I haven’t much of an appetite anymore…
With the credit crunch eating away at us, and our purses, you really should forget about watching your waistline. The only diet you need to be on is one that’s going to save you pennies, not lose you pounds.
Living in the digital age, we’ll often spend ages on the internet trying to find the best deal on anything from car insurance to better broadband. But when it comes to our weekly groceries, old habits die hard.
Whether we like it or not, one of our biggest expenditures is food shopping. According to a recent price comparison by MySupermarket.co.uk of a basket of 24 staple items, the cost of our weekly grocery shop has gone up by 14% over the past year. This equates to a hefty £743.60 annual price increase on the average family’s food costs.
Seven hundred and forty three pounds and sixty pence!
So, what is the best credit crunch grub to get you through the hard times? And how can you dodge the price hikes without leaving your rumbling tummy?
Well in short, if you want to live off items that are going to save you pennies, you should be buying bananas, tomatoes and oranges. A diet rich in vitamin C that is as good for your body as it is for your purse; bananas saw the biggest decrease from £0.85 to £0.77 - a 9% reduction.
With these goodies already in your trolley, you’ll need to have a think about what you can cook up with them. The first answer is obvious: add the tomatoes to a jar of Dolmio (which hasn’t risen in price), so you’ll have a pasta sauce that actually tastes of tomatoes. As meat has gone up in price by nearly 30% (even Bernard Matthew’s turkey ham has gone up in price, although why anyone would want to buy the processed meat after it was subjected to the wrath of Jamie Oliver is beyond me…) this will have to be a meat-free dish. As will most of your meals I’m afraid.
Unfortunately, you’ll undo all of your budgeting if you pour your sauce over pasta, and sprinkle on some grated cheese. The cost of a bag of fusilli pasta has nearly doubled over the year, and cheese has gone up in price by an average of 32%; neither can you have it with bread, as a medium white sliced loaf will now set you back almost a £1. You should think of this as a kind of vegetarian Bolognese, à la Atkins diet.
The figures also show that Basmati rice is up by 101% in 12 months, from £0.90 for 1kg to £1.82, while garden peas have gone up in price everywhere except Tesco.
Us girls can’t even enjoy a homemade skinny latte now, as semi-skimmed milk has also gone up. Six pints will now set us back £2.25.
All this talk of price increases is enough to put anyone off their food, but there is one way you can avoid paying over the odds when you reach the checkout:
Start using MySupermarket.co.uk.
Comparing products from Tesco, Ocado (Waitrose), ASDA and Sainsbury’s, the site is worth checking out just to find out how much you could save simply by buying your shopping from different supermarkets. You can then either head on down to your finance-favourable retailer and buy your food in store; or ‘proceed to checkout’ and avoid the hassle of shopping entirely by ordering your goods online, having them delivered straight to your door.
Quite literally, a piece of cake.
My other top money saving tip is to avoid the penne, and if you want to eat like its still 2007, you’ll have to essentially think like a vegan.
A vegan that doesn’t eat many vegetables I might add.
All you need is loans
Narrowing credit acceptance critera, a stagnant housing market and rising food/energy costs are making us all spend frugally this late summer.
Cutting back on your weekly grocery spend and turning the thermostat down by a degree or two will help to alleviate the financial pressure, but unfortunately for Liverpool Football Club there may be no such quick fix when their request for a £350 million loan is rejected by RBS.
The troubled north west side, already rocked by a sluggish start to the season and internal wrangles between manager Rafael Benitez and co-owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks, desperately require the £350 million loan in order to complete existing debt restructuring plans. The loan is needed to cover the collapse of Hicks and Gillett’s original loan deal (£298 million) that financed their purchase of Liverpool FC, the collateral against which was business assets in America and Canada which have since been considerably devalued by the US sub-prime crisis.
RBS reported a pre-tax loss of £691 million in the first six months of 2008 and are therefore expected to veto Liverpool’s request.
So, as we turn into a nation of spendthrifts, has Liverpool FC followed suit and curbed its spending in anticipation of the seemingly inevitable RBS rejection? Not a jot.
Over £30 million has been spent by Liverpool this summer on French teenagers and Italian journeymen. £20 million alone of that budget was blown on a diminutive Irishman with no proven Premiership scoring record.
The spending doesn’t appear to have stopped either, with Benitez adamant he will land another £18 million transfer target, a midfielder who is essentially a facsimile of a player Liverpool already own.
Should the RBS loan deal fail, the only remaining option open to Liverpool FC is to borrow from elsewhere at a much higher rate. As a result of these short-term financing strategies, the club would tumble headfirst into fiscal meltdown and administration, possibly within 18 months.
On a positive note, the club could be bought by Dubai based investment firm DIC, although the new owners would still be required to manage the old debt.
