How recession-proof are you?

Some of us are of course really struggling in this recession.  When that happens, it is all about survival paying the mortgage or rent and buying food.  If there is no money for anything else you do not get anything else. 

The trouble is, many people have actually been in that position for years without realising it.  In other words, they had less than nothing to start with because they have borrowed more than they earned and were not paying off the debt as a priority, but spending their income on other non-essential things.  Then when someone in the household loses a job it is a disaster, even if there is someone still working.  So this is about how to assess your situation and recession-proof insofar as that is possible, because this affects everyone.

We have been  reviewing our position given the changes and these are the questions we are asking ourselves.

1.       How inflation proof are we?

2.       Are we living on income or capital?

3.       Are we putting some money into savings each month – even if it is a very small amount?

4.       How would we manage if one or both of us lost our work?

5.       How will the proposed changes in our occupational and state pensions affect us in the future?  This is relevant no matter how young you are.

 

1.       How inflation proof are you?

We are fortunate to have a relatively inflation proof lifestyle.  Not having a large income, we also do not spend much money.  That means spending time doing things instead of paying others to do them, which is more inflation proof.  

As the price of goods and services goes up and the risk of unemployment gets higher, the value of doing things yourself also goes up.

So for example economising to reduce expenditure rather than just earning more money makes sense.   The job can disappear in a moment and when no money is coming in, the time spent growing food is worthwhile even if the hourly rate is low.  The lower the expenses the better you survive unemployment and wage cuts.

There are other hidden benefits to things like growing vegetables such as meeting the neighbours whilst out in the garden and being able to cancel the gym membership.

2.       Are you living off income or capital?

Spending everything you earn in wages actually means you are living off capital!  There is nothing there for unexpected expenses so when those occur you need to borrow money.

This is not a time to deplete savings but to increase them whenever possible.  The interest earned on savings has gone down in many cases (unless you have inflation linked savings) which means you need to save harder to gain the same ground.

Here are some useful questions:

Are you saving 20% - or at the very least 10% of everything you earn?  If not you are actually living beyond your means and have no financial cushion if circumstances change or for roof repairs, a new car or other larger expenses.

·         Do you have debt?  If you are working in a well paid job but have debt get rid of it as fast as possible.  Put every spare penny/cent into paying it off.  If the debt agreement does not allow you to pay if off early, put the money into a separate savings account to pay for it later.  Get rid of the most expensive debt first.  Transfer any credit card debt to a 0% deal.  Do NOT use that card for purchases and aim to pay it off before the 0% deal is finished.

Remember – debt can be a disaster if you become unemployed.

·         Insure what you cannot afford to lose – but no more.

In other words, insure your house and your car.  Your health if you live in a country without a National Health Service.  If you have dependents and no income other than your job, look into insuring against you becoming ill or dying so that they will survive without you.

·         If you lose your job, make sure you will not lose your home.  If there are two people in jobs within a household, mortgage protection insurance may only pay up if both people lose their jobs.   Or it may pay for half the cost of the mortgage but not all of it.  Check that the cover has the right balance, so that if the main wage earner is made redundant there will be enough to pay the mortgage and remember there is usually no payment for the first three months.  In other words, the very least there should ever be in the bank is enough to cover three months, mortgage, council/property tax and bills.  Remember you are unlikely to get any state benefits if the other person is still working, mortgage or not, and it is very difficult to borrow money if you do not have a job.

·         Put your savings into tax free cash savings.  This is not the time for individuals to play the stock market.  Remember financial advisers do not make commission out of cash savings such as National Savings and Investments so are unlikely to recommend them or be abreast of them in the same way they are with other investments. 

Use up all the tax free cash savings options available.  In the UK National Savings and Investments Index Linked Savings Certificates are tax free and earn the equivalent to the Retail Price Index in interest, plus a small amount.   That means they are inflation proof.  Check the inflation rate and if it is high (as it is at the time of writing) they are very worthwhile.    You are not paying any commission off what they earn either.

