A few updates...

I know it's all been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently - I've been a bit lacking in time as work's been very busy, and I've been trying to juggle a lot of stuff outside that.

However, many things have happened/are happening...

• I'm in the middle of moving my money from Natwest to The Cooperative. So far, so good.
• I got very excited about a table. My friends gave it to me when they moved out of their house, and it's in the kitchen of my new house. To look at, it's nothing exciting. However, the exciting thing is that the table is designed to be taken apart and put back together - the legs are held on with bolts and butterfly nuts, meaning it can be moved between places, instead of battling with the Ikea style furniture that doesn't like being taken apart and reassembled. 
• I'm reading two awesome books - "Waste" by Tristram Stuart, which is all about waste food, and "Cradle to Cradle", which is about rethinking the way we view things and sustainable product design. Both are awesome.
• I went on a bike maintenance course last weekend at the Bristol Bike Project, which was a birthday present from my sister. My bike needed a bit of work, and I was keen to learn how to fix some basic things myself instead of just taking it to a bike project. The course was great, and a great insight into the wider project as a whole (hopefully more on that soon...). If you're looking for a bike maintenance course, I highly recommend it, as it helps support a lot of their other awesome work.
• I've made some progress with booking my holiday in Spain. I'm travelling to Barcelona with 4 friends, and we're hiring a car (just as sustainable as getting the train if you have a full car!) and getting the ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre, then stopping off at a few places in France along the way (including a WWOOFing site of a friend of a friend I believe). Then after the festival we're helping out at, I'm staying on in Barcelona for 3 days, before getting the train across to Bilbao for 3 days. Someone has already offered me a couchsurfing spot in Bilbao, but I'm on the hunt for somewhere to stay in Barcelona still. I've also booked my tickets back - the sleeper train from Hendaye to Paris, the Eurostar across to London and then the coach back to Bristol. All in all, I'm pretty darn excited, both about the holiday, and doing it in a different way. The idea of getting the train back is especially exciting as I love trains, and I'm really looking forward to couch surfing and meeting some people while I'm there...
• I found an awesome butchers - Sheepdrove Farm up in Redland - they have amazing welfare and environmental standards. They also have really minimal packaging, including wrapping the items in waxed paper that can be recycled

Put your money where your mouth is

I have a Natwest bank account. I always have done, as it was the local bank to my parents and it was where they banked. As a result, when I set up my first bank account, it was a Natwest one. As I got older, the bank account type changed to a student then a graduate one, but I never changed banks.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve got more aware of the ethical implications of a lot of high street banks, and realised that choosing where you bank your money is one of the most influential things you can do. Yet my money has stayed with Natwest. I’d attribute this mostly due to laziness and busyness – it’s just never got to the top of my list of things to do.

But March was Move Your Money Month, and so it seemed like as good a time as any to actually make this change. However, with moving house and everything, it all went a bit out of the window, and suddenly it was April. Oh well....

Initial research left me with two: an ‘ethical’ bank or building society, or the local credit union. The credit union (whilst having many benefits), went out, due to the limits to access issues – I’m an avid internet banker, especially with living in a shared house where bills have to be paid and money transferred on a regular basis. And so, I did some research into the most ethical bank accounts. I ended up deciding on the Cooperative. It’s not perfect, but I like their ethical policy, and I value being able to go into a branch and talk to someone about the options available to me. There are plenty of good resources that go through all the options - the Move Your Money website and Ethical Consumer both look at it in more detail. 

So, the decision made, how exactly do you go about moving your money. Well, I popped into the local branch of the Cooperative on my way back from work, and informed them I’d like to give them my money. They made an appointment for me a few days later, and I turned up clutching some paperwork on my lunch hour.

An hour and a half later, I’d chosen which kind of current account I wanted, and started the process to move that across (which will be completed within the next 3 weeks). I’d set up an ISA and transferred across my old savings. I’d got a new savings account set up linked to my current account for the rest of my savings. And I’d got a credit card (for emergency purposes). All things considered, it was ridiculously easy. The woman spent a long time with me, explaining the different accounts, the merits of each, the savings options available, and I ended up leaving very happy. Yes, I’ve lost some of the perks of my old account (£1500 interest free overdraft?!), but the knowledge that my money isn’t being invested in things that I abjectly disagree with is a good feeling.

So the wheels are in motion, and we shall see how smooth the transition across is. They’ve given me a £1000 overdraft for the first 3 months to help with the transition while direct debits/standing orders etc are being moved across. The new accounts are set up, and they've texted me to say they're starting to move across my standing orders. All in all, pretty painless so far. Fingers crossed....

Weekly update #2

Yes, the weekly update is back. A bit quiet this week, but still there.

- Money moving - I've been meaning to move my bank account to a more ethical bank for years (I've always been with Natwest), but still haven't done it. Occupy Bristol encouraged people to do it at the end of last year, and their campaign has now spread into Move Your Money month, which will take place in March. And so that's when I'm going to move my money. I need to do some more research to decide where I'm moving to, but at least I have a time frame now...

- Useful tool - This tool lets you look at your journey and work out whether it's better to go by train, car or coach. It surprised me that the coach was better than the train, as is a car with 5 passengers. I'm going to do a bit more research into the figures they use though.

