Thrifty Thursday 1
Digital Photography
Digital photography can be quite thrifty and a great hobby for the kids. It’s worth buying them their own digital camera. The local park is a great place to begin taking pictures. Incidentally, my previous Thrifty blogs have their own page and there are still lots of thrifty ideas there. I am using a blog with a permalink this week so I can write it in advance.
Farmfoods
I have mentioned Farmfoods before and I have a leaflet from them again this week. The coupon offer 10% off if you spend £25, £50 and so on. That’s a decent saving even though I dislike coupons. The frozen vegetables at 3 for £2 are a reasonable price because it’s a 1/3 off. I can buy most of those vegetables around the corner at Iceland though for the same price – £1 a Kg and so it’s not that good.
Sky TV
I saw an advert on television last night for Sky TV, phone and Broadband. It said Sky TV, broadband and calls all for £19.50 a month and it says the same on their website. I checked it out! They didn’t mention the £11.50 a month line rental or the £10 up front fee or the fact the line rental goes up a quid on the 6th of July. It might be legal but is it honest? Virgin is more or less the same on cable and their line rental goes up at the beginning of August. BT is similar but you can save by paying your line rental 12 months in advance. I’ll stick with Freeview and my TalkTalk broadband and phone.
The digital switchover
The digital switchover will affect large parts of central England soon. The guy canvassing for Sky told me how all my neighbours were getting poor signals and would be better off with Sky. I told him how good my signal was, I was in technology though and have a good aerial. It will be even better when they switch the digital transmitters to full power. There is no need for a new aerial (antenna) or for satellite TV or cable or bloody BT Vision. BT Vision is also on a 24 month contract and has set up fees. £60 for the box and £30 activation fee. My box works fine on Freeview and is free. I have just ordered a TV for my bedroom that records to a USB flash drive – it has a built in DVD player. I know, I needed an anaesthetic to use my credit card…
You can also check out my Frugal A to Z on the Frugal page, I’m doing V for Vanity this week; vanity can be so expensive. You can save a lot of cash by being thrifty; then save and invest it. Compound interest is your enemy if you’re in debt but is your friend if you have savings. If you put £1,000 into Zopa for 5 years and manage a 6% return at the end you have £418 plus in interest; the only investments to compare to that are the indexed linked ones from National savings and investments and the new Post Office index linked bond; the latter being taxable. I wrote a blog a while ago about Zopa that you can find here. I now have over £600 in my Zopa account; but that includes a £50 introduction fee. I obviously earn interest on the interest and so the return increases. I shall put more into Zopa in just over 2 months time. I am looking to diversify and so I’ll look at NSANDI indexed linked savings certificates too; if they are still available then. I have seen comments that people will lose out with index linked certificates if inflation drops; but the return in real terms will still be good. If prices aren’t going up so much then; I don’t need such a big return. If my personal inflation rate is high then I could lose out. This can happen if the price of manufactured goods is stable or dropping and the price of food, fuel and housing is increasing fast. The price of the things we need, rather than the things we want, always seems to increase fast. I expect higher council tax bills, food bills, energy bills and housing costs. We can also rely on the government to find new and innovative ways to tax us and deprive us of our money!
You might like to read, need or greed or maybe average or typical. You can also check out the Home page for all the blogs from the last week. I have quite a collection now!
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- A Saturday Ramble… (mike10613.wordpress.com)
Mike10613's Blog 
Hey Mike!
This is an excellent post. I try to be thrifty and my wife calls it cheap. I think the two are very different concepts, however, I understand how they can be confused, lol.
P.S. I’m sure some government official is reading your blog right now dreaming up a new tax! Glad I came by to visit.
30, June 2011 at 2:26 pm
Hi Jermaine,
Thanks for the visit. Thrifty and frugal is the way to be now. I had to buy a drink yesterday in the hospital because it was hot – £1.20. My friend thought it was ‘reasonable’ until I bought a six pack of the identical drink a little later for £2.00. I was very quick to work out it was .33 p a bottle, nearly a quarter of the price on offer in the supermarket! Looking at it another way, six in the hospital would cost £7.20 compared to £2.00 in the supermarket! I avoided the hospital car parking charge though!
30, June 2011 at 2:34 pm
The digital switchover has meant that I can only get my regional tv programmes on subscription tv. Freeview gives me news about cornwall and devon and not my area of the south west! So this is progress?!
11, February 2013 at 1:06 pm
Hi Tom,
I think we’re starting to lose some local TV news in the Midlands too. I get a lot online now though and the weather forecast emailed to me every day, so I don’t watch so much TV. There is so much crap on, it hardly seems worth it most of the time. I watched a documentary last night about natural selection, that was the best thing I’ve seen for a while.
11, February 2013 at 1:47 pm