The trouble with personal blogs is they tend to become havens for discussing everything. You start out with the intention of discussing a singular issue, and over time they branch out, diversify, and to an extent, dilute. I’ve noticed I talk a lot about money and finance: while that is linked to “buying a house” which is what this blog is supposed to be primarily about, money isn’t the primary topic. It’s a side-issue.
So I’ve given birth to another blog in the hope of keeping this one ‘on-topic’.
I’d like to introduce you all to Five Pence Piece 
Who amongst you rolled your eyes when you saw that title? It’s OK to admit it. As a child, I was routinely told “charity begins at home”, and therefore never got round to really doing much about ‘giving’. Giving to charity is something rich people do, right? Something you’ll “do next month”. You may want to give but can’t because it’d set you back against getting out of debt. But giving to charity isn’t limited to donating £2 a month to the RSPCA or PDSA or WWF or whatever advert pops ups on your TV in the next 30 minutes.
Give Time
There are hundreds of ways you can give meaningfully without having to actually spend a penny. Organisations are crying out for volunteers with all sorts of skills from IT, to communication, to just being an ‘adult’ at kids clubs. When you donate your time rather than the loose change in your pocket, you get to see first hand at the difference you are making. A handful of examples based on my field of expertise: Community First Responders work with their local NHS Ambulance Trusts to provide life-saving treatment to those in their immediate vicinity, bridging the gap between that emergency call and the ambulance arriving. Full training and generally, full equipment are provided. Police Special Constables give up their free time to police their community, but are otherwise fully-fledged, fully trained police officers who do it because they want to help people, and not because of the paycheck. I salute you. Volunteer firefighters do much the same for the fire and rescue service in their area.
Whoever you choose to donate your time to, it’ll be mutually beneficial I promise.
Give Blood
Do something amazing. Give blood. As the saying goes! It doesn’t cost you anything to do, and each donation you give can save up to 6 lives. It takes an hour to do, and you get free juice, tea, coffee, biscuits and crisps in exchange. I put this off and put this off for almost a decade. “I’ll do it next time”, or “I don’t like needles” or one of a thousand other excuses. I gave for the first time in July and it was an amazing experience. The people are wonderful, and you are directly helping to save lives. You can’t beat that feeling.
The National Blood Service website has more details if you want to get involved.
Don’t Make Any More Excuses
Trent over at The Simple Dollar has a different view – he does keep money for giving to charity. If you can afford to do it, then do it! But there are many more ways you can help and ‘give’, without it costing you anything in physical monetary terms, and help save or improve people’s and animal’s lives all the same. You can argue you “don’t have time” but really, is that true?
Charity doesn’t begin at home. Financial Wellbeing begins at home.
It’s no secret I drive a lot in my commute to work and back. A good day sees me traveling about 60 miles round trip. If I go elsewhere, have to use my car to go someplace else, and factor in personal millage, this can easily be 100 miles a day. I work 6 days out of every 10 (ignoring overtime for the moment), and therefore tot up – for the sake of argument – about 1,500 miles a month. Even though I have a super-efficient car even by today’s standards, this equates to a lot of money spent on fueling the beast.
My trip computer reckons I get about 65.7 mpg, averaged out over the last 400 miles. It’s been at or around this figure ever since I adjusted my driving style to maximum frugality, without dawdling everywhere at 15mph. At current pump prices of around 106.9p/litre (£4.85/gallon for my US visitors), that’s a monthly cost of about £92.15. Factor in personal millage, and I come out to about £115/mo.
Except, on paper, I now spend £125/mo on fuel.
Why? Hedging.
I calculate what it would have cost me to buy the fuel if the price had been 115.9p a litre (£5.27/gal), and then save the
difference in a high interest bank account. Taking into account compound interest, this covers me currently should prices reach 116.9p without actually touching capital funds for about 2 months. As time goes by and fuel prices hopefully stay the same or reduce, then this buffer will increase in length of serviceable time, or cover higher short-term fluctuations without reducing my spending power. I also continue to hedge on fuel even when I’m not driving, such as annual leave, or when I’m being put up in a hotel for a week in the course of my work.
