The other day my friend’s Facebook status read “Stan Chau has no money till Friday :(” and instead of responding with “sux 2 b u lolz” or whatever the correct etiquette is these days I decided to type some tongue-in-cheek survival tips.  The response was unexpectedly positive, so I’ve decided to expand on them and put them up here.  Think of it as a tasty little starter to the rather bland but filling main course that is Finance July.

How to be Broke

So, You Think You’re Broke

More than likely you’re not broke, you just think you’re broke because a paycheck or student loan is taking longer than expected to arrive (if this isn’t the case, and you have no savings of any kind, you should probably seek real financial advice rather than reading my blog).

This delusion of brokeness first sets in when an ATM refuses to give you any money.  Instead of panicking, take your bank card to student cash point (the kind that dispenses five pound notes) and make a withdrawal.  If you can’t find one  or you have less than a fiver in your account go to your nearest branch and make a withdrawal, it might also be worth asking for an overdraft extension while you’re there (the worst they can do is say no).

Now collect together all the change you have in your trouser pockets, coat pockets and change jar.  Have a look down the back of your sofa and under your bed.  Is there a place you hide money for emergencies?  Look there.  It’s also worth thoroughly examining your wallet, more often than not there’s a slot that you “never use” that turns out to be harbouring a fiver.  Also collect any foreign coins you have and take it all to a Coinstar machine.

Food

By now you should have almost £10, and it’s more than likely that the Coinstar machine you’re standing at is located in a supermarket, so it’s time to go food shopping.  Whatever you do, however, don’t do this when you’re hungry or else you’ll just end up buying yourself snacks that you’ll have consumed before you’re even halfway home.

Stick to the end of the aisles because this is where all the deals are located.  Try and purchase things that will turn the leftovers you have at home into edible meals, it is useful to remember the following universal laws;

anything + bread = a sandwich

anything + eggs = an omelette

Also it is inevitable that you have tonnes of dusty pasta and rice, buy some sauce so you can actually eat this stuff.  If you don’t already have it, purchase some granulated coffee.  When you run out of food start making very strong cups of coffee so thick they’re like paste, this will stave off hunger for a while.

Fun

The cheapest hobby you can ever take up is sleeping, try and do this as much as possible.  When you do find yourself conscious,  drinking will help you through this (understand that these tips are “tongue-in-cheek”, so if your mother or your liver start complaining you can’t hold me responsible).  Find an open bar or at least a bar that will serve you free drinks.  Free food and free drink should now be the criteria you use to decide which social events you attend.  If friends and family owe you money or dinner now is the time to collect those debts.

For numerous examples of what not to do, keep reading.

Finance July

Week commencing 6th July (0 posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £17 food
• £67 council tax
• £19 Vodafone
• £15 insurance

Total: £118

End of Week Total: -£3,568

Week commencing 13th July (two posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £77 food (seems somewhat excessive, not sure if that’s actually true)
• £20 student loan over calculation repayment (only another £1,346 to go on this one, plus whatever interest they’ve decided to heap on top)
• £29 rounding error (numbers seem to be seriously sketchy this month, although they were back when I did this on a weekly basis.  Some things never change)

Total: £126

End of Week Total: -£3,694

Week commencing 20th July (0 posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £45 food
• £2 drink (I know this category tends to be reserved for drinks of the alcoholic variety but I have a Tesco receipt for the time I bought Fanta Fruit Crush and nothing else)
• £45 rent to Nick (I stayed with him temporarily while I found a new house)
• £56 utilities to Gingell (outstanding debts from the Green House)
• £20 for my BUPA Great Capital Run 2009 registration (I was sober when I paid for this as well, I blame Gingell.  I promise to blog about it sometime soon)

Total: £168

End of Week Total: -£3,862

Week commencing 27th July (0 posts)

Incoming:

• £800 as a freelance writer (feels really weird to be typing that one)
• £20 from Envirophone (these guys paid me £20 for the broken phone I blogged about here, well worth checking them out)

Total: £820

Outgoing:

