Hey, Skint pals,

Hope you’re all having a great week so far. Sun shining here, second load of washing on the line . . . ah, the glamour! Speaking of which, last time I shared some insider secrets from a city stylist following my gobsmacker of a bill, and promised you a second round of tips this time. And guess what? They’re getting curiouser and curiouser . . .

My stylist’s a redhead. I covet her hair, big time, but it does look high maintenance. How, I wondered aloud on my last visit, does she cope with root regrowth, since the colour’s quite far removed from her natural shade? Okay, she works in a salon, making touch-ups more easily available  to her than the rest of us, but even so . . .

‘Paprika.’She told me flatly. ‘I sprinkle it in at the roots as soon as they come though. It matches my colour perfectly.’

Use paprika, Riri! Honest, it’ll save you a bomb.

Wow. Really? Her hair isn’t even paprika coloured but she swears that paprika covers just about all shades of red.

What, I asked, suits brown and black hair that’s showing its true colours? Mascara, for black hair, she told me, just brushed in with the wand.

Brown eyeshadow for brown hair, applied with a toothbrush. And failing those?

Good old felt tip pens/Sharpies – honest! (Just be careful not to get caught in a downpour I’d say.) All of these colour tricks buy you a spare couple of week between salon visits, and will cover-up roots in an emergency such as unexpected date/big meeting/ night out, when there’s no time to visit the salon.

And she told me some clients get creative, mixing their own concoction of, say, paprika and eyeshadow together, to get the perfect shade and save money on hair colour, a la George’s Marvellous Medicine.

For blondes? Trickier that one, if your natural roots come through darker, but don’t underestimate the power of flesh coloured eyeshadow, mixed with some gold to reflect the light, which basically helps to dazzle people into not noticing your roots. (the stylist explain it more scientifically, but that’s the gist!)

You can also buy nifty colour wands, such as these Instant Haircolor Touch-Up Sticks, which you can carry around in your handbag and whip out in any roots emergency. Many moons ago, when my hair was black, I used one of these and found that it did the job nicely. They come in a good range of colours and I’m thinking that you could extend the life of your colour for a good few weeks with them. I’ve also used Loreal Root Touch-Up between salon visits to do the same job.

Some Other Quick Tips 

Reader Meg reminded  about loyalty schemes when she email to say: ‘Always find out if there’s a discount for repeat booking.  My salon gives a 10% discount for bookings taken up to 4 months in advance.  Once the booking is made I can change the date, time, stylist and what I have done and still get the discount.  They also have a loyalty scheme and for every six visits you save about £30. ‘ Go Meagan! My hair salon also operates a similar scheme, giving me 20% of the total bill every fourth visit, which is quite a chunk, ahem, based on my last bill shocker.

 If you don’t mind being a salon floozy and hopping around to take advantage of the best deals then you can’t beat Groupon or the lesser-known but more beauty-focused Wahanda, for the best cut and colour deals.

Standby appointments at your usual salon are even better in my book. Often half the price of standard cuts, you’re on home ground, meaning they’ve got your notes about which colours to use, and even if your usual stylist isn’t free, he/she is often around to advise the person doing your hair about your preferences. 

So, what about you folks? Got any roots cover-up tips that are wacky but work? Egg-yolk, gravy, Mojitos, Cosmopolitans – whatever weird and wonderful things you use on your locks you fellow Skint pals would love to know!

Like this? Then you might like these:

How to Save on Haircuts

Beauty and the Bizarre

Hey Skint pals, 

A quick post from me here as I just have to let you know about this great offer. Shell is currently offering the chance to buy £20 of fuel for just £10, via offeroftheday.co.uk. Here’s the link you need.

This is limited to the first 100,000 buyers, so get in there fast if you fancy it! You’ll receive a Shell loyalty card in the post which you use to claim your whopping fuel discount. It can be spent on fuel at any Shell service station.

I’ve just grabbed the deal – I’ll go now and let you do the same! 

Best of luck.

Skint xx

PS – If you miss this deal, here’s a post I did before about saving money on fuel in other ways.