A little example:
Yesterday, I purchased 18.7 litres of diesel (£20 on the pump) at 106.9p/litre. I had a 3p/L off voucher, so this took my actual purchase down to £19.44, saving me 56p. Hedge charge is currently 115.9p/L, so I transferred £2.25 into my hedge fund. This only actually ‘cost’ me £1.69 to do, courtesy of the money-off coupon.
British and American drivers can do this alike with ease – an ING Direct ’sub-account’ can be used to segregate your fuel hedge fund. Or, if you don’t use ING, then just account for it on paper in your own financial planning. As an added bonus, certainly here, every time I park down town I get a 3p/litre off voucher on the back of my meter ticket. The difference is also hedged!
By making minor alterations to how you spend, you can prepare to ride out the inevitable short-term price hikes in gas prices. When times are good, keep your spending the same to build up your hedge fund. When times are lean, use your resources to make up the difference. Review your hedged bets every 12 months. Does your current per-month spend equate to reality? Dip-Check your receipts for a month. Have gas prices moved on since you set up the initial spend figure? Has your cost-of-living wage increase come in? You can use this effectively here because gas prices are a real, every day, ‘in your face’ “cost” of living.
The beauty of hedging is it isn’t limited to fueling your car. You can do exactly the same again for electricity, mains natural gas, water and other utilities. Yes, this involves being disciplined with yourself – no one likes spending more than they have to; but overspending by a little every time can help to mitigate or entirely absorb price fluctuations down the road that otherwise really would affect your bottom line.
Good luck! Share your thoughts in the comments.
I’m addicted to Money blogs. One that I read with monotonous regularity is Five Cent Nickel. I know that’s a US site, but a lot of it still holds valid, irrespective of the particular market you apply the principles to. One of their posts on The Lending Club got me started looking for alternatives.
I’d been thinking about “where do I put my money once all my debts are paid?”, but this truly spurned me into going from ‘thinking’ to ‘doing’.
An ISA is a must – it is, after all, tax free. Most are offering about 3% at the moment. But I can only put £3,600 in one each year. That won’t take long.
A Regular Savings Account comes next, where you save an amount every month and get a bonus at the end of the term. Most of these are coming out at 5% right now. However, there are limits on how much you can save each month and they seem to range between £250 and £500. That won’t cover everything.
That just leaves a standard savings account for the rest, paying (if I’m lucky) 0.75%.
Rubbish! So I’ve been considering alternatives.
Stock trading is one option. Play your cards right and you could see compounding returns year on year. Are we at the bottom of the stock market crash right now? Who knows. That is the question. There’s also index funds, OIEC’s, mutual funds, futures, and almost as many stock investment options as there are people in the world. Stock trading is a risky venture but it does come with some reasonable rates of return for careful choices. But to make the most, you need to risk the most. That doesn’t sit comfortable with me right now but I’m working on myself. You have to speculate to accumulate, after all.
Then, there’s Zopa. It’s effectively a Lending Club. Loans cutting out the middle man (e.g. the bank). You lend as little as £10 and up to £25,000, to people at different rates. They’re all credit checked, and Zopa does any debt chasing on your behalf. Seems interesting. Returns are upwards of 12% in some markets, and if you lend short-term to A-rated borrowers, still around 6% (after fees and bad debts) so it’s still better than any of the High Street saving products out there.
I’ve just put my first £10 on the market to play with.
What do you do?
UPDATE: Yikes! In the time it took me to write this post, my £10 offered has been taken out! A Young borrower from York looking to finance a holiday has taken it as part of a 36-month loan at a rate of 10.4%. In 3 years I may, if all goes well, have £11.04 My £10 only makes up a small fraction of the £2,000 he borrowed in total. Good luck megzanator! Hope you enjoy your holiday!
I was reading another blog today, and it posed the question: Where do you envisage yourself to be in five years time, financially and physically? Such a simple question on the face of it. 14 words. 19 syllables. Infinite possible answers.
I pondered this for a while, then decided it’d be worth putting on ‘paper’ and review it at regular intervals. Use it as a life goal sheet, a personal motivator, and a reminder of what the hard work is all about. I’ve also decided to break it down into smaller chunks than just envisaging the end of the 5 years and saying “everything will be rosy.”
