Every car on the road could have an extra-urban miles per gallon of 50+. A little legislation could bring most new cars into line very quickly. No one really needs a super-sporty, gas guzzling dream machine, and even those who like their cars to actually do something when they hit the gas pedal could buy a rapid 1.9L diesel and still hit the magic 50mpg.

Of course, 50mpg is a just a nice round number that’s significantly better that the 20 or 30mpg still achieved by many cars on the road today, but it could be even better. Increasingly, car companies like to have one or two vanity ‘green cars’ in their line-up. Sadly, these seem to be well out of the price-range of the ‘t’s just a set of wheels’ brigade. The new Polo Bluemotion is a 1.4L diesel much lighter than the standard models, with all bits of power-sapping paraphernalia taken away. It’s good for over 70mph extra-urban. You’d think, then, that after have made a good old tin-can Volkswagen would but this out as the cheapest Polo in the range. Nope - it weighs in at over £14k, leaving it status symbol for unfeasibly posh ‘ethical shoppers’.

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If you ditch fossil fuels all together and go for something radical, there’s the Tesla Roadster, which has a 125mpg equivalent from its electric motor and can go for up to 245 miles on a single charge. Still, that’s a sports car based on a Lotus and is a $100k shot. A nice technology showcase, but not an option for Joe Blogs who can barely afford 40mph, 50-mile range invalid carts based on antiquated ideas.

The ‘ecocars’ are the headline grabbers, but ultimately there are loads of normal small-engined, small emission cars that can do 50MPH. Waiting for that fuel revolutions that’s just around the corner as an alternative to action now isn’t much of an option.
Of course, no car is truly green. Greener cars will only serve to reinforce the urban sprawl that continues to grow, even with more emphasis of inner city regeneration (which mostly turns out of be economic cleansing and gentrification) and brownfield development. Regardless of CO2 emissions, car production is one of the most energy intensive industries around. Still, even as road clog up an commutes become longer and longer in both distance in time, many of the public still cling to the idea of the car as a libertarian tool of personal freedom and, to be fair, millions of people live in public transport deserts where life would be spent waiting for a bus if cars were not available.

While new developments should be created with the goal of radically reducing car use, the obvious first step is to simply make every new car sold the minimum of 50mpg. Why not?

Anyway, our banger just got written off so now I have to decide what to do next. Unless you are a mechanical expert, or have a mate in the trade, going down the banger route is a risk, even if it seems frugal at first. Yes, you can get lucky and have a machine that sails through MOTs when it’s age and general tiredness should all all rights cause it to fail. More often than not, however, you end up with a car lacking modern brakes and safety feature, with much poorer emissions than it had when knew, that brakes down on your and requires frequent and expensive trips to the mechanics. I’m toying with either getting another banger and keeping finger crossed it doesn’t cause too much hassle or expense or buying something no more than three years old in great condition and lowish mileage. Which is the most frugal option?

Either way, it’s not a decision I’ll rush. I can live a mildly inconvenient life without a car. Work will be only a modest cycle or bus-ride away and home deliveries can often solve the problem of transporting bulky stuff.

While the urban grime and elbow-crowding of city living certainly has it’s downside, having a good set of basic amenities on the doorstep makes day-to-day living cheap and hassle free. Is it more frugal or greener to live in a more densely populated area or a low-impact development in the countryside? It’s a debate. Anyway, we can easily go for a couple of weeks without using a car. One Low-Budget Life comment poster called Ian recently suggested using a Car Club. Where we’ll be living in Brizzle is could well be convenient to use City Car Club http://www.citycarclub.co.uk/.

The freedom of a car when you want it, with none of the overheads and hassles when you don’t. The concept is simple - just pay £75 to join, book your trip and pick up a car from designated collection points around the city. At first glance the hire rates seem steep, but when you realise there’s no car to buy, no tax, no mechanics to deal with, no insurance to ’sort out’ and even some mileage is included you can see just how cheap it is. Getting a car, even a banger, on the road has big start-up costs and you’re essential paying for it, even when it’s sitting idle. Of course, you need to book so you lose the ability to hop in the car at a moments notice, still, if like me you really don’t use a car that much but would like hassle-free access to one when you really do a car club could be ideal.

Well, the good old Bank of England have cut interest rates in the face of growing inflationary pressure and said to hell with it. But can this move make much different of a debt-soaked economy reporting more ‘bad news’ by the day?

