Love Is Not Enough: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Money. Merryn Webb Somerset

Чтение книги онлайн.

      If you must buy a new car you might want to think about buying it at the end rather than the beginning of the month. Why? Because that’s when dealers are most desperate to hit their monthly sales targets and so most likely to give you a proper discount. Last year What Car? sent undercover buyers to car showrooms at the end of March and then again at the beginning of April. On average they were offered the same cars at £525 less at the end of the month than at the beginning and in some cases the price difference ran into the thousands. And when you do go in to start your negotiations make sure you are tough about it whatever time of the month it is. You may think you live in an equal sort of a world but car salesmen think nothing of the sort: they think women are a bit of a soft touch and so save up all their big discounts for men. What Car? sent both a man and a woman into 45 dealerships around the country last year and discovered that on average women are asked to pay up to £1,800 more for exactly the same car as men (the problem also exists in the US where women are charged on average $1,300 more than men for the same new car). Four out of five of the salesmen approached by What Car? were prepared to cut prices for men but less than half offered any deal for women. If you can’t face fighting this kind of inbuilt prejudice (life is too short to fight every battle) send a man in to do the bargaining bit for you.

      Finally, before you shell out consider if you need a car of your own at all. According to Sainsbury’s Bank the average motorist spends about £2,000 a year on car expenses – insurance, fuel, parking, tax, servicing and repairs. Include depreciation, says the RAC, and that number goes up to around £5,000 a year and higher for real gas-guzzlers (a Porsche Cayenne will cost its owners going on £19,000 a year, according to the RAC’s figures). That’s a whopping amount of money particularly if (like me) you live in a city and don’t use your car that much. So why not consider a sharing scheme of some kind? Join a car club and you can order up whatever kind of car you want whenever you want it, without the bother of tax or maintenance and for a fraction of the price of owning your own car. You pay a monthly fee to the club and are then charged based on how long you have the car for on each outing and on how far you drive. Carplus suggests that driving this way will save you around £1,000–£15,000 a year as long as you drive less than 6,000 miles a year. Carplus is a charity set up to promote car clubs so its numbers aren’t exactly unbiased, but I don’t think they are that far out either. Car clubs aren’t a perfect replacement for owning your own car (there is the inconvenience of having to walk to a nearby parking bay to pick up your car rather than having it waiting for you directly outside your door) but, given the savings on offer, they’re a pretty good one. Car clubs include www.citycarclub.co.uk and www.mystreetcar.co.uk.

       Cutting utility bills

      These, like many money-related things, are boring but very important. Unlike many of our expenses utility bills are not optional. We all have to pay for our water, electricity and gas. Worse, the cost of making these payments has been soaring for three years as water shortages have kicked in and energy prices have been rising: gas bills have jumped an average of 39% since 2003 and electricity bills are up nearly 30% over the same time period. All this makes it very important to use the cheapest possible supplier. To find out if you are doing so visit one of the price comparison websites such as www.uswitch.com, www.energyhelpline.co.uk or www.simplyswitch.co.uk. Uswitch claims that the average household can save £140 a year on its energy bills by switching supplier. One of my friends, on a saving binge after the birth of her first baby, estimates that she has cut £250 off her family’s annual utility bills since she spent an hour on uswitch.com changing all her suppliers.

      You should also take a look at your water bills. If you live alone or don’t use much water (perhaps you don’t have a garden) you are probably paying too much and may find it worth your while to ask your water company to fit your house with a meter so instead of paying an average tariff you simply pay for the water you use. If you live in a block of flats or somewhere else where it is not possible to get a meter fitted ask to start paying the Average Household Charge instead of the usual charge based on the rateable value of your house. This can often provide hundreds of pounds of savings a year. I moved on to it a few years ago when I was living alone and using very little water (I was showering at the gym and was hardly ever home) yet paying the same water bills as the four people living in the flat above who appeared to do nothing but play in the bathroom. My bills were immediately halved.

      You might also consider going green to save money on energy. Switching off everything in the house that is on standby will save you considerable amounts (at the moment the government estimates that appliances left on standby cost a total of £740 million a year), but you might save even more by switching to a renewable energy provider such as Ecotricity. Check this on www.uswitch.com.

      Ensuring that you are paying as little as possible for your phone is another way to cut your spending easily. More than a third of UK fixed telephone lines are now with a non-BT supplier and the tough competition in the market means that prices have tumbled. Again, visit the price comparison websites to see if you can change suppliers and cut your costs. You should do the same with your mobile phone. Altogether we spend £25 billion a year on our phones but we could probably spend rather less if we shopped around a bit before we signed up to our contracts. According to another comparison website, Onecompare.com, the average person could shave £210 off the cost of their mobile СКАЧАТЬ