I love a week with some amazing time with friends and good food. September had been a quiet month for social stuff on purpose with me trying to save money, so it was nice to start off the month with some fun. We also had a big drama at football over the weekend. Dylan played West Ham on Sunday, the team he supports. During the third quarter he went in for a tackle and was sandwiched between two players, he flipped in air and landed heavily on his head and neck.
He was taken off on a stretcher and due to the neck injury was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital. The NHS are amazing, everything happened so quickly, and he went in for a CT scan as soon as he was assessed in the hospital. Luckily everything was fine, just a very big bash to the head and dose of concussion. Today he gets to chill out on the sofa with a duvet day.
A Great new offer from Curve on Foreign currency
I wrote about Curve a couple of weeks ago and about how its making my wallet life easier. All my cards are now combined into the one curve card. They have just introduced an amazing new benefit where they have dropped their foreign exchange fee to 0% (the only exclusion being weekends when the charge is 0.5%) Even better they are using the interbank rate which is slightly better than the Visa/Mastercard rates. This is going to save you lots as opposed to using your regular debit/credit cards abroad! Read my review here, and grab yourself a free £5 for signing up to Curve.
This currency benefit is so worth it for me and means I can ditch my ‘holiday’ Halifax card that I only use for holidays and good exchange rate. I can use my normal accounts and get the best rate possible!
Saving Money on train travel
I made good use of my network railcard last week. I travelled into London twice last week after 10 am and my tickets cost £14.70 rather than £22 for a London travel card. The network railcard is available to anyone living in the south east and saves you money on train travel after 10am. The card costs £30 for a years worth of train discounts.
Turkish and Thai dinners out
On Tuesday I met up with Natalie of Pretty Edible Stylist for a beautiful Turkish feast at Shawarma in Exmouth Market. We feasted on chicken, steak, roasted cauliflower (was was sooooo good!) and dips. Very good dinner and I highly recommend a visit to Exmouth market, a lively road packed full of bars and cool restaurants.
Then on Thursday I was treated to Thai with my best friend Neil. Such a good friend. He knows that Im a bit short on money at the moment, and treated me to dinner out. We had some amazing pad thai, along with chicken and pork dishes.
Emotional Investing
I recently finally sold my Tesco shares. These were bought 9 years ago and were very much an emotional investment. That I promptly lost money on. I kept hold of them for nearly 9 years hoping they would regain their value. They never did. I wrote an interesting post with Exo investing exploring the many different human bias’s we use when investing. Not many are based on logic!
Chip Account was raided
Am admission time. I had to raid my Chip account this week. I have been using Chip to save up for Christmas but I did have to use the money this week to cover some of the monthly bills. As I have mentioned before cash flow is tough at the moment and September had lots of extra big bills that needed to be covered. I was very grateful for the £500 that had been built up in my Chip account to help with the payments. Money is moved over to my chip account automatically every week or so when the app deems I can afford it. I love it as its like saving without hardly noticing it!
How did you save money last week, what are you particularly proud of?