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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Flashy furniture at a discount

      The sofa market is an extraordinary thing. There seems to be a sofa shop on every corner of every street in every town in the UK and half the advertising time on evening television appears to be taken up with adverts for various unattractive sofas from dfs. An alien landing on the average high street would think we were nothing but a nation of sofa addicts, a people who just can’t walk 20 yards in an urban environment without popping into a shop for a new piece of furniture to lounge about on. I don’t get this (there is only one sofa in my – admittedly small – house and I’ve had it for seven years), but more than that I don’t get why, if you must buy sofas and the like, you would pay the full list price for them on the high street when you can buy at an out-of-town warehouse at a 50% discount. Sofas (like cars) become second-hand and hence verging on worthless as soon as you take them out of the showroom, so it makes sense to pay as little as possible for them.

      Good news, then, that warehouses have been springing up all over the country selling end-of-line pieces, oversupply and bits of furniture no longer needed in show homes. The Showroom Warehouse, about an hour and a half up the M1 from London (www.showhomewarehouse.co.uk), is one good place to look. It contains the entire contents from show homes around the country priced at a half to a quarter of their original price. This is a great place to buy almost-new furniture at major discounts, although you should always bear in mind that to make the rooms look bigger ex-show-home furniture is often designed to be smaller than normal furniture (take this into account if you are thinking of buying a new-build house or flat too). This is particularly the case with beds so test before you buy. Trade Secret (www.trade-secret.co.uk) is another place to try (it specializes in discounted brand-name furniture at around 50%) as is You’re Furnished in Essex (01279 870036), which specializes in selling top-quality bathrooms and kitchens at major discounts.

      It isn’t that much hassle to seek out this kind of place and the savings can be huge; if you are looking at the sort of kitchen that might usually come in at £10,000 but get it for £5,000 at a warehouse, any research and travelling you might have to do along the way is going to be well worth the effort. Another plus point of these outlets is that at most of them what you see is what you leave with – there is none of the absurd nonsense you get in high street shops of having to wait 6–8 weeks for your new piece of furniture to be delivered to you. See www.homesandbargains.co.uk for more places to pick up discounted furniture.

       Big designers at small prices

      There’s no more reason to pay retail prices for designer clothes than there is for sofas. In fact these days you shouldn’t ever have to pay retail. There are a hundred ways to buy the same clothes the uninformed and lazy are paying fortunes for in department stores and boutiques for a fraction of the price. You can, for example, visit a branch of TK Maxx (I go to the one in Hammersmith, London but there are branches everywhere – see www.tkmaxx.co.uk for locations). TK Maxx fills its stores by buying in stock at cost from designers who have cash-flow problems or who have ended the season stuck with too much inventory and then adds a small margin. The result is prices that end up more than 50% less than they might be elsewhere. I do much of my Christmas shopping at TK Maxx every year. The only problem I have is maintaining a degree of discipline so I don’t end up spending hundreds of pounds on things that weren’t on my list in the first place.

      Otherwise you can visit designer warehouse sales where and when you can (see www.dwslondon.co.uk for details of sales in London where you can get up to 80% off clothes and www.bdbinvite.com for an invitation to the Billion Dollar Babes designer sample sales), or apply for tickets for the sales after fashion week when designers sell off their samples cheap to the general public after the fashion press and department store buyers have seen them (see www.londonfashionweekend.co.uk). Finally, you might consider combining a bit of bargain fashion shopping with a holiday: Outlet Firenze (www.outlet-firenze.com) near Florence offers discounts on labels from Gucci to Armani and is also pleasantly close to the Prada factory in Montevarchi.

      Current accounts: get them cheap

      Most people have a current account. We all get our salaries paid into them and then pay our mortgages, rents and bills from them. But very few people have given much thought to why they have the one they have and what they want from it. As a result 70% of people still bank with the UK’s four big high street banks – Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays and NatWest – despite the fact that they offer some of the worst accounts on the market. Even I had a current account at Lloyds until last year. Why? Because my mother was with Lloyds so when I opened my first bank account we automatically opened mine there too. I then, like most of the population, never thought about it again. I kept that account for 20 years.

      Then suddenly my cashpoint card stopped working while my husband and I were on honeymoon. I didn’t do anything about it at the time on the basis that no one should have to speak to a call centre when they are on honeymoon. But when I got back I called to complain. The reason my card didn’t work, I was told, was because I had ordered a new pin number. I hadn’t. It says here, said the woman at the call centre, that you have, so we have blocked your old one and sent you a new one. But you can’t have blocked it, I said, because I can still use it as a chip and pin card in shops and restaurants. No you can’t, she said. Yes I can, I said. And so on. This absurd saga went on for some days (getting more and more complicated with each phone call). We never established how the problem had come about but the final result was that I had no access to my accounts for well over a month and that I suddenly realized that having an account at Lloyds was a very expensive way to be inconvenienced.

      Why an expensive way? Three reasons. The first is that, like the other big high street banks, Lloyds pays practically no interest on current accounts (the average current account pays just 1.2% on your money). This is important because if it isn’t earning interest your money loses its purchasing power fast: if inflation is rising at 3% (i.e. prices are going up at an average rate of 3% a year) you need to make 3% interest on your money to be able to buy the same amount of stuff at the end of the year as at the beginning. If you aren’t making 3% you are effectively losing money. The second is that while I didn’t often get overdrawn it did sometimes happen, and Lloyds, again like the other high street names, charges interest of 17–18% on overdrafts. Other banks pay proper amounts of interest on their current accounts and charge as little as 7–8% on overdrafts. Finally I had a ‘premium’ account at Lloyds, meaning that I paid an extra fee every year for a variety of perks I never used (most current accounts are free of annual fees). Lloyds sent me a nice bunch of flowers to make up for all the confusion – something which made me feel a bit warmer towards them but wasn’t quite enough to compensate for all the other downsides to banking with them. I closed the account.

      The sales: one big scam?

СКАЧАТЬ