• £36 food
• £20 drink
• £8 transport
• £45 rent to Nick
• £5 utilities to Gingell
• £50 Vodafone (apparently the Samsung J700i is a pay-as-you-go phone so if you have it on contract you can’t insure it, therefore when I got mugged I had to pay to replace it.  The girl in the shop was very helpful though and had good eye makeup)
• £6 entertainment (after reading about the likely demise of The Observer I grew nostalgic for newspapers and went out and bought The Sunday Times, as I would have done four years ago.  My subsequent live tweeting of each supplement clogged up Gingell’s tweetfeed.  I also picked up the September issue of Front Magazine)
• £4 wallet (“Is it a gift? I can wrap it for you.” “No, I got mugged earlier.”  Awkward silence ensues)
• £95 rounding error (like I said, the numbers are sketchy)

Total: £269

End of Month Total: -£3,311

The Poverty Line, for the month of July*

* Figures are rounded up and my student loan debt of £19,993.48 is not included but then regular readers already knew that.

Working nine to five may be the way Dolly Parton intended but for a time it severely sapped my urge to blog. After spending all day sat at a computer typing, when I got home all I wanted to do was make a drink, watch some tv and crawl into bed.

When I wasn’t tired, I was busy. Since we last spoke I’ve moved house twice, which has involved a lot of sorting, a lot of packing and a few trips to the charity shop. It’s also meant working my way through a variety of internet connections, most of them unreliable or non-existent, and spending too long on the phone trying to change my address details with numerous faceless corporations.

I guess the other big thing that’s happened to me is that I got mugged. Here’s the account I gave to The Sentinel. It’s been over three weeks now since my attack so I think I’m over it, although it took a lot longer to replace my bank card than it should have done. For some reason my local branch only opens during office hours and doesn’t open at all over the weekend. This would be a brilliant business strategy if unemployed people had any money.

So, now I’ve fixed my sleeping pattern, settled into my new house and have almost sorted all my records, it’s time to pick myself up and get back on the blogging horse.

I’d like to start with a comment Clara left on my Facebook wall in relation to my new job.

very very good Jon! Quite proud of you at the moment! I will be checking in on the website to see fundamental changes to the graph

Now this might cause confusion for some of you but that’s understandable, I’m not saying it’s a long time since I created graphs to represent my debt but it’s probably before you were born.

Finance June

Week commencing 1st June (three posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £10 food
• £728 rent
• £67 council tax
• £18 Vodafone
• £10 entertainment (I went barfuss at Trentham and I bought Front Magazine)

Total: £833

End of Week Total: -£3,046

Week commencing 8th June (one post)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £38 food
• £48 transport (catching all those trains to go to Sky School)
• £100 utilities

Total: £186

End of Week Total: -£3,232

Week commencing 15th June (0 posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £38 food
• £3 drink (I bought a medium Pepsi at the cinema because I didn’t realise they had a coffee machine, it was sickly sweet and apparently medium now means bigger than my head)
• £20 student loan over calculation repayment
• £15 insurance
• £6 entertainment (I went to see Night at the Museum 2 at the cinema and it was a lot better than I imagined it would have been)

Total: £82

End of Week Total: -£3,314

Week commencing 22nd June (two posts)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £50 food
• £20 transport
• £1 stationery (an address book I needed for work)
• £9 rounding error (haven’t a clue)

Total: £80

End of Week Total: -£3,394

Week commencing 29th June (one post)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £26 food
• £10 drink
• £20 transport

Total: £56

End of Month Total: -£3,540

The Poverty Line, for the month of June*

For those a little perturbed by the re-appearance of the graph, here’s one last photo from the phone with some words of wisdom that it’d be worth you heeding.

* Figures are rounded up and my student loan debt, which has now risen to £19,993.48, is not included.

In March I made you a promise. I’d quit the overdrafts and cut back on my bank accounts.  We’re now in June and I only have two accounts and for a short time last month I was even in the black.  Once these two conditions were met I said that I’d make Finance Friday a less frequent event, so here are the last two weeks of May.  From now on I’ll update you on a monthly basis.

Week commencing 18th May (blogged three times)

According to my bank statements I didn’t acquire any pennies this week, nor did I spend any pounds.  This is contradicted by receipts, my memory and reality.  Presumably I was spending loose change found strewn across my room, more than likely the £16 I couldn’t account for the week previous and also £55 that Frosty lent me.

