Super saver on Home Services

Jan

Super saver

posted by admin in Window Cleaning

From her kitchen window, Jackie Gower’s life looks picture perfect. Her two-storey house rests above the calm grey-blue expanse of Lake Waikere, among the rolling farmlands of Te Kauwhata. Outside, chickens scratch and fluff about beside a coop. In a nearby garden, winter vegetables sprout, including silverbeet, radishes and flowering spring onions. The kitchen bench is spotless, as Gower, 34, wipes the surface with a homemade all-purpose cleaning concoction - made of vinegar, ammonia, water and a drop or two of orange essence. Her freezer is stuffed with chopped vegetables, her cupboards lined with basic baking ingredients, and cake tins are chocka with muffins she made this morning for her two boys, Liam, 11, and Alistair, nine. On the kitchen wall, a week’s worth of dinners are planned out, with recipe books and page numbers neatly written in. It’s a picture of domestic bliss, of housewifely organisation and frugal living.- But four years ago, it was quite a different scene. Gower’s life was out of control. “I used to be the queen of excess,” Gower admits sheepishly. Gower and husband Noel, who were working on a dairy farm, had a change of circumstances, which meant they had to move. They bought their first home, the “dream house” by the lake, took on a mortgage and found their income also halved. They were no longer getting free meat and petrol, and the mortgage meant they should have been budgeting and tightening their belts. But Gower was still spending too much. “Everything we couldn’t afford, we bought on hire purchase,” says Gower. “I saw all these things in shops that I wanted for our first house, and my spending was getting out of control. I worked and my husband was working hard, but I was spending all the money we made.” She was spending $20-$30 a week on magazines, and in 2004 Gower read a magazine article that changed her life. Australian woman Fiona Lippey, founder of a website called Simple Savings, was talking about practical tips for saving money, everything from grocery shopping to cleaning the house. “She was sick of young parents being told what baby food and nappies they should buy, falling for elaborate advertising,” says Gower. “As a householder, I thought, that’s what I do. That’s relevant to me, I buy all these things.” She logged on, became a fan and later an employee. As her spending and saving habits changed she began recording them in an online diary or blog in May 2005, under the name Penny Wise. Entries are full of practical tips. “My husband used to go through dozens of razor blades a year,” says Gower cheerfully. “Now I soak the blades in olive oil and instead of a new packet once a month, it is once every six months. The razors don’t get rusty and it’s good for dry skin as well. You can save $100 a year right there.” Olive oil also comes in handy for polishing the wooden table and chairs - Gower adds a drop of lavender oil and uses a pump bottle rather than spraying Pledge. She uses hot soapy water or watered-down white vinegar for the windows, polished until gleaming with old newspapers. “I can save thousands of dollars a year,” she says. She cuts and freezes her own vegetables, and makes cookie dough from scratch and freezes it in rolls. The smiling, sweet-faced mother of two, who is originally from Hampshire, southeast England, admits she is no expert and does not have a finance degree. But New Zealanders are paying attention, and the blog has more than 50,000 readers a month. Gower’s approach harks back to another era and may not be for everyone - but maybe it should. Consumer debt continues to increase. Housing debt from residential household mortgages was $147.1 billion in June 2007, an increase of 14.4 per cent from June 2006, according to the Reserve Bank. General consumer debt was $12.2 billion in June 2007, an increase of 4.7 per cent year to year. For those on the front line of New Zealand’s financial crisis, the website gets the thumbs-up. “Anything that gives people control over their finances is good,” says Clare Mataira, manager of Hamilton Budget Advisory Trust. She says the website should not replace the advice of an expert financial adviser, but says the practical tips may resonate with some people. The trust is increasingly in demand for budgeting advice, not only from those on low incomes or benefits, but also those who have a reasonable income, Mataira says. “We had one lady recently, in her early 30s with a good job, who had $45,000 of debt, including a car.” The level of indebtedness people are presenting with has increased over the past few years. “It’s not just one or two debts, now it is five, six or more. A lot of them are HP (hire purchase loans), credit card debts and living beyond their means. There is too much easy access to credit, and if people had to pay cash we wouldn’t see as much debt.” Young people in their 20s, with student loans as well as $20,000 worth of debt or more, before they have even started out with homes or mortgages, has become more common. Mataira likes the Simple Savings website. “It’s like the kind of thing my grandmother and her generation did; during the war, they had to make do.” FOR Gower, it is about making little changes in daily life - as the saying goes, “take care of the pennies and the pounds look after themselves”. “When I started and saw it worked, my confidence grew,” says Gower. “It is one step at a time.” A friend buys a $6.50 panini three times a week. “We worked out she was spending $1014 a year on panini,” Gower laughs. “That’s what we are trying