Are you paying for your neighbours electricity?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been focusing on understanding my electricity consumption, with my post about how much it costs to run a freezer being one of the most read posts on MillionaireAdventure. A couple of months ago I started taking daily meter readings to see how much electricity I used and noticed something very odd. Bizarrely on Sundays and Wednesdays my electricity consumption doubled.

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5% bonus from GreasyPalm for Amazon vouchers

Did you know GreasyPalm can pay your cashback in Amazon vouchers, and not only that but they’ll give you a 5% bonus for opting for this method of payment?

This bonus meant I earned an extra £2.15 on my recent cashback payment of £42.94 which included £15 betting cashback from back in March last year and the first £20 of what will hopefully be £50 cashback in total from December.

It also included £7.94 of cashback that I had earned through the GreasyPalm Rebate Catcher, basically a program that you install in Internet Explorer which automatically credits you with cashback when you shop online from any on their partners.

Are you partaking in more homedulgence?

I love the fact that this recession has led to the media creating a whole new vocabulary so that they can sensationalise economic news. If there was a prize on offer for newcomer of the year it would surely go to ‘credit crunch’ which is now so widely used, it’s hard to imagine a time when it did not exist.

But by personal favourite right now has to be ‘homedulgence’ which can be used to describe the growing trend for consumers looking for cheaper ways to maintain the good life they have become accustomed by switching to home-based indulgences, such as cocktail parties and lavish dinners (recently cited by MarketingWeek).

So do you think you are partaking in more homedulgence during this recession? There is certainly evidence to suggest people are as sales of takeaways are soaring with Dominos Pizza announcing a 25% increase in sales over the last couple of months.

The costs of being half sized

One of the downsides of losing weight recently has been the amount I have had to spend on downsizing my wardrobe. Now that my weight has finally stabilised I have found myself in the unfortunate position of being half sized, not in the dwarf sense, but as a size 14 and a half collar and a size 7 1/2 foot.

Whilst people don’t call me names in the street I am however excluded from the majority of high street stores who either simply do not sell these half sizes or rarely have them in stock. So whilst others were over indulging in the post Christmas sales my search for a new pair of shoes was hampered by the lack of availability of anything in my size.

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Snow Business this week

Not content with officially going into recession last week, the UK has gone one better this week and shut up shop altogether as a bit of snow has brought the UK to a grinding halt. Southern England had the worst snow it has seen for 18 years, causing all London buses to be pulled from service on Monday and repeatedly closing the runways at Heathrow Airport.

An estimated 20% of the UK workforce took Monday as a ‘snow day’ and in some parts of the country the whole week has been a complete write off. The Federation of Small Businesses has put the cost to the UK economy at £1.2bn a day which it can ill afford given the current state of the economy. The snow has however distracted the media from reporting the gloom and doom of the economy, with the news of another historic cut in interest rates reduced to a mere tag line at the end of the news bulletins.

As the snow begins to thaw, could this also coincide with the start of an economic recovery?