Look after the pennies

My late nan was renowned for her thrift, in fact it's a running joke within my family that I inherited my frugal ways from her.
She was far from mean - as a child I remember her filling her coat pockets with wrapped boiled sweets and handing them out to children playing in the street.
But like many who experienced the hardship of the war years, she was careful with her cash and found ever more inventive ways to stretch her money further.
She wasn't short of a bob of two but, particularly in her later years, it became almost a game for her to spend as little as possible. It was her way of life.
She was the original jumble sale queen, and often took me along on her epic bargain-hunting adventures. I must have been a babe-in-arms the first time we joined forces to liberate a dolly-in-distress from a charity bazaar.
I have so much more to say about nan and jumble sales in future posts. I mention her now because I promised to show you how to work out where your pennies are disappearing off to.
Nan had a saying that has stayed with me over the years: 'Look after the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves'. To me, that is at the very heart of frugality.
If you're reading this blog then it's a fairly safe bet that you've looked at your incomings and outgoings and tried to find ways to expand one and shrink the other.
It's probably another safe bet that you've used a monthly template to do that - using your post-tax salary, fuel bills, mortgage payment, council tax etc.
While it's an unquestionably valuable financial exercise, it can also be a disheartening one. When you look at your finances in such general terms it can be hard to see where savings can be made. Your family need to eat, so you can't cut back on the food budget. Right? You need to heat and light the home, so you can't cut back on the enegy budget. Right?
For me, the answer is to look at your finances in much closer detail. As my nan would have said, you need to start looking after your pennies.
So here's your homework. For the next week I want you to write down every single penny that you spend and I mean every penny, whether it be cash, cheque, debit card, credit card, paypal, whatever. I even want you to include the 20p a time drinks from the vending machine at work, coppers you drop into charity collection boxes, charges for carrier bags at discount supermarkets etc right up to more substantial purchases.
In an ideal world, you should keep the spending diary going for a full month, to give a fuller picture of your typical spending habits. I'll leave that up to you.
If you have a partner or other adults in your home then perhaps you might like to involve them too. Or perhaps your children could put their maths skills to the test with the challenge.
It might seem a bit of a bind, but it's a method that's worked for me over the years. No, I haven't written down everything I've spent over the decades, but I've used this technique at particular points in my life when I've needed to pare down my outgoings. I did it for the first time at university, when I was living on a tiny grant (yes, they did exist back then) and have called on it again and again over the years.
You might find it helps to keep a piece of paper and a pen in your pocket, so that you can jot things down as you go along.
Don't try to change your spending habts at this point, that will hopefully come when you've had the opportunity to review your spending diary. At the moment we're simply trying to pinpoint what you spend, when and on what.

The money diet

The beginning is generally the best place to start, so please bear with me if it seems like I'm stating the blindingly obvious in this post.
If you want to lose weight then you need to change your diet, do more physical activity or, if you want to achieve results as quickly as possible, combine the two.
Similarly if you want to improve your financial situation then you need to cut back on what you spend, generate more income or, if you want to achieve results as quickly as possible, combine the two.
Forgive me for stretching the analogy to breaking point here, but if you jog for an hour every day but then eat a takeaway and a family-sized sherry trifle you're more likely to gain inches than lose them.
Go on a spending spree on payday and you're effectively running around the block then tucking into a box of doughnuts.
For many of us, spending money has just as many emotional connotations as eating food. We treat ourselves with a purchase if we've done well and comfort ourselves with one if things haven't gone to plan. We spend money on our family and friends to show we love them and regularly spend our hard earned cash out of guilt, duty or habit.
There are so many ways to cut back on the money you spend, and just as many to generate extra household income.
But before we get started on that I think it's important to take a long, hard look at how you spend the money you currently have coming in, and what your life priorities are. Only by doing that will you be able to figure out what you can cut back on, and what you can perhaps lose altogether.
When I first started on my mortgage challenge I decided to cut every area of expenditure back to the bone, apart from the cost of socialising with friends and family (as I knew I'd still need plenty of fun and didn't want to lose people from my life).
At that time I was single and didn't have children, so I only had myself to feed and please. Nowadays my life priorities would be different, and no doubt they will differ for each and every person reading this.
It may be that it doesn't suit you to do this as radically as me, but as long as you're prepared to ditch a few doughnuts and go for a jog now and then I believe I can help your finances move in the right direction.
In my next post I'm going to explain how you can work out exactly where your pennies are disappearing to.

In the beginning...

Welcome to my new blog, Frugal&Fabulous, which I plan to use to share financial and money saving tips. At the age of 30 I set myself the challenge of paying off my mortgage by my mid-30s. I've achieved it, and I'd like to help other people do the same. If I can do it then you can too. I don't want to gloat, I just feel I have valuable advice to offer. Paying off your mortgage is like taking a millstone from around your neck, like buying your freedom from wage slavery. Of course there will always be other bills to pay, but it's a leap down the path towards a better work/life balance. I'm not going to pretend it's an easy process, unless you get a winning Lotto ticket, but the end result is worth the sacrifices en route. Plus, once you get into the swing of it, finding inventive ways to save money and boost your income can be fabulous fun.