Hey Skint pals,

One of the things I love about writing this blog is that I’m always learning about new ways to make cash. That’s what happened this week when Mr Skint arrived back from a trip to Dublin without his luggage. Somewhere during a  forty minute  direct outward flight the airline had managed to lose his bag – meaning that Mr Skint spent three days in Dublin making emergency trips to buy socks and the like.  

Anyway, the random ways of making money I was talking about? Whilst taking a look at the process for claiming for lost baggage earlier I came across a phenomenon I previously knew nothing about: buying up lost luggage for cash.

Buying up Lost Luggage for Cash

Here’s the deal: loads of people lose bags every year whilst flying and these bags land so far away from their owners that it’s impossible to reunite the two. Who knows why a Dublin-bound bag ends up in St Louis, but that’s the kind of adventurous life our luggage leads.

So, these poor orphaned bags get spend a while circling the globe, then end up sitting in some huge baggage purgatory for a few months before the airport folks get fed up with them and send them off to be sold. And then?

Well, it turns out that there’s a whole industry devoted to buying and selling this lost luggage, with buyers taking a chance on the contents and hoping to strike it lucky. In fact, in America, the Unclaimed Baggage Centre in Alabama is the state’s biggest tourist attraction, with people flocking from all over the USA and beyond to see what they can snap up. 

Just one of the outfits that apparently turned up a treasure haul at the Unclaimed Baggage Centre. Bonanza!

So confident is the Centre of its appeal that it encourages people to plan their whole vacation around a treasure hunting trip to its warehouse. And it seems to work because their visitors’ map has pegs from Australia, Greenland and China. If you’re a US based reader and have been to the centre – what’s it like? Did you snag any bargains? 

I can understand the appeal of buying lost luggage – it’s like a gigantic lucky dip, isn’t it? Imagine, just for a moment that you bought Carrie Bradshaw’s suitcase at auction – what a treat for magpie eyes that would be. Or Victoria Beckham’s (like her luggage would ever get lost), snagging yourself a caseful of designer dresses for £50. 

For UK readers, we don’t have a one-stop shop like the Alabama Centre  - here luggage tends to go to auction houses close to major airports . All of British Airways’  unclaimed baggage eventually makes its way to Greasby’s auction house in London, which holds sales every Tuesday morning. You won’t get a chance to root around in the bag before bidding though, so you’re taking a gamble, based only on the appearance of the bag itself.  Luton’s lost bags go to Hertfordshire Auctions,  whilst the sad orphaned cases from Gatwick, (imagine how many thousands a year), end up at this Bristol auction house. If you sign up for the auction houses newsletters you’ll get to know when the baggage auctions are taking place – they’re not every week.

The cost of snapping up a bag at auction? Depends who you’re up against really. I’m a massive fan of auctions and much of chez Skint has been furnished from the auction room – when buying luggage the usual auction room tips apply. Each of the above auctions – in fact nearly all auction rooms – have viewings before the sale, so do try to get along to the viewing if you can. That way you can have a look at the cases and make your bidding decisions based on that. If the suitcase itself is expensive, the greater the likelihood of top-notch gear inside too.

And, after you’ve decided on a bid and snagged your suitcase at auction? It’s time for the big reveal . . .  The case needn’t be packed full of gold ingots for you to make money on it. 

The easiest way to do so is to sell off the contents separately on eBay and the like. I’ve written before about how to make money on eBay by buying job lots then selling the goods separately. Even if the suitcase just contains the usual stuff you’ll almost certainly make pretty good money from listing the best items on eBay with a good description and write-up. Remember to list the suitcase itself as well.

Of course, a better result really is for the luggage to be reunited with its rightful owner – as we’re hoping will happen with Mr Skint’s. But, if luggage has been lost for six months and the owner has made every effort to track it down without any luck, then I’d rather the case was sold off than incinerated. 

What do you think? Have you ever bought lost luggage? Would you?

Or have you ever lost your own – and did it show up in the end?

Oh, and if you have any tips for Mr Skint on how to go tracking down his lost case, please do share. Is it best to go through our own travel insurance or to pursue the airline via their compensation scheme?

