I have a dear friend who I have known since school. She is funny, caring, tough and always the life of any party.

She also never has any money, and is perpetually in debt.

Here’s why.

She is a Dog Owner

I have been down the pet path myself in the past with cats.

While having a pet is a great boost in certain areas of life, they can be a real big money drain. Food, vets, insurance, initial purchasing, sundry items such as carriers, leads, clothes etc. etc. Year on year these prices just go up and up and sap the life out of your finances.

My mother is in a similar situation – with 3 cats with big appetites (and of course, they will only eat premium food), she spends more on them per month than she does on the adults in the house.

My friend has a rather large dog, that costs rather a large sum to feed and insure. To add insult to financial injury, due to the times she works (she is an A&E doctor), she has to pay for someone to come and walk it at least once every day as well.

I hazard a guess that in total she spends over £4,000 annually keeping her four-legged friend.

She Likes Expensive Holidays

Everyone needs to get away for a while to relax and recharge, but it does not need to be to expensive destinations year in year out. For the last 4 years running she has flown to Las Vegas which is expensive enough, but to compound the issue she then spent 2 weeks gambling whilst there (and lost overall, naturally).

I estimate she spends £2,500 a year on each holiday.

She Only Buys Premium Food

If it is not from Waitrose or Marks & Spencer, she doesn’t eat it. For those of you not in the UK, they are the two more ‘upmarket’ supermarkets that cater for the more well-to-do in society (or those who wish to be associated with same). An average microwave meal from either will set you back approximately £5, where the same could be purchased in Tesco for £1.50 or so, or even half of that if you are not averse to buying from the Value range. In other words, these stores are 6 times more expensive for no good reason other than buying into the brand ethos.

As an experiment at the beginning of the year just before I found my frugal self, I shopped exclusively in both stores just as she does for a whole month. I have just dug out my bank statements and added up each visit for the month.

I am shocked.

My food bill rocketed from an average of £97 to £339!

Over £4,000 a year just on food to feed one person. Nearly 3 and a half times my spend then, or nearly 7 times what I spend now.

She Drives a Lexus SUV

When she bought her four-legged friend, she felt she needed to upgrade her car to not only be able to carry the thing in comfort, but also project a more professional persona in line with her vocation.

She splashed out on a brand new 4×4 – on finance – to do this. Couple the interest payments and horrific mile per gallon calculations for the vehicle concerned, I suspect Sarah is sinking an additional £7,000 a year here compared to if she had just kept her perfectly suitable and fully owned, cheaper to insure, cheaper to run, cheaper to service previous vehicle.

She Carries a Credit Card Balance

You may wonder how I know this, but let’s just say it is amazing what friends will disclose after a few drinks. My attempts thus far to bring her round to financial sense have failed, despite probing questions and long discussions.

Her current credit card balance is around £2,000 at 19.9%. She always pays the minimum amount and by my calculation will be free of this debt around 2036 having paid £3,240 in interest for having done so. If we include the accrued interest, let’s say keeping this revolving balance costs her £1,000 a year.

She Smokes 20-a-day

My thoughts on smoking aside, a packet of her cigarettes currently costs £6.04 for a packet of 20. If she buys a packet every single day as her habit demands, this adds up to £2,204 a year.

She Cannot Resist Clothes Shopping

Remember that carried credit card balance? The majority of it is from her regular romps up to London for clothes shopping. She thinks nothing of spending the entire day traipsing up and down Oxford Street going in all the fancy designer clothes boutiques and coming out with armfuls at a time.

Wow.

Every year, adjusting for the fact she needs to buy some kind of food, my friend is spending £16,000 a year either servicing habits, keeping a companion or trying to inflate her lifestyle.  If instead of spending this she saved it at 4% for 25 years (the amount of time until she will theoretically retire) the effects of compounding would result in her having a retirement fund of her own – excluding the one she pays into with our employer – of – wait for it.

Wait for it.

£731,211.33!

Very nearly three quarters of a million pounds.

Do you have any friends you’d like to hit with a financial clue-stick?

• MBNA Launch Best Credit Card Balance Transfer Deal Ever
• My Financial Meltdown: Part 4
• The Credit Crunch Has Positives
• Cash ISAs vs. Regular Savings Accounts
• Beware The Balance Transfer Cheque

Every Friday I publish “Frugal Friday!”, an open-ended series with some of the simple and best ways to really save you money both now and in the future.

This week I’m focusing on short, sharp tips that could save you hundreds of pounds over the course of a year while food shopping.

Never Shop on an Empty Stomach

You know the drill. It’s early evening, you are tired from work, starving hungry and find no food in the house. By some miracle you resist the temptation to ring the local Indian delivery folks, and instead shuffle back in your car to visit your local supermarket. You have nothing in mind particularly beyond getting home again, and as a result end up massively overspending. Your hunger did your shopping, rather than any conscious plan you may have had.

Eat before you go shopping. If you are not hungry when you go, then tantalising offers that are not already on your shopping list will likely be easily ignored. Which neatly brings me to my next point…

Write a List

Going shopping without a list is a disaster waiting to happen. You buy loads of things you don’t need, forget half the stuff you do, and get loads of “extras” on the side.

To combat this, work out a meal plan for the week ahead and everything you’ll need to buy to make it happen. If you are going to do some batch cooking in the week, see what you already have in the store cupboards before adding them to the list.

If it isn’t on the list – don’t buy it!

And leave the pen at home… adding it to the list afterwards is cheating.

