Laziness costs you £££’s
No, I am not trying to insult every one of our readers by calling you lazy. However, there is a lot of truth in this statement and nobody is alone in this. I have been guilty of losing out on £100s, and potentially even £1,000s, because of nothing other than my own laziness.
A lot of the examples I am going to discuss in this blog post are from own experience, so please don’t feel ashamed if you can relate to them. Without further ado, let’s have a look at some of the ways laziness is costing us a fortune.
Unused Subscriptions
Yes, we all pay a staggering amount every month for subscriptions nowadays. From Netflix, to Disney+, to who knows what will be next, yet do we actually get our money’s worth out of these subscriptions? According to recent reports, we definitely do not.
Supposedly, £7.5 billion (yes billion with a ‘B’) is wasted on unused subscriptions every single year. This figure is absolutely astounding and was a shock to me when I realised quite how much money is being wasted each and every year.
You might think that this is skewed by Americans who have even more subscriptions than us Brits, but we aren’t much better. Research done by CompareTheMarket showed that more than 25% of us wasted £265 per year on completely unused subscription services.
That might not seem like a lot of money, but that is a long weekend away! It is certainly worth having a look through your bank statements to see if you are paying for anything that could be axed!
Free Money
Oh, here he goes again, I can hear you thinking! Yes, I love free money offers and I will not stop going on about them until you have all taken full advantage of them.
Here on our website, we have a dedicated Earn section which has the sole purpose of listing the best ways to make easy money online. Even if you did one of these offers every week, which would take no longer than 10 minutes, you could make an additional £1,000 per year.
Better yet, you could work through our free guide which does exactly this, and takes you from £1 all the way up to £1,000+ by using online methods of money-making.
Lost Pension Pots
If you have had multiple jobs where you were enrolled into a pension scheme, chances are that you have got a pension pot with your name on it somewhere.
You aren’t alone, as the ABI estimate that there are 1.6 million pension pots sat abandoned. Even more staggering, is that the estimated value of each of these pots is around £13,000. That is a lot of money that could be forgotten about, waiting for you to come and reclaim it.
To see if you can track down your lost pensions, you can use the Government’s free tool here.
Not Investing
The Biggie. Unfortunately, with interest rates near all-time-lows, and inflation at one of the highest levels in decades, our money is not worth what it used to be. One of the only ways for us to be able to grow our wealth at a faster pace than inflation is to invest in the stock market.
This doesn’t have to be as complicated as TV and Films make it out to be. That’s why we have created a free guide all about investing; all in simple terms and easy-to-follow. You can find this here.
As an illustration of the power of investing, if we were to take the £265 figure that gets wasted on subscription services we mentioned, and we were to invest this amount every year for 40 years we would have £52,903 at the end.
That figure includes £42,303 worth of investment gains which is absolutely astonishing for a cost of 73 pence per day!
Thoughts
Generally, you don’t have to be a finance expert to get far in this day and age. However, by spending a couple of hours really getting to grips with your finances, you really can turn your life around financially and open up a whole new world of opportunities that may not have previously existed.