 Joe Public has been well-educated in the process of pumping up credit then cutting rates when the house of cards looks like toppling. Indeed, today at work many people suggested the bankers had done a ‘nice thing’ for all those who are stretched on their mortgage and credit cards.

The last time a cut in interest rates occured was in 2005 and it had the negative effect of reigniting the housing bubble and a fresh credit splurge leaving more people in more debt and bankrupcies mounting. There was a different back then, though. Worries over the inflated US housing market and sub-prime loose landing had not really translatied into house price falls outside a few hot markets. Also, while inflation in housing, fuel and services could be seen in 2005 the price of cheaply processed food and far-eastern DVD players white goods was still low enable the CPI inflation rate to be cooked by the government stat-meisters. Even though in 2005 UK banks were needing to write off a few billion in bad debt here and there, their profits were so massive that a few thousand families blighted by debt didn’t really matter, so long as there were still plenty of suckers paying back interest-laden loans all was well.

However, with even fiddled inflation rising and the Bank of England seeming to have abandonned their supposed remit to ‘control inflation’ is possible that this time the recession is all but here and no amount of ‘Greenspan puts’ can save it.

Up until very recently friends, aquaintences and colleagues would play down my protestations that the debt-based economic system was due for a major downturn and that most of what passes for ‘economic success’ has been paid for on the never never.

In the media, people who have criticised building an economy on nothing more than big mortgages and credit card splurges have been labelled ‘doom mongers’ but what could be more optimistic than looking forward to a time when people’s money actually went somewhere? What could be more optimistic than wanting the environment to get a rest from people buying too much undurable, disposable rubbish? What could be more optimimistic than wanted affordable homes that match real-world incomes and allow people to save for their futures not maxed out to the hilt enslaved to idle buy-to-let landlords or banks?

Disposable income is at its lowest level for a decade, as taxes, housing costs, phone bills and travel expenses eat into salaries, researchers say. While the average household gross income has climbed over the past decade from £34,796 to £53,835, people have far less of that money to spend each month after they have paid essential bills
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/08/ntax108.xml

Well, of course, now people are chnaging their tune rapidly as the ‘credit crunch’ grips the media. However, even though the reality of a downturn is staring everyone in the face people still have the idea that the government ‘won’t let it happen’. There’s some logic to this - after all the government has poured vasts amounts into not letting a collapse of Northen Rock happen and in spite of food and fuel driven inflation the Bank of England may yet slash interest rates to try and restore consumer confidence. Still, vast subsidies and interest-rate cuts are both pretty blunt instruments and ratecuts from the Federal Reserve has done nothing to stop the US housing market sinking ever-further downwards. What’s more, the value of the dollar continues to slide and the pound is now following suit. So there’s still plenty of so-called doom to get mongered

Regardless of what you make the minimum wage, or whether you believe there should be one at all, it’s the cost of living which is out of the control.

That said, when you look at low paid work like retail or catering, many employer have been paying £5.something for years. Heck, I was on £5.30 basic in a McRetailer as a student in 1999 in the provinces and those kinds of wages are still quoted locally in the South East fro shop work. At my McJob there were staff in that kind of money who had bought one bed flats recently or couples you’d bought two or three bed terraces no problems. If you were stuck in that kind of employmen life was humble but with a little low-budget living perfectly doable. Indeed, there was financial headroom for, say, one of the couple to go part-time to complete a college course.

Now, even the middle-class couples are salary slaves, not daring to leave an unsuitable job - paying their mortgage trumps all other aspects of life, including whether to have children.

The inflation of the money supply through a decade of loose lending without the compensation wage inflation is a hidden tax of incredible brutality that has hit the working poor harder than anyone. Low-wage pay has barely moved while the value of ‘housing pounds’ has fallen massively over the last few years. The North is riddled with £120k two-up two downs which were £30k just a few years ago, their prices hyped up by professional and amatuer speculators and anyone-with-pulse lenders.

Low-wage employers often justify the poverty pay by saying it’s simply the ‘market rate’ although as the minimum wage rises more people become mimium wage workers who were just ahead of the legal minium before. Thus, the state essentially dictates ‘market rate’ for millions of workers anyway.

A useless watered-down currency and its brutal inflation tax, state-santioned low wages, and banks propped up with billions of tax-payers money. That’s the reality of the ‘free market’.

