Tired and Skint

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  • My 10X Goals

    10X goals. You may have heard the term 10X before. I first heard it from Grant Cardone and since then I’ve heard it used in many different contexts and by many different people and I can only come to the conclusion that it’s meaning is different to everyone.

    For me, it’s means things that can literally change my life, things that aren’t necessarily tangible but have a profound impact. Some are tangible, think 10x income.

    They need to be big enough that they seem impossible in your current situation but also a little possible. My income is around £1800 net per month, my goal is to earn £20k per month. Seems impossible but it’s not. Now obviously it’s not going to happen to me tomorrow but think, CEO’s, VP’s, business owners, professional athletes. Almost all of them earn £20k+ a month. £20m a month, now that’s ridiculous (and whilst still not impossible, I’d have to own Amazon to earn that).

    The non tangible things, having a positive impact on my community, freeing up time, creating deeper connections. Much harder to put a number on, I can’t measure a deeper connection with a number. I can however, benefit from better relationships, connections and communication but how much by?

    The key for me is to set goals that seem almost impossible to achieve from my current baseline but by breaking them into manageable chunks (seasons), I might just be able to do it. It’ll be hard work but worth it in the end, so without further ado, here are my goals.

    10x Goals (to achieve in 3 years from 10 December 2025):

    Financial:

    • £20k per month income
    • 10 houses
    • £250k nest egg

    Personal:

    • Freedom to work from wherever
    • More time
    • Stress free (or at least only have stress I want)

    Relationships:

    • Ability to drop anything for them
    • Stability
    • Peace

    Community:

    • Help other achieve more

    As you can see from my list, I’ve broken them down into 4 categories. 3 of them I feel will have the biggest impact on my life and the 4th one is to give back. I only have 10 goals for now and that’s intentional, any more than that and it would be overwhelming. I have loftier goals for the future beyond these 3 years but everything needs to be done in seasons at least.

    I’ll post the seasons here as and when they are created.

    Season 1: 10 December – 10 March

  • Why am I going to change my life.

    In this post, I want to cover why and how I am going to change my life. My life is great in places and dire in others. I’m going to change the bad things, improve the good things and cut the fat.

    My past choices and current actions have led me to where I am in my life and if I’m not careful will define me. On my current trajectory, I believe that my future life with look like this:

    • Living pay cheque to pay cheque.
    • Constant stress and pressure.
    • Lack of purpose.
    • Lack of time.
    • Failing relationships.

    Obviously, it doesn’t sound great and if someone gave you a choice to live that future or a better, more prosperous future, I’d bet you pick the latter. Which is why things need to change.

    I’m having to reframe my mindset, not necessarily into a more positive one (I like to think I’m fairly positive already) but into a more future me mindset. I’ll touch on this more in another post but a brief summary below:

    My actions need to be driven from my future life and not my present life trying to define my future. I have a goal to earn £3k per month, net income into my bank. The present mindset is to try and earn that money from where I currently am. The future mindset is change my circumstances to get there, to cut the fat.

    A simple example – I spent 1 hour and 33 minutes yesterday doing nothing useful. Just scrolling and randomly checking emails, making a cup of tea and just floating around with no purpose. I could have earned £15 driving for deliveroo in that time or £15 training AI. It’s not much but it’s a start.

    So how do I change my life driven by the future me?

    The first thing is to set my future goals, I have 10 goals for the future (3 years from now). I’ve split them into 90 days chunks which I call “seasons”. I have 12 seasons to achieve my goals. My goals are lofty and on paper from where I am now, unachievable and almost laughable but to me that’s a good thing. By splitting them into 90 day seasons and much smaller objectives, it becomes more achievable and more appealing. My 10X 3 year goals can be found Here. On that page you can find links to each of my 90 day seasons as they are uploaded but I want to leave you with one goal as an example.

    Earn £20k a month net income. Hahaha. For context, I’m lucky if I get £1800 a month net. So as you can see unachievable, laughable, unrealistic. Or is it? My first 90 day season is to earn £3k per month net. I’m already over halfway there. £1200 to go.

    I can break it down in so many different ways to get to that figure.

    • Earn £100 a day overall
    • Earn £40 a day extra
    • Sell things on eBay/vinted
    • Deliveroo/Uber Eats
    • Second job
    • Ask for a pay raise
    • Opt out of workplace pension (£15 per week) please don’t do this.
    • Train AI
    • Surveys
    • Matched Betting

    So on and so forth, the point is that there are loads of ways to earn a bit more, just a bit of creativity and thinking outside the box.