Today is the 9th August 2009.
January 1, 2010 (Year 1 – Aged 26)
I will be DEBT FREE. I will not owe any creditor a single penny. My credit cards will be paid up, my loan will be paid off, and I won’t be in my overdraft. That is my goal for New Years Day. If I wasn’t working hard right now, pushing myself to make it happen, then according to my calculations doing this would have taken me almost 3 years alone. With effort, I will achieve this in a little over 4 months time, having taken 11 months in total to do. Holy cow that was a lot, and remains a lot of overtime done and still to do.
To achieve this, for those who have been following along this bumbling blog from the beginning, will know I’ve moved back in with my parents.
January 1, 2011 (Year 2 – Aged 27)
January 1, 2012 (Year 3 – Aged 28)
January 1, 2013 (Year 4 – Aged 29)
January 1, 2014 (Year 5 – Aged 30)
That’s my current 5 year plan. Will it work out? Time will tell.
What’s yours?
Wow. It really, really has been a while since I’ve posted. I apologise profusely. All work and no play, etc. But, I’ve got a little while before I’m due at work this evening, so it’s time for a well overdue blog posting.
A lot has happened since I last posted. Summer, I think, came and went. It rained for the most of July! July! Raining! But then again this is England so I shouldn’t be all that surprised. August hasn’t been too bad so far, so maybe we’re in for a late one?
I’m still bumbling along to becoming Debt Free; I’ve all but paid off one of my credit cards! It was a little earlier than I’d planned as I’ve been working working working, but it’s also saved me a few hundred pounds in interest charges, so that’s a double-good thing. That just leaves one other card and my loan to tackle, but in any case that should be paid up by the end of the year if I keep working hard. My remaining card is on a 0% deal, so I’ve just divided the debt by an equal amount to pay off monthly with a target of December.
Now, and this is my biggest news this week: I had a meeting with the mortgage advisor at my bank today. I’m not looking to buy any time soon, (I’m not even debt free yet!), but I wanted to introduce myself, explain my goals, and see if he would be able to help me. A very nice chap indeed, who devoted 45 minutes to me even though he knew I was in no immediate place or rush to buy, which I found very pleasant indeed. No rush, no hard sell, just him and me talking facts and figures. I’ve been with my bank a very long time (I think I opened the account when I was 12) and it seems loyalty does pay occasionally. “You have one of the highest pre-approved mortgage markers on your account I’ve ever seen” were his exact words, after we had finished discussing what I’d like to eventually buy. I nearly fell off my chair at that point. 
My bank are prepared to lend me £158,000 with virtually no questions asked! He went on to explain that very few people get pre-approved mortgages at all, particularly after ‘the crunch’, and to have one that high shows how much trust the bank places in me through the way I run my account and other external scoring mediums. As a potential first time buyer it was nice to hear these words. I do try and run my finances in an almost anal fashion. I check online banking daily; I keep spreadsheets; and yes while I do have credit and debts, they are all well managed, paid on time and kept in check.
Now, all that said, there are caveats to the mortgage. Of course! Their maximum LTV is 95%, but he said ideally for a good rate I want to be looking at 85%, and for the best deals I should be considering 70%. Now, 70% of £158,000 is £47,400. A lot of money. I reckon with effort I can save £20,000 a year, so in 3 years I should be able to have the down payment I need to get the very best deal, and still have enough capital left to basically furnish the place, do some DIY, and get settled in. That is cool beans indeed. Sure, I could get 5% which works out at a paltry £7,900, but I’ll be paying more for the privilege in the long run. For the sake of 3 years of hard graft on my part, I could go from paying (say) £1,100 a month on a mortgage to £700, for exactly the same amount of money borrowed over the same period, then I’ll damn well do it! It’ll also insulate to a degree against rate fluctuations. Let’s face it, rates will go up. They’re really low at the moment and won’t stay there forever.
So that’s me! I hope you are all well. I promise to start posting a little more often again. I hate neglecting blogs and friends.
Hi.
I had an email last week from Apple, inviting me to their store opening in Brighton where I work. They even threw in the tempting idea of a free t-shirt, for the first 1,000 people through the door. Excited, I decided to go with a friend during our lunch hour.
