The 2013 Consumer Power Adventure pt 1: Turning Bills Into Mills

Time for the first of my  NYR posts about how I am trying to change the world using my consumer power. For this one I am cheating slightly because its not something I actually did in January, but I am trying to se January to convince my parents to do it, so I think it counts.

So, quick introduction. Ecotricity are and energy supplier. They were the worlds first green energy supplier and remain one of the largest. When I first decided I wants a green energy supplier I spent a lot of time researching different options and I decided Ecotricity were my favourite, for a number of reasons.

Firstly because Ecotricity are run as an not-for-profit organisation. There are no shareholders so they put all their profits into further research into alternative and effective green energy sources. For me this is very important, if we are really going to use green energy properly we need to do more research into it. Secondly Ecotricity are one of the few companies which offer green gas. Currently they are aiming to be the first company to build a green gas plant in the UK, using food waste to produce energy which we can use. This is a brilliant idea and its brilliant ideas like that that are going to save us all when the giant spaghetti monster comes.

One thing that did totally surprise me was that it didn't cost any more. Ecotricitiy have 2 simple tariffs. The first uses a majority of their green energy supplemented with brown energy they buy in (check the website for full details of the mix). This tariff tracks the 'big 6' so doesn't cost any more than your current supplier. So you can be doing good without costing you any extra! The second is their full green energy - this is 100% green using a mixture of their green energy supplemented with bought in green energy. This costs a little more, so if you an't afford it you don't have to.  

But to be perfectly honest, beyond all the green energy and saving the planet messages I really love Ecotricity because they are nice. According to Ofgem's complaints reports Ecotricity had the least complaints per 1000 customers in 2012, and from my experience I can see why. Call them and you talk, not only to an English human being, but they will do their best efforts to make sure you always speak to the same human being. If you email your own personal advisor will call you back, the same one, every time. I wasn't sure if Economy 7 was really saving me any money so I emailed them and told them. Later the same day they called me back and told me that they had calculated that on a standard tarrif I would have saved £1.10 over the last 3 months. So they had swapped me over but because it was such a small difference and such a short space of time they would monitor it for the following year and let me know if I would be better switching back. Can you imagine nPower or British Gas doing that?!

Check out their website for all sorts of fun and interesting facts about what they are doing:

ecotricity - because they are awesome

and really do seriously consider what you could be doing to help save our planet.

P.S. We got 6 free bottles of wine when we switched through the £50 naked wines voucher they give you and if that doesn't incentivise you to action then nothing will!

2 weeks on and the questions remain...

So its been two weeks since I couldn't sleep and frankly my sleeping patterns are not much better. Getting quite good at surviving on Paracetamol and diet coke tho, so its fine. I'v only made one or two more cock-ups at work and only my boss and the sales manager have noticed so far, so alls fine!

In those two weeks some rather dramatic things have happened. Firstly I am writing this post from my parents spare bed. This is because all of mine & Joni's 3 bedroom house has been packed up and moved into their garage. Again. This is the third winter in 4 that we have moved into my parents house, they must be getting sick of us. We decided to vacate our rented house pretty sharpish when we realised there wasn't time to buy a house in the time we had left on the lease. So we are here, saving money again. woo. hoo.

On the positive, our meeting with the bank actually went rather well. In fact I have had about 5 good meeting with banks in the last 2 weeks. Turns out we have reached the point where people want to give us money, which is nice. So its all systems go for buying a house - we just need to find one we like!

Which is of course where it all falls down. The problem with 'a buyers market' is that we can have pretty much whatever we want. There are so many houses on the market we could literately have anything. So what do we want? Something ready-made? A project maybe? A big garden? A conservatory? Something pretty good that just needs a little modernising? Do we want something to live in for a while? Or a quick project and the chance to make a few quid?

Now I am indecisive at the best of times. Throw in a few thousand pounds and I am like a kid in a candy shop, I just want them all. Buying a house involves making some serious choices about what I want for my life for the next 5 years. And I'm not sure I am grown-up enough to make those choices....

Loosing sleep over big decisions - now that is grown up!

Tonight I can't sleep. Joni is happily sleeping next to me but I can't sleep. "How can this be so?" I hear you cry. Well, 2 days ago something rather dramatic happened and thus unrolled the following, highly stressful weekend....

"Sorry to do this to you but I need my house back. Can you move out by the 17th of Feb. Love your landlord"

This was the txt message I revived from my landlord at 2pm on Friday afternoon, or words to that effect. Needless to say my brain went into total meltdown and 'ahhhhhhhhhh' was all I thought for about 12 hours. Luckily Joni is much less of a drama queen than me and he walked me through what our options were, and what should happen next.

The options are pretty simple. A) rent somewhere else, B) buy a house. In truth buying a house has long been a goal of our for this year (ever since The Great Mortgage U-Turn of 2010) but it was really for in 6 months time. You see, we have no deposit. What we have is 2 creditcards, 1 loan & 4 overdrafts. And interestingly one visa will not cover a house deposit! We always planned on taking a loan for a deposit (i mean really, the only people who can afford to save £15k before they are 40 live with their parents and ask yourself, who is really doing the saving in that situation?) but we hadn't quite reached the point where we could apply for a big enough loan yet, which brings me onto the real point of this post (and my sleeplessness)....

