because we compare ourselves with the Joneses we want the show off we want what they have and we buy something more flashy more expensive it doesn't make us happy and in fact it just opens up a new Vista of stuff you know out there so I have a big your yacht is someone else has a bigger yacht so you know it's never going to make you happy the Epicureans also said we like being frugal and the idea of being an Epicure very curious was that you would sort of withdraw from the world and live in a commune with twenty or thirty friends or Philly fellows the Greek word for friends you wouldn't really be in a family and you would reduce your expenses by sharing everything growing your own vegetables but that'd give you a lot of time to be an artist on the Philosopher's so the idea of reducing your expensive if you want to be an idler or more idle I think makes a lot of logical sense because then you rely less on work why do we work we work to make money so if we don't need so much money if we don't desire so much stuff perhaps we won't need to work so much it will happen more freedom for our own creative enterprises the Epicureans also said you know this isn't about self-denial it's about pleasure you know I can take as much pleasure from a Bali cake and a glass of water as from the great feast I'm not going to say no to the great feast of the great feast comes along that's great but I want to learn how to live on little so that I'm not scared of poverty and I think that's a good thing too a good good for the trip to get so these are some of the background philosophies if you like the idea of being frugal I want to say you know why am I talking about this and what credentials that I have as far as frugality goes and gets to say briefly I was doing some research for this talking eyes looking up income levels what's good service to the poor and rich and so on and I looked at the different percentages now realized that I've been at practically every level at some point or another so at certain points or household income was like in I worked at the bottom 6% at the country you know for a year or two not always and other times notably for one year anyway in 2001 when I was doing really well our income went up and our household income went up into the top 10% and mr. time it's been somewhere in the middle being in the bottom six or 10% is actually not fun that's all but at least we look it's horrible because you can't do anything you can't go to the pub you worry about eating out you you also have some ungenerous but what that was good for was teaching us a few skills in looking after our own money and also as a family we lived 12 years in the countryside on a small holding long way from many shops and my income was again fluctuating sometimes had a good year from books sometimes a bad year so we had to learn how to sort of live well on little but for the media amounts and we learned how to sort of bake breads I tried to brew beer unsuccessfully we grew vegetables we had chickens and so on I wrote a book about it and of course people said oh it's alright for you living in the countryside I live in a flat in London and don't tell me to grow my own vegetables you know so whatever you do someone's going to kind of a tacit but we did at least learn how to sort of get hold of the finances my own finances I think drops to an absolute all-time low I remember Christmas driving to the petrol station in Bountiful and filling up the car and going to pay for it and being unable to pay for it because I'd gone over and all my cards and having to telephone my mother from the petrol station and ask her to pay the petrol station for this petrol so this is just getting ridiculous so what I want to do this evening is to run through the sort of ten areas of life that we could look at to save money and I think being frugal although I'm not saying I sort of enjoyed it particularly but I enjoyed the lessons and the lessons I think has stayed with me and with Victoria and there's a sense in which you can actually enjoy being frugal you know for example because tiny examples I mean they seem ridiculous to it I enjoy cycling to the office and cycling here and I enjoy adding up the little small sums that I'm saving by not going on the tube and they add up to quite a lot you know and I like you don't breaking bad who seen Breaking Bad in Breaking Bad having much money he makes there's a lovely little detail he always makes its own sandwiches before going into the into the crystal meth Factory for the day so he sort of did all sort of routine and he's in control and I thought to enjoy that too and taking our own coffee into the office and telling Percy who works from the office not not to you know go out for lunch but to bring his own sandwiches in and this becomes sort of something that's actually quite fun and if you can then it kind of thinking have more money for the important stuff and that's what I really want to talk about you've got money for a tailor-made suit we shall say a hundred pounds which I bought when I was 40 and has been the best purchase ever so you can buy very casually very good things and buy for example good food we get river foods organic food delivered and I mean it is really good it's not the cheapest but it's not that expensive and you know when you know what's coming you can bug it more easily and you get the milk delivered and it is absolutely terrific okay so let's