Day: March 14, 2007

In the mood to save money

Posted on By admin 3 Comments on In the mood to save money

Orange has pissed me off for the last time (I hope).

I hate Orange. They're fucking evil and this will be the last time I have to deal with them or give them money. The first year of my contract was fine. Then my phone broke 1 week after my contract was renewed and it would have cost more to fix it than to buy a new one. So I did. And it sucked. Then I started traveling to the continent for work and my phone bill tripled in roaming charges. And Orange was laughing all the way to the bank the whole time, because I was paying £40 for about 30 minutes of airtime and about the same number of SMS messages. Fuck Orange. I have now switched to a pay-as-you-go phone on T-Mobile. I'm in the process of moving my phone number over so there should be no disruption on my calls and contacts.

I'm also in the process for shopping for a new broadband and phone provider, as well as looking into 0% balance transfers for the credit card. I read a very interesting article recently on how businesses make money on the laziness and inertia of people. We can save £240 a year by switching to a package deal on Virgin media and probably just as much with a balance transfer for the visa.

All things you should all be looking into :)

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Today is Pi day

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Happy 3.14 to everybody.

In other news, Katy and I have decided that we're out of the housing market for the foreseeable future. We've been talking/thinking about it for a while now and finally came to a decision today.

We currently pay £780 a month in rent. If we were to get a mortgage, we'd be paying £1600. That's how crazy the housing market is in Cambridge. We could afford it, but we would have no leeway in case interest rates went up, and things would be tight if/when we had kids and we'd be down to one income for a while.

We've decided to do something a bit different. We're going to stick to the budget we decided on and worked out while we were crunching the numbers. If we put away £600 month in an ISA at 5.5%, we have £7500 saved in a year. If we do that the 7 years I have left on my contract, we come out of it with something close to 50K. That's not bad at all.

Now, people will say that if we did get a mortgage, we could probably make double that in the profits of selling our hose in a rising housing market. Maybe. Yes, it is tempting to think of it that way. The housing market in Cambridge is insane and will probably only get worse. The EBI AGM this morning informed us that staff levels will probably go from 250 to 400 in the next 5 years. Then there's London commuters that are forever going further out of town in the attempts to get more bang for their housing buck (and piss off everybody else in the process). So yes, chances are good that we'd make money if we bought a house now and sold it in 7 years. The thing is that we're not sure if we could afford it now. Interest rates are set to rise. People keep saying that the housing market needs a big correction or else it'll self-implode. You have experts arguing both sides of the same situation. So yeah….

We could make more money, we could make the same amount. In the end, I think we'll go the ISA route. We might not make more, but we'll make some and I'll probably end up sleeping better at night.

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