Hope you have a good week, Skint pals. xxx

Like this post? You might also like these:

How to Make Money on eBay

Great Things to Buy at Auction

Auction Room Tips for Newbies

Photo credit: thisispretty

Hey Skint pals,

Just back in the UK after a great holiday in Portugal with friends and family. We did that renting a big villa thing and splitting the costs – much cheaper than going as a small family. And despite the torrential rain on landing in the UK, it’s still good to be home.

Still, things are a bit tight money-wise chez Skint post-holiday, so I’ll be economising over the next month or two. I’ve been wondered though: when you’re strapped for cash, do you spend less or borrow more? I’m firmly in the spend less camp, but I read a survey this week from a personal loans firm which revealed some very bizarre reasons that customers give when requesting finance.

See, apparently not everybody who asks for a loan needs money to pay for a new car or holiday. Explanations given to the company included funding an investment in gold bullion, a new tattoo, and paying bail money! Needless to say, not all of the personal  loans requests were approved. . . 

Take out a loan to build a rocket? Beats paying off the mortgage for stories to tell the grandkids I suppose . . .

Top strange reasons for requesting a

personal loan:

•             Buying a gold bar
•             Buying a collection of antique glass eyes
•             To fund production of home-made rocket (how much does that cost?)
•             Paying a taxidermist to stuff a pet
•             To open wallet and impress a new girlfriend
•             Buingy the latest Star Wars memorabilia as a future investment
•             To pay bankruptcy court fees
•             To pay for a new tattoo
•             To loan to a friend at a higher interest rate (this one really tickled me. Some friend, eh?)

I think the Star Wars enthusiast might have the right idea though. Have you seen how much some of those old figures go for? Most loan requests though are still for more down-to-earth needs such as household bills and car loans. The most popular reasons for requesting a loan are:

• Rent or Mortgage arrears
• Bills
• Credit card debt
• Car loan
• Significant household purchase

Hi Skint pals,

I’m writing this post today with a million things on my mind. I’m getting ready to go on a week’s holiday soon and I really ought to be digging out my shorts or buying suncream or wasting time on tripadvisor,  but instead I’m sitting here cursing my poor memory and wondering how to pay for the hire car.

See, I planned to pay for the car and some other big expenses by credit card whilst abroad. Here in the UK I often use a debit card for day-to-day stuff but they have their limits abroad, so a rewards credit card is what I use on my hols. But today, when I started looking stuff out for the holiday, I realised I don’t have a clue what my pin number is. And of course the bank can’t tell me. I wouldn’t want them to – I could be anyone, after all. A new pin will be posted, but not in time, so it’s adios credit card and hola . . .  what?  

Ah, this is the life. Holiday money has a much better life than all the other money, don’t you think?

What did people use pre-credit cards when travelling? I can just about remember the days when credit cards weren’t so common and instead it was travellers cheques that people turned to, but what a hassle having to go to the bank abroad and cash them in. You might remember that I found an ancient travellers cheque still lurking in my cupboard not so long ago, and how the woman in the bank actually laughed when I fished it out of my purse. 

For me, credit cards really come into their own when travelling and a credit card that offers rewards points makes sense to me. The idea is that you collect reward points from things that you’d be buying everyday anyway: fuel, food etc. Sort of like a bunch of store loyalty cards and a credit card rolled into one. I like the convenience. I guess it makes best financial sense though if you only collect the rewards on stuff you’d be buying anyway, right?

Anyway, despite this little hassle I’m still excited about our forthcoming hols with our pals. And whilst abroad we’ve got some other friends from out of town housesitting our place for the week. They get to enjoy being skint in the city for a change and we get the peace of mind knowing that the house is safe. Just a little nervous after the break-in, you know, and so it’s great that they’re here to keep an eye on the place. 

What about you? Do you use credit cards when travelling or do you do it the old-fashioned way and just stride boldy out towards the horizon clutching a fistful of dollars? Did you do a lot of comparing credit cards to find the best one for your lifestyle? And do you have any nifty ways of remembering your pin numbers? You know how none of us are meant to write them down, but how on earth do you keep them all in your head? Any top memory tricks gratefully received! 

Photo credit: on the beach

Today’s post is a guest post from MBNA. 

