Budgeting during the 'credit crunch'

Lucy1982_2

CCCS_Matthew wrote: »

Hi Lucy,

You seem to budgeting quite a lot for car maintenance. Is it a particularly old car? At the moment you are putting aside £1200 a year. Do you think you could take some money out of that and put it into your petrol costs?

CCCS Matthew

I could, but everything comes out of this MOT, Service, Car Tax. I intend to get the savings to £600 and cut this back to £50 a month.

I had a scare in Feb when my car belt went... I only just got enough money together as Mum offered to pay for half.

So I have a thing about this. But it should only be at that level for another few month (hopefully!)

tsharp

My AA renewal was going to be £78ish, but I called them and said I was going to leave (and then promptly reapply via rpoints as a new customer and get the £42 deal with cashback) - but they just dropped the price to £42 anyway!

Try that sort of thing when renewing.

Lucy1982_2

I did that with RAC last year... 'I can get the same cover with AA for x amount, what will you do' and the matched it!

Saves much hassle.

I will try it again this year.

Nala

And I LOVE 3 for 2!! Oh and Boots points nearly £20 there as well.

Sign up to do surveys for www.valuedopinions.co.uk - I get Boots vouchers from them and they seem to add up pretty quickly

Lucy1982_2

I'll have a look. I am already with pigsback, Lightspeed and you gov although I never seem to get paid ones from You Gov.

I figured I would try to get as many vouchers for Christmas presents as I can, either as gifts themselves or to buy gifts with!

tsharp

I'm currently using all the amazon vouchers from surveys to pay for my Xbox 360 i intend to get later in the year, I'm up to £60 and have only been doing this for the last couple of weeks! That's about 30% of the way there already!

Nala

I find YouGov a load of pants - been with them for a year, they surveys take ages to fill in, up to £6.50 and they don't pay you until you hit £50 grrrr Hope it works better for you!

Lucy1982_2

It doesn't look like it's going to.

Lightspeed is ok, but surveys have been a bit thin on the ground recently. But every little bit helps right?

And I just want to make life a little easier for myself.

redsquirrel80

Hi Lucy, I know where you're coming from, was just thinking earlier that it would be nice to not have to budget like mad and do all these extra bits and pieces just to get through the month and do things I want to, I'm finding it particularly hard to keep food budget down.

I would highly recommend the £10 a day challenge for ideas and motivation, even if you don't want to try for the full amount, there are quite a few people aiming for £5 a day. I've found it's kept me motivated to do things like surveys, which don't seem to bring in much but seem worthwhile when you see your total going up!

floss2

Re your RAC - does your mum shop at Tesco? You can use deals for RAC membership - full membership for me & DF cost us 1/4 of the actual cost