Oh. My. God.
Figuring it’d be either so crowded we wouldn’t be able to move, or completely empty, we took the chance.
I think I’d still be queuing now if we’d dared get in it! It went all the way around the top level of the mall, and back on itself again. Insane.
Those who know me well will know all too well how much soul searching I have been doing over the last 2-3 months with regards to mobile/cell phones. It started out with the “I want the new iPhone”, thinking that the one Apple will release will be the all-singing, all-dancing device that everyone was hoping it would be. The other competing device at that point in time was the also yet-to-be-released Nokia N97. This also seemed to be the perfect convergence device.
Wind the clock forward to the iPhone 3GS release, and things did not look rosy in the Apple direction. The N97 release came and went with much bluster from the networks, but of little substance. A device filled with bugs, an unusable keyboard, an unusable resistive touch screen and lack of integration with what I consider “must haves”, now, such as native Exchange (for Google Mail). While the iPhone is capable of that, the device itself was looking less and less inspiring, and is now apparently plagued with overheating issues. Both the N97 and the new Apple 3GS are out of the running.
After several weeks of further searching, I have stumbled across the perfect device: The HTC Touch Pro 2. This is actually available on a couple of networks over here in the UK, most notably Vodafone. Having done lots of price comparisons, I can’t seem to get Vodafone to work out as expensive! The device is free on a 24-month contract (and an 18 month), and comes with 750 any network, any time minutes, unlimited inclusive landline calls, 250 text messages, unlimited internet, free push email and accident/theft cover for the life of the contract period. On a £30, 24 month contract the total spend works out at £630 (the first 3 months are free, saving £90). The other networks are more expensive or with less service offerings, so they are out of the running immediately.
I telephoned Three today (my current network who I have been with now for 5 years), to see what they could do for me in terms of reducing my line rental in lieu of renewing with a new handset. The idea then being I’d go and buy the HTC “sim-free” and just pop my sim out of my current phone – the trusty Nokia N95 – and dump it in the HTC. After we’d cut out the standard retential bull of offering the N97 for free, or the Blackberry Bold 9000 for free (… which is still tempting, actually), we got down to what they can do for me. It boiled down to: absolutely nothing. My only option is to change to “sim only” (which is what I want to do, if you sit down and think about it I suppose), for £15/mo which has 300 voice minutes, unlimited 3-to-3 calls, unlimited texts, and they’ll throw in unlimited internet as a perk. Total monthly cost then: £15 (half the price of Vodafone’s offering).
Except, if I take the Three deal, I need to go out and buy the handset. Let’s draw up a little comparison table:
| Three | Vodafone | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan: | Sim 15 | Anytime 750 |
| Minutes: | 300 | 750 |
| Texts: | Unlimited | 250 |
| Internet: | 1 GB | 500 MB |
| Perks: | Unlimited 3-3 | Unlimited landlines |
| Handset: | £500 | £0 |
| Monthly: | £15 | £30 |
| Total (24M): | £860 | £630 |
My usage tends to be around 120 voice minutes and around 100 text messages, so either will suit me. I do use a lot of mobile internet, but even that tends to be around the 100mb at the very most, so either fits my requirements. Free 3-to-3 calls would be nice, as it means I could ring my mother entirely for free but with 750 cross-network minutes included with Vodafone, it’s really quite irrelevant!
So I can stay as I am and take advantage of possibly being able to bargain future good deals with Three given I’ve been with them 5 years now but they have poor upgrade and retention offers right now, or I can move to Vodafone and save £230 over 2 years, get the phone I want, but lose any loyalty I’ve built up with Three.
Ugh. This was supposed to be simple!
For the majority of blogs, speed isn’t a great big deal. Efficiency doesn’t matter too much either. I’m not terribly fussed about either issue on this blog. My other blog however, gets quite a hammering now. Given the little server it is hosted on, this can cause problems. So how can you make a small server act like one of the big boys, without having to spend a fortune on upgrading?
Note: This is partially for those who host their own websites on their own web servers. You will require root access to do some of this… but not all. Even those on shared web hosting can benefit from some of these suggestions, so do keep reading!
Disks are Slow. Memory is Fast.
