They say that if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, and that’s something that I have always adhered to in my wealth creating life from the very early days, when I hid money in a book, right through to today, when I hide money in a variety of places.
So what are my top tips for scrimping and saving a fortune?
- Keep your eyes open and be prepared to rummage. When I made the Secret Millionaire programme, I kept records of where my money came from. I earned a total of £95, found 86p in my pocket and another £1.22 on the floor, over a two week period. Now that’s amazing. Of my total income of £97.08, 1.26% of it came off the floor! And I am not alone:
• The Halifax bank has concluded that there is £42.9 million hidden down the back of the countries sofas, and that’s without money found in the bottom of bags, or coat and trouser pockets. Their research revealed that the highest value of loose change is likely to be found in a desk drawer (£3.59), closely followed by pockets (£3.38) and in the car (£2.44). Brits also estimate they have an average total of £17.69 floating around in these places. This amount falls to £15.43 for women but rises to £21.03 for men.
• My son actually introduced me to a lot of good places to rummage. As a young boy he was always diving about and falling over and inevitably he would pop up with a coin in his hand – as, with his natural curiosity, he would be under sofas, under slot, vending or car parking machines, in the gutter and other odd places. In fact he always liked going on Brighton pier, so that he could check all the ‘exit’ cups on slot machines – and he inevitably found loads of discarded, missed or forgotten coins.
• Look in the bottom or catchment area of your washing machine – there’s generally a coin or two there.
• Virgin Atlantic Airways discovered that it takes in an average of 18 cents per passenger per flight in loose change found in the plane’s seats. If that figure holds for the approximate 320 million people who fly from one country to another worldwide each year, the total is about $58 million. And finally,
• Look in bins. Whilst making the Secret Millionaire I used to walk back to my lodgings along the Docklands Light Railway in the east end, and I used to rummage in all the bins at each station – looking for newspapers and magazines – and I always got at least one daily paper that way. And you may always find something extra as a bonus!
2. Barter: there are two kinds here. Firstly the traditional barter of one thing for another of equal value but as a poor student I also used to barter my time. Naturally I worked in a pub and one of my fellow workers was a single mum and eventually we came up with a working relationship which went as follows. I worked my own shifts in the pub, and then on her shifts I would go and sit in her house and watch her kids. In return she would leave me something to eat (free meal), I could use her washing machine (launderettes are ridiculously expensive), and use her electricity to sit and do my studying. Great deal for me and for her