End of Week Total: -£2,820

Week commencing 25th May (blogged twice)

Incoming:

• £80 wages (from the traffic survey I mentioned in this post)
• £10 from my Gran

Total: £90

Outgoing:

• £57 food
• £14 drink
• £36 gifts
• £55 repaid to Frosty

Total: £162

End of Month Total: -£2,892

Since Finance Friday is now only a monthly ordeal I might even start redrawing the graph, for this month however you get one last photo from the phone.

This is a snap of the sticker that Gingell was giving away to anyone on Twitter who promoted her blog over the weekend.  If you didn’t follow the link yesterday, there’s no harm in taking a look today, especially as there’s a new post to read.  This piece of Running from Zombies merchandise now takes pride of place on my music box just above my Wu-Tang Clan sticker (yes, their new album Chamber Music is out on Tuesday, going to reign my excitement in for now because I haven’t met anyone that feels the same way.  If however you are hyped check out Fat Lace Magazine, a project Reg is involved with, to preview some of the tracks).

On the topic of merchandise, I’d like some input from you dearest reader.  Would you like to see some scribbleboy.co.uk freebies?  If so what kind of items and where can I buy them cheap?  This is unlike anything I’ve done before on this blog, the closest I ever got was offering a free drink to anyone who came up with a creative swear word that wasn’t on my list of banned words for Lent.  This was won by a man who works in bar and was therefore ultimately pointless.  His name is Nick, I’m going to leave you with his winning submission;

donkeyrapingassmaster possibly not something in you’re vocabulary but soon will be when you start thinking about it, plus it rolls of the tongue quite well i have found when delivered as one word…….. try it and add a quid to the jar.

On Friday 22nd May I replied to a vaguely worded job description posted on reed.co.uk. It read;

DO YOU HAVE THE X – FACTOR ?

Birmingham based Advertising company looking for individuals with a great attitude to work within a lively outgoing environment.

We are looking for people with that special X – Factor that can be trained up to join our busy PR team.

Must have excellent skills in customer service, confidence in their communication levels and be willing to be trained from scratch.

Full training given with opportunities for advancement for the career minded.

Please forward your CV to us for consideration.

Ten days later they made contact.  According to the man on the phone I had enough “X – Factor” to get an interview.  When I returned home there was an email from Scorpia Corporation informing me that I was also being considered for their “Business Development Program”.  Further details could be found on their website, ANB Promotions.

This is when I became suspicious.  Scorp Corp had placed the advert on behalf of The Cobra Group, part of which was ANB Promotions LTD, the company I would be working for if my interview was successful.*

Ignore that scorpions and cobras poison their prey, ignore that ANB stands for A New Beginning and sounds like a new-age cult, just look at the website.  It looks very professional, with a lot of stock photography and very little detail.  If I was part of an undercover operation this is the kind of site I’d put together to try and convince the public that we were legitimate.  Look at their contact page, their location pulsates, as if at any moment it will vanish, and the man in the dark glasses looks nothing if not shady.

It was at this point that I wondered if ANB Promotions was my Credit Dauphin, if like Sydney Bristow in Alias I’d be recruited for what on the surface appears to be a banking corporation but in reality turns out to be a criminal organisation.  When a business says they’re “a leading below-the-line direct marketing specialist representing an array of national and international clients” you wonder what you’re going to be asked to do.  As it turned out it wasn’t ripping off jumpsuits to reveal slinky cocktail dresses and abseiling in heels, although it was seven floors up from a cross-dressing strip club.

ANB Promotions is located in Chinatown in Birmingham and provides other businesses with new customers.  One of their most recent clients is Sky TV.  Sky currently have 9.3 million customers in the UK and are aiming for 10m in the next five years.  Here are some facts that make ANB happy; Sky’s closest competition is Virgin who are losing 2,500 customers a month.  Some people are just trying to save money, others are unemployed, both are watching more tv and scrutinising how much they pay for this service.

I passed the first interview.

Then I completed the evaluation day.

Then I passed the second interview.

Then I was invited back for the training week.

Then, if I passed the end of week test, I would have a job selling pay tv door-to-door.  This job would be commission based, so if no one bought Sky then I wouldn’t get paid.

The training week began on Monday at 9:30am with some of the most detailed paperwork I have seen in a long time.  Hair colour, eye colour, height.  A five year history of all employment, unemployment and education to the exact date with no omissions or overlaps.  I was also required to arrive with eight different documents, including a reference I had to source and print over the weekend.