go through some of these ideas and I have today a flipchart as an aide memoire as well as a what are these things called again clipboards so I've got the clipboards and the flip chart to give you some authority so I've got some charts as well so I'll be doing some research in newspapers like the Guardian googling stuff and I found out exactly where our money goes on average from government figures I'd also like to say that this idea of being frugal is not about self-denial it's about creating more time for idling and it's about also reducing our emissions carbon impact or whatever you want to call it because doing stuff driving a car emits carbon uses up power I've got a list here of the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 main kind of forms of activity which affect the planet the first one is power ok that's obvious electricity or mobile phone use and windmills or whatever it is that's absolutely massive that's one 405 emissions whatever that means and are you already handing out the notes yeah don't look at the notes yet turn them over notice of people looking at in the in the in halfway three they did then glanced at the notes yet please everyone turned them over look in other ways he went concentrate on me you'll wonder through the notes and lose concentration so I guess what you to sort of think without making that without looking at the notes what do you think number two is so we have power is the first this is a list of the largest contributors to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018 power usage went up in that time power usage goes up as people come out of poverty and use more stuff rich people with the use a lot of power as well and what do you think number two was the second largest contributor to the increase in global carbon emissions from 2010 to 2018 nope nope nope nope nope SUVs big cars so these big cars that you see people driving around in contributed the next biggest contributor to the increase in global carbon emissions over the last eight years or so eight or nine years which is amazing they use so much power and energy to make them in the first place to transport them to run them to maintain them so they're incredible power things so that's I think an amazing statistic and the 99.9% of cases that utterly 100% totally pointless and there's no reason to have these things I mean people say they feel safe in them maybe you know obviously if you're a farmer you need to go off-road and stuff there's a need for them but not in nothing he'll I mean you said maybe it's quite nice for the car industry and people who work in it that these SUVs have been land rover and so on have been so successful and they also according to George Baum Bo killed more people than the small cars so there's two very good reasons not to have one of those other ones include heavy industry trucks aviation is quite a lot less about half of SUVs and then shipping and so on okay so but I just want to make the point really that you know reducing energy consumption reduces your outgoings and reduces your overheads so if you think of yourself like a business you know you've got these overheads these regular payment that you have to make you can go through them all I mean it's really boring but you can go through the movement and really make a lot of reductions and with this method I'm going to show you if you're just demonstrating it because we'll all have different ways of doing it because the demonstration but you could very easily make save 12,000 pounds a year with my little routines which I'm going to show you and talk through so our first outgoing is obviously housing rent and mortgage and well that's really difficult it's very difficult to reduce that we all sort of think of way they're doing it perhaps at different points in our life but also the other points it's it's it's it's the biggest reality that you have to face and it would be sort of a bit for the pact nodding for me to make seen anything connections that really because we all have different circumstances obvious ideas or things like living on a narrow boat some of my friends do which I wouldn't want to do living outside London trying to get the mortgage paid off if you possibly can there's a thing called the fire movement financial independence retire early which goes through these different sorts of economies you can make and find that they can put in a certain amount per month into the same as the council or against their mortgage and pay the mortgage off quite quickly and this is actually quite commonly done in other countries I mean I remember going to Czech Republic and the young people stay they buy a flat but they really don't spend a lot of money I'm talking about the middle classes and then they but they try and pay off their mortgage really really quickly when they're quite young is that opposite of what I did when they had money in my twenties which was to spend all of it on cocktails and absence another things and I got reputation and from my parents and my family being incredibly bad with money which I was because I am or less one of those people if I've got a hundred quid in my pocket I'll spend it if I've got a fiver I'll spend beds and I'll some boil the drinks and so I really had to kind of rein that in because that can get you into big trouble particularly if you're a freelancer if any freelancers no because a good year is great I'm like yes I've