Hey Skint pals,

What are you up to this weekend? Shopping for diamonds, anyone? In keeping with the living the high life on a shoestring tagline I occasionally like to bring you news of how you can really splash out for less. A little bit frugal, a little bit Fendi, that’s us Skint girls. And when we think of splashing out, few things make bigger waves than some nice shiny diamonds, right? So when the folks at Diamond Manufacturers approached me with this guest post about how to save money on diamond jewellery I thought that you might be interested in learning how to get your rocks for less.

After all, with the Easter bank holiday weekend fast approaching, many couples will be using the extra days to take a romantic break and pledge their undying love. Marriage proposals always spike at bank holiday weekends, and even if that’s not your style, you might just decide to buy yourself a cheeky little sparkler after reading this. If any of you do decide to bag yourself some rocks over Easter you will let us know won’t you? Even better, send in the pics!

Over to you Diamond Manufacturers:

Cheaper than you think

Everyone’s surely heard the phrase ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’, right? It’s easy to see their appeal: clean, luxurious and great to look at even for the millionth time. The cost of diamond jewellery can be too much for many people looking for that perfect gift, but believe it or not it is possible to buy it on a tighter budget!

Tying the knot for less

If, for example, you’re buying an engagement ring, there are a few tricks you could use in order to get a great piece of diamond jewellery without breaking the bank. Vashi Dominguez from Diamond Manufacturers offers these tips to save money on diamond jewellery:

• Choose a diamond that’s less than 1ct or 0.5ct – this will save you a lot of money without making too much of a difference in the diamond’s quality.
• Diamonds that are nearly colourless rather than completely colourless are cheaper, and when used in jewellery, the difference is hardly noticeable.
• Don’t be put off by any stones that have minor imperfections – again, they can hardly be seen without use of a powerful microscope, and are much, much cheaper.
• Using a bezel setting will help to make a diamond appear bigger. This will mean you might be getting more for less. It circles the stone in the ring.
• Diamonds set in white gold rather than platinum is cheaper, yet few people would know the difference!
• Try to set a ring with some side stones – this makes diamond jewellery look more impressive without setting you back too much.
• Buy your diamonds online. This lets you easily compare prices online to find the best deal and can help save you as much as 80%.
• If size really matters to you, consider buying a diamond that’s pear-shaped. This gives the illusion of looking larger, so you get more sparkle for your  cash.

What about you, Skint pals? Ever snagged a bargain on some serious rocks? Or did you find another novel way of declaring your undying love? We’d love to know.

Have a great weekend.

Skint x

Hi Skint pals,

How was your weekend? I spent it in London, at the Write On Finance Blog Up, a meet up for UK personal finance and thrifty living bloggers  across the UK, organised by Help Me to Save. What a great time I had, putting faces to names that I’ve been tweeting with for months . 

More about that later, but first I want to share something that preoccupied me all the way home. While waiting on my return flight from Luton on Sunday evening I nipped into the airport Boots to get some snacks. At the fridges – there’s a whole wall of fridges – the shop assistant was scooping armfuls of sandwiches, salads etc into bin bags.

‘Isn’t the fridge stuff for sale any more?’ I asked.

‘You can still buy that food there’ – she pointed to a tiny section – ‘but all this stuff goes out of date today so I’m getting rid of it.’

It was 7pm. There were hundreds and hundreds of snacks in these binbags.

Did we love our lunches more when they weren’t wrapped in plastic?

‘What do you do with them?’ I asked.

‘Bin them.’

There really must have been about two hundred packs of sandwiches.  Pals, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Seeing all this food getting loaded into binbags I said it was a waste to chuck them. The shop assistant agreed and said that Boots used to give the food to homeless charities (this food wasn’t out of date, remember), but that they stopped doing so because of health and safety. I’m assuming that means Boots don’t want to be held liable if someone gets ill from eating a freebie snack.

Whilst I understand the liability dilemma that Boots might face, I left the shop on Sunday night feeling that such food waste is plain wrong. If the food is still in date is there any more liability around giving it away than there is around selling it? And even if it’s considered too much hassle to take food to a local shelter,  is it naive to suggest that Boots might even at least just give the sandwiches free to customers, or to delayed travellers at departure gates?

