Richard Browning is the author of How to Survive the Credit Crunch: 101 top tips to beat the credit crisis. Here's how the book came about...
A few years ago, at the height of Britain's spending binge, I popped in to one of half-a-dozen High Street hairdressers in town with my daughter, who needed a quick trim. The bill for a few minutes' work came to £35. My daughter was six years old.
A delighted receptionist explained that the £5 offer posted in the window was only available at certain times of the day, mostly during school hours. I’d not read the small print. They’d won, I’d lost.
Well not exactly.
Small print, or Satan's get-out clause, is a burial ground for bad news and rip-offs. But almost nobody reads it. Often because it's impossible.
If you want to play the National Lottery online, the terms and conditions that players have to read run to more than 39,000 words. Some of Shakespeare's plays aren’t much longer than that and he was really good with words. But you wouldn’t want to read a whole play just to gamble a quid or two.
Luckily, when banks tweak their small print they are obliged to tell you. Luckier still, the journalists on This is Money and our sister newspapers are on hand to read it for you. They've often met the leading figures responsible for the misery we are now facing and have, within the laws of the land, been reporting on the warning signs for years.
At the heart of the credit crunch - or the total collapse of trust in the financial services industry – was deception, greed and stupidity all screened by incomprehensible small print or spin.
My experience at the hairdressers was simply a reflection of how that arrogance filtered down to everyday life. It was one of many experiences over the years that have earned me the right to write a money-saving book on How to Survive the Credit Crunch. I don’t just preach this stuff. I do it. And so does my family.
You see, for two and a half years following the infamous £35 trim, I cut my own hair.
Never mind that towards the end I resembled some kind of experimental hedgerow - that's not the point. By seeking cheaper alternatives and by taking the DIY route, we'd saved hundreds of pounds.
Another experiment we tried as a family was to see how long we could survive without setting foot into a shop. I hate shopping. And the shops, I don't doubt, hate me back. I rarely buy what I don't need and I certainly don't buy anything if the price isn't right. But supermarkets have an almost magical hold over the subconscious and the temptation to buy extra is often too much to resist.
Arranging online shopping facilities with the supermarkets was surprisingly easy and with a bit of planning you only order exactly what you need. It meant suddenly we were making no impulse buys and were generating little waste. The average British family throws away more than £600 worth of food every year. By any measure this is a ridiculous state of affairs.
After about three months, we had squirrelled away enough cash to pay for a long weekend including flights, accommodation and spending money in Bergen, Norway - one of the most expensive places in the world. Not bad for not doing anything.
Our shopping experiment came to an end when the light bulbs began popping. You can’t buy a light bulb online in an emergency. But again, we'd proved a point. You can save money with almost no effort and it can be fun. It's easy when you get your head around it. These days we shop at the local market and other local shops on a need-to-buy basis. It still saves plenty of money over the filling-the-giant-trolley-experience at the out-of-town supermarkets.
A saving of a mere £10 a week adds up to a whopping £520 a year. And £50 a week is more than £600 in three months. I know people who spend that on mobile phone calls.
Now, I'm not suggesting for a minute that everyone should start hacking chunks off their own heads or not go shopping. We’d soon become a terribly scruffy nation with an economy on death row. And we wouldn’t want that to happen, ahem.
Since the book, How to survive the credit crunch: 101 top tips to beat the credit crisis, was published towards the end of last year I have been asked many times the same two questions.
First: How long did it take to write?
And second: Why do I think it is acceptable to treat such a serious subject in a light-hearted and sometimes funny way?
The answer to the first question is a week. It took five days to write the main body of the book – the 101 tips, about 25,000 words - and two more days to write the introduction, most of which I wrote on the London's tottering underground system, the Tube.
The introduction was about the descent from carefree spending binge to black hole of financial mismanagement and debt. It needed to be compiled as close to publication as possible and I wrote 7,000 words en route to the England v Azerbaijan World Cup qualifier at Wembley and finished it on the same journey to see Oasis in concert the following week. It is amazing what you can achieve if you make the most of your spare time. It's one of my top tips.
But such time scales do myself something of an injustice. Not just because I’ve been writing most days as a journalist for more than 20 years - and writing lots of words in more or less the right order is what I do - but because for even longer, I’ve led a money-saving lifestyle. And it is really quite easy to write about what you know. It’s all about simplicity.
'Simplicity,' said that well-known artist, inventor, musician and mathematician Leonardo da Vinci, 'is the ultimate sophistication'. And he had a point. In financial terms, it means if you borrow money, you pay it back. If you have money, you manage it in the simplest way possible. To complicate it is to fall prey to the perpetrators and the causes of the credit crunch.
One of my most important tips about saving money is to take a step back from your daily life and see if there are any patterns of waste that you’re not aware of, such as regular trips to a shop that has become a habit rather than a need. Bank statements are a reliable source of that information. Similarly, if you can find a hobby or develop an interest and meet like-minded people, you will soon find that you’ll not only stop spending on the frivolous but you could form friendships that last for a lifetime, which in turn can save you a fortune as you share skills, contacts and equipment.
In answer to the second question I say, well, for at least the last eight years so many people I have spoken to laughed in my face when I questioned the dangerous levels of credit card debt they were racking up that the best way to cope now is maybe to take a light-hearted view of the consequences and the solutions. We’re British, it’s what we do. But a frightening number of people have been really stupid.
In fact, the stupidest advice I think I have ever heard is the idea that (unless you're a financial wizard) you can manage your debt by taking out more credit cards. It is a theory regularly espoused but anyone, such as me, who has struggled with plastic debts in the past, will know that the card companies are not stupid and will do everything within their power to make you spend more, take on more debt and pay their punitive interest rates.
If you have debts, you have to pay them off. It’s not clever, or stupid or funny. It’s really simple.
And if you want to write a book, that's simple too. Just do it. It may take longer than a week but if you write about what you know. Anything is possible.
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Richard Browning
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