Tired and Skint

Blog

  • 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!

  • Vinted Review: Is it worth it?

    I think so. Will it make you rich? Probably not.

    Vinted is a marketplace where you can sell your old clothes, tech and accessories. The concept is fairly simple and it is worth doing just don’t expect to make a fortune.

    All you need to do is take some photos, upload them onto the app, write a brief description around size and general condition, colour, set your price and click upload. Buyers can then view your wardrobe and if there is something that they fancy either pay the asking price or send you a counter offer (you can decline). Once you have accepted an offer, the buyer pays. You package the item and take it to the nearest drop off point, normally the post office or an InPost locker. No labels required, they do that for you in store. The buyer receives their item and has 2 days to confirm they are happy with it before Vinted automatically approves it on their behalf.

    Most of the things you list on there aren’t going to bring you top money but if the alternative is chucking them in the bin or donating to charity then you may as well try and get some cash for them first.

    Non designer clothing can fetch anything from £1 to £10 if you’re lucky but generally around £3-£5. Low end designer clothing really does depend on what brand it is but I’ve been selling used Jack Wills polos at £5 with great success. I have a Gant shirt on there at the moment listed for £20 with plenty of views and favourites but no purchase just yet. I have known people sell Canada Goose or Moncler jackets on the for £50 which is a lot for Vinted but I can’t help feeling that it’s cheap for the jacket itself.

    If you think of Vinted as a bargain website you won’t go far wrong. If you’re expecting to sell things for half the price you originally paid, you’ll be disappointed but if you look at it as another £5 in your pocket every time something sells you’ll be delighted and filled with excitement every time a notification pops up on your phone.

    Overall it’s a good little app that will help you financially (even if it’s not much) and also help you declutter your wardrobe.

    If you want to get started you can use my link Here.

    Top Tips:

    1. Make sure you list a minimum of 5 items straight away. This gives you a frequent lister badge straight away and boosts your profile visibility.
    2. Take good quality photos, I prefer to take pictures of shirts/tshirts on coat hangers.
    3. Make sure clothing is ironed, nobody wants to buy something that’s creased.
    4. Price a little higher, everyone loves to offer a little less than you’re asking. If you want to sell for £3, list it at £5!
    5. Once sold, post quickly. Don’t buy parcel bags as this eats into your profit. Instead use a bag for life, Morrisons cost 40p when you do your shopping which is cheaper than a parcel bag which can be a £1 each!

    Bonus Tip:

    You can refer your friends using your invite link and if they list 3 items for sale, you get a £5 voucher to spend on Vinted. If they sell an item in 30 days, you get an additional 5 x £2 vouchers to use on Vinted.

    Good luck and happy selling!

  • FREE £10 weekly giveaway

    My goal is to add value to people’s lives. I’ve spent a long time scouring the World Wide Web looking for ways to make money online and it would appear to me that generally speaking there is always a catch.

    There is a lot of paid online material, courses, and offers promising to help you make you money online and the truth is, it’s true they will help you but conveniently they leave out the hard bits and even more conveniently they ask you to hand over your money before you find this out.

    I’ll give you a few examples:

    Affiliate Marketing:

    For those of you who do not know what affiliate marketing is, in a nutshell it’s the idea of promoting a product through an affiliate link and when a customer buys the product the seller gives you a commission. If the seller is offering a 10% commission and the product is £100, every time a customer buys that product using your affiliate link the seller will give you £10. Now this model does work but what happens is the person who is introducing you to the world of affiliate marketing is generally selling you a piece of software which they turn are getting an affiliate commission from getting you to buy it in the first place. At the same time they often offer you a discounted course or a free e-book on how to become a “6-figure affiliate” whilst leaving out the hardest part, generating traffic to your affiliate link and fundamentally there are two ways to generate traffic.

    • Paid traffic: essentially paying for adverts to display your website and affiliate links meaning your spending money you probably don’t have on something that’s unlikely to generate any sales or enough sales to keep you motivated.
    • Free traffic: it takes a long time to generate any meaningful traffic to your link, it’s unlikely you’ll get a sale within 6 months meanwhile the marketing guru that has introduced to affiliate marketing has benefited from 6 months of commission whilst you try and get your affiliate marketing business off the ground.

    Avon/Utility Warehouse:

    Both have been around for quite some time and both involve selling products to the general public. This way of generating extra money for you and your household is marginally better the affiliate marketing however it is a mix of affiliate marketing, direct sales and referral marketing. It’s split into two main channels, sales commission and affiliate commission.

    Sales commission, you get a percentage of every product sold, let’s use the 10% commission example on £100 again, for every £100 of product you sell with Avon, Avon are giving you £10 commission.

    The affiliate side of it all is that you refer people into your “down line” and then you earn a commission on every they sell, it could be 2% or 20% it all depends on the company you are working with.

    You think great, I’ll sell it a bit, recruit some people into my down line and earn off their sales too. Soon I’ll have 100 people in my down line and I’ll live off that but what happens when you run out of customer or people to recruit? Have you ever noticed both start with hosting a party or recruiting yourself. Ask friends and family, post on Facebook. What generally tends happen is even if you can sell to your friends and family, once that’s done you’ve run of customers, you post of Facebook you get 2 people interested and you are ignored by the rest so you keep posting and then suddenly your Facebook friends count starts to go down and people are snoozing your post because they’re sick of seeing it.

    The truth is every product and every service has a catch and a motivation but people tend to hide their motives, hide what they’re really after. So what’s my catch?

    This is a new website and all websites need traffic to succeed, to maintain operational. As I said in my opening line, I want to add value to people’s lives but also to my own life, to my family’s life. I want to do this full time, I don’t want to work for people, I want to work for myself. I don’t want to be scouring the internet trying to find ways to make money and grow increasingly frustrated by the false advertising and half truths. I want to provide the genuine ways to make and save money. An honest and transparent service that anyone can use.

    Enough waffle,

    THE CATCH:

    The reward: every Friday I will giveaway £10 to one person picked at random, via PayPal.

    Concerned about subscribing for any reason? Think you be receiving daily emails or not quite ready to hand out your email to such a new site? Create a brand new email address, use gmail or outlook whoever you like. PayPal payments require an email address to send money to and your email also acts as your entry to the free weekly £10 giveaway. For as long as you are subscribed you are in the draw.