    The main differentiator for me will be trimming that fat, the 1 hour and 33 minutes yesterday doing nothing, needs to be converted into doing something productive.

    7.5 hours a week (Monday to Friday) over 4 weeks is 30 hours. 30 hours at £15 an hour is £450 and that’s without optimising anything.

  • Batch cooking – is it worth it?

    Absolutely. Batch cooking is 100% worth it. It gives you a meal plan, a shopping list, a food budget and so much more.

    Just last night, I made myself my lunch for the next 4 days, it took me 90 minutes and to be honest most of it was just sat around waiting for it to cook.

    So how does it work?

    Essentially, batch cooking is simply just making more food, a big batch that you then split into smaller batches. You can freeze most things, you can take some to work for your lunch and you can eat it that night. In doing this you can turn one cooking effort into 2, 3 or even 4 meals, often at a lower cost than it would be if you cooked the meal on 4 separate occasions.

    How much can you save?

    In reality not much to start with, in fact it almost feels more expensive to start with. Let’s take for example a meal that feeds four people costs £7.50, you’re going to scale that up into a bigger batch, double it and that’s £15. Scale a meal from 4 to 16 portions and suddenly that one meal for 4 goes up to £30 (£7.50 x 4). However, you’re now able to take advantage of scale and the discount that it can provide.

    At the time of writing this, Sainsbury’s 5% Beef Mince was priced as follows:

    • 250g – £3.00 (£12/kg)
    • 500g – £5.00 (£10/kg)
    • 750g – £7.25 (£9.67/kg)
    • 1000g – £9.25 (£9.25/kg)

    A generic Lasagne recipe for 4 people calls for 500g mince so applying that logic to a recipe for 16 people you would need 2kg and using the above pricing it would cost £18.50 for two packs of 1kg beef mince versus £20 for 4 500g packets. A saving of £1.50 on one ingredient.

    So back to the point, there’s more money leaving your pocket short term but long term, you’re keeping more of your money.

    £1.50 isn’t worth the effort – or is it?

    I don’t want you to get hung up on this point but what I will say is that in the example above that’s just one ingredient. I can’t think of any meal that is one ingredient alone, not even chips (unless you want really really badly cooked soggy chips in an air fryer because you’ve tried to prove me wrong). Generally speaking most meals have 4 ingredients or more and you can save on each ingredient by bulk buying. I’ve gone off track a little and now I’m getting hung up on this point.

    The real saving is time. By batch cooking you can save yourself at least one cooking session a week. That Lasagne I keep referring to, you cook it once and you can eat it once a week for the next month and in reality you’re just reheating it (it will need freezing if not eaten within 3 days of originally batch cooking it). Let’s just say, you save yourself 1 hour a week by not having to cook a meal from scratch, over the course of a year that’s 52 hours you’ve given back to yourself.

    The saving people never realise: Takeaways/Eating out

    My favourite part of batch cooking that hardly anyone realises and possibly the biggest saving of all is that by having a pre made meal ready in the house (even if it’s frozen) means that you can avoid a takeaway. Now I’m not saying takeaways and treating yourself is bad but what I am saying is that if you can’t be bothered to cook, you don’t have to but you also don’t have to order a Domino’s either.

    Picture this, you’ve come home from a hard day at work and you can’t be bothered to cook, perhaps you’ve got kids or a sport to get to. Housework to do, homework, meeting a friend. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

    You’re looking for something quick and effortless to eat so your first step is to mindlessly look in the cupboard for noodles or beans on toast or even worse, crisps. Once you’ve eaten 4 bags of crisps and you’re still hungry the next step is to look on Deliveroo or Ubereats, one things leads to another and you’ve just paid £20 for a takeaway and whilst waiting for your takeaway, you’re eating your fifth bag of crisps.

    Now let’s change it slightly, everything above happens until we get to the cupboard. We change the cupboard for the fridge/freezer, pull out that Lasagne, put it in the oven, set the timer and wait. Timers goes off, you eat the lasagne and you’ve saved yourself £20 and 5 bags of crisps.

    Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll slowly be building out my recipes and I’ll be posting them here as and when so keep an eye out for them.

    In the meantime, give batch cooking a go.

  • Phone bills – a different perspective

    Today I wanted to talk about mobile phone contracts and more specifically why I don’t have one.

    When I turned 18, one of the first things I did was take out a new phone contract and from memory it was an iPhone 7, top of the range at the time and probably around £35 per month. 2 years later and I upgraded to an iPhone 8. Another 2 years later an iPhone X and I repeated this process all the way through to an iPhone 13, every time, my phone bill increased until finally I was paying almost £100 a month.