·         Check that your personal pension is in the safest investments possible whilst the stock market is volatile.  You will have to ask the question, it will not happen automatically.   Keep an eye on how the pension is doing and it will do much better.

·         Remember - no one will look after your money as well as you will.  Keep on top of it, move it when interest rates go down and keep putting a little bit into savings each month.

·         Consider all the ways you can reduce out goings and inflation proof your lifestyle for the future.  We installed solar panels which have inflation linked payments for the electricity generated, grow some of our own food, have a wood burning stove and have paid off the mortgage early.  Your house is a liability rather than an investment in most cases, because you cannot sell it and live off the money without becoming homeless.  Make the house as low a liability as possible by moving to a smaller house if you have a large mortgage, doing Bed and Breakfast, getting a lodger or anything else you can think of. 

In other words this is a time to be resourceful, reduce unnecessary spending and put more money into savings.  Develop good habits now and if things do go wrong, it will be much easier to cope.

WHAT A BARGAIN!

If you like to shop, this may be for you.  I have just received £50 worth of Marks & Spencer gift vouchers but I am not going to spend them without doing some forward planning... 

Bargain hunting can be great fun.

It puts a whole new slant on shopping, and in fact on recreation.  We would rather spend time on something that is fun but will make us money or save us money, than on something that is also fun but will cost us money. Because it is soooo satisfying when you uncover a real bargain. 

Seven years ago in January, a friend e mailed me to say that Marks & Spencer had underwear reduced in their sale and her daughter had just got £96 worth of undies for £16. 

If you beome a committed bargain hunter, you will want to plan ahead, and keep a note of what your needs are likely to be for the coming year. 

I did this rigorously when our 3 kids were small and it meant they got to have a lot more than they otherwise would have, on our limited budget.

They were all the same size so we had no hand me downs within the family although we did have a bit of a system with friends of passing on clothes to each others' children.

I kept a book of what things I had been given that were too big for them, such as next year's size school uniforms, and then knew what we needed to buy at a glance and could snap up that bargain with confidence.

Our clothing needs are actually very predictable.  

Our kids would need a minimun of 12 pairs of new socks and underwear each a year, 5 school shirts, 2 school jumpers 2 pairs of school trousers, a school bag and so on.   Add to that another 5 play tee shirts, 2 pairs of play trousers, 2 smart pairs etc.  Once I sat down to think I realised it was really very easy.  The system also meant that everyone always had a smart outfit in their wardrobe that fitted if we got an unexpected invitation.

Once you have the list and you know what you are going to need, just wait and stock up when you see a bargain or until the end of the January or Midusmmer sales.  There is  no need to bother queueing for the expensive bargains on day one of the sales. 

By the time the sales are on, you may have found most of it in the charity shops anyway  but there is always something that has to be bought new, socks and undies being a good example.

Fashion

Fashion may change but there are a surprising number of things that are fashion proof even if you are a fashionable person.  Socks, underwear and nightwear are good examples. Other relatively fashion proof things are school uniforms and tee shirts.  And actually those are all of the things that we will definitely have to replace regularly anyway.

Tee shirts and school stuff do change a bit fashion-wise - for example over the last few years Tee shirts went from longer length to waist length and are now back at longer length again.  Skirt lengths have done the same in reverse and trouser legs have gone wider and then narrower.

However it didn't change every year and if you buy a certain number of plainer shirts, skirts or trousers for everyday wear you can always buy a few more fashionable items with all that money you have saved!  The plainer ones are more fashion proof - it is this year's must have item that is totally out next year, your plain black tee shirt will still be okay.

As you get better at planning and buying in advance when things are cheap,  there are fewer urgent needs, because you have stocked up at a knock down price.

What's more, because you know what you are likely to need for the future, when you do see a bargain you can buy with confidence.   

