Week two of saving I now have the princely sum of £14. I will keep going. I'm sure as I save more on shopping and no cigs for a fortnight now I will b able to save more?
As well as checking your receipts, save all of them (keep ones for electrical stuff separate) in case something perishable goes off before it's use by date later that week, or several months later for a carton or can that starts leaking. I've taken back packs of veg bought reduced to 20p when they've gone off and bunches of flowers that haven't lasted as long as stated on the label (save the label and staple to receipt). That's when going shopping by the way, not making special trips for refunds, so sometimes it's really smelly (including the receipt which goes in the bag with the rotting stuff). CS always refund us promptly. Also take photos of the receipt and product, note the batch number and send an email to the manufacturer as you'll probably get between £5 - £10 in vouchers in compensation (don't mention you've already got your money back and don't show the receipt if you got something reduced). P.S. Manufacturers will often send you some vouchers if you email them and tell them how much you enjoyed one of their products and what it was you liked about it.
I keep all receipts for foodstuffs (paid by credit card that gives me 1.5% cashback) until checked against my statement the following month. All other receipts go into either the file labelled Electrical or the one labelled Non-Electrical. Note to self:- I really must clear out receipts for items that died over twenty years ago
I once bought a tin of cat food from my Tesco local that practically exploded when I opened it. I phoned them up but the manager refused to collect it and bring me a replacement, so I put the tin in several plastic bags and took it back myself. Before going in I opened the bags and walked around the store before waiting my turn at the tills. I could still smell it in there the next day, although it took longer to rid my house of the smell.
Did you just get a refund for the tin of cat food? If so an email to Tesco Head Office CS (or live chat) would probably have got you a £10 - £20 gift card, the cost of which is deducted from that store manager's customer care budget.
Used 2 Morrisons £3 off £20 vouchers (15% off) this morning: Bought 6 x 1Kg bags of grated cheese reduced to £3.29, not as cheap as we'd like (like 50% off) but getting it down to £2.80/Kg. Then did a second shop and bought a Breville 1.5 Litre slow cooker for £15 (our daughter wants one) together with £5's worth of other stuff, mainly their cheap salad stuff. That gets her slow cooker cost down to £12 when the cheapest we've found them elsewhere is £15.99 off ebay (so hassle to return if goes wrong). Then we went to Tescos and used our £5 off £40 voucher, together with a £5 off £25 off 'Homewares' voucher, mainly getting special offer homeware stuff for our daughter, a couple of pieces of half price cheese (we eat a lot of cheese!) and about £10's worth of shopping for elderly, infirm neighbours, so got £10 off our £30's worth of stuff.
For debate: I don't have a good understanding of economics. Company makes profit, some is retained (which is prudent - in case of Hard Times) some is distributed as a dividend - are there other ways it is "in the hands of a few mega corporations" ? Dividends are paid to people / corporations in return for the money they "lent" to he company - by buying shares or subscribing to a Rights Issue. I, personally, would never borrow money like that - the dividend is paid FOR EVER, the capital sum is never repaid (well - company CAN buy back its own shares, but that isn't how such "Loans" are repaid, as such). I've never understood why having ANY shares is A Good Thing for a company. Who owns the shares? Obviously some individuals & speculators (not much difference between the two), then Company A owning some shares in Company B - usually because of a buiness connection between the two. Other than that it is Pension Fund A owning shares in Company B - not a bad way of cycling profits into pension funds is it? (rather than "in the hands of a few mega corporations" as you put it ), but I have no idea if a) pension funds holding stock, and getting dividends, is A Good Thing, or just the current sensible investment, and if b) Pension funds hold a Lot or a Little of the total stock in the UK - if they hold a Lot then perhaps there isn't actually THAT much ""in the hands of a few mega corporations"? I often wish I knew a bit/lot more about such stuff, as I am not sure that whatever it appears to be, at face value, is actually the case - clearly there are exceptions, and abuse, but I have no idea if it is the majority Good point, I totally overlooked that. So in effect they could have Tesco's Online in Luxembourg, and use the mechanism of in-store order fulfilment to drive individual store profits down, and thereby reduce profits made in UK. I wonder what they would pay me for such a brilliant piece of consultancy?! You are over simplifying what I said One way of looking at it is: Large farming benefits from economy of scale, and thus final-prices are lower. It also becomes possible to spend a planned amount of time on hedging and so on which, on a small farm, would be the first and easiest thing to "do without" for a bit, and even in good times some farms just wouldn't bother. Food consumers enjoy lower prices because of more efficient farming, supermarkets tough contracts have played a part in forcing farmers to be more efficient. Another way is that economies of scale are a bad thing - I'm struggling to think of many. Mass exodus of Labour from Agriculture? - not sure many would want to return to the back breaking work it was - Heck! we can't even get British kids to pick vegetables, and have to bring in East European works to do that job ... Another downside is that big farming leaves us wider open to rampant spread of disease compared to have more varied farming. It has happened a few times in the last few decades, and I expect we are, more or less?, "ahead" on points - so perhaps, so far, it has been "tolerable"? Our food production, as a percentage of what we consume, is way too low to my way of thinking - if we had a major problem bring in food from overseas we would be in trouble in short order. That worries me, although I can't envisage a situation where food would stop coming in from overseas. War? Soaring fuel price? (I think we would get years of warning, and time to adapt, to the fuel cost issue) City money definitely doesn't help with that. Supply & Demand. Have rural bus routes ever been profitable? I doubt it [for most of them], so they need to be subsidised. Not enough population in rural areas for politicians / councils to be bothered to spend money on subsidies there I reckon - unless you see it differently? Local shops? Not selling Mangos, or nappies cheap enough ... Supply & Demand again. Do I need a village shop? it would be convenient but ... infrastructure of distribution is probably a lot more efficient if I shop online, and my order is optimised into a delivery routing starting from a central warehouse (I think that starting from EACH Tesco's store is not my idea of the most efficient, but rather the "fastest to be first to market" when Tesco's first developed their internet shop; ship-from-warehouse would be most efficient) Isn't ALL the Company's money the Customer's Use www.MySupermarket.co.uk ... All those are fixed by using www.MySupermarket.co.uk ... plus you'll get all the other beneficial offers that you are currently not aware you are missing out on
Me neither. But as I see it economics are common sense unless you either need to spot trends/trouble in advance or need to manipulate an economy (ie; you're in government). They make profit, invest in property (frequently for gain as opposed to as a part of necessary business infrastructure) or in company B etc, then compile the accounts and declare a smaller profit than they actually made. Obviously perfectly legal, and nothing more than expansion, but this money is never seen again in the hands of the general populace. To take part in a rights issue you need to be a shareholder. There are different rights issues, some with a dividend, others offers described privileges. That is pretty much it for the footsie companies. As we are all to aware though, our pensions have been under-performing for more years than I care to remember. I'll be back - gotta go out now.