I like Boots. It’s one of the few high street stores that I’d really miss if it closed, and their Advantage Card is most generous  loyalty card I’ve found.  But to see such a blatant waste of food at a time when so many people are struggling doesn’t sit well with me.

It got me thinking about all of the hundreds of stores getting rid of food every evening. Where does it all go?  And how could it be put to better use? One of the bloggers that I met at the weekend was Viviana of The Lean Times, who blogs all her thrifty meals each week. Perhaps with all the talk over the weekend about looking after our cash I was especially tuned into that, but I do think such waste would trouble me at any time. The Love Food Hate Waste campaign is great on how we can reduce food waste and gives some cracking tips for what to do with surplus food.  

What do you think folks? Am I getting hot and bothered over nothing? What do you think about food getting binned at the end of every working day? Any ideas on how it could be better used? Maybe we can share our ideas with Boots.     

And if you’d like to read more about Write On Finance then Donal of Money Saving Challenge has a round-up of Day One here.

Hey Skint pals,

Happy Sunday to you all! Hope this coming week is a good one. What would make it brilliant for you? Winning £300 maybe? You might just have hit lucky here then! This week, Skint in the City has worked together with fellow bloggers, The Savvy Scot and The Money Principle, to bring you a bonanza-tastic chance to win money – £300 cash no less, sponsored by myvouchercodes.co.uk! Yep, 300 smackers (more than $450) to spend on whatever takes your fancy.  Sadly, I’m barred from entering, but if I could I’d be planning to put the winnings towards a little Easter getaway.

Not being the most organised type, my holiday planning generally kicks off around May, when many of the best bargains have gone. But this year I am smugness itself, having already booked my Easter hols. Admittedly I can take little of the credit for getting my finger out so promptly. You see, this year we are going away with a couple of pals and their families and it’s their get-up-and-go that galvanised me into action – otherwise I’d likely still be dithering over holiday websites till a week before take-off.

I’ve spoken before, here, about the many benefits – financial, social and others – of renting a villa with pals and this Easter we’re doing it. Six adults, six kids in a villa in Portugal. Chipping in this way really makes a massive difference in terms of cost – a six bedroom villa with a pool and great views, split three ways, is both cheaper and far more luxurious than any of us could have gone for on our own. And by buying and cooking food together, eating in round the table etc we’ll be saving money without trying too hard. The other massive benefit of this type of break I think is that children seem to magically disappear when they get together with others, banding together and generally steering clear of the adults all day. More fun for them and more chill-out time for the grown-ups too.

Wait up – serendipity alert! I’m writing this in a cafe and, as fate would have it, the people next to me are, at this very second, talking about Portugal. The guy is saying that his sister is thinking of buying somewhere in Portugal since prices are reasonable and the Portuguese people are lovely. So, there you have it – my holiday choice validated by a bit of impromptu eavesdropping! If you won the £300, what holiday destination or activity would you put it towards? Let me know by entering the competition.You can choose to just enter once or – by Liking, Tweeting etc – you can gain lots more chances to enter. Just click here to enter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Best of luck pals. Skint x

If you like this post and want to get more updates from Skint just click on the RSS button at the top of the page.

Photo credit: Bleacher Nation

Well, would you? Or does the very question cause you to wrinkle your nose in disgust? Rescuing ‘pre-loved’ items from the street certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of Earl Grey but I read this week that in these hard-pressed times it’s becoming an increasingly common way for  young first-time homeowners to furnish their flats.

I don’t see anything wrong with it at all. Though we never see Carrie Bradshaw picking up a little bedside table from the sidewalk, I’d argue that if she was starting out in 2013. These days there’s nothing wrong with picking up a discarded piece of  furniture from the side of the road and taking it home to love.

Does the very thought of finding furniture on the street make you go yeeuugh? You wouldn’t be alone – whilst most people will now happily visit charity shops, the idea of picking something off the street, or worse, out of a skip, still seems like a step too far, but this is changing fast. In a recent episode of Kirstie’s Homemade Homes, I saw Kirstie Allsop dive into a skip to rescue a lamp, and where Kirstie goes, other chichi types are sure to follow. 

