keiris
由 Carrasco Martinez Keiris RubíOne woman's 'no-spend year', and how she survived
She cycled 120 miles to a wedding, and her lunch budget was just 51 pounds a day.
Michelle McGagh, a 34-year-old journalist, had a mortgage of 230,000 pounds which she wanted to reduce. Last November, she looked at her finances and she discovered that every year she spent a lot of money unnecessarily - for example, 1,570 pounds in the pub, 1,110 poiunds in restaurants, and 400 pounds on coffees. So she made a radical plan - to stop spending money for a year. She continued to pay her broadband, gas, and electricity bills, and allowed herself 30 pounds a week to buy food and household essentials. But she couldn't spend money on anything else - no clothes, no buses or flights, no meals out, no drinks, and no cosmetics.
She cooked large quantities of curry and bolognese sauce, which lasted her a week, and which she ate with rice or pasta. It was cheap and healthy, but also 'really boring'. She also experimented with home-made cleaning products and beauty treatments, like using vinegar for cleaning or olive oil as moisturiser, but she decided that most of them didn't really work.
At first, she tried to see her friends as often as before. She cycled 120 miles to be at a friend's wedding, and camped in their garden to avoid paying for accommodation. The following weekend, she rode 60 miles to Brighton to meet friends. But she couldn't join them for dinner in a restaurant, and when they went to the pub, she drank tap water. In the end, she simply went out less, which made her feel more isolated.