This principle applies to all things, not just to clothes.  for instance, cans of tomatoes, ink cartridges, copier paper, spare oil filters for the car,,,

And then you begin to find you are getting better off.  This is one of the things that can give you real leverage.

You don't notice the difference at first, and I can remember wondering if it really did work when we started out15 yearsago.  

Then one day I found myself thinking 'how come we always seem to have so much money?!!'  Our income had not changed and we were not big earners but we had savings - money in the bank. In other words we had an emergency fund and that meant the next time there was an unexpected bill we did not have to borrow money. 

This is called 'The Snowball Effect' by Amy Dacyzyn who wrote The Tightwad Gazzette.   this book has been in print for probably 20 years.  It is phenomenol and quite literally saved our bacon.  If you buy two books about simplicity and getting ahead with money, get this one, and Your Money or Your Life 

by Joe Domnguez and Vikki Robbins.

 

The snowball effect works like this: 

• you predicted your needs and bought cheap.
• you therefore spend less money and accumulate savings.
• you don't need to borrow next time there is an unexpected bill.
• you therefore save on loan interest payments and accumulate more savings
• you are able to buy something that enables you to save even more money, such as a wood burning stove to burn free wood or a second hand sewing machine to make your own curtains.

• You make a new friend when you get the free wood from their dead tree.  They get their garden cleared free and don't need to pay for a skip.  You give them some vegetables from your garden to say thanks for the wood.  

• Next time they go fishing they leave you a fish on the door step. It turns out they don't eat fish anyway so from now on you have a regular supply of fish-for-vegetables thus saving you and them money on the grocery bill. 

In the present climate when we are all worried about money to varying extents, a plan like this can give you that emergency fund, or can help keep your head above water if things are bad.  It also gives you a morale boost because when you have no money you have things put by and can 'shop at home' and choose things out of your stock to treat yourself or the kids with.  

The 'mummy shop'

I used to keep a 'mummy shop' of bargains or things I had made.  If the kids did something that was thrifty or helped with a special job (they all helped a bit in the house in an age appropriate way as a matter of course), I would reward them with something from the mummy shop.    They totally loved it and I had fun finding things to put in it.

If you are a tax payer, money saved is worth more than money earned, because you don't pay tax on it.

 

So anyway, when my friend e mailed about that Marks & Spencer underwear sale, I was already poised with a list of our needs for the year.  By the time I actually got to Marks & Spencer the undies had gone down in price even more  – everything was £1! 

I e mailed her back and let her know.  By the time SHE got back there, everything was 50p.  Top quality, lovely stuff that had started out way over our budget.  So when it was 50p we bought a second lot for when the first lot wore out.  A bit of planning has saved a lot of money.  And I actually got a five year supply of undies for about £50.

So you can bet I won't be spending those M&S vouchers before Christmas.

Our kids got really good at spending any vouchers they got too.  They used to ask us if they could keep their Christmas money or vouchers until January.  Then they went shopping in the sales and got a lot more for their money.  Not a bad idea for anyone who gets a voucher this Christmas...

What is Downshifting?

How it All Began..

my name is Janet and I have been meaning to do this for a while.

'Downshifting' is what we call it when you learn how to live on less money without having less fun.
It means getting out of debt, having a more meaningful way of life and living outside the groove.
In other words, thinking what you really want out of life and then setting about getting it.
To us it does not mean moving to a house in the country - bad move this financially speaking. It does not mean depriving ourselves yet it does not mean earning lots of money at the expense of our freedom.
It does mean thinking what we really do want and focusing on how to get it. Not in a frantic dream-and-it-will-happen life coachy sense, though. I am talking about working with what you already have here, to make it work for you instead of the other way around.

Sometimes it is hard, just because being your real self makes you stand out. It makes others curious and they ask you questions. They want some of what you have. (That may, however be mainly because I just cannot resist talking about it - hence this blog... )

So here is some of our story.
We have been downshifting for 15 years now. It has become a way of life, entertainment, making friends and most of all a passion for a life style we would not change.