to teach people - trying to save on the big things too, but it is really in the little things.” Although the Simple Savings website is Australian, such was the demand from Kiwis for practical everyday savings tips, it launched in New Zealand earlier this year as www.simplesavings.co.nz. The site includes a paid members-only section, where some 6500 practical tips from members and staff have been collected, from ways to save money on your wedding and do-it-yourself beauty products, to techniques for bartering for discounts on big ticket goods. Some suggestions seem overly frugal: “When you think you have squeezed all the toothpaste from a plastic tube, cut the tube across the middle and you will usually be able to dip your brush in for about seven or more cleanings out of each tube,” writes one man. Others are more about conscious spending and good organisation. “I saved over $600 a year on work day snacks, since I began stocking my office drawer with heat-and-eat soups,” writes a woman. Some advocate leaving your credit and Eftpos cards at home, and heading to the supermarket with just cash, so you are not tempted to overspend. Others live by challenges or rules, turning saving and budgeting into a kind of game. One woman writes: “I am never allowed to spend more than $10 on anything, which forces me to either go without or hunt around for the best deal. . . Now we are on track to paying off our new mortgage in three years.” HAMILTON mother Sara West, 32, has the Simple Savings website as her homepage on her computer. “I check it out if I have time, read the blog and the forum,” says West, who has been a paid member for 18 months. “I look for hints, and what I like about it is they are from real people, in the same situation as you, so it is real advice and not from some economist in the paper.” West and husband James went from two incomes to one after their first child was born. A change from lucrative mining jobs in Perth to life in Hamilton meant a major lifestyle change. She found the website and started receiving the free newsletters, then signed up as a paid member ($47 for one year). “One thing I found really useful was the meal planning, so I know what I’m going to have for the week. It means I don’t have to run to the shop so often and I’m more organised.” It is making a difference. “I feel like we are finally getting ahead, in terms of paying off credit cards, and our mind-sets have changed a lot. We are saying `no, we don’t need it’ - before we might have put things on our credit cards, now we say we will wait and save up for it.” She no longer buys so much prepackaged food and is enjoying cooking using recipe books. She says the website has tips to suit almost anyone. “You can pick out what suits you, and change yourself a little bit at a time.” GOWER has a challenge which has proved popular with thousands of blog readers, her $21-a-week challenge. The aim is to plan basic meals and feed a family on just $21, using basics already in the pantry, from flour and baking powder to canned and frozen foods, and then topping up with milk, vegetables and other necessary items. She uses a weekly meal planner, free from the website. “Half the time, you have things in the back of the pantry you can use up,” says Gower. “Over a four-week period, I save $719 on groceries. Last week I spent just $17 on groceries.” The secret is in the organisation and planning, and only getting what is necessary from the supermarket, and not going back for multiple trips, where the temptation to spend increases. “Now that I plan meals, I only buy what I need,” says Gower. The food isn’t gourmet, but it will satisfy, including classics such as tuna pie, lasagne, beans and rice, hamburgers, quiche and chicken curry. Gower is a fan of Sophie Gray, aka the Destitute Gourmet. “Her books have been an absolute lifesaver and have slashed my grocery bill in half. She’s taught me how to cook from scratch. So many people are moving away from cooking their own good food and they don’t know how to cook.” In her shopping, Gower now goes for basic or unbranded supermarket items where possible, and reckons it saves her hundreds of dollars a year. “I used to be a terrible brand snob, I used to think if it wasn’t a brand item, it was inferior. I don’t think people can tell with the flour in your baking.” Is there anything she won’t compromise on? “Shampoo,” says Gower. “I used to spend $15 a fortnight on Pantene. I still like to get it, but I now put it into plastic pump bottles, and use a few small pumpfuls instead of big handfuls, and it lasts for four weeks instead of a fortnight.” She says it is “not about going without” but smart choices to “enjoy a better quality of life”. She says her good budgeting and bargaining habits have rubbed off on her young boys. “They do like having a mum who doesn’t just pay for things and they realise money has to be earnt,” says Gower. “They realise they don’t have to accept the first offer and they are probably smarter.” They have seen her clip coupons and bargain for discounts, including $400 off their widescreen TV. Gower believes her commonsense approach is not necessarily all that more time consuming, and rebuts the comment busy mums and working people simply don’t have time for all this muffin making, meal planning and cooking things from scratch to save a buck. “I work 30 hours a week,” says Gower, who is also the national manager for Simple Savings, responding to emails, editing tips and managing the website. Although she does work from home, she believes those who say they have no time to plan and save money, are making excuses.