I’ve always loved this picture – and I bet there’s one in every skip and car boot sale in the land.

In other countries ‘street shopping’ quite the norm, and indeed it was living in Barcelona for a couple of years that opened my eyes to this way of finding new stuff. There it’s a very acceptable social pastime. Nearly the whole population lives in apartments, and each area has a designated day for people to put bulky items out on the street. And lots of furniture on the street means lots of people sniffing round it. In Barcelona, people will talk openly at the office about street hunting, and make plans to go together to help each other lug home heavy items.  

After hearing people bragging about their street finds, my pal Claire and I were keen to see what the buzz was about, so we secured a list of each barrio’s rubbish days from the town hall and formed our plan of action: focusing on the city’s poshest areas.

And there couldn’t have been a better time to hunt. It was only two or three years after the Barcelona Olympics, and with the poverty of the Franco years in the past and the future looking shiny, the chicest thing was to ditch the old memories and buy new, which meant that all over the city people were throwing out beautiful, well-built old Spanish furniture and replacing it with modern, flatpack stuff: great news for bargainistas. I lived in a titchy attic flat with hardly any furniture, so I was well open to making it prettier any way I could – and it turned out that the street way was fantastic.

On my first trip out with Claire I was slightly dubious about the whole thing – till I spotted the most gorgeous bedside table with little Art Nouveau carved legs. Carrying it up four flights of stairs to an attic flat was a bit of a marathon – street finds don’t come with delivery – but once installed in my titchy bedroom it transformed the space. Oh, and Claire and I once jostled an enormous dining table back to her flat, then had to get her boyfriend out of bed to help us up the stairs with it. But boy was it worth it when a couple of months later ten of us ate Christmas dinner around it.

In Barcelona, we would often come across not just other young people but older couples or even families all out scouting for goods. In the UK, however, it’s still not really the done thing. With acceptance growing though, and the trend for upcyclinggaining steamI don’t think it will be long before picking up bargains from the street marks you is seen as the smart thing to do. Meantime, look upon the ick factor as a positive – the fewer people doing it, the better pickings for you.

Upcycling at its finest. This made me laugh . . . lends a new meaning to lying in the bath

How To 

• Ask your local council for the collection dates in posh neighbourhoods near you, then trawl those streets the night before.
• For maximum fun take a friend or two with you and compete to see who can eye the best bargain: you’ll need the combined muscle power when it comes to hauling home your loot.
• Get over the shame. With a couple of exceptions, finds from the street are as good as you’ll get anywhere. You’re going to clean the stuff immediately, aren’t you? Look at it this way: fifteen minutes ago the item was inside someone’s living room, possibly someone with more money and better hygiene than you. Then they threw it out to make room for their new purchase and you’re the lucky winner – what’s dirty about that?
• Stick to hard furnishings like desks and chairs, bedside tables and bathroom cabinets. Avoid anything porous like sofas, mattresses (yuk!) or rugs – you never know where the cats have been.
• Steer clear of electrical goods – just too risky.
• Clean your goodies as soon as you get home, wiping down surfaces, table legs and undersides with a cleaner appropriate to the furniture type.

Then have tons of fun arranging your free treasures, in the knowledge that you’ve kept stuff out of landfill and grabbed yourself the most super-skint bargains possible. 

Convinced? Or still find the whole business way too distasteful? Go on, if you’re a street scavenger, please out yourself now – I’d be delighted to make your acquaintance! xx

Photo credit: Sofa bath courtesy of Home to Life

Hello Skint pals and a very chirpy good morning to you all!

Why the annoying intro, you ask? Well, today being officially the most depressing day of the year * (cue sad face, gloomy voiceover), I decided that I wouldn’t buy into all that, but instead find reasons to be cheerful. 

See, we’re all supposed to be extra-low today, after someone or other calculated that today is the day we’re at our skintest/fattest/most sunlight deprived/lowest in self-esteem. Are you feeling at your very very worst – the worst in fact you’ve felt since this day last year? Nope, me neither. In fact, I’ve always quite liked January. November is my gloomiest month – watching the light fade faster each afternoon is what I hate. But by this time in January I always feel that things are on the turn and so here are some of the reasons why I’m fairly happy today, in this skintest of months. Bucking trends: it gives me quite the thrill.

