Interesting article from GoCompare on money leaks and how they average out to £360 per person per year on the UK.

The UK wastes a whopping £17.6bn a year by letting money leach away on takeaways, snacks, coffees, ready meals and items and services which aren’t used – that’s an average of £360 of unnecessary spending per person, per year.

Takeaway meals, paying for lunch or snacks at work and unused TV subscriptions all come high in the list.  It’s definitely worth taking a quick look at the article for the top 20 money leaks.

Gentle reader have been guilty of many of these in the past – but getting back into the gym in 2014 meant that I totally vanquished my takeaway habit (down to 3-4 times a year rather than 3-4 times a week) and increased my cooking at home from lovely fresh unprocessed ingredients (thus killing off another item on the list – buying too many ready meals).

Unused subscriptions ceased to be a problem once I started adulting like a boss and reconciling my bank accounts monthly .

However I still have some slightly guilty (from a position of fiscal responsibility) habits including:

• the Starbucks coffee ritual (not daily but often enough to rate a mention)!
• not prepping lunch the night before which can – at busy times – lead to a week of lunches from either the staff canteen (relatively economical) or pandering to my Itsu habit (not so economical)!
• occasionally not being quite as on top of my credit card payments and balancing various bank accounts so I get hit by the odd overdue charge (but much improved over the last 2 years).

I’m getting better at the whole lunch prep – especially as knowing what I eat helps with achieving my gym targets.  I can certainly afford the coffee and lunches out – I just need to keep an eye out to make sure they’re the occasional treats rather than a daily thing.

One thing that helped me get a grip on spending over the last two years was making my unit of calculation either PT sessions with the lovely PT  or things for the allotment.

I’ve found it far easier to balance wants and needs when framing it that way.e g. if I have an ITSU lunch every day this week that equates to 1 PT session.  Would I rather eat out for ease or would I rather invest in having fun in the gym?  Put that way it’s much easier to go with investing in someone who is totally focused on helping me achieve my goals (and who makes me laugh a lot) rather than a nice snack!  Or if I only have one take away coffee this week rather than 4 I can buy several currant bushes or packs of seeds for the garden!

What tricks do you use for breaking some not so great habits and avoiding money leakage?