Wednesday 13 February 2008

Slow To Save Money

I have been at my current job in Surrey since September and have been tooing and froing to London by train, wincing as it was costing me almost half my spending money for the pleasure. In January the train companies blessed us all with their annual fare increase and I also discovered that the parking changes at my local station car park increased to bring it inline with the charges at other stations in the area. An increase of 230% if I use the car park for the day and a fare increase of about 5%.
When I read books or articles on reducing debt I would generally skip the bits relating to reducing your gas bill or your electicity bill because they just don't relate to me. And as for reducing my mortgage bill, well one day I do plan to get excited about that. But I was missing the whole point about reducing costs and I wasn't looking passed the examples, to what I could be and should be reducing costs in.
So now I am the proud owner of a Network Railcard which costs only £20.00 per year but will pay for it's self by the end of the month and will save me £££ for the rest of the year. I am a little slow and when I think of the money I could have saved - well I could spit tacs.
Still a little lesson learned, don't ignore something because it doesn't appear to relate to your situation. Ask yourself what is this information trying to help be do ultimately? And then apply that fact to your problem.

2 comments:

Ugly Debty said...

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've done something that has cost me money, purely because I didnt "look into it" or "read the fine print". I take my time now, I dont impulsively buy and I read the fine print on anything so that I can see what I'm getting into.

LisaClark said...

Amen to that - we'd all be rich if we really took stock before we spent any money.