got loads of money this is brilliant like you know I'm getting gonna get a black cab who cares I can afford this but then they're following you you have a bad year and you have no money or and you might be in debt and you have to pay tax on the good year with the profits of the bad year that follows it and that can really get you into a lot of trouble on any sort of a level and by the way you know frugal living is good for for rich people to I mean I've got a friend of Sopranos friends of ours you know he ends really well but they're still frugal this is men they've been able to sort of go from like smaller to bigger house because they did all the work themselves and they worked really really hard there I'm 40 lazy to do that sort of thing but they've made money kind of by being frugal yes another tip is to buy a house 25 years ago that would that was a really good idea it's awful really what's happening to the world I talk to people in San Francisco there was a girl from San Francisco on our retreat a couple of weeks ago and people in San Francisco Olympic having to live in smaller and smaller apartments she's in a rent controlled apartment so she's basically safe but let's would always say because they can sell it to another landlords and the rents are going up and up and up and all the interesting people the artists have now left and the teachers can barely afford to live there either and so the teachers having to move out of the main city and it's full of these very young very stupids very rich tech people who sort of get the bus into Google every day and sort of I think three young gods so this is a some of these ideas are not gonna work in San Francisco because you just cannot afford anything and people literally could have to move out or get something absolutely tiny unless they bought a house 25 years ago which is one of my tips so can you save you know 100 quid 200 300 400 quid 500 quid a month I don't know but through some of these techniques he probably can and thought to get the mortgage paid off to car again I've done the sums on cars and your car is after housing your biggest out gang by far and it's extraordinary how much money goes out on a car so even if you think you're not spending that much money on car I mean we bought it like a crap car for a thousand pounds and something we don't use it that much but if you add up all the if you might up the parking tickets which we get some quite a lot of speeding fines trips to the garage the insurance particularly in London you're talking about sort of five six seven eight thousand pounds or even more this could be sort of actually cut out at one go because by selling the car you don't have 150 pounds a week to spend on taxis and bicycles and trains bicycles taxis and trains or hire car you know so we do need a car you can hire a car for like 30 quid a day and get cut out that kind of grinding monthly expense and it's something I'm trying to do at home my family are still resisting it because they have one argument left because that we have a dog and they say well it's good to put we can put the dog in the back and drive to Richmond Park on a Sunday I say well we did that twice last year they're saying each time we did that cost two and a half thousand pounds I mean you know but okay that's not fair we we used to call other times but you know it's gonna work out how much these these journeys are actually costing Ivan Illich in the 70s worked out that when you add up all the time spent on your car not just in it but working to fund it and how many hours of the year you're working and how many hours you're in it and how many ask your it's at the garage and divide it by the miles you know that you're driving it seems like you're going at 70 miles an hour but he works out you're actually going at about 8 miles an hour or something like that I don't remember exactly but it's like slower than a bicycle so we're all dicks the college we like cars we like getting in them and you know they're sort of fun but but can you actually cut that expense out because that's a lot of money what's that so that's five grand the point here is whether so I'm saying that you can make this little through galleries and then but feel actually very very feel that you've got plenty of money I think that's a nice word plenty I've got plenty of money I'm not constantly wanting more yes I want to keep earning well if I make the if I sort of bring the outgoings down you know you can sort of get this sort of situation and you start to feel like you've got some money in the bank so they're not worried if the boiler breaks and you can you can afford it that's doing absolute worst thing about dipping down below certain levels it's the feeling that yes like I can survive like this you know it's fine I mean I can I drink plenty of beer from the supermarket or whatever I can't couldn't we say I'm suffering in any way at all but if something goes really badly wrong thing you might worry about it for example Victoria this sounds like I'm attacking my wife I'm not Victoria put petrol in the diesel car the other day and this is because our cat had died and cubes all over the place and we had we've had a horrible weekend our cat was put down on Saturday morning and this cat has been with us for you know 16 17 years so it's absolutely devastating so we're all absolutely all over the place and picture was went down to the garage filled up the