Calculate a Budget

Much like having a list is important for not over-spending, so is having an idea of where ‘overspending’ would be in the first place. Everyone will have their own idea for a budget, but £50 per person per month is not unreasonable to aim for if you have the time to batch cook. That is my own personal food budget, and mostly, I manage to achieve that these days.

Slow Down & Scan

The items on the shelves at eye-level are the most profitable products. You see a jar of pasta sauce the moment you walk into the aisle and grab it, throw it in your basket and zoom off to the next item in the list.

You just fell for the oldest marketing trick in the book. Next time slow down and study the prices. Scan the entire shelf from top to bottom and look at the cost per unit calculations most supermarkets provide in the super-small-print on the shelf labels. If you take a moment to compare prices you can save upwards of 100% on the purchase price of some items.

Try Downshifting

Downshifting isn’t about suffering a cheaper product, it is about finding a cheaper product where you cannot honestly tell the difference between it and a more expensive brand. If you have a habit of always buying “Finest” or “Taste The Difference” or some other premium product, try a brand name instead. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, try stores-own. You’ll often save pounds per product doing this and likely won’t notice a shred of difference when cooked.

Some premium brands and stores-own are even made in the same factory. The only difference is the packaging and the price.

Shop at Reduction Hour

My father makes a killing doing this. He very rarely goes shopping before 8pm, which is precisely when our local Tesco begins doing the final knock-downs on things that are going out of date the next day or so. It is not uncommon for him to come home with bagfuls of items at 10p here, 20p there where the original cost would have been pounds here and pounds there instead.

Anything that will not be eaten or turned into a batched meal gets frozen until it is needed and remains just as good and just as flavoursome as the full priced equivalent.

Never Turn Down ‘Free’

Quite regularly my mother will include me in meals she makes for herself, or my father will invite me out to lunch to catch up. Never turn down these opportunities, as it’s a great way to spend extra time with friends and family, and shave costs from your food bill as well.

Happy Friday, and Happy (Cheaper) Shopping!

• Frugal Friday! 20 Ways to Cut Your Annual Vehicle Costs
• Frugal Friday! 8 Christmas Gift Ideas
• Dig Yourself Out of Debt: Cleaning Up
• Frugal Friday! Cutting Electricity Bills
• A Fundamental Question - Answered?

One of the ways I enjoy saving money (for paying off debt quicker, of course) is to batch cook. The average UK household – if the people I watch in Tesco are anything to go by – seems to live on prepacked microwave meals, pizza and takeaways.

If you enjoy cooking though there’s a much cheaper alternative.

Cooking in Batch

This sounds complicated but is actually really easy to do. All it involves is cooking more than you plan to eat right now, portioning out the remainder and either putting it in the fridge, freezing it, or a combination of the two. Batch cook several meals over the course of a week and before you know it you have a fab selection of home made food in the freezer that can be taken out at a moment’s notice and popped in the microwave.

Good steaming hot home made food in 5 minutes flat. Because it’s frozen you can even take it to work for lunch providing you have a microwave available.

A Quick Example

I love Chinese takeaway, but I really dislike paying for it. So as I was going out anyway, I combined journeys and diverted to Tesco before coming home. Scouring the reduced areas (I was going to cook when I got home), I managed to pick up:

• A family-sized packet of ready cut Chinese vegetables (70p down from £1.50),
• 2 cooked meat-counter hot & spicy sausages (50p down from £1.85),
• A bag of fresh egg noodles expiring today (20p down from £1),
• 3 giant red onions (30p down from £1.05),
• 3 giant mild red chillies (20p down from £1),
• A clove of garlic (full price at 30p),
• A packet of sweet sticky chilli stir-fry sauce (full price at £1)

Method

I already had the olive oil to fry off of the onion so that was done first. After softening and turning a nice golden brown, I sprinkled some sugar in to caramelise, and then added the giant packet of vegetables. After gently frying it down for about 10 minutes I added the sauce, chillies and noodles. Mixed well, and divided equally into some snap-shut plastic containers – the ones your Chinese delivery normally arrives in!

Tip: Save these plastic containers – they fit together to take up next to no space anyway and are great for doing this with. Wash them out, and store dry. They are reusable, microwave and dishwasher safe.

Calculate The Saving

After cooking and portioning out, I’d managed to feed myself for lunch yesterday, and I also made up 5 containers for freezing.

If I’d not purchased the discounted items, then the total meal cost would have come to £7.70 which made each meal £1.28. This is still very cheap for a Chinese meal, but being frugal, I am not ashamed to shop in the knock-down sections first. The total cost of the items I bought was £3.20 making each portion just 53p – over two and a half times cheaper!

Now the kicker: I always shop in Tesco, and where possible, get my fuel there as well. The end result is lots of Tesco ClubCard points and vouchers. I actually cashed in a £2 voucher for  this shop, so I only really spent £1.20, making each dish just 20p.

Need Inspiration?

There’s no shortage of recipe repositories online, but if you want ones with frugal wholesome living in mind, check out this amazing list of ideas from the dedicated people over at the MSE forums.

If you find yourself using the excuse “I don’t have the time / energy to cook” when you get home from work, then batch cooking is a great way not to just save money but keep your pennies to yourself and save yourself time later on in the week as well.

Have you tried batch cooking before?

p.s. Frugal Friday is published every Friday and includes a frugal tip for money saving. To see every Frugal Friday post, click ‘Frugal Friday’ under Categories to the right.

• The Experian Credit Score Con
• Frugal Friday! 5 Easy Ways to Spend Less
• Petrol Hedging - Update
• Frugal Friday! 20 Ways to Cut Your Annual Vehicle Costs
• My Adult Life in Graphs