Howyou can live a happy life without spending
toiletries, they would spend nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Michelle would use her bike to get around, they would meet friends in galleries or the park rather than the pub, they had enough clothes anyway, and there was no need for the gym membership if you were out on your bike all the time.
It was just the slow frittering away of money that depressed Michelle. You take £20 out of an ATM and the next thing you know you’ve got three quid left in your pocket and you don’t know where the rest has gone. Said Michelle: “I would buy a flat white coffee on the way to work in the morning. So I worked out I was spending £650 a year on that daily cup of coffee. Now if I handed you £650 in cash and said you could spend it on anything you wanted, I don’t think you would want to spend it on coffee.”
She got a bit philosophical about it. “So I work for eight hours to earn money which I then spend on buying stuff to make me happy, and it doesn’t make me happy, so I work for another eight hours to earn the money to buy more stuff. So I stopped, to try to work out what made me happy.”
And businesses make it easier for you to spend money. Contactless payment with your credit and debit card is the simplest thing ever.
Amazon stores all your details so that buying anything is simply a click on your computer mouse. The more remote from us our money becomes, the easier it is to spend it.
She did miss things. Small things mainly. Fresh flowers, going out for a
‘‘ I don’t live in poverty. Nobody chooses poverty. I can pay my mortgage. I could still pay my bills
curry – her home-made curries just didn’t cut it. Husband Frank cut her hair. “He’s an incredibly brave man,” she says.
And after doing this for a year? “I wasn’t expecting to be this much happier at the end,” says Michelle who has written about her experience in The No Spend Year.
Even their holiday was free, camping on a beach, and she says it was great – one of the best holidays ever.
Over the year, she and Frank saved £22,000. Did they have a big splurge with it? No. She used the cash to overpay their mortgage. She concedes that might sound very boring, but it means their mortgage will be paid off years earlier, and what could make you happier than that.
Happiness also came from getting help from friends, even strangers, and paying them back by doing tasks for them. It meant a closeness and rapport with people they had perhaps lost.
She was at pains to point out however that she was not saying people in poverty can save money. Michelle chose to live frugally. “I don’t live in poverty. Nobody chooses poverty. I can pay my mortgage. I could still pay my bills.”
Her talk ended with the chance of meet the author and buy a copy of her book.
But as we left the room, an Aye Write! volunteer announced that the library had copies of the book you could borrow rather than having to buy it.
The canniness that the Mitchell showed in acquiring the design of the dome, is still there today.