car and then got back as you know I put petrol in the diesel this guy came around called something like you know super petrol guy in his van and I said well I'll cap your work done this before and I said well no now cats just died he said that that's always happening when someone's cat died something Bad's happens that's when people put diesel in the petrol petrol in the diesel car anyway let's pay 200 quid but we had the 200 quid so I didn't worry about it too much I think a few years ago some of ours for the poverty points that would have been really stressful and the cause of a massive drought so travel in general okay putting aside the car because I'm talking about commuting we cycled to the office it's 20 minutes each way I'm just talking about my experience lots of people say well I can't do this and obviously no everyone could do all these things I'm just running through some of the things that we've done as an example I think cycling is because such a huge pleasure and it's completely free and it's really really enjoy it and it calls for it well it cost nothing apart from their bike repairs I could save at least 15 pounds a week cycling to the office with a bicycle that's just me and so times two for two people in a household is 1440 over a year which is quite a lot of money just for cycling and not getting the tube food and drink okay so the sector's called bring your own sandwiches I'm fully aware that these are all sort of the common things that our parents taught us and you know sort of rightly but in my case being sort of being someone who sort of tends towards luxurious living and splashing it out I have to make a bit of an effort to do these things but I'm really pleased with myself when I have when I make the sandwiches so bring your own sandwiches is a key concept in this whole thing your own sound week is a much nice of them the ones that they sell in Tesco and okay it's only three quid from my meal deal but actually the cost of two slices of bread a piece of cheese and a bit of pickle must be sort of far less than that so again we're saving fortunes on bringing our own sandwiches coffees Starbucks that's out as well so they're incredibly expensive and you know I'm going to go to Starbucks and I'm going to get like my treat it's going to cost 2050 think about if you buy two coffees a day times five that's 10 pounds is it am i right now 10 pounds a day that's 50 quid a week that's two and a half grand a year which is another holiday or it's three is it's like too subtle roast suits you know that you spent on coffee it's the most gorgeous pair no I mean they're how many pairs of shoes it's 10 pairs of church's probes you know the sub wasted on coffee so I have a coffee well I have a coffee before I go to the office and then in the office we have a little sort of copy plunger thing if we require because I never never use I've also said a voice chief marketing shoes river food or something like that so when we don't do this so much now but when we lived in the farm house we were such a long way from anywhere that we had to kind of work out different ways of shopping and getting vegetables delivered not the ones that I hadn't made for myself of course and going to little and avoiding the big Tesco's and was the good economy because obviously if you walk into testicles or Saints there's no well needs a tiny attached and you overspend and it's difficult to come out with that putting a hundred quid into your basket because you think well I'm here I'll get all this stuff but that's actually the opposite of what you should be doing which is budgeting planning and thinking ahead I might also say I'm now getting so annoying about this I'm trying to do spreadsheets at home so it's quite good idea to not only to learn how to do spreadsheets but to find spray keeps quite enjoyable and and I send little emails to Victoria kind of working out what incredible savings were making on various things and how this will mean that we can you know go to Italy or something like whatever it is that you want to do it becomes easier [Laughter] she's into it as well clothing again I think the principle is you know buy the good stuff so I have to say if you don't you know if you don't have a proper job then you do save an awful lot of money because you don't need all this stuff you don't need the clothes and the copies and the snacks and the treats and this sort of drinks off to work and so on so if anyone's kind of contemplating quitting the full-time job and becoming a freelancer yes it can be very tough because your incomes going up and down as I said but you or you are also saving a lot of money so your outgoings are going down so what could we save here food and drink I put eighteen forty I can't bhai work that out that's like twenty quid on coffees twenty quid on something else obviously these are rough figures I'm just trying to give you the principle as far as clothing goes I mean I think you could sort of as you get older you don't want to be dressed in rags but there are ways of Griffing we've nedly well without spending loads of money if you've got a bit of time going to second-hand shops vintage shops going to places like riffle and tape it's Jenkin Notting Hill why something pop in and get a shirt or something and one very good pair of shoes a couple of pairs of cleaners that's all you really need I'll just put random some here of 500 quid one thing that