Has anyone noticed how ridiculous the current credit system is in the country? I mean really, seriously ridiculous. See we had a meeting with a man from Lloyds yesterday. Very nice man, very helpful, would have lent us £131 thousand pounds for a house in a heartbeat, but £13k for the deposit?!? No way! And I know the mortgage is secured against the house bla bla bla but why not secure the loan against the house too? It's just insane. The idea that I can get one hundred and thirty thousand pounds (seriously, say it out loud like that, its a huge sum of money) but I might not be able to buy because instead of staying home and sponging off mummy & daddy I went out and got a life is just extraordinary.

And before someone spells it out to me, I know its incase the house looses value, to cover fees (not that the grands worth of mortgage fees wouldnt do that) and the banks covering their arse bla bla, we get it. What really annoys me, what really gets to me, is that it is all decided by a practically-arbitrary computer system.

In the last 6 years I have proven I can budget, I can handle money. You can practically watch in my bank statments how I improve with money over the past decade. I the last 18 months Joni & I shown how we know exactly how to live to a tight budget, and in the last 5 months we have paid back over £2000 of debt while living in a rented house. Will anyone take notice of this proven responsibly? Of course not! You can't quantify that and turn it into an algorithm for measuring candidates so it doesn't count. No one cares for your actual situation, they only care about the numbers written down.

Tomorrow we have a meeting with our bank in which we will basically find out if we can get a house. Turns out, thanks to credit scoring, it may all come down to wheather we have a landline or not.

We don't.

Welcoming in a New Year

Traditionally people welcome in the New Year with lots of alcohol and a resolution. The copious amounts of alcohol were consumed last night, to predictable effects (laughing, shouting, drinking cava on the park at 1am), and now its time to talk about resolutions. See, I never start resolutions on the 1st of January, they are bound to fail. So I start resolutions on the 2nd. Much higher chance of success!

Last year Joni and I realised that all New Years Resolutions fall into one of five categories:
1) Personal Interests e.g. I will learn a new language
2) Personal Well-being e.g. I will quit smoking, stop being fat and win a marathon
3) Lifestyle e.g. I will love my job/life/husband and never complain about my lot again.
4) Relationships e.g. I will start/end a relationship with another man/woman/goat
5) Altruistic e.g. I will give 50% of all my wealth to children with aids and volunteer 30 hours a week in an old peoples home.

Having set five categories, I decided to have one resolution for 2012 from each category. I wrote a list and in the following months preceded to loose said list and forget most of the resolutions. I know the Personal Interests one was about going to the Broadway Cinema once every calendar month, and I know this because it is officially the first ever resolution in the history of mankind to actually be achieved, hurray! A had a personal well-being one about getting skinny, lol, and a relationships one about my relationship with Joni "staying the same", a wishy-washy resolution if ever I heard one.

So on to this year. I figure if I blog about my resolutions then they might actually happen (and at the very least I will probably be able to find them next year).

P.S. Mostly because Joni is a total nerd the resolutions have to be SMART targets (thats Specific, Mensurable  Achievable, Relevant & Time-bound in-case you have never worked in a school/office/any target-driven environment)

Fiona's 2013 New Years Resolutions!

1) Personal Interests: I will Learn Danish
This is a little broad, so to make it smart I will aim to be able to hold a reasonable conversation in Danish with one of my relatives when I go to visit them later this year. I will let the relative decide what counts as a 'reasonable conversation'.

2) Personal Well-being: I will do 150 mins exercise each week.
Diet goals never work - I always cave and eat my own mass in chocolate but 150 mins is the governments recommended weekly exercise for an adult and it seems achievable.

3) Lifestyle: To reach the end of 2013 with less debt than I have now, without the year feeling like it has been overshadowed by debt-repayments.
Its no secret that Joni and I have lots of debt and we want rid of it. In the last 5 months of 2012 we cleared over £2000 worth but we broke our backs to do it. I want to keep going in the right direction without feeling every step is being governed by how it affects our credit ratings. I'm not sure its a particularly SMART goal, but it is a goal.

4) Relationships: To not be dumped by any friends via text or other social media outlets!
While this may seem funny I am ending 2012 minus two friends who, in January, I thought were rather good friends. I discovered (via text) they weren't. While I am reassured this isn't my fault I do feel that this year I would like to focus on loving the friends I have, and building some new ones too. So watch out blog-lovers, you will be hearing more from me soon!

5) Altruistic: To blog once a month about how I have used my consumer-power to improve things.
I'm not a fan of giving money to charity. Millions of people give millions of pounds to charity everyday and nothing much changes. Starving people are still reliant on western cultures, ice caps are still melting and once a year Terry Wogan is still given a quick shock to wake him from his slumber, wheeled out on stage and given a variety of young presenters to ogle. BUT I do believe in consumer power, the power of every person to change the way the world looks by what they buy. Which is why once a month I will be trying to do something to change my habits for the better, and I will write about it here to encourage others to do the same. I think this will be the hardest goal, but it could also be the most worthwhile.

So there you have it. 5 resolutions for 2013. All a little bit tricky but also all worthwhile. I'm quite looking forward to next year now. Not looking forward to the 6am start tomorrow....