The other day I stumbled across a short video about an intriguing offshoot of Scouting on YouTube called the Kibbo Kift. I first encountered mention this strange enigmatic group at university when reading a book about the battle of fascism vs. communism for the hearts of the British working class. The Kibbo Kift were just mentioned in passing as a footnote but the name was so odd-sounding I wanted to find out more.

The Kibbo Kift mutated into the Greenshirt Movement for Social Credit, which provided a very different approach to society and economics based on reform of the debt-based monetary system.

Someone has now made a short intorduction to the Kibbo Kift and posted in on YouTube.

This year will be a very low budget Christmas. We’ll be moving and we’ll be lucky to get so much as a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream down our necks with all the hassle that comes with a move.

However, I’m noticing the price of food going up and up and up and one survey priced-up the typical Christmas dinner and found it had inflated way more than the CPI - that bizarre figure that now has little relation to reality and measurs £2 t-shirt made by kids and the latest disposable technojunk from China.

Another big increase is fuel. We do run a small 1.2 car but can easily go for a couple of weeks without using it and even then for a short trip where the little engine barely sniffs the petrol. However, as we’ve been making several long, three hour motorway journeys you get a feel for just how expensive fuel has become and how much the average motorway commuter must spend month just to get to their boring job. First there’s the fuel. Then there’s buying a car that won’t let you down, the servicing, the insurance. It’s bad enough keeping a pretty reliable little banger on the road.

Retailers are broadly reporting slow sales, sometimes a percentage point or two down on last year but it’s far from a Christmas meltdown as yet. With consumer debt levels starting to strangle spending power it could be a slow death for retailing in 2008.

The housing market is happily now falling at last following the pattern seen in the USA for the last couple of years, which will give Christmas cheer to the priced-out millions who’ve grown used to spending Christmases holed up in dank buy-to-let hovels paying some lazy bloke’s mortgage. As the latter part of the buy-to-let boom has seen landlords banking on rising property values offsetting the fact it’s hard to cover buy-to-let mortgages with rent a falling housing market should send the speculators packing. Here’s hoping…

What better time to make it a low-budget Christmas, folks. Everything about modern Christmas is dreadful. Plastic decorations on depressing plastic trees. Easting so much refined sugar and drinking so much booze that the immune system fails and you start the new year some some humdinger headcold. Parents bankrupt themselves to get their sprogs the latest must-have electrotoy.

This year, I’m going to go traditionally Pagan and Christian - bring in a few sprigs of evergreens, celebrate the winter solstice and maybe go to Church this year. I’m neither a pagan nor Christian but if celebrating something at this time of year is compulsory I’d rather celebrate something other than commercialism.

The other day NuLabour were once more going to ‘tackle’ the problem of too many people sitting around on the sick list claiming benefits. This, they said, could save a couple of billion quid for the taxpayer.Of course, you only have to walk up your local highstreet or enter a Weatherspoons pub mid-morning to see dozens of people enjoying a life on benefits who are as clinically normal as many people who are not on benefits and working.

While it’s un-PC to use the phrase ‘enjoying a life on benefits’ if you can obtain extra living allowances, and have all your rent and council tax paid you will, in an expensive region, be better offer than a single worker on an apparently good wage. And everyone has a friend, in-law, bloke down the road, they know who are working the system to the full. And loving it - these aren’t Daily Mailish fantasies.

Still, when the tax payer is propping up just one once mutual now shareholder-owned private bank to the tune for £30 billion, a bank which has gambled like a daft young star footballer on the debt-fuelled housing party lasting forever, making five times income loans and worse, well the ‘kick the scroungers’ savings are really put into perspective.

Who’s really getting their noses wiped by the tax payer?

Scroungers are targeted as it wins votes, as generally people want to know everyone’s stuck in the same miserable work-to-buy-tat-and-pay-taxes hole as them. As a way to save money for the state, the scroungers are small fry. Northern Rock shows that.

I’ve always believed replacing benefits with a basic or citizen’s income is the why to go, as it removes the idea that one group is scrounging off another and work pays as no one can lose their citizen’s income. As for big private banks scrounging off the tax payer. Well, stuff ‘em. Joe and Jolene Public have to put up with an evermore brutal ‘free market’ system so let’s just let the bankers go to the wall. It’s only fair.

