Saturday 18 June 2011

save water, top up your pension by £377

A pension, who needs one when I/we are saving so much money to put into our own personal pension plan ha ha... The government can do what they want, we are immune from their meddling.

Here is another EMS to help the needy (me)

If, like I, you are a habitual tea/coffee drinker, then you probably spend a lot of money on take out or vending machine hot beverages.Now I do not buy the expensive coffee house Latte/Cappuccino etc.. but I do like a decent beverage.

I decided that this is a waste of money as it is just a habit rather than a necessity, as we could all live off just water.Why do we drink tea, I guess it is a social norm knitted into the fabric of British life. So when did it start? I look to the UK tea council for inspiration..
http://www.tea.co.uk/page.php?id=94
'There are various legends surrounding the origins of tea. Perhaps the most famous is the Chinese story of Shen Nung, the emperor and renowned herbalist, who was boiling his drinking water when leaves from a nearby tea shrub blew into the cauldron. He tasted the resulting brew, and the beverage of tea was born. An alternative story claims that links tea drinking to the Indian prince Bodhidharma, who converted to Buddhism and in the sixth century and went to China to spread the word. He believed that it was necessary to stay awake constantly for meditation and prayer, and took to chewing leaves from the tea shrub, which acted as stimulant, helping him stay awake. (An alternative, more macabre version has Bodhidharma accidentally falling asleep, and upon waking cutting off his own eyelids in disgust at himself. He threw the eyelids away, and from them sprouted the first tea shrub.)'

Amazingly the British Tea Council have an online rolling estimate of the number of cups of tea drunk per day and they put it at a staggering 8.1 million.

 It seems that we have been fed advertising and are attached to social norms that mean we are obliged to drink tea/coffee. I am sure there is research that identifies the link between advertising and behaviour. Although your own experiences and up-bringing play a large part in your choices as an adult.

I have roughly calculated my own spend on vending, spend on soft drinks, to calculate a saving.
I decided that to assist in my own cost-reduction quest, I would stop drinking from vending machines, take squash as an alternative to soft drinks and re-use tea bags. The re-use of tea bags comes from the fact that I drink a cheaper tea, others drink higher quality tea. By chance, I made a cup from two 'used' tea bags and it was a good strength, possibly 80% of the original strength of virgin bags.Perfectly acceptable.

Reducing spend on vending is easy, take your own if you have access to boiling water and make it at work or wherever you are.Alternatively, take the ready made Latte etc...
Soft drink reduction is also easy, this comes from life experience.. drinking water from the tap has to be good for you, no? we have paid for the cleaning and processing of our water, why should we not drink it from our household source, the tap? I have read that exposure to tap water lessens the risk of contraction water borne diseases such as cryptosporodiosis as tap water is not pure (read) http://dwi.defra.gov.uk/research/completed-research/reports/DWI70-2-255-exsum.pdf and builds our own immune system. So to take a bottle of made-up squash from concentrate is not such a hardship.

saving p.a.on tea bags would be £13.61
saving on vending would be £208
saving on soft drinks purchase £156
Combined reduction by reverting to cheaper alternative would be £377.61

as normal if this was compounded it would equate to £6795.36 without interest and £8983 with.

So, I can add £6795 to my pension pot straight away....

if all the tea drinkers in the UK did the same... £4580000 into the coffers of pension providers or £108 million with compound interest.

My own personal running total to add to pension coffers is...£1890 & £377 = £2267

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