Being Thrifty in the City

So this week is all about saving money . Something which is particularly hard in the big expensive world of London. The priciest thing in London is probably the rent and commute. We all have that  friend whose parents had bought their plush Fitzrovia pad in 1901 for £16 and consequently don’t pay rent, but for the rest of us we are torn between living in a room that would technically be classified as a cupboard in order to shorten our commute or spend 11/3 of our working life on a train.

Whilst I can’t help you with rent prices, there are plenty of other ways to save money in the big smoky urban jungle...

  1.  Vintage Markets and Boot Fairs  – One of my favourite things to do is spend the afternoon at a London market. I really recommend following @lemonandgingervintage, they are one of my favourite vintage stalls and their stuff is proper cheap. On Sunday I bought some second hand Birkenstocks £1 and a pure silk top for a fiver.You never know what you might find and hardly anyone is likely to have the same item.  Brilliant!

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          2.  Find out your reduced day- I have them down to a T. Especially the fancy shops as these do the best bargains. Waitrose food just for the rich? Never! I know exactly when my M&S and Waitrose reduces,  and though they try to mix it up a few times I am usually bang on the money and come away with some great bargains. Call me an Ian Beale but I have done a weeks food shop for £15.

.         3. Reusable cups- I have said it before and I will say it again reusable cups are the future. Or at least a way to secure the future. You spend more than you think on coffees and bottles of water. Make a coffee at home ( can really recommend an Aeropress) and be the smug cat in the street with your coffee that cost 1/10 of other coffees.

          4.  Working Lunch- If you spend £5 a day on lunch you are spending on average £100 a month! Make big batches of food on Sunday night and put it into Tupperware ready for the week. I normally make a big curry or chilli or even if you put a baked potato in the oven and heat it up at work.

              5. Get Cultured- Theatre and the arts shouldn’t just be for the privileged. Most theatres do some sort of cheap scheme if you are under 30. I go to the National Theatre a lot simply because of Entry Pass tickets which are £5! I know the Old Vic does something similar and there is always smaller productions dotted around the city for pretty cheap/ free.

              6.  Christmas is fast approaching and there are a few shops with some Sporadic sales. I bought two fun and bright cushions in Paperchase which were down from £60 to £9. I kid you not. It took all my will power not to buy them all but put that with a nice homemade candle and that’s a bloomin great present right there.  

8      7.  Do you really really want it? We all know that if it came to needs we really just need food, water and shelter. I am not asking you to cull your materialism back to quite that extent but think about it, do you really want that silver dress with dinosaurs on it? If in doubt sleep on it. If you can’t stop thinking about that dress and you can afford it without living off mung beans for the next week then I say go for it.

  8.  Buy local, buy in markets – I always scour my local markets for some good bargains and, particularly if you go at the end of trading you can usually haggle a bargain. 4 avocados for a pound? Yes please.

           9. Promotional freebies! Take advantage of restaurant openings and offers Time Out and @SkintLondon are always in the know of offers and sweet deals.

 10.  Another man’s treasure… A lot of people these days put furniture outside their house that they can’t shift. I often see this as a great opportunity to upcycle. There are lots of ideas on Pinterest if you get stuck. Reused, upcycled and not ending up on landfill. Make sure you pay it forward

by doing the same when you have something you don't want.

         11.   Follow me @floraesme I will update you on any fancy bargains I seem to find on my wanderings.

 That is all for now but I will keep posting about any great bargains as and when they pop up! 

Wake Up and Smell the Waste

If there is one thing I love it is coffee.

If there is one thing  I hate it is a shit tonne of plastics ending up on landfill when they can be avoided.

As the child of a single parent, I have always been brought up to make everything last. I was encouraged to  eat as much of the fruit or vegetable as possible , cut that bit of mould off the cheese and eat the tangy fruit. (I am not saying we need to go that far, my mother would sometimes be in full denial and would try to convince me that a yoghurt that  had a fluffy coating was just condensation).

