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.

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GT5:Prologue for £17.27 using Quidco

I had to purchase Gran Turismo 5: Prologue for my PS3 and having searched online to find the lowest prices I also checked Quidco for cashback offers.

I discovered that Play.com were offering 4% cashback so I went with them as they also had the lowest price. Ok so I didn’t have to purchase this game but I would have done anyway so at least this way I saved myself 72p.

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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?

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Easter Egg Hunt

It wouldn’t be Easter without an Easter Egg, or at least it wouldn’t be for me anyway. The problem is they are very expensive for what you get with many being over 5 times more expensive than the equivalent amount of chocolate being bought in bar form.

Also I have expensive taste so prefer the ‘premium’ eggs which cost considerably more than some of the cheaper alternatives available. Unable to totally resist the urge to buy an Easter Egg this year I did however hold out until today which meant I could buy the egg I wanted for only £1.24, reduced down in price from £4.99. So I got exactly what I wanted but for £3.75 less than what I would usually have spent.