I think not economize on what I say to Victoria you said well spending so much on my hair I said that's actually fine spending some actually want on your hair because that's the kind of a therapy where else have we got oh yeah it's so fuel so this is a bit sort of head mastery and kind of basically dull dull lecture about figgity right I could hardly bear to say this because it's a boring video you know that there's a money saving supermarket websites or whatever they're called and things like that and a friend of mine said Oh have you thought about switching your energy supplier and I was like I'm not gonna fall for this rubbish and eventually I did I changed it to another energy supplier and ever since then I've been really on the case like reading the meter monitoring my monthly outgoings and cutting it down a little bit I guess the process of doing that makes you think a little bit more about turning lights off you know so our monthly electricity and gas bill used to be something like 240 pounds and now it's about 140 and it seems to be going down all the time I'm not really quite sure why other than that I've got this sort of enlarged consciousness of what we're doing so I keep looking at the bills and keep checking them and you have to be careful that they're not overcharging you there's a story in the paper that they put you on a monthly direct debit and they make you pay a little bit more than what you actually use because they want you to stay in credit and this could build up so quite a lot of money the credit they have for you and then sometimes these companies go bust because it's all so vicious neoliberal capitalistic you know loads of any competing energy companies which then go past and its can be quite difficult to get that money back and there's some guy he's involved in the case where he's trying to get his 1,500 quid back as we speak but you can if you kids sort of keep checking it online even ten quid a month there's actually quite a lot of money you know I sort of think actually ten pounds is a lot of money I can buy a lot of beer for ten pounds I could buy like practically a case of beer save fuel and power things that use a lot of power it's again fairly obvious things with motors so dishwashers and washing machines and tumble dryers now of those we use the dishwasher quite a lot and we use the washing machine quite a lot but we don't use the tumble dryer much anymore in fact we put the tumble dryer a long way away in the cellar at the end of the at the end of the cellar so it's difficult to get to and we try and use winnings and SunPower in the little yard to dry our laundry when you go to Italian towns if one's drawing their laundry outside outdoors it rains Tom in this country not always and you can sometimes bring it back in and put it in the kitchen and it's actually incredibly amazing how quickly laundry drives in the Sun and the wind and it drives in a much nicer way than the tumble dryer we leave the clothes also of wrinkly it's easy because you're working too hard and you've run out of time you're not thinking ahead but I think this lack of tumble dry use and that were they called the drum going round and round and round for the hours and hours on end using up so much electricity I think that might be the secret of our diminishing fuel bills each month and of course power is the greatest contributor to global warming so less dishwashers less washing machines anything with a motor that turns has got to be good for your wallet and the environment we've even removed some of the radiators downstairs as well because again they thought pump away when you're not there you leave the timer on and to me we need these radiators on a quickly put an extra jumper on things to think about so I put yeah so our bills gone from 240 to 140 and is still going down I make that 1,200 quid in a year I've got one here about your loans and credit cards obviously that they point saving money until you paid off all your loans the first thing to get rid of again obvious thing to say is the credit card because the interest rates are absolutely ridiculous so I think now we've got rid of all our credit cards but I haven't actually had a credit card for years because I forget to pay it off and I thought when it says five thousand pounds of variable I sort of think that's free money I'm just going the middle you spend it without realizing they're gonna pay it back over the next ten years and really suffer a terrible rates of interest like 20 or 30 percent interest a year so it's good to obviously get all those loans paid off and if you do want to borrow money it's much better to get those sort of five-year loan from the bank much cheaper than taking money out on the credit cards and gladly try and get all those loans paid off and this did happen to us in when we lived on the smallholding and the other people's full holdings say they turned into debt free killers they called themselves the FKS because they were they no longer had any debt but they were killing animals and slugs and things all day long that was a little small holding joke the FKS but that's obviously a good feeling I mean Victoria says you know debt makes me feel sick debt makes me feel sick and when we in my own case when we closed our shop we still had some debts hanging around from having one a bookshop for five years and it was hot so a horrible feeling you feel like you can't really