cash strapped

I've been having some serious financial issues just recently.

There are a number of causes.

The primary one is my spend-thrift ways (you don't acquire hundreds of unwatched DVDs and unread books without spending a hell of a lot of money), but extra pressure has recently been building due to the rise in the cost of living.

In particular, Petrol now costs an absolute fortune.  I easily spend more than £100 a month, which is getting on for half as much again as I spent four years ago and in that time I've not had any pay increases.

But also, this last month I tried to "pre-invest" in electricity and spent a total of £150 to try to build up a bit of a cushion.  Now that's a lot of money, but I felt it was necessary because my electricity supplier has increased their rates by 11%.  This is particularly worrisome as I've heard serious predictions that this winter is going to be another super cold one.

Apparently we're going to have this warm spell, and then temperatures are going to plummet.  I hope they don't plummet too far before I go on holiday.  I'm going down to Devon at the end of October, which is a bit later than I would usually do, but I felt I needed to fit in with other people's holidays a bit.  It's also already booked, so I can't change it.

My landlord is apparently going to plumb some heating in across from his place while I'm holiday, which will hopefully help a bit with heating (it's the electricity for heating that really hits me during the winter) although it's going to mean my rent will go up a fiver.  Also I won't have any control over it, so it'll only be on at certain times and of course during summer I won't use it, so although it might only sound like £5 a month for heating, it's probably more like £10 a month during winter.  So helpful, but I'm still going to be spending a fair old bit on heating.

I've also had to buy some more clothes.  When I switched over the summer cloths I actually chucked a few clothes away.  This was partly because they were getting very worn out, but also because I'd lost a lot of weight.

Back then of course I thought I'd loose more over summer, but I haven't so I'm still having to buy outsize clothes, which are more expensive.  I'm not sure why they're more expensive - aren't all clothes made in sweatshops in Malaysia?  I mean, I know there's more cloth in big clothes, but surely cloth costs next to nothing and there's not that much more labour involved, surely?

Anyway, point is I've had to buy a new coat, a suit, some new belts and I've also bought a new work shirt.  As mentioned, I threw some clothes away and I actually threw too many shirts away, so I have to get some shirts or I'll be wearing short sleeve shirts right into winter!

I only got one shirt, more as an experiment than anything else, as I measured my collar size and, to be frank, I couldn't actually believe the size, which was 16 inches.  I've a feeling that the shirt I've therefore ordered will fit my neck, but probably not my waist!

Also, I've had a review of my pension and it's gone up as a result.  I'm in a bit of a weird position with my pension in that I started it way "ahead of the game" but then I failed to really capitalise on that and increase it in line with my wage.  Now, the flip side to that is that there was a miss communication when I set it up and my contribution was nearly double what it should have been, but still, now that I'm on a lot more I should be contributing more so that I'll have a good pension when I retire.

Which, if you think about it, is really just another reflection of how bad I am with organising my finances.

I therefore got a bunch of stuff on e-bay this last weekend, and also identified some other stuff I could put on next weekend.  But the truth is I'm running out of old stuff I could e-bay and really need to go through things I've got on my to do piles in order to sell them.