Since entering the “real” world I can’t help but notice how prevalent food and packaging waste is, despite the most of us  being very aware of all of the statistics. I won’t get all Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on you, but according to Environmental Innovation (April 2000), each paper cup manufactured is responsible for 0.24 lbs of CO2 emissions. That’s a hell of a lot.

Most people I work with will only drink bottled water ( FYI PEOPLE TAP WATER IS ABSOLUTELY FINE, I HAVE BEEN DRINKING TAP WATER FOR OVER TWENTY-FOUR YEARS AND I AM ONE OF THE HEALTHIEST PEOPLE I KNOW.  STOP BEING A DIVA AND RUINING OUR PLANET!) and the  mindless disposal continues  despite numerous warnings, information and education. I can currently see four empty plastic water bottles lying on one desk in my office that I am hoping will make it into the recycling bin that  I had organised, but I’m doubtful. Each of these water bottles will  take up to 400 years to be broken down! 

Whilst recycling is great, if you really think about it, all of the energy has already been used to create this cup already so it is a lot better to actually have a reusable option.

Enter Keep Cup!

This leading brand of reusable cups is the world’s first barista standard reusable cup. There are lots of reusable cups out there but  I can’t recommend their product enough. They have waged a war on disposable cups and work hard to try to reduce the amount that end up on landfill. It all started with a solution for restaurant packaging and now they are taking over the world, and making it a better place one reusable cup at a time. Whilst the  difficult to measure they have calculated that they have removed 1,449,104 disposable cups from circulation. Which is pretty darned impressive. The cups are really reasonable and some coffee shops will even give you a discount if you bring your own mug. 

If you are feeling really benevolent you get yourself a reusable water bottle. I tend to use glass ones as I try to avoid plastics and I save so much money with this! I have a Full Circle DayTripper water bottle which I found in the Urban Outfitters sale but there are all sorts of different ones, some even have a compartment to put cucumber should you so wish for your water to have an essence of greenery. Just try, as hard as possible and be aware of where your water bottle/food/coffee cup is going to end up and the process that has happened to make that product. 

Go Green, Save Money and Save the Planet!

A Bad Day's Work

On average, we spend about 30 percent of our human life working.

Depressing right?

Probably not if you love your job. Which is probably why (most of ) our parents instill in us from a young age that they don’t care what we do as long as we are happy. Blaa blaa. We dismiss this on our way to our grueling internship telling them they don’t understand the world anymore and it has all changed since the free- loving sixties.

I remember when I  had just started a new job. The previous office manager had quit leaving me in charge of post. My boss was being particularly psychotic and called me into a meeting in front of my manager to illustrate how badly I had packaged up a box of product by stamping on the box repeatedly until it broke and then handing it back to me. I left his office and burst into tears. I didn’t want to cry but  I felt awkward. My manager felt awkward. We all felt awkward. It was a nasty and a quite frankly strange way to do something. I was fairly new to the business and immediately decided that work environment wasn’t for me. The rest of  that day was utterly crap with everything going wrong and I just couldn’t wait until 5.30pm when I could run away to the pub and drink a bottle of wine and moan to my poor sympathetic friends about how I was totally done with that place and that mad nutter running it. 

I wanted to write this post to let you know we all have these kinds of days. They are horrible and they can completely knock your confidence. Well, don’t let them. In all honesty, my director was probably having a shitty day and I was an easy target. Maybe this boxing was the final thing that tipped him over the age. My point is, don’t let affect you. Do whatever you need to do that evening to feel better. Meet up with friends, go out for dinner, drink two bottles of Prosecco  and watch the entire box set of Ab Fab. Whatever you need to do. My point is that our happiness is the most important thing.  Tomorrow is a new day.  Do not put up with ever letting someone make you feel worthless or insignificant in the workplace. 

Most of all believe in yourself. You are 3000 % worth it and deserve to be happy.