One sure-fire way to inject a speed boost into your WP-powered website is to move your WordPress directory from disk, into RAM. Then configure your web server to read the web site out of RAM, rather than off the hard disk. Ubuntu comes with a handy existing method for doing this called /dev/shm. Anything you put onto that mountpoint, will actually be served out of RAM rather than the physical disk. I copy (using cp -Rp) /var/www/sussexinfocus.co.uk to /dev/shm every time the server boots.
Make sure of course that if you install any plugins through the web interface, change templates or themes and so on that you feed the changes back to physical media (e.g. /var/www/sussexinfocus.co.uk) from /dev/shm when you’re done. If the server crashes or you reboot it, everything in /dev/shm gets wiped out. That wouldn’t be cool if you just spent 3 hours pefecting your WordPress setup! If you’d like a copy of my ‘init’ shell script that’ll do all this for you, drop me a comment and I’ll get back to you.
Repetitive Database Queries Are Slow. Cache is Fast.
If your server is underpowered or not powerful enough to handle a lot of traffic, you’ll find one of your bottle-necks is your database. Ramp up the query cache within MySQL by editing /etc/mysql/my.cnf
(on Ubuntu anyway), and make sure query_cache_limit and query_cache_size are somewhere around 16mb or so. If you have lots of ram to spare, ramp that up to 64mb.
Reload your MySQL server to begin with the increased cache limits. (/etc/init.d/mysql reload).
Dynamically Generated is Slow. Static is Fast.
Every time you or someone else loads a blog page, a lot happens. Your web server calls the PHP engine which runs the compiler to compile the WordPress .php files which runs the WordPress program which talks to the database server which reads (possibly) from the disk and so on. If you’re getting quite a few hits, this very simplified example of what goes on, causes things to slow waaaay down. Cut out all that by generating static copies of your posts. Visitors then talk to your web server that calls the PHP engine which runs the WordPress program that notices a cached copy already exists, cutting down on page generation and database queries.
WP-Cache is a simple to use and effective method of achieving this. If you use my RAM Store method above, your cached files will also be in RAM, doubling the benefit. Avoid WP-Super-Cache though. It’s complex, buggy, and does pretty much what WP-Cache does anyway.
PHP Compilation is Slow. Cached Opcode is Fast.
Following on from the above example, speed things up further by cutting out your web server having to compile WordPress every single time someone requests a page. PHP Accelerators store an executable cached copy of the program in memory, cutting out the need to compile it every single time. This will be one of the best speed changes you can make for very little effort. Statistics on various sites show around a 3-30x speed increase and load decrease, just from doing this. I personally recommend eAccelerator paired with Apache2.
Serving Multiple (Possibly Large) Files is Slow. Off-Site is Fast.
My other blog is a photoblog. The photographs range in filesize from 400kB to well over 1mB. Imagine having to read these off your overloaded hard disk every time you want to show it to someone. Imagine further having to tie up an apache web server process to serve each one. Multiply that by all the visitors your site gets. Slow. Slow. Slow! But, there is a solution…
Amazon S3 is an off-site, cloud-based, distributed file storage system. To cut a long story short here, use Amazon S3 to store your uploads through your blog. Check out the Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress which automates it. S3 is super cheap for what you get, and the performance increase is very noticable. You can even keep it appearing ‘in-house’ by setting up a CNAME to your storage location. Mine is static.sussexinfocus.co.uk!
Can it Really Make a Difference?
If you just do the above, then yes, it really can. My page generation times have dropped from an average of 650ms with a transfer average of 1933ms to 102ms generation time and 778ms fetch time. That’s a 600% speed increase.
If you look at it another way that is a 600% DECREASE in the time someone stares at “Web site found, waiting for reply…” in their browser, and the whole page loads more than twice as fast as it did before!
Be Realistic.
Ultimately, if you’re truly successful, no amount of optimisation will be sufficient, and you will need to look into upgrading your hardware. If you’re already struggling, then these tips will keep you going for a good while yet. If you’re designing a new blog and want to be ‘Digg proof’ from the beginning, these principles should go a long way to keeping your site up and serving requests rather than doing the usual ‘crash and burn’.
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