Afterwards we went into a boardroom.  We were given talks and we took tests, I dubbed this part Sky School.  Most days we didn’t finish until at least nine at night.

On Wednesday I got to go out in the field with my Sky Buddy Kristel, as I had done on the evaluation day.  Kristel was born in Estonia, lived in Norway and has worked with ANB Promotions for over a year now.  She has an amazing sense of humour, bought me an umbrella when it rained and is very good at what she does.

Then on Thursday we did the same again, only this time with less rain, flying bugs, and unfortunately, less sales.  Every day each field representative is given a walk sheet (note my correct usage of technical terms there) detailing 100 names and addresses of people who can afford Sky tv but are currently with someone else.  The average success rate is seven.  For the entire week.

Friday I quit.

I met some great people and I learnt a lot about sales, psychology and body language but this job was not for me.  In the short term I had to jump through a lot of hoops to make money that wouldn’t have covered my transport costs.  Long term this job could have been quite profitable but I’d be trapped in a tiring, repetitious, mentally draining job.

The job hunt continues on Monday.

* A subsection of The Cobra Group is Appco Direct LTD.  ANB Promotions and Lifestyle Advertising are both subsections of Appco Direct.  While the email suggested I’d be working for ANB it turned out I was working for Lifestyle.  Both companies share the same office and do exactly the same things, only with different coloured folders.  Mine was red.

Week commencing 11th May (blogged three times)

Incoming: £500 in Premium Bonds

I had expected last week’s bonds to be wiped out when my landlord cashed my rent cheque.  Only thing is he hasn’t cashed it yet.  He did however come and do a day late “house inspection” (although he didn’t actually look in any of the rooms).

His reason for being late was that when he was in Crimea his helicopter got shot down and he bashed his head.  Since then he randomly falls over with no warning and had to get a doctor to jab him up with something.  Best excuse ever, am tempted to start using it myself.

One good thing that did come from his visit though was the reminder that I will be getting my deposit back.  To be accurate the lead tenant (Gingell, who else?) will be getting all the deposits back and it is then her responsibility to distribute them.  So looking forward to what is going to feel like free money hitting my PayPal account in a couple of months time.

I thought it’d be amusing to create a PayPal donation button for this site but apparently they can’t decrypt their own encryption, amateurs.  I guess I could use an unencrypted button but then you’d see my email address (no offence, I’m sure you’re all lovely people, but I’d rather keep the rape and Bible spam on my WordPress dashboard rather than in my inbox).  If you really want to send me sweet nothings you can head on over to my contact page.

Outgoing:

• £28 food
• £15 drink
• £20 loan over calculation repayment
• £50 Vodafone (I had to buy a new phone because the speaker packed up on my Samsung SGH-U600.  People could hear me but I couldn’t hear them, this made conversation difficult).

Let’s pause here to review my new Samsung J700i (my fourth ever mobile), a phone that was described to me (apart from the camera) as an upgrade.

Pros

• I can hear my callers.
• No slide buttons.  Be a button or be a touchscreen, don’t try and be both.  I’m sorry I’m just prejudiced that way.
• The menu icons are prettier; their shapes and colours suggest the kind of marzipan covered cakes that would be served if you were ever invited for high tea with Mr Kipling.
• Menus are more intuitive in places.
• Standard issue backgrounds are marginally more inspirational.
• The phone has more of a physical presence to it, seems sturdier and makes a more satisfying sound when you close it.

Cons

• Camera seems to have lost 1.9 megapixels somewhere.
• On my old phone I could fit half of Outkast’s Stankonia, on my new phone I can only fit two songs from Wild Young Hearts by Noisettes (album is a lot more chilled than the single would have you believe, has something of a Fiona Bevan vibe to it).
• Vodafone won’t let you change what has to be the ugliest homepage I have ever seen.  Browser feels even more broken than the last one, although that’s a gut feeling rather than anything scientific.
• Menus are great until you want to send a text, then it messes you about by asking if you want to send the text to additional people and it doesn’t save your sent messages automatically you have to prompt it everytime (maybe this option is buried deep in the menus somewhere, in which case another menu fail).

Back to the numbers.

