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When I was 22, I was the kind of youngster who buys an iPhone just because the other people in the office have one and I needed to fit in. The kind of person who spends their weekend shopping at the mall for things they don’t need. That has a maxed out credit card to get designer clothes. I had nightmares and worries that I can’t repay my debts. I’ll be 30 in a week. I have no debt; I live on a boat that I bought with cash and this year I’m spending my holidays in Hawaii. I invest for my retirement, and I considerRead More →

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One of our goals for 2018 is to get better at meal planning and meal prepping. Because we cook most of the food we eat, we spend a lot of time in the kitchen and optimizing this will be both time and money saving. Benefits of meal planning 1. It’s budget friendly I dedicate a whole chapter to meal planning in my e-book, The Smart Girl’s Journey to Financial Bliss because it can cut your grocery shopping bill in half. You go to the supermarket with a list of items and the correct quantity you need to make the meals that you considered in advance.Read More →

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Registration for No Spend November is closed. Stay tuned for our next challenge. Want to start right away? Everything I teach in the challenge and much more is in my e-book, The Smart Girl’s Journey to Financial Bliss.  Alin and I started budgeting and taking our finances seriously about 5 years ago. I can’t claim that I know everything there is to know on the topic, but I got pretty damn good at it. We have no debt and we’re able to have some luxurious experiences once in a while because we still live well below our means. We are currently on a journey to saveRead More →

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The second month of our savings challenge is gone. If all of them pass by so quickly, we won’t even notice when it’s March 2019, and we need to draw the line! In case you’re new here, we decided to set ourselves the goal of saving £25000 by March ’19, which means around £1390 every month. If you think that’s a lot, you’re not the only one! If you want to know how we did in August, here’s the blog post. September was a concern because it had one big challenge – we went on a 4-day break in Stockholm. Well, a break might beRead More →

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Expenses we refuse to have A mortgage At the moment, owning a house is almost impossible for us financially. The prices in the UK are way above what any human being would consider reasonable, so we wouldn’t want to purchase a home here. Ideally, we would find a cheap house in another country that we could buy with cash, but we’re not there yet. A house would also mean that we can’t move anymore. We like exploring different places, living there for a while, but then move on. I don’t want growing roots. Four years is enough. From a financial point of view, having aRead More →

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It’s our second month of the saving £25k in 18 months journey. August went well, but it’s a constant effort. Every day we do some more research, we hunt offers and plan our spending carefully. We started using a few cashback apps and websites, and these are our favourites. Quidco How it works: Before shopping online on your favourite retailers’ websites, you check Quidco to see if there are any offers available (e.g. 2% cashback). When you find something suitable for you, you proceed to the retailer’s website, but through Quidco so they can track your purchase. You do your shopping as usual, and QuidcoRead More →

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Ohh, it’s almost September. Hello, Autumn, I missed you. But before getting excited about everything that’s coming up, let’s see how August went. It was the first month of our 18 months to £25k journey. At the beginning of the month, we didn’t know what to expect. We blindly set the goal of £1389 a month and just hoped for the best. Read on to see if we made it. We focused on three big things this month: food, transportation and monthly subscriptions. 1. Food First of all, we set a weekly budget of £40 plus a monthly online shop of £50 (for a totalRead More →

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We recently celebrated one year of minimalism, and in the anniversary post, I mentioned what we purchased in the last 12 months. But there’s also a lot of stuff that we didn’t buy, so let’s talk about reusable items. When we were still in the decluttering and minimising phase, we tried to switch everything we can to a reusable option. I wrote a blog post about all the new habits we were trying out, but the emphasis was on space optimization and environment, but the truth is, we also saved some money. Let’s do the math together. Reusable items – how much you can saveRead More →

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If you’re not among the few lucky people that get to work from home on a regular basis, it means you have to spend a reasonable amount of time commuting. The average commute for a Londoner is 45 minutes to 1h one way, but there are many people (like us) who decide that their living standards are more important than the distance to the workplace and live much further away. I spend 3 hours commuting on every day I go to London, so doing something useful with those 3 hours is pretty important. Otherwise, they just go to waste. When we were living in London,Read More →

We set ourselves the big goal of saving 25000 pounds by March 2019. We have weekly and monthly goals and in this post I'm listing all the tools I'm using to save money in August.

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A few years ago we changed our relationship with money to be able to get rid of debt and enjoy a money-stress-free life. Going through Dave Ramsey’s seven steps, we created an emergency budget, then got debt free and eventually built up the emergency fund to accommodate six months of expenses in case one or both of us would lose their income. We’re firm believers in keeping a budget, and I have a few blog posts that explain how to create and use a budget, why it’s essential to have an emergency fund and things you shouldn’t spend that much money on. But things gotRead More →