    My final phone contract was due for renewal in November 2024 and simply put, I refused to upgrade. I was sick of paying an extortionate amount for a phone I used primarily to scroll Facebook and google things. When my phone contract came up for renewal, I did what most people do when looking at upgrading, I looked for the best possible deal, the best of everything, unlimited everything.

    Then I had an epiphany, why don’t I keep the phone I have a move to SIM Only? In moving to SIM only, I’d be saving at least the £50 per month device plan but it was actually more than that, overnight I cut my current phone bill down to £10 a month, that’s a £90 saving per month, £1080 per year and given that most phone contracts are 2 or 3 year deals, I’m on track to save between £2160 and £3240 overall.

    Even if you still want the latest tech, go direct to Apple or Samsung or whoever manufactures the phone and take it out directly with them, that way you could still probably half your overall bill due to the savings on a SIM only plan.

    My advice, don’t do it. Find a SIM only deal and get that, keep the phone you have. If your phone is on the verge of dying for good, look on Wowcher and get a refurbished model, mine cost £54.99.

  • What is a budget?

    A budget in its simplest form is a place where you write your income and expenditure down as plan for your week or month (sometimes year).

    It’s a good starting point to see where you’re at financially and if you have any money left over (surplus) or worse have a negative amount of money (deficit). You detail all of your income and then expenditure. You minus your expenditure from your income and see what you have left (or not)!

    The problem with most budgets is when you create them, you create them with the best case scenario in mind and they’re often too aggressive and not specific enough. Once you have paid all of your bills and put aside some money for fuel or food, everything else goes on paying off debt. You miss the annual expenses, birthdays, gifts and fun money. You then get caught out trying to scrape together money for a gift or even worse put it back on your credit card you’ve just paid off.

    I’ve been guilty of this in the past and my budget still isn’t perfect but it’s leaps and bounds ahead of where it once was and I think in a couple of months it’ll be perfect.

    So I’ve put together a list of things that I’ve learnt over time which has really helped me out.

    Income:

    • Only include fixed income that you know is coming, salary, child benefit, any benefits.
    • Do not include extra income you think is coming in (extra shifts, overtime). It may not come in.

    Expenditure:

    • Include all fixed bills, rent/mortgage, energy, car expenses
    • Add a section for annual expenses, things you pay yearly. Car insurance maybe? Put an amount aside to make it easier when that bill is due.
    • Add a section to save for things you pay monthly that you could pay annually, car insurance if you’re not already paying it yearly.
    • Gift fund, cards, birthday presents etc
    • Debts, credit cards, loans, car finance.
    • FUN MONEY. Everyone needs some down time, do not miss this out. You’ll overspend otherwise.

    Optional extras include, big ticket items, new car, house deposit, annual subscriptions.

    One you have a starting point, be patient. Your budget won’t be perfect and it takes time to develop and fine tune. The main thing is you start and start today.

    Good luck and happy budgeting!

  • Just Get Started

    What have you got to lose?

    I’m guilty of procrastinating, I put things off because I don’t want to do them or I think it’s too big of a task to tackle today so I put it off. What I’ve found is, it doesn’t go away and it doesn’t get any easier, often it gets worse. It drives my wife crazy.

    The other reason, I want it to be perfect. There’s often a lot of complexities in things we do and I want to understand it all before I do it, the end result. I don’t do it and I use the excuse of I’m researching it or I need to understand it all first. To me they’re just excuses and something I still do now although I’m making a conscious effort to try and change that.

    This blog is a perfect example that we can all see. As you can see, it’s far from perfect, it’s sloppy and nowhere near where I would like it to be. The old me wants me to get everything perfect and then launch it. The new me, just get started. I don’t want to bore you with the intricacies of how websites and traffic works but I’m going to provide a brief overview so that you can get an idea.

    A website needs to be user friendly, visually appealing and have a traffic source. It then starts to get trickier, listing on google, keyword research, optimising pages, subscriptions, calls to action, navigation menus, SEO, the list goes on and on and I know this and it’s overwhelming, so much to do and so little time. I could spend a month full time getting it to where I want it to be, ready to launch and the outcome would be 0. No views, no visitors, no traffic. All I’d be left with is a very pretty website that doesn’t fulfil any purpose. Knowing all this, I decided to just get started.

    I made a very rough plan and got to work knowing that as time goes on it will get better, my writing will get better, the website will get better, the visitors and views will get better. There are tools available that let me monitor how the site is doing and what areas to improve, so with that in mind my plan was created.

