Money Makes The World Go Round

Mick found a five pound note last week. He was taking Archie for his last walk of the day just before bedtime when he saw it lying there on the pavement. It reminds me of the time, many years ago now, when he came into the house and told me he'd found a five pound note on the drive. It was half an hour later, when looking for some money he had in his pocket, that he realised he was a fiver down. The five pound note he'd picked up on the drive was his own!

Whenever I find any money in the street it always makes me wonder who dropped it. Was it a child who has lost their pocket money, or an elderly person who has lost part of their pension. Will someone have to go without something now because losing that money means they can't afford to buy it.

How are you managing your finances in lockdown? We're very lucky, Mick is able to work from home so he's still been earning his normal salary but I know many people are having to take wage cuts, or worse still, have lost their job.

Are you finding that you're spending more or less in lockdown? These days, many people shop around for the best prices but I suppose lockdown is preventing that somewhat. People don't want to be going in lots of different shops for their groceries, they want to be in and out of that one supermarket in the shortest time possible. The one way systems in the shops also make it difficult to head in different directions once you're inside the shop too, so you can't backtrack to an item once you realise it's a better offer than something that's ahead of you. I would have thought that having Mick at home all day, we'd spend more on food but in actual fact we seem to be spending less. I think that's because we're not doing all those top up shops during the week when 'extras' seem to jump into the basket.

Another area where we're spending less is petrol, though it's not actually saving us any money as Mick can claim mileage for petrol he uses for work. Usually, he drives an average of eight hundred miles each week when he's at work, but he claims the amount that costs back. At the moment he's taking Eleanor to work and picking her up too every day so that she doesn't have to use public transport, it's ten miles each way so that's forty miles a day, and he drives to my dad's too, so he's still using the car and I'd say it's costing us about the same as it usually would.

You would think that the amount of gas and electricity we're using at the moment with Mick being at home would increase, but it's hard to work out how much extra that is. We change our supplier regularly to ensure we're on the best deal and the heating has been turned off for much of the time during lockdown as we've had such lovely weather.

One thing that's definitely gone up is the coffee bill. We have a Tassimo coffee machine, it's Mick's, there's only him in our house who drinks coffee. He usually has one cup before work each day, but being at home, he's helping himself to numerous cups each day, and those pods aren't cheap!

How about you? Which areas are you spending more on and where are you making savings? Have you realised that a change you've made during lockdown is saving you money and therefore, it's something you'll continue to do in the future? I'd love to know.