Good point. Not sure that is "locked away" though? They might have bought a ransom strip of land to stop XYZ from building a rival supermarket on the adjacent land. That's money-gone - not making them money/profit, nor squandering the customer's money. If it stops competition it may be good for business. Ethically? Who knows ... maybe without it there would be too many supermarkets in the town, and all Tescos staff there could lose their jobs (don't all cheer at once!) Other land bought? OK, so buying land reduces profit ... but if they then build a megastore on the land in 1,2,...5 years time and make Monster Profit then the cost of the land wasn't a device to reduce profit, as such. Although ... where does that extra profit go? most goes into the pot that we are debating, but I figure a fair chunk is Director's Bonus for Doing Such A Stonkingly Good Job. (At least theirs is profit-related, unlike Banker Bonuses ... which are just a way of paying salary "off balance sheet") Sure. But shares are still just a loan from "people" to the company - which is never paid back. Why would they not just walk into a Bank and say "lend us some money"? I'm doing a big business expansion at present. My bank very happy to lend money (more than we need to borrow in fact) so why wouldn't I just finance it like that? I don't feel the need for fancy-footwork to portray my accounts in some-other-way, although I might ask my accountant what fancy-footwork other people do, and why. If my accountant tells me that, legally, I can do X instead of Y, and there is a benefit to me of Z+ then I am likely to take it. But most of the time when I tell him that I read that "People are doing A, B and C" in the Sunday paper he then explains to me why it is a bad idea - "Sounds too good to be true? Then it is" Stock Market hasn't performed well (I haven't been watching it, but the current FTSE level doesn't seem to me to be much higher than 5 or 10 years ago). But I think the real culprit of pensions under performing was caused by Gordon Brown as Chancellor. He introduced tax on profits made within pension schemes; prior to that they retained & reinvested profit, tax free, within the pension and the only tax was when you withdrew the money (e.g. as a Pension). Now that there is tax within Pension guess what? (And this I did say at the time, but don't remember reading it anywhere at that time) it is impossible to get enough financial growth of the money to produce the pension fund that is needed to buy an Annuity. Stands to reason: if it was easy to quinquadruple your money making investments AND paying tax then we would all be stonkingly rich! An increasing-age population doesn't help (more people retired supported by fewer people still working - gawd knows how Japan is solving this problem, their aging population is outliving ours, and none of their youngseters are having kids - and they are a long way from any centres of immigration population - not that their immigration policy has ever been very generous!) So people are looking for other ways to fund their retirement, other than pensions. Talk about upsetting the apple cart! Rather than just shovelling money into a pension, which was well understood, and in the main people didn't lose their shirts, folk are now having to become expert at buying property - e.g. buy-to-let - or gambling on Stocks and Shares - or some other additional money-making skill, over and above their 9-to-5 job to try to accumulate money for their old age.
I had the same with a tin of Cod Roe, they offered me a replacement tin off the same shelf, but I declined, and just took the £1.16p cash Another time I emailed Jacobs biscuits, as I had a pack of cream crackers, and I think they had forgotten to bake them, They wanted me to do so much I just put it down to experience, though I still buy the product Jack McH
My small pension is an ethical pension which is a sector that consistently outperforms the more standard footsie based schemes. Yes, but you do get tax relief on pension contributions! Two points to consider; a] the public sector in all its forms is the UK's largest employer and it has to be paid for. A small percentage of these workers made redundant would have huge consequences in the economy as a whole. b] Money tied up outside of the day to day economy is money not creating revenue. Some simple maths using simple figures. £100 returning 10% over a year taxed at 20% yields a total of £108 instead of £110 if untaxed. The year after it yields £116.64 opposed to £121. So yes, over several years it does make a difference, but it is still only 2% as per this example.
Excellent! Well done you Found this, potentially interesting article 15-Oct-2006 Brown's raid on pensions costs Britain £100 billion http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukn...id-on-pensions-costs-Britain-100-billion.html "The Chancellor's raid on pension funds is blamed for creating the crisis that has left huge shortfalls in pension pots and forced hundreds of firms to wind up final salary schemes." I think its not just the 20% thing, but the removal of tax credits on share dividends (which, I think, means he taxed the income twice - normally the company pays Corporation Tax and then if you get a dividend you only have to pay the difference between Corporation Tax and your Income Tax, but Brown took away the difference - so pension Funds paid the full tax, even though Coporation Tax had already been paid). Assuming I have understood it correctly!
Interesting. This more up to date article clouds the issue further....................... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...-widens-to-a-record-3121-billion-7845086.html