- The car saga continues - Turns out my car isn't dead. So car sharing is off the agenda immediately, but I'm going to look into it again once I've moved house (since I'll be sorting things like insurance changes there anyway). What the whole thing has made me do is loosen my emotional attachment to my car - a few months ago I would have been very precious about anyone else driving it, and now it seems like a fairly easy step. I've also ridden my bike a lot more over the last couple of weeks when I didn't have access to my car, even doing a couple of journeys by bike that I would have previously driven. So I'm definitely going to try and consider cycling journeys like those rather than driving in the future...

- Milk follows chicken - A few years ago, my friend Em took me to an organic dairy to learn how to milk cows (it's a long story). The whole experience really stuck with me - the cows were so happy and well looked after that it made a real impression on me, and one that contradicts a lot of evidence I've seen about a lot of large scale dairy farming. Added to that, research has now shown it's better for you. I've recently discovered that a local corner shop sells organic milk, so I now have no excuse for not buying it. So only buying organic milk follows the free-range chicken commitment.

- Supermarketless life - I'm still managing ok (apart from the issue with feeding 30 people at the weekend). I've hit my first couple of problematic areas though, and one really surprised me - wine. Turns out most of the wine I buy comes from the supermarket - in fact, my favourite red wine is a Tesco Finest wine. There's so few decent off licenses around that I've been buying fairly average wine from my corner shop. I think this might call for some further investigating...

- Boxes of vegetables - I've ordered my first veg box, and it's arriving on Thursday. Exciting times!

The analysis...

It’s mid January and my two weeks of monitoring my consumption are over, and I’ve spent a bit of time analysing the results.

In two weeks, I’ve spent about £180. That doesn’t include any of the one off annual costs I make, or things like rent and bills. That’s just what has come out of my wallet over the period of a fortnight. It’s about what I expected to be honest – there have been some big costs (a couple of pieces of clothing, which I don’t buy very often), but a lot of it is basic stuff like food and socialising.

So how does it break down?

Well, about £50 of it was food (not including eating out), and this is actually slightly less than I expected. I’ve been cooked for a few times over the last couple of weeks, and started it off with a few things already in the fridge. A good chunk of it was on “socialising” – going to the pub, buying a bottle of wine when going round to someone’s house, purchasing gig tickets. This comes in third under food (and clothes, thanks to buying a new pair of jeans) as the largest expenditure.

What surprised me most was the food and drink in cafes section. £16 in two weeks. Now, about a quarter of that was buying lunch a few times at work after I didn’t have anything to take from home. However, that is still higher than I expected. Although, ironically, I would say that writing this book is partly to blame, as most of the times that I’ve been in a cafe over the last couple of weeks has been in order to write. I’ve found from past experience of writing and working from home for a job that I just don’t work well at home, and I’m much more productive if I’m out of the house. And bizarrely, I find busy, noisy cafes to be the best place to go. So this has a certain impact on my finances, as I tend to buy at least one, and usually two drinks during the time that I’m there. However I’m not feeling too guilty about this as I tend to favour my favourite cafe – a local cooperatively run vegan cafe – where I’m more than happy to spend my money and support.

Another interesting way to look at the my fortnights expenditure is in terms of local or independent businesses versus chains/multinationals. The breakdown is £100 to chains, £80 to local businesses. This is slightly skewed by the £40 of clothes all having come from chain stores, but all my eating out and cafe expenditure was to local businesses.

What is interesting is that whilst I made as many trips to local food shops as I did to supermarkets over the last two weeks, I spent more than twice as much at supermarkets as I did at the local shops, reflecting the fact that I tend to favour supermarkets for major shops, and use my local shops to pick up the odd item I need here and there.

It also inspired me to sit down and do an annual budget, looking at all those costs that I make once a month or year, and work them all out on a weekly basis. And that really is surprising.

Top of the list is bills. And that’s mostly due to rent, which is a fairly significant cost. So for the time being, I’m going to exclude that from the category and give it a whole category for itself.

What surprised me was that travel is top. This includes my annual car costs, petrol, train and coach, and bike maintenance. It is a little difficult to tell, as because I use my car a lot for work, I get money back from expenses. So taking this into account, travel slips into second place behind entertainment (but above food!), so I’m still pretty surprised by how much of my budget is taken up by it. And what surprised me most is the size of my annual car costs. Excluding petrol, my insurance, tax, mot, servicing and breakdown cover comes in just under £22 a week. Suddenly car sharing seems a lot more appealing. Equally surprising is that other costs come in at £15 – so that’s bike maintenance (very small cost), coach and train tickets. This is a mix of train tickets heading round the country to see friends, train tickets when I go home to see my family, and coach tickets to go to London. I tend to favour the coach when going to London due to the price, but otherwise stick with the train due to the comfort and time improvements over long distances. And while I might only go away once or twice a month, the cost of this really adds up...

What also shocked me also is that entertainment is above food. I put eating out under food rather than entertainment, but decided cafes came under entertainment (as I usually only drink there, rather than eat food). The combined cost of gigs, pub trips, cups of coffee, film processing, cinema trips and other things all added up to more than I thought.

In fact, lets break it down by percentage (after taking out work related travel for which I get expenses)...

Food – 13.2%

Bills – 4.8%

Rent – 28.7%

Toiletries and household items – 2.8%

Clothes & shoes – 3.8%

Transport – 13.7%

Holidays – 4.4%

Entertainment – 15.7%

Other – 12.2% (of which significant costs are Gym - 2.44%, Present – 1.74%, Furniture/electrical goods – 2.54%)

So now, I know where I'm currently at, I'd better get started on making some changes...