Downshifting is about choice and getting what you want out of life.
15 years ago we had an average income, a mortgage and some credit card debt. We worked full time yet there was never quite enough money left at the end of the month although we would not have said we were extravagant.

Today we have no mortgage, no debt and work part time. We have just worked it out that we could retire and live off our savings if we really wanted to.

All of that was done on an average or less than average middle class income. We are not in the 'executive' class, and have not had any kind of promoted posts except for long enough to discover we didn't like it. That is not to boast, rather to illustrate that changing what you do and how you think can make a difference.

The most obvious solution if you don't have enough money is to earn more. And yet it seems that if people do earn more, somehow their expenses go up and they still don't have quite enough. Whatever their income level research shows that they still think life would get better if they had about 15-30% more money. Research also shows that once we have about £15,000 (or the equivalent in your currency if you live elsewhere) per person per year to live on, more money does not make us happier. In other words it is enough. Interestingly this figure does not go up in line with inflation. That is because inflation figures include consumer goods, buying a bigger house etc.

• As downshifters here is what inflation means to us: We already have a house and do not need a bigger one. (In fact as you will see on this blog in the future, once we had de-cluttered we got a smaller house because we didn't need to store all that stuff) . Therefore rising house prices don't concern us.
• We paid our mortgage off 12 years early so rising interest rates do not increase our outgoings, only our savings.
• Rising prices of goods do not generally affect us. the price of good plain food that you cook yourself has actually gone down over the years. When Bernadine Lawrence wrote her book 'How to Feed Your Family on £5 a day' in 1978,(whilst living on State benefits with 4 kids) bread, milk, most vegetables, fruit, pulses and meat were more expensive than they are today. Watercress was cheaper because you could buy in by the bunch instead of ready washed in a supermarket bag.
  Almost everything else costs less.
• As we buy almost all consumer goods second hand, the increase in the price of new ones does not affect us. the second hand price has not changed much over the years. Even the price of new ones does not change much if you stick to the plain one rather than the new-with-extra-features one. We bought what was effectively the same washing machine twice at 10 year intervals and it cost £10 less for the replacement.
• Many consumer goods such as TV's fridges etc can actually be got down the car boot sale or for free on 'freeble' which has online groups around the UK to re-distribute unwanted goods. If people buy the newest model or get one that matches their new kitchen they often just get rid of the old one.
• Inflation does put the Council Tax up. Income Tax or your equivalent Tax on earned income is a percentage. Council Tax which we pay on our property for local services is not and just goes up as much as the Council thinks it should so far as I can see. the council tax we pay today (£141 per month) is more than I earned per month in 1978 (£132).
• Fuel bills, household and for vehicles affect us. You can combat that to some extent by energy saving measures but not completely.
• If inflation goes down our cash savings earn less interest. However as our lifestyle is mainly inflation proof, this does not matter as much as it seems, and looking after money to get the best rates available makes a big difference.

The real secret of getting ahead with money is not how much you earn but how you spend it. We now earn a lot less than we used to but have a lot more money to spare!

So how much did our Christmas dinner cost? about 50p. but get this: we had pheasant that was a gift from a friend and sat outside round a roaring fire, surrounded by 6 inches of snow. (That had not been the plan, but being snowed in we could not visit my sister as intended.) And of course the pheasant went on to be pheasant and butternut squash curry the following day and then stock for soup.

That fire was so warm I sat out there for hours knitting...(hot water bottle covers seeing as you ask.)

And how much did our new year's eve dinner cost? about 70p for 4 of us. We had king prawn and chicken paella. Thanks, Asda for 5 packets of king prawns and one packet of chicken reduced to 5p each.

So read on and see how we got out of debt and ended up with savings, no mortgage, a great social life and able to work part time.

And this blog will not all be about money.

If you are broke and cannot see a way out, there is hope but you have to put the work in.