sort of move forward unless you're a massive business person in which case you love enormous debt I was reading about Soho House and they have a depth of 250 million pounds they think that's great and they keep growing more and more money so didn't understand that but that's a whole different kind of world out there and that's perhaps not his own personal debt when you read in the financial papers about that the debt that some of these companies have exactly extraordinary but that's something else like you know when if you owe someone a million pounds that they're it's an asset to them they're really happy the bank is absolutely thrilled if you know the bank 100 pounds the bank is not thrilled and they might come knocking to get your money back it's a weird rule but in our case let's keep the debts down to a minimum get rid of them and I have said this before and it is something I do is because just check your direct debits because I don't want note all the figures of its suddenly huge the the uncounseled services that you still pay for you pay for them for two or three months adds up to sort of millions or billions when you add everyone's up so so look at the direct debits because my TV now on the pad on your bank account so you can see was actually going out and because trying counts for some of them don't cancel the one to the idler it's only 27 pounds a month in the first year phone now phone I personally speaking got rid of the dumb fat sorry I got rid of the smart phone and I was sent this dumb phone by the company that makes them for reviewing the idler but you can get a dumb phone for like 10 pounds and we signed up to something I looked at something called smarty so I did this thing which is quite painful of looking at the other mobile phone providers there was a new one called smarty which said it was only 5 pounds a month so we rang up Victor I rang up all the other mobile phone companies that we had in the household I just went through them all and we've got it got our monthly fee would used about 6 pounds a month each for the children each and me and Victoria which really gives like one pound a pound a week so that saves absolutely masses and I don't have a smartphone so that need all the data or anything that that's what I have instead is I bought a mini iPad for stuff like 200 quid so the mini iPad and a dumb phone and I think that's good and I've also personally this week pretty much good off Twitter completely I think Twitter as you know Twitter and Facebook are advertising sales systems that's what they're there for so if you're on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and stuff on your phone you're paying a lot of money to be advertised at that's the way I see it so if you have a dumb phone you don't get the ads and you're less like just spend so much money so that's another saving so nobody's saving the actual cash that you're spent I mean I remember a few years ago when I had a smart phone on spending 30 40 50 pounds a month on this thing why I just didn't really need it 50 pounds a month what's that times 1200 times 6 600 pounds I mean it's awful lot of money yes 7 credit cards and loans I could put a figure of a grand phone I put 282 I don't know how it works all these things out now entertainment cinema eating out theater pub well they're very expensive actually I mean even the pub's expensive nowadays the gangster cinema cost about 15 or 20 quid in these big multiplexers I know it sounds a bit miserable but can you guys this is more a bit less and do we have to eat out so much some people well again this is a fairly obvious one the I've been talking about cleaning to the writer jeff dyer and he says i don't understand why everybody doesn't do their own cleaning I just love cleaning and just I hate cooking but I love cleaning for him as the greats of distraction from his work and he really enjoys it he likes the different cleaning products you can get the whiffle's and things like this and we had lovely conversation which is going to be on a podcast about how much he likes cleaning say but I do all his own cleaning and cleaning you know obviously down to pay for clean there now it's a very difficult subject some people have cleaners some don't should you you know is it good to be giving people that sort of employment is it not but I think if you have if there's two or three of you know I mean I don't you a one would really need a cleaner because if you got a household and everyone can help with the cleaning and all children should be forced to be helping I mean I've been through sort of all kind of like semi wealthy little cloth phases and we've had cleaners at home when our children were really small when we had like three under fives and we were really really kind of stretched and perhaps that was better but even then I think it might have been wiser for us to do it ourselves but certainly if the children grow older and you have more time as well if everyone did an hour a week you know in a family of five that's quite a lot of cleaning so that's an obvious way to save money I've also looked at no that's it yeah so so I have it all up to about twelve thousand pounds in a year and that's cash and you think well that's money that I would have to and pay tax on you know I'd probably have to go and store twenty thousand pounds to get that sort of cash into the bank but more than that it's sort of it's a principle and I