Are your water bills furthering your debt?
Excessive water wastage can increase your debt
Everyday we spend money unneccesarily on utilities, by leaving taps running, leaving that hallway light on or forgetting to turn down your heating during summer. All these things can contribute to a rising level of personal debt.
If you have been keeping up with our recent debt management and budgeting articles, you find various bite size articles which will can help you save money, however utilities seem to be one area that is often overlooked within the household.
Unlike our gas and electric suppliers, who we can change to find a better rate (which we highly recommend), our water supplier is often fixed, so usually stays the same. Because of this, some basic ways to save money on your water bills include:
- Use a shower rather than a bath. Although showers are commonplace nowadays, some people still are bathing rather than using a shower. An average bath uses between 30-50 gallons of water, however a shower uses around half of that. So that’s a considerable saving on your daily water usage!
- Turn off your taps whilst you brush your teeth. Although this may be a little over cautious, you may have a tap running for 2 or 3 minutes whilst you brush. Add up this volume of water over 2-3 brushes per day it soon adds up.
- If you have a garden or plant lfie that requires constant watering, consider rigging up a water trough that collects rain water from your gutter. When the weather is warmer, you will have collected plenty of rainwater for use on your plants, saving you cost on your water bills.
Even small changes in the way you use water can add up to considerable savings during the year which can be used to repay your debt.
Easy Money Management
Kublax allows you to aggregate your financial data into one place.
In my experience with everyday money management, the simplest and easiest way to make sure you don’t end up in debt is to make yourself a budget. I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before, but if you’re not budgeting, you’re not really keeping a close eye on your spending - and that’s where money problems begin. If you’ve been making excuses not to budget, I’ve found a free tool online that simplifies things.
It’s called Kublax, and it works by aggregating all your bank, credit, and building society accounts together. It’s a free to use program, and once you spend a few minutes tinkering with your settings, you’ll start to see your finances in a whole new light.
What I like about it, is that it takes the parts out of budgeting that people normally trip up on – such as calculations, missing out an expense or forgetting about a direct debit – because it does the calculations for you and categorises your spending into your budget automatically.
I’ve been road testing this financial software for the past six weeks now and have been really pleased with it. Once you’ve uploaded your details, you define your expenses into as many categories as you like. The software then plots your finances for you on an easy to read graph. After you enter in the figures for your budget, your graph will show both your actual spending and your budget visually.
Now I was happy with just those two functions alone in Kublax, and then I noticed the ‘compare me’ tab. The team at Kublax has come up with a way for you to get some perspective on all your finances by allowing you to anonymously compare your finances with others. You can then check out what areas you might be overspending in by seeing what the average amount others spend on that expense.
I’ve been waiting for a decent money management platform like this to launch in the UK for some time now, and would recommend you try it out if you’re not a fan of traditional budgeting and hate spreadsheets. There’s still some room for improvement in the software, but it definitely lives up to it’s promise - ‘Making sense of your money’. If you choose to road test Kublax or know of any other online money management tools, make sure you let us know.
Do hobbies increase your debt?
Often when we attempt to consider why we end up with high levels of debt, we look at the common factors such as rent, mortgages and credit card bills to understand our financial situation. Although these areas are key to understand your personal finances, it is also important to consider your hobbies and whether or not they are adding to your financial worries.
If you have expensive hobbies, such attending sports events, music gigs and theatre trips then you may be living too extravagently when instead, you should be considering putting that money to one side to help clear your debt.
Firstly assess how much your hobbies and leisure activities are costing you. Of course, im not saying stay indoors at all times and never enjoy yourself, but you may need to ease back on the spending for a few months while your finances get back on track. The key to debt management is minimise unneccesary spending when you have more urgent outgoings, such as credit card and mortgage payments.
Although you may be a little tighter on the purse strings for a while, there are thousand of free things you can do that wont involve just staying indoors. Check Time Out for some great suggestions. So get to those free museums, gallerys, fetes and shows and save some money in the process. Your bank balance will thank you in the long run.
