Tag Archives: financial

Top Money Saving Tips to Survive the Recession

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Remove the engine from your car, and cut holes in the floor beneath everyone’s seats, so their feet can easily touch the road. Then simply use the ‘Flintstones’ method to pedal your way around town. The strong leg muscles you build from this method of travel will aid you in outrunning security when you’re stealing family tubs of Lurpak from Asda.

Sellotape sausages and pork chops to your arms and legs under your clothes, and run through your local park, suing the owners of any dogs that bite you.

Buy a cow. Not only will you save money on dairy products and lawnmowers, but you’ll also be able to make money by charging people to ride the cow. And I’m not talking children doing the bovine equivalent of a donkey ride, either. I’m talking perverts. Rich local perverts. Be the cow’s pimp. Dress it in leather, smear its disgusting, pat-flecked face with lipstick, and make it an OnlyFarms account under the name ‘Holed MacDonald’. Then, buy or steal a step-ladder, and wait for the mooooo-lah to roll in.

Two hollowed-out dead hedgehogs make ideal substitutes for a pair of children’s football boots.

Spray ‘PEDO OUT’ in giant letters over the front of your neighbour’s house, then enjoy the free heat from the petrol bombs.

Heat yourself without gas or electricity by using the power of anger and surprise. Pin reminders of shocking real-world events on your living room wall, and look at them whenever you’re feeling cold. For the warmest blood possible try these ones: ‘JACOB REES-MOGG HAS HAD SEX MULTIPLE TIMES’ and ‘LEMBIT OPIK ACTUALLY PUMPED ONE OF THE CHEEKY GIRLS’

Save money on food and entertainment by pretending you’re Ant and/or Dec hosting an inexplicably popular jungle-based ITV gameshow. Force your kids to eat raw daddy long-legs and house spiders straight from the webs while you film it all on your phone. If they complain, tell them they’ve lost the public vote, and make them crawl through piles of rat bones until they get some perspective.

People in England, Wales and NI: save money on medical prescriptions by simply refusing to become ill.

Skint, but your family has a hankering for fast food? Recreate the McDonalds experience by painting your hamburgers grey, smearing them with campylobacter, and serving them with the haunted look of a person contemplating self-immolation.

Want a pet but can’t afford one? Recreate the experience of having a budgie by placing an empty cage in your living room and occasionally shouting, ‘SHUT THE F*** UP!’ at it. Still not enough? Experience the thrill of keeping a fish as a pet by filling a bowl with water and then forgetting about it until the water goes stagnant, and even the microbial life inside it is dead. Then flush it down the toilet.

Take a leaf out of Halloween’s book. Dress up in a long cloak and a novelty mask each and every night, and chap doors with a basket in one hand and a knife in the other, demanding money in exchange for a joke. It’s a win/win, because If you’re arrested, at least you won’t have to worry about food and heating for a while.

Sell Monopoly money to children and idiots.

Take the financial sting out of Christmas by becoming a Jehovas Witness until February.

Can’t afford dental treatment? Simply start a new career as a Shane MacGowan tribute act.

Menstruating ladies: tackle period poverty and its associated embarrassments by foregoing sanitary products altogether and spending one week out of every month dressed in a white boiler suit whilst carrying around a brush with red paint on it. Added bonus, you might get hired to do someone’s living room.

Dress up as a bin, and squat outside of high-end bakeries and supermarkets with your mouth open.

Love watching the BBC, but BBC TV License becoming too expensive for you? Stop watching and paying, but keep the spirit of the BBC alive by walking through the streets with a microphone in your hand looking for interesting and significant events, and then ignoring them because they don’t fit the government’s narrative. Alternatively, narrate your love-making, or acts of lonely masturbation, in the voice of David Attenborough.

The McMost Expensive McMuffin in the McWorld

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Inflation, recession and corporate greed make for a miserable mix. We’ve all been paying through the nose – and every other orifice besides – for everything from petrol, to heating, to butter. But I’ll wager that – unlike yours truly – as bad as things have become, you’ve never paid £105.22 for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.

I know what you’re thinking. Did the sausage meat come from an endangered rhino? Was the egg that was used in the sandwich laid by a magical hen, which was in turn owned by Lady Gaga? Had the McMuffin been autographed by the late Jeremy Beadle, and using the little withered hand, no less? Well, no.

Let me explain.

My lady and I (yes, I am a Victorian gentleman, thank you very much) had attended her sister’s birthday party on a large campsite somewhere on the outskirts of Galashiels. There’d been a giant fire-pit; a vast, mutant Tiki beach-hut boasting a stage, dance-floor and sufficient seating to trick you into believing that you were in a city-centre boozer (where the booze was free); bathrooms with deodorant in them, for Christ’s sake! It was heaven.

The next morning… not so much.

Sleeping on the ground under a piece of tarpaulin isn’t many people’s idea of a restful night’s kip. Add to that midges and a mild hangover and you’re a good few rings closer to Dante’s Hell than you would be on your average Sunday morning.

I hadn’t had much to drink. My good lady hadn’t either (Editor’s note: may or may not be entirely factual in her case, but there’s a lot more at stake here than veracity). But since neither of us drink more than once in a Blue Nun, we hadn’t needed much alcohol to turn our next morning into a mourning. We greeted the day with a considerable degree of despondency. Until, that is, we remembered the existence of McDonald’s.