think an attitude I'm really aware that I don't want to sort of sound preachy or like this is some kind of like sermon but I just think it's nice to get the conversation out there and it's actually fun to think about money you know when I did my trends though I don't think about money and I didn't think about money and then money came and sort of I've been overspending and money came in sort of bit me on the are sort of thing so I actually find it sort of quite enjoyable to kind of sit down and work out these frugality there's a kind of a hobby now I guess what are the finish by talking about the breakdown at average total household expenditure and this is figures from the state which I'm going to hand around with your on your notes we'll just run through these because I think they're really illuminating actually the first one is transport and we spend 14% of our annual income on transports moving around going places getting in the car getting on the bus you know well that's a massive amount of money and could easily be saved simply by not traveling are you staying at home now you might say well I have to travel for my job and so on but you know because of that B could you do some of that journey on the bicycle or somehow cut down your traveling I just thought that was absolutely huge it's the biggest expenditure of any household is transport number two is housing housing including fuel and power so number two is housing including fuel and power again that's about 14% an average of 70 pounds per 73 pounds 50 per week in the UK is there anything we can do to reduce that I'll talk about sort of fuel and power again doing less means your bills go down and in theory you could have more time for sitting around playing the ukulele or reading a book the third one is recreation and culture and that's things like eating out and going to the cinema so people spend on average nearly 70 pounds a week on that well maybe it's a bit visible but you could quite easily cut that out for a few weeks saving 70 quid according to this thing the next one down is foods and non-alcoholic drinks that's difficult to cut back I would say this is on 56 80 which sounds like quite a low sum for a family to be spending on food and non-alcoholic drinks of the week restaurants and hotels is the next one down so that's one two three four which is quite surprisingly high so I was quite surprised about that so you could cut down on your restaurants and hotels miscellaneous goods and services as the next one down which is not very helpful category I don't really know what it means the next one is household goods and services so that might be string mr. muscle whatever you know cleaning products actually even cleaning products less there was a complete waste of money you only need a lemon and some vinegar everyone knows mr. muscles like a massive silk on it some sort of bleach marketed really well with some clever as clothing and footwear is the next and then communication which has gone up a lot on 15 pounds a week and that's your mobile phone your internet and so on the next one down I'm sorry I was absolutely amazed by how little this one is alcoholic drinks tobacco and narcotics I mean alcoholic drinks is definitely one of my biggest outgoings easily and that's one thing I've always refused to cut back on because I think low quality booze is really bad for you and it really really spending a little bit extra on really sort of fine ales and proper wines makes all the difference so that's where I'd like to say put any savings I make it's ongoing and Victor replied like a really good bottle of wine to have at home and that's that's a real pleasure and that cost 20 quid but you could save to adequate on the coffees so this is what I'm trying to say so I live like a king on less money health and education well the last one is education that's all that was interesting we don't spend anything on it education really and I personally I think we should spend more on education I think education is one that most beautiful gifts you can give yourself with the money that we save on these various economies I give my daughter and myself a tennis lesson each week and that is just pure bliss and I just feel like I'm sort of richest person in the world having an actual tennis tester with one person teaching the two of us when we can and I think teaching you know piano lessons and literature lessons or whatever it might be for yourself for your children it's money really really well spent that's all I was amazed at this is that people spend all their money on driving around and going on trains and absolutely nothing on education if you'd be the other way around and it's not that hard to do it it's even when we win definitely had a piano teacher who came round on Saturday morning and taught four of us and we had a half an hour piano lesson that was the highlight of my week that's absolutely amazing so I think education we should probably spend more on and cut down on some of the other things so that's the end of this part let's have a quick drink and then we'll we can look through the notes and have a brief chat about these or others of the boring frugality thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Idler

Views: 3,359

Rating: 4.4909091 out of 5

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Id: zX55ELxPjRQ

Length: 46min 53sec (2813 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020