My holiday plans take a £’ing
I’ll shortly be off to Australia on holiday and today had to buy my foreign currency. Having already learnt the lesson of how costly this can be if you leave it to the last minute and have to buy at the airport I now make sure I buy in advance online.
When I first started planning this trip 6 months ago £1 bought $2.5AUD but as you have probably seen recently the pound has weakened substantially. This now means that I’ll get closer to $2.1AUD for each pound spent so everything out there is now 19% more expensive to me than it would have been. To put that in to context I estimate that my holiday will now be £350 more expensive just because of the weak pound and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.
My Budget Review Q1 2008
As today marks the start of the new tax year I thought it would be appropriate to review my spending for the first 3 months of this calendar year.
How I am fighting inflation
Regular readers of my blog will be used to me complaining about inflationary increases to my regular expenditure whether it be utility bills, cost of petrol or the rising price of food. I devised a tight budget at the start of the year based on my spending during the previous year so I need to find cost savings equivalent to any price rises (i.e. inflation). So what have I done so far?
New Year - New Budget
A new year brings a new opportunity to budget and that’s just what I have been doing. This year it’s been easier for me to set a budget as I tracked my spending in 2007 against the budget I had set at the beginning of the year so I had a good baseline to start from. However it looks like inflation is going to drive many of my costs up in 2008 adding a lot of uncertainty into my figures.