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Rumpelstiltskin stamping on finances
I know it's vulgar to talk about money, but as our fixed-rate mortgage is just about to come to the end of its two-year term we've had a nasty shock.
Even a canny bit of shopping around, including reading so much small print that our eyes started to water, has failed to prevent our monthly outgoings rising to a quietly alarming extent.
(I say it was the small print that caused our eyes to water, but it could just as easily have been the fact that our pockets are now being squeezed so tightly that a trip out to the nearest branch of Nandos has begun to look like a fine dining experience.)
Now, this is obviously a bit of middle-class whinging on my part, but at least I'm not carving a career out of it like Rosie Millard. You might recall this former BBC correspondent's anguished bleat a couple of years ago about being overwhelmed by so much debt that she was forced to sell the family car, when in fact she and her husband were sitting on a property empire that included a flat in Paris.
She's since gone on to make a new career for herself as the voice of the nouveau pauvre, most recently writing about digging out her sewing machine to run up some clothes - possibly out of curtains?
Sounds like a lot of Von Clapp Trapp to me.
Anyway, unlike Rosie we've just got the one house and one mortgage. And like thousands of other borrowers all over the country, this spring we are coming down to earth with a resounding bump. I think it's called a sharp dose of reality.
Having fixed our mortgage during the enchanted days when fairy-godmother lenders were practically camping outside our door in their eagerness to offer us extravagant amounts of dosh at remarkably magical rates, we are now facing the dark side of the bargain.
Rumpelstiltskin is stamping his little foot on our finances and I suspect that not even knowing his real name is "Fallout From the USA Sub-prime Market" will make him go away.
My heart goes out to those who were enticed onto the property ladder in the heady days of the lending frenzy and who are now facing the very real prospect of repossession. Many of them will no doubt be first-time buyers who were persuaded to borrow sums in multiples of their salary that even Stephen Hawking would find difficult to compute.
That was back in the day when banks really did seem to be operating in a parallel universe - before the discovery of the big black hole at its centre.
Fortunately for us, the rise in our monthly payments is something we can cope with (so please don't start knitting blankets and assembling food parcels), but even though we recently managed to re-mortgage with a new lender on what passes these days for a fairly reasonable rate, a certain amount of belt-tightening will be clearly in order.
It was in this pioneering, wartime-style spirit of austerity that last week I discovered the joy of Lidl.
I'm not a snob when it comes to shopping. I've written before in this column about the dangers that lurk in wait for the unwary bargain hunter in the neon-lit aisles of Primark.
Lulled into a false sense of security by the high fashion styling and low prices, it's all too easy to load up your shopping basket with so many must-have items that you end up shelling out double the amount that you would have spent (guiltily) somewhere like Whistles.
For food, however, I have to admit that I've always been more of an M&S or a Waitrose kind of girl. This is largely due to laziness on my part.
n These are the shops nearest to my house, so it's easier to carry stuff home on foot.
n They both do extraordinarily good ready meals - a boon to anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with my cooking.
Last weekend we found ourselves in the wilds of Norfolk for a couple of days.
In our new budget mode we decided to forgo the potent lure of surf n' turf night at the local pub and cook our meals at home.
Pointing the car towards the nearest big town we passed a branch of Lidl on the outskirts.
Now, I have a friend who has been banging on about the delights of Lidl, Aldi and Netto for ages, and I have to admit I've been intrigued. It took some tussling to persuade my husband that we should turn of the road to take a look (he was quite fixated on the idea of finding the nearest Tesco's Finest range), but eventually he agreed.
The shop certainly didn't look much. There was something warehouse-like about the strip lighting and the pyramids of random produce plonked artlessly around the entrance. But I have to say that once we managed to smother our pointless aesthetic misgivings, we turned up some gems.
I knew we were onto a winner when my husband decided that our first modestly proportioned trolley was too small and promptly supersized it.
Cunningly, there seemed to be no discernible order to the way items were arranged around the store. This meant that we enjoyed a pleasurable half hour scooting around discovering new delights on every shelf and in every chest freezer.
Our selection was totally eclectic, ranging from a chunk of parmesan the size of Mount Etna and a pair of car mats embellished with Wallace and Gromit, to a boxed Chinese dim-sum selection, a bright red lipstick (for me, obviously), a couple of velvet crabs (mainly out of curiosity) and a bottle of premium-brand gin so large that it could keep Amy Winehouse happy for an hour.
It was only when we queued at the till, suffused with the euphoric glow of born-again bargain hunters that we realised our fatal error.
It was Primark all over again. The teetering pile of indiscriminate items obscuring the view of the car park from the conveyor belt actually cost four times as much as the surf n' turf special at the local pub.
Mind you, I am a complete convert to Lidl and its ilk. Next time I see one, if I manage to curb my squealing enthusiasm for bulk-buy superdeals, I'll definitely be stocking up.
And by the way, the parmesan slab is actually just as nice as the one we usually buy in Waitrose - at a quarter of the price.
9:08am Friday 16th May 2008
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CommentPosted by: DS, Manchester on 7:10pm Fri 16 May 08
Good article.
Jay Rayner had a piece in yesterday's Guardian about the hit and miss products in Aldi which you might want to read.
http://tinyurl.com/4
okoez
Good article.
Jay Rayner had a piece in yesterday's Guardian about the hit and miss products in Aldi which you might want to read.
http://tinyurl.com/4
okoez
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