• Cheap Eats: January is a very bargainous month. I’ve got a January birthday, and my birthday meal a couple of weeks ago saw Mr Skint and I as the only two people in the restaurant. Okay, it was a tad awkward – at one point we had three waitresses – but what January socialising lacks in atmosphere it makes up for in bargains. Many restaurants, including Pizza Express and Zizzi, do great deals in January, with a whopping 40% off at Pizza Express. Here’s a list of the best, courtesy of the mighty Martin Lewis. 

• Sales: The January sales are at their very cheapest. Now’s the time to snag that sofa you’ve been eyeing up – it won’t be as cheap again all year. And for clothes – especially if you’re not one of the most common sizes – mid-January is bargainsville central. House of Fraser’s Blue Cross sale sees amazing discounts at this time of year on furniture, jewellery, beauty products and clothes, with all brands slashing heavily. Nothing to cheer up mid-Jan for me like a trip to Frasers to spend the Xmas gift vouchers. Party dresses are one of the biggest bargains and worth snapping up cos they don’t really tend to date. I like this one, pictured right, now less than thirty quid. One of my best sale finds came from Frasers in mid-Jan, the toy soldier dry-clean only jacket I recently put in the wash.  Emboldened by that success I might just snag another dry-clean item or two this year then stick them in a spin cycle one cold February evening, just for kicks. Crazy stuff.

• Light: The nights are stretching and soon it’ll be that happy day where we leave the office at 5ish and step into daylight. One of the loveliest, most hopeful, evenings of the year, that one.

• Hope: The year is still young enough to feel optimistic – the resolutions are still new and even if they’ve already been broken there’s still time left to start again. And if you’re not great at sticking to resolutions, here’s something great to help. Stikk is a site where you type in your resolution/goal and pledge that if you don’t keep it you’ll make a donation to the anti-charity of your choice. Yup, if you don’t do what you say you’re going to you must donate cash to the Lance Armstrong Truth and Honour Stipend or the Payday Loans Pseudo-Charity, or whatever else fills you with fear. The most popular choice is apparently the George W Bush Memorial Library. Genius huh? You can also choose to have the cash donated to a charity you actually support, but apparently it’s the fear of money going to their anti-charity that makes people stick to their goals. 

• Burns Night: It’s this Friday and it’s a great excuse to have friends to dinner on the cheap. Whilst normally you might feel obliged to cook something fancy for your pals, on Burns night you just cut some potatoes, peel a turnip and buy in a haggis. Then you open the whisky and all sit around trying to remember the words to Burns poems, which no-one ever can. Only other investment? A book of Robert Burns poems. I like Andrew O’Hagan’s collection because he talks about what various Burns poems have meant to him at different points in his life and his love of them really comes through. There’s something great about Burns night – it just feels like a night to be with pals.

• The Best Films: The best films of the year are coming soon. Late January/February’s a bonanza time for film-lovers. All the Christmas schmaltz and the  kids films have finally slung their hook and made way for the goodies. I’m hoping to see Hitchcock. And if you fancy trying to bag some cheap, or even better, free, cinema tickets this year, just sign up to those websites which offer free cinema tickets to see previews of films before they’re released. It’s easy to get on their lists – simply sign up online and you will be sent a code for free tickets when they become available. Sites include seefilmfirst and tellten

*There’s even a formula to prove, beyond a glimmer of any doubt, why today is the most depressing. Here it is, lest you are still not feeling the gloom. {[W + (D-d)] x T^Q} ÷ [M x N_a]. So, that’s us all clear now then. 

Apparently W stands for weather, D for debt, T is time since Christmas and Q is time since New Year’s resolutions were failed. M is for low motivation and N_a means you can’t be bothered, basically.

Does this ring any bells with you?  Are you  enjoying an Eyeore-like wallow in the gloom today or confounding science by feeling quite okay? If you can raise yourself from your torpor to give me your comments I’d love to hear them . . .