• £15 insurance monthly direct debit
• £15 toaster (don’t really have a category for this, sorry)
• £16 rounding error

• Total: £159

End of Week Total: -£2,820

Deskscape was late by 11 days, I’m writing about last week this week and this post is either one week or one day late depending on which half you read.  

Tardy is the new punctual.

Week commencing 27th April (blogged on four occasions)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £27 food
• £19 rounding error

Total: £31

End of Week Total: -£3,576

The week above is a perfect example why Finance Friday is so tedious.  I have to try and add and then you have to read it.  The week below is probably the most interesting week so far.

Week commencing 4th May (one measly post)

Incoming: 

£190 Thorntons

That’s right I got paid for the work I did over Easter and not only that but with the most ridiculously oversized payslip I’ve ever seen.

Also £500 worth of Premium Bonds cashed which means I’ll now be able to pay my rent (turns out the cheque bounced because it had been damaged rather than there not being enough money in there, so no additional charges for me, yay).

So £190 plus £500 is (all together now) £690.  It was great, for half a morning my bank account was in the black, then I paid Clara and Gingell and I was back in the more familiar red territory.

Outgoing:

• £37 food
• £20 drink
• £2 toiletries (I bought mint and tea tree flavoured shower gel, don’t get too excited)
• £4 stationery (envelopes and stamps)
• £4 entertainment (I bought a magazine, then I wrote about it here)
• £18 Vodafone
• £72 Council Tax (a council so corrupt they arrested the mayor, glad my money isn’t being wasted)
• £50 Utilities

Total: £207

End of Week Total: -£3,161

Hopefully next week Finance Friday will be more punctual.  Will also post about my one day of work, Brummie Chinatown, sitting in for Totem Films at a meeting and any Summer Ball escapades that take place tonight.

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,

Scribs

Last month I only ate 11 apples which, when you’re challenged to eat one apple for each day of a a month, is something of a failure.  Based on the graphic above you’ve probably figured out that this month I was more successful.  Here’s what I learnt.

Sometimes apples are watery pap, sometimes it’s like biting into a lemon, most of the time they’re just apples.  Unlike money orgasms double gin something wholesome, the experience doesn’t get any better depending on the number of apples you have, in fact it gets worse.

After seven apples in a day (I had to play catch up towards the end of the month) you want to eat and yet the swirling of seven apples worth of acidic mush inside you suggests that this would be a bad idea.  This explains why it was one third of the ACT diet (apples, coffee, tobacco) that MGM Studios prescribed Judy Garland (can’t seem to find an online reference to this but swear it’s true.  Either that or I’m imagining dieting facts about Judy Garland, and that would be quite probably the gayest thing I’ve ever done).

On a more positive note I have successfully completed another challenge and am the first person in recorded history to actually have my five a day.

In other news, Finance Friday.

Week commencing 20th April (blogged but thrice)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £27 food
• £10 drink

Total: £37

End of Week Total: -£3,565

Phone bill and student loan repayment haven’t direct debited themselves which suggests someone somewhere has screwed up.  Thorntons haven’t paid me and NS&I are dragging their tails over cashing my bonds which means my rent cheque bounced.  Oh joy.

PS.  Going to roll out my set of challenge icons next week, so if you’ve got any opinions on what you’ve seen so far let me know.

When Graydon Carter said, “Those who can’t teach, write. Those who can’t write, write about themselves.” it was not only a cruel indictment of this very blog but also of what I’ve been doing for the past two days.  Here’s what I wrote about myself;

I have a Higher Education Certificate in Creative Writing and Journalism having completed the first year of an NCTJ accredited degree at Staffordshire University. I have real life experience working on a hectic news desk and in a variety of office environments. These experiences alongside the work I have done in both hospitality and retail mean I have excellent communication skills, can work quickly and efficiently and am also adept at dealing with the public.

I am currently looking for a Birmingham based job in either media or retail. I am well experienced in both fields and enjoy working with the public. I am quick to adapt to different situations, enjoy a variety of tasks, work well under pressure and have a good sense of humour.

I currently work as a freelance writer with Totem Films, a media production company.  I write extensively researched emails to persuade companies to commission promotional films with Totem. I would like to develop the office experience this position has given me by taking a job that has a greater variety of tasks and involves more human interaction.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’re probably more familiar with my employment history than you’d care to be, and with my three day stint at Thornton’s out of the way (it’s not that I was bad, they just needed some temporary support for Easter) I am once again in search of employment (yes, I write emails for Totem Films but I’m looking for something in Birmingham that is not solely commission based).