    1. Start writing posts and pages and publish them.
    2. Monitor the website analytics for views, new users, returning users and bounce rates. A bit more boring website stuff
      • New users shows me my website is getting out there
      • Returning users shows me people are coming back
      • Views shows me what pages get the most views
      • Bounce rate shows me how many visitors come to the website and do nothing
    3. Adjust the website based on the above metrics.

    It was really that simple for the new me. I knew all these about websites and the intricacies of how to make them successful and I chucked them in the virtual bin, in pursuit of just getting started. If I didn’t do that, this website would be very pretty but not online in the pursuit of perfection.

    What are you going to chuck in the bin today in order to get started?

  • Is £10 a lot of money?

    Yes and no.

    I pondered on writing this post for quite a while and decided that it was worth writing even if it’s to prove a point around perspective. In reality £10.00 doesn’t get anyone very far. Most people’s biggest expense is their mortgage or rent and when you compare that to £10, £10 is probably close to 1% in of their mortgage/rent in most areas of the UK so when you put it like that, it’s not a lot of money.

    I used to stress a lot about money, more specifically not any. Countless sleepless nights, waking up early on pay day to move money around before any company to take money off me, thinking I was in control bit in reality I was just avoiding my money issues and the issues were compounding but that’s not a sustainable way to live and it’s stressful. It takes its toll in more ways than you think, including your personal relationships.

    One of my money managing methods is now to break things down into £10 increments but I’ve found it only really works if you use that money wisely. That can include going to the pub or whatever you like but only if it’s planned correctly.

    Examples of what £10 can get me:

    1. My phone bill for the month (SIM only)
    2. Almost a monthly Netflix subscription
    3. Monthly Amazon prime membership
    4. 3 days of fuel
    5. Almost a monthly Spotify Premium Subscription

    Now I’ve purposefully listed the “fun” things above and the reason for that is setting aside or earning an extra £10 isn’t going to pay your mortgage but it is going to pay for those things listed above.

    I’ve talked about what the £10 increments can pay for but I haven’t talked about what £10 increments can do for your stress levels and your financial well-being. £10 a day over the course of a month is £300.

    £300 pays my energy bill in full and still leaves (a small bit of) change. It can pay for my water bill, 2 sets of car insurance and tax and still have change. Actually it can pay for at least 2 things a month, the only exception is our rent which it can’t do unfortunately.

    Instead of stressing and focusing on money I don’t have, I focus on money I could have and it’s liberating.

    I find £10 a day to be just about the right amount of money that anyone can focus on, it’s big enough to make a meaningful impact but small enough to feel achievable daily. I made £20 yesterday selling lamps I no longer need on Facebook, I have £48 sat in Vinted Vinted Review: Here and £20.05 selling books on world of books (review pending once complete). That’s £88.05 in a day.

    Is £10 a lot of money to you?

  • Prograd Review: Earn £10 Today

    So here is my honest Prograd Review. Prograd is a new one on me and I’ve been playing with it for a little while to try and optimise what I can make from it.

    The whole design concept of Prograd in my opinion is for them to act as an affiliate/referrer to various different companies. There isn’t anything wrong with this but I can’t help wonder if they have tested out the products/services they are referring to you. Some of the products they refer you to are just incredibly difficult to actually monetise, with high payout thresholds. You’d have to basically work full time on some sites to even get £10 which is obviously not viable and incredibly frustrating.

    However, as Prograd rewards you for viewing the product, signing up and completing some very basic tasks, you can make around £20 in one day with very minimal effort. This money can then be withdrawn to PayPal and although they say it takes 3-5 working days, my withdrawals were virtually instant.

    A brief overview of how it works:

    Once you have signed up, you are taken to an offers page. These offers are static so don’t worry if you click off one by accident or even want to have a look around first, they’ll still be there when you want to come back to them. Each offer you look at and click the external link to, Prograd will pay you 10 ProPoints (£0.10) and with around 50 offers to view at any time, you’ve made your first £5.00 (£5.00) to go. Sign ups are generally worth between 20 and 50 points, so you will need to sign up to a few to get yourself up to the £10 threshold. The good news is, a sign up can just be registering your email and phone number without having to pay for anything. Some of the sign ups are however free trials which you will need to remember to cancel at the end of the free trial.

    Generally speaking once you have completed the majority of the offer, you will receive an email inviting you to review the product. Don’t ignore these, this is where the majority of your points will come from without having to do much. I’ve found that the more positive the review about the product is, the more points you will be credited. The maximum points available per review is 150, so with 7 product reviews you can cash out another £10.00.

