What percentage of the time do you use your car? How much of the time does it sit, empty and alone? Cars cost money to own and spend most of their time idle. You probably don’t need one.

Once you have a car, it’s difficult to imagine life without one. It becomes a part of a great many rituals and we build a life around the availability of the car for weekends, holidays, grocery runs and everything else in-between.

The car is, however, a huge money drain. It costs a fortune to own, to run and to insure. In this article I’m going to cover

• How much your car costs you
• The alternative modes of transport you could use
• What it’s like to live without a car
• How to switch to carless without losing your mind

I posted a few weeks ago with a savings plan calculator that allowed you to build you own 52-week savings plan using a google spreadsheet that I shared.

I thought about that some more and wanted to make it more versatile. What if you want to save over only 40 weeks, for example? What if you wanted to start with savings of £20 per week?

Check out this article to see the free online savings plan builder that achieves whatever target you choose.

The path to repaying your debts can be long, and one of the hardest things about completing that journey is finding the strength to stay the course for months on end as you rebuild your finances, one brick at a time.

One of the most motivating things you can do as you set out on this journey is to look forward to that time when you will be debt free. Visualize how your efforts will pay off and how your debt is gradually erased until you reach that moment when it is all finally reimbursed.

Visualizing the results of your efforts is known to be an effective motivating strategy when you’re looking to strengthen your resolve.

Any wall can only be built one brick at a time, but visualizing the completed wall is how you motivate yourself to keep picking up bricks.

This article provides an online tool that will allow you to draw a picture of your debt repayment journey, month by month, until everything is paid off.

I shamelessly participated in the traditional financial blog January epidemic of sending out 52-week savings plan sheets to my readers.

I decided upon a savings plan that doubles the amount you save every week from a very small base, so in my case, you started by investing 50p, then £1, then £1.50, until the 52nd week when you saved £26, and you’d have a box, or a jar, with £689 in it.

This savings plan post proved a bit more popular than average, in part because the concept is both appealing and approachable.

That’s a decent chunk of change that allows you to do something substantial, and the idea behind the plan is that it’s small enough an effort that anyone can sign on and stick to it until the end.

The reason everyone in this field suggests this is because it works. It’s something simple, tangible, that anyone can do.

But it’s a bit prescriptive. What if you really needed to save £827 to buy your Spring holiday trip for next year? Maybe my £689 plan isn’t all that useful to you…

Since the math is really simple, I thought I’d review my post from last week and go one better, letting you set your own target and print out your own savings sheet, based on the target and the method you choose.

A straw a day makes a bale of hay.

Follow this easy and accessible weekly savings plan to save over £650 by the end of the year with almost no effort.

In 2016, cable TV companies made $81 billion revenue from subscriptions.

Eighty-one billion dollars in revenue. In a single year.

Believe it or not, that was a bad year. Two years earlier, in 2014, they made $99 billion. They peaked just shy of the hundred mark, then Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and all the others started taking market share away, and the number began to decline.

In 2016, Netflix made an estimated $4.8 billion in North American subscription revenues.

Entertainment is a valuable business. And an expensive cost.

Each of these numbers has another side to it. If the average bill is $1000 per year for cable, then $81 billion is 81 million subscribers, give or take. Each of these people swaps $1000 per year in return for the ability to consume countless hours of their free time watching mostly reruns of shows.

How much do you spend on cable? How much can you save if you cut the cord? What are the alternatives to cable that might save you a ton of money?

One of the most exploitative businesses in the world is the foreign exchange services at airports and on-street booths. The rates they charge are nothing short of robbery. They exploit the ignorance of the general population to charge a fortune for a service that deserves very little margin.

That may sound harsh, but when you look at the options available to everyone for foreign exchange transactions, it’s absolutely shocking that outlets charge what they do to switch your dollars for pounds, or euros for dollars.

In this article I’ll explain the problem and give you a few numerical examples to show you how bad it can get. Then I’ll provide alternative methods for getting foreign currency. Methods that won’t result in spending a ton of cash for a service that shouldn’t cost very much.

If you’ve rented a car from time to time, you’ll be familiar with a decision you have to take every time you pick the car up from the agency.

You get asked if you would like to “buy back the excess”, or “waive the excess for a fee”.

What this means is that you pay an extra amount per day, and they remove the excess on the car insurance. If you do not take this option and you have an accident, or a person steals or vandalises the car, you’ll have to pay the first £400 to £4000 of costs towards that damage before the car rental company’s insurance takes the rest. If you do take this option, that gets reduced to zero and you’re safe.

This option can cost anything between £5 to £45 per day, and if you think that’s a lot to pay to get rid of a risk, you’re right. You can get the same thing for much less money.

One of many things you can do to keep your costs down over time is to ensure that you’re not overpaying for things you subscribe to or purchase on contract.

This includes a long list of things that include

• Utility bills (gas, electricity, water)
  
• Home Internet
• Cable / Netflix / Hulu / Amazon Prime
• Home Insurance
• Car Insurance
• Car Lease
• Mobile Telephone Contract
  
• Mortgages and Home Rental
• Loans and Credit Card Debt

Each of these things can be renegotiated, but often only at a specific moment in time. In some cases, these things auto-renew for an additional year and if you miss the window, it become impossible to alter for yet another year.

Have trouble sticking to a budget?

There are many reasons why we don’t always manage to hit the targets we set ourselves, often despite our best intentions. You may set out to stick to a budget and find yourself challenged by decisions you don’t remember making, or lapses you regret after the fact.

The principal culprits are often bad habits and losing sight of our objectives. We need some tricks and tactics to keep our eye on the prize.

Of course you should ensure that when you set out on a project like this, you are clear about the goals, and why you want to achieve them. If you are not committed up-front, then you’ll have forgotten all about it when then next project idea comes along. There isn’t room in our minds for several large personal projects all at once.

 But if you’ve made that decision and you’re afraid you’ll miss your targets, or you’ve experienced difficulty getting this kind of project off the ground in the past, here are five things you should consider.

In my universe, eating out is a special event.

Even if I could afford to eat out in a good restaurant every evening, I wouldn’t.

Aside from the effects on my waistline and my life expectancy, restaurants would lose their appeal. That would be a shame because I really enjoy eating out.

The things that feel like rewards for a job well done or an effort made should be protected. If we overuse these reward systems, we become habituated. That means we don’t notice them anymore, we take them for granted. In addition, if I eat out all the time, eating at home will start to feel like I’m depriving myself of pleasure, when the opposite is true. I love cooking and serving a really good meal around my own table.

That said, when I go out for a meal, I expect to get good value, and there are a number of things I bear in mind before I reserve, and once I’m in the restaurant, to ensure that my money is well spent.

I’ve had a lot of discussions with people who are trying to get a handle on their finances. Most are willing to make significant efforts to change the way they think about spending money, but there are two blind spots that people can have trouble getting around.

The first blind spot is a belief that none of the savings opportunities will work for them.

“Well I’m sure this would save lots of people money, but in my case…”

I can run though a huge list of things and they can respond that it’s just not possible for them because they’ve already looked at this and in their specific situation it’s just not going to help. They apply this to every suggestion and end up trying to convince me that there’s really nothing to be done.

The second blind spot is the set of purchases that your subconscious really wants, that it considers justified and deserved reward. Your mind guides you away from these areas and so you avoid thinking about them too much. Things like cigarettes and alcohol, but also chocolate bars and lattes on the way to work.

Here’s how to think about these savings opportunities…