The above description was written for reed.co.uk.  You can also read it on the jobs section of The Sentinel (in case you want to hire me while I’m still in Stoke) and my LinkedIn profile.  

Over the next few weeks I will update this post as I join more agencies, sign up to new websites, hand out CVs and fill out application forms.  I promise not to bore you with any further posts about job hunting, unless I get an interview, in which I plan to bore you to tears.

If by some twist of fate you want to hire me click here.

This week I have been watching a lot of The West Wing and Invader Zim, which represents a problem (and it’s not my lack of productivity, although that is an issue).  My tastes are somewhat varied and my blog posts even more so.  Guessing what you people like is almost impossible.

For example, my friend Ally has started a blog called Wheels on Fire about his quest to wheelchair race in the Paralympics and while I hope that my audience wouldn’t advocate sport, I’m sure there’s a few of you out there that do.  Am adding it to my links page and will be keeping a close eye on it, should be quite inspirational and entertaining when he’s starts putting some posts up there.

Shocking as it may sound however I’ve done more than just watch tv and read other people’s blog.  I went on a 5km run with my housemate Gingell and even travelled to Stafford to present Totem Films with their belated Easter egg (photographic evidence pending).

It was the day before the dissertation deadline in Stafford and Frosty thought everyone would be out partying (see I have some non-lazy friends) but instead they were all at home, writing their dissertations.  Deciding that Love2Love (£10 all you can drink) would be dead we went across the road to Casa (five bottles for £5), and while the night was lousy the company was good, here’s a picture.

L-R: Zofiah, Damian, Frosty and Guy

All this however is a mere sideshow.  The reason you read this blog is to feel better about your bank account and so, without further ado, I present another Finance Friday.

Week commencing 13th April (blogged five times)

Incoming: £0

Outgoing:

• £23 food
• £15 drink
• £4 Entertainment (I bought Love All the People by Bill Hicks.  Hicks’ material was always harsh but to see it in printed form gives it an extra edge.  This book makes me realise how much we need someone like Bill with us today)
• £24 presents
• £30 utilities
• £15 insurance monthly direct debit
• £10 additional (have decided to start calling this category “rounding error”, it sounds marginally less incompetent)

Total: £121

End of Week Total: -£3,528 (I don’t even know anymore, feel free to come and audit me)

PS. The title of this post is courtesy of Gingell, you should take a look at her blog Running from Zombies.

Finance Friday, posted on Saturday.  I bet you’ve worn your F5 key to dust in anticipation.  It’s alright, my monetary incompetence has now been fully documented for yet another week.

Week commencing 6th April (blogged five times)

Incoming: While the fabled Lloyds TSB account turned out not to exist, the Chelsea account was very much real.  This week, with the help of my mother, it managed to close itself down.  This means I now have only two bank accounts and, if I can jump myself out of this last overdraft, Finance Friday will become a monthly instead of weekly event.

£117 Chelsea account

Two weeks ago my Gran sent me £5 to call her.  This week, having not called her, she sent me another £25.  Logic would suggest that if I wait another two weeks she will send me £125 but somehow I doubt it’s that simple.

£25 Gran

Total: £142

Outgoing:

• £38 food
• £3 entertainment – I bought Mark Ronson’s Version in HMV.  A lot of people, most notably Front Magazine (warning: If you’re offended by nudity… remove all the mirrors from your bathroom, immediately), hate Ronson but even if you recognise that he is a personality failure, most definitely not a style icon and overuses horns you still have to admit he is good at what he does
• £6 clothes (I purchased two black shirts from the Primark Essentials range for my time at Thorntons, all about the labels)
• £23 additional (As recognised by this blog post and the book The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic I need to make a note everytime I spend money)
• £4 to the money-grubbers at Nationwide.  (I still don’t know why, we discussed this before)

Total: £74

End of Week Total: -£3,407 (Last week’s End of Week Total was waaaay off due to my mathematical inability)

When your two greatest outings for the week have been Sainsbury’s in Stoke and The Potteries Shopping Centre  in Hanley it’s rather difficult to find a universal truth to accompany your finances.  Here instead is some chav wisdom (an oxymoron if ever you heard one).