The Green Party’s Moly Scott Cato suggested the remains could be remutualised into a good old fashioned prudent building society. And why not…

Well, I recently managed to find a flat in Bristol. Usually I’d say don’t bother with letting agents and deal directly with landlords as you can simply pay a deposit and that’s it. That’s the biggest money-saving tip. For some reason letting agents charge a massive great big fee for ‘holding’ the flat or for ‘reference checks’. As you can get reference checks virtually free why do they charge anything from 180-280 quid? Yeah, they’ve got to pay for their staff, their office, advertising and the various costs of running a business but why shouldn’t these fees be taken by the landlord. Well, probably because then he or she wouldn’t bother with the letting agent. So the poor old tenant pays.We did look in the free ads papers and on Craiglist and Gumtree but the private ones weren’t really suitable for us and we needed to make a quick decision to get the move underway. If we’d had vast amounts of time we might have held out. So, yes, ouch - a whopping great letting agents fee will need to be paid.  So there’s a first hefty blow to plans of a low-budget move.I’m still hopefully I can move our now slimmed-down collection of stuff in a van and have cheap van hire instead of proper removals. We shall see. 

Well, work has taken over and I haven’t touched good old lowbudgetlife.com for an age. Have I gone high budget and forgot all about fruaglity? Nah, not a bit of it.

My lady and I are moving soon so planning for that has taken up a lot of free time. As we’re moving away from the grimey wasteland that is the greater London fringe to the South West the first question everyone has asked, ‘Are you going to buy a house?’

It seems people leave the London area merely to buy property, not because the elbow-crowded, traffic trodden South East offers a fairly dismal quality of life usless you earn megabucks and like hanging around in stainless-steel overpriced chain bars with dodgy 80s themes.

Still, one of the main advantages of moving to the South West is, yes, it’s cheaper. It’s not actually as cheap compared to the South East as it may have been 20 years ago, when people would sell a semi, say, Reading and arrive in Zummerzeh to buy a socking great 4-bedroom executive pad and still have money left over for a gert big Volvo before moaning to the Parish council about all the smelly muck on the roads. Still, it is cheaper…

Our rent will likely be 100-200 less than we pay just outside Zone 6, although that’s for a place in a lively but decent inner suburb of Bristol, with far more interesting things in on the doorstep. Council Tax, too, will be a little lower as will the general cost of living.

Near where we’ll live is the Gloucester Road, an unpretentious street that leads into North Bristol offering a wide range of real independent shops for traditional hardware stores to newer wholefoods co-operatives wher you can buy beans, rice, museli, etc. totally loose enabling you to recycle your bags over and over and purchase exactly what you need. There’s real bakeries, real grocers, and real pubs, cafes and bars of all descriptions. It’s like going back 25 year when chain stores, chain pubs and chain eateries hadn’t totally pushed out the varied ecosystem of small businesses. At the same the area isn’t one of those more contrived responses to corporate homogenisation filld only with organic yummy-mummies with creatively-named sprogs - it’s real.

Gert lush, in’er!

Having mostly been a flat-dweller since leaving the nest many years ago, or living in rented hovel with only a hard or a dense thicket of jungle for a garden that whole area of low-budget living called ‘self-sufficiency’ has been off limits.

I used to like growing the odd vegetable with by parents or granddad when I was a kid, especially courgettes and runner beans that seemed to provided a massive yield from a relatively small patch of ground. I always wanted to become a veggie gardener par excellence as soon as I ‘had my own garden’.

Well, the housing boom intervened and the little house with little garden never happened so this year I thought, screw it, I’ll scythe down some of the jungle in the back yard and grow a few things - not seeking a massive yield or anything, just for fun.

So far, I’ve planted some tomatoes, which seem to be dying of blight, a couple of varieties of pepper, which seem to be going great guns, but most of all I’m impressed with me potatoes, which were just a bad of spuds that got forgotten about in the recess below the sink and had started to go to seed. The rulebooks tell you not to use normal spuds for seed, but these are growing up a storm. In about 15-20 weeks, if any spuds have formed at all I’ll be very happy.

I took delivery of a wormery and a bog standard compost bin recently. It’s now

a kind of sport to try to put as little non-recyclable rubbish into the bin as possible. About the only thing that’s true rubbish is things that come in cellophane. I wish I could buy loose lentils and brown rice and just have them weighed for me. Then I could bring my own bags and not generate this small amount of cellophane. Perhaps I should start a food-buying co-op.

While talking about gardening I’ll take the opportunity to highlight the exceptionally well-written blog called Daughter of the Soil, which is packed full of handy advice and a displays a love of heritage vegetables. Go see!