Now, McDonald’s beefy and chickeny day-time staples rarely tempt me – though they tempt my children, who usually strong-arm me into going – but their breakfast offerings? McMama Mia! They fall and float down onto my taste-buds like syrup-and-sausage flavoured snowflakes. An almost transcendental experience. If religion wants to compete for our appetites in times of sin and recrimination it’ll have to up its game, with, I don’t know…. Burgers at sermons? Baptising people in Coca Cola? Until then, it’s golden arches, and definitely not golden harps for me.

And thus it came to pass that we were going to McDonald’s, and, yay, verily, we were going to have motherf***ing McMuffins.

There was just one problem.

It was 10:41 and, according to Google Maps, we were sixteen minutes from the nearest McDonald’s – along tractor-infested rural roads to boot. I hastily packed the car – too hastily, as it turned out – and we stuttered and trundled up the all-terrain obstacle course pretending to be a track that snaked its way towards the main road. I say ‘main’ road.

In spite of my worst fears, we were making good time. The roads were smooth and clear. The scenery was wide and breath-taking. The immaculately-grey road sloped and slipped between roller-coastering ski-slopes of greens and browns and yellows, broken up by a circulatory system of dry-stone dykes. Sheaths of sunshine lay like stage-lighting over the gently-swaying fields. It was beautiful. My girlfriend agreed: ‘Pull over,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Well, what can a man do? Nothing, I suppose, except pull over to the side of the road (I say ‘side’) and sit rubbing his dear lady’s back as she hangs out of the open passenger-side door like a downed pilot hanging from a tree by a parachute, all the while keeping one eye on the digital clock and saying to himself: ‘Shit, it’s 10:50, I’m not going to get my McMuffin now, I’m NOT going to get my McMuffin!’, and feeling like a bastard for it, and then saying out loud, ‘Shhh, shhh, darlin’, it’s okay, you’re going to be fine’, but at the same time thinking, ’10:51!!!! I’ll drive right into that bloody restaurant in my Dacia if they try to offer me a cheeseburger, and I’ll make my own McF***ing McMuffin!’ and feeling a bit queasy himself now because he’s clearly the sort of person who places the acquisition of a meaty, eggy takeaway above his beloved’s welfare?

Dear reader: that’s exactly what I did.

A few thwarted spews later and we were back on the road. The clock was ticking. Not literally, you understand, because, as I’ve already established, my car has a digital clock. But you get it, right? I’m trying to sell the impression that this was a race against time, and really tense and that. Which it was. Never-the-less, though, a mere few minutes later we pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot.

And it was 10:56.

Ta-da, right? Phew! You made it, Jamie! Go you, you heroic hunk! Well… no. No, I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. Why would I write something about an entirely successful, hitch-free trip to McDonald’s, and why the hell would you read it?

We joined the queue for the drive-through. It was long-ish, and moving incredibly slowly. My choice was either to take my chances in the queue, and hope that my mouth would reach the sound-portal before the electronic menu blinked out its McMuffins and replaced them with Mozzarella Bites. Or I could back out of the queue, park up, and run into the restaurant with minutes to spare instead of seconds. The choice was obvious. I gave a cursory glance through the sleeping bags that were draped like thick theatre curtains at either side of the back windscreen, put the car into reverse and CRUNCH. I know what you’re thinking, but, no: my good lady hadn’t at that moment bit into a particularly crisp Hash Brown. I’d backed into someone’s BMW.

It was 10:57.

I was deeply apologetic, and deeply concerned about the potential financial impact of my actual impact, but that didn’t stop my subconscious from chanting ‘SAUSAGE AND EGG MCMUFFIN!’ at me throughout my entire encounter with my vehicular victim. ‘STOP HIM TALKING! GET THE McMUFFIN! DISTRACT HIM! GIVE HIM YOUR SHOE? OFFER HIM A PARROT! JUST GET BACK IN THE F***ING CAR!’ I don’t think anyone has ever swapped details after an accident as quickly as I did that morning. It was conducted with the speed and finesse of a magic trick.

AND IT WAS 10:59!

The lunch-time face of the electronic menu snapped into place precisely one second after I’d finished ordering our breakfast. We’d made it. And Jamie said, let there be Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And Jamie saw the Sausage and Egg Mc Muffin. And it was good. Amen.

As we parked up to eat, and I bit into that delicious breakfasty mouth-orgasm, I could taste all that I’d gambled and lost. I could taste my regret at having been so hasty, hashy-bashy and myopic. I could taste having to borrow money from my dad to pay for the damage. I could taste the invoice for £102.53 that would arrive on my phone by electronic means two days later. I could taste my own panic and desperation. And do you know what? It tasted great! My sacrifice, the great personal cost, had somehow made that Sausage and Egg McMuffin taste all the sweeter. I’m hooked now. Hooked on excess. I want this to be the only way I experience food from now on. I’m going to blindfold myself and go through a McDonald’s drive-thru in the hopes of sampling the perfect McChicken sandwich. I’m going to order a quail and quinoa sandwich from Vidal Sassoon. I know he’s a hair-dresser, and dead, but that’s how committed I am to this thing.

So, in summary then: I’m skint and I’m stupid.

But do you know what? I’m lovin’ it.