    Overall, I’m an hour you can earn £10-£20 depending on how committed you are. It may take around a day to pay out but it’s an hours work. A little more effort and patience and you could walk away with £50 on average over the course of a week. The beauty of it is once you have signed up and done what is needed their end, you’re just waiting for it to track and show up in your ProGrad account.

    It’s never going to make you rich but it is going to give you at least £20 you didn’t have before.

    You can sign up for ProGrad Prograd – Sign Up

  • The Biggest Income Boost

    The whole website is dedicated to provide people advice on how to make money, save money and live a better life. Often, when people come to this site they are looking for a way to earn extra money but the one sure fire way to make extra money is to get another job. You can take that one of two ways, get a higher paid, better job or quite literally, get another job on top of the one you already have.

    Now everyone’s circumstances are different and realistically getting a second job isn’t going to work if you are sole carer/parent unless you have some very helpful grandparents.

    I want to try and give a little perspective here. If you’re on a minimum wage job, try and get one that’s above minimum wage. You probably read that and wanted to scream as is so blatantly obvious and probably a little insulting but let’s just think about it for a second. Let’s say you work in a warehouse, there’s a warehouse across the industrial estate pay £0.50p per hour more, you probably wouldn’t apply. You like where you work, the people are nice, you’re comfortable but that 50p an hour over a 40 hour week and 52 weeks a year is £1,040 you’ve just lost out on. Even if you want to calculate the extra after tax, you’re around £832. I’m going to holiday to Crete in May for £699, that pay rise would pay for it. Not a warehouse worker? Same applies for coffee shops, shop assistants, anything like that.

    A second job, the idea of it puts most people off and there are tax implications if you already earn over your tax free allowance. More often than not you will be put on a basic rate (BR) tax code meaning you are deducted a straight 20% tax with no tax relief, your tax relief is already included in your primary job. This means for every £1 earned in your second job, the government initially taxes you £0.20 leaving you with £0.80 to take home. However, every tax year you can claim a tax rebate for any overpaid tax which is highly likely if you have 2 jobs or more.

    My advice is to do both, find a higher paid primary job and find a second job, even if the second job is only for a few weeks to try it out or until you get that higher paid job.

  • Are you missing out on FREE money?

    When I lost my job in April 2024, we came a bit stuck financially. We didn’t have any money to fall back on, we were living pay cheque to pay cheque, always one step away from financial disaster and this was the disaster.

    I had everyone’s worst nightmare, not being able to pay the bills. I had every man’s worst nightmare, not being able to provide for his family. So I swallowed my pride and asked for help, help in the form of benefits for the government. I arrived at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) office, terrified. Feeling judged and unsure of what to expect I walked in, sat down and patiently waited my turn, I was then met with a lady who tried to be helpful however, I left with more questions than answers. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I received £745 in housing benefit which saw us through to the following much, by which point I was back in employment. I will go into my experience in more detail but that isn’t the purpose of this post today.

    Last night, I was lying in bed next to my wife, talking about money and we got onto the topic of benefits. We both know people who are claiming benefits who are quite content on continuing on claiming them for as long as possible without actively looking to change their circumstances for the better. It piqued my interest and I was curious to see how people are able to live solely off benefits.

    I just want to be very clear here before I continue, I am not criticising anyone who is claiming benefits, in fact I’m actively encouraging you to check if you are entitled to any additional help.

    I started to look into the UK benefits system to see if we were entitled to any additional support and it’s a minefield. It appears simple in principle but it becomes overly complicated and difficult to calculate accurately as soon as you factor in partners and children. You could married and have children, if you don’t choose a primary caregiver (even though you split it 50/50), you lose out on some money in your benefits award. Madness.

    Then I came across an absolute gem of a website, Turn2Us. Turn2Us is a charity, they have a benefits calculator, simply input your information (don’t worry it’s anonymous) and it does all the calculations for you. So, I filled in all of our information and we’re not entitled to anything other than Child Benefit which we already claim but I was curious and so I played around a little bit and these were the results.

    • If we had another baby – £245 a month extra.
    • If we both quit our jobs and did nothing £1700 a month.
    • If we earned £400 a month each, £1600 awarded plus we would have £800 earned income.

    Now I’m not for one second suggesting you quit your job and live off the state but the two major points that stuck out for me.

    1. There are things you can potentially claim for that you wouldn’t think you could. Take an extra child for example, I was gobsmacked to see that we would be entitled to £245 a month. If I didn’t play about with the calculator, I would never have known and we would never claim.
    2. No matter what you current circumstance please check your eligibility to claim and check every time your circumstances change. You never know.

    Here is the link again Turn2Us

    Good Luck!