Mega Detox Challenge Final Results

Jan31
by TFS on January 31, 2014 at 1:59 pm
Posted In: Health & Fitness, TFS Challenge
Hanging up the running shoes (for a day or two at least!)

Hanging up the running shoes (for a day or two at least!)

If you missed my original challenge throw down post and follow up challenge log then to get you up to speed I have been attempting the Mega Detox Challenge during January. This consisted of the following key elements (along with how I got on):

  • No alcohol consumption for a month – FAIL
  • No caffeine consumption for a month – PASS
  • 50 Press ups per day – PASS
  • 50 Burpees per day – PASS
  • Run as least 1 mile per day – PASS

As you can see I completed the lions share of the challenge, so I’m both pleased but simultaneously disappointed I let the alcohol element of the challenge slip. Here are my brief thoughts about each part of the challenge.

 

No Alcohol

I made it till day 23, which is not too bad going. The reason for the slip was that we went for work drinks to celebrate a project I have put my heart, soul, and numerous unpaid overtime hours into over the last year and a half. To “cheers” to that project being completed with only a glass of tap water in my hand would have been practically soul destroying! I had three swift pints and made my excuses to leave fairly early. And as I’d broken the challenge already I had a few pints the next night after some golf with my friends. No real harm done I think. In terms of the bigger picture, it has been quite eye opening to see how much better I felt even by going more than 1 week without drinking. When I did drink I genuinely felt like I had a different mindset as well, which I hope continues. It has changed from “Wow there is an occasion where it is remotely socially acceptable to drink at, let’s get smashed” to “hang on a minute, I know I can have a fun time even without a drink in my hand, so let’s just have a few and see how we get on”. Everything in moderation as they say.

I think 2014 could well be an all time low spending year on the booze since I turned 18.

 

No Caffeine

Perhaps the biggest wildcard in the challenge, seeing as I have had periods of sustained exercise and abstainment from alcohol before. To be honest it’s hard to say what the effects have been. I guess it’s like giving up (or starting) smoking, the every day changes are slow so you don’t realise how much better your body feels one month later (or how feeling worse slowly creeps up on you, in the case of when you start). I am certain if I could flick a switch and feel like I did one month ago, I would feel less alert, more drained, more dehydrated, and less able to get a good nights sleep. Of course you could argue these effects have been mainly down to the alcohol and exercise variables of the challenge. Scientific my method has not been, but I still feel I can take something from this section of the challenge in that drinking 3, 4 or more cups of a caffeinated beverage per day is probably not the best for you, and drinking one after 6pm is a definite no no.

I’m thinking my future tea drinking habit might look something like 1 a day, with breakfast or lunch, but also other days with none at all. On the other hand, there has only been the odd occasion where I’ve thought “Man I am dying for a cuppa!” so maybe I will only have one when that feeling occurs.

Other fringe benefits of the new tea drinking regime:

  • Less boiled water = less CO2 burnt going into the atmosphere.
  • Small amount of money saved on teabags, milk, electricity.

 

One Mile a day

Here are my average times (or “pace”) for each week:

  • Week 1: 7:32
  • Week 2: 7:10
  • Week 3: 7:06
  • Week 4: 7:04

So as you can see, a rapid increase in performance at the start followed by a much slower one. This is the way many effort vs results curves go (also see: weight loss for example), which is in stark contrast to your standard compound interest curve, where results actually accelerate over time. It’s also worth noting that there are obviously more than 4 weeks in the month, so if you took the final 7 days of the challenge, the average was actually 6:56. On that metric, I beat my original average pace goal of 7:02 comfortably, which is good considering there is an outlier result of 8:00 in there. That “freak” result being the result of my run the day after I played a game of squash; my muscles were stiff as a board!

One other weird effect: these averages are actually in contrast to how I felt going through the weeks. I really felt I had hit the point of diminishing returns somewhere near the start of week 3 and was getting slower again, as my legs were aching more and more each day. I think this is because, if you look the times, I didn’t clock any results down in the 6:30’s where I had done that in previous weeks. I was consciously thinking about not over-doing it in the final two weeks, and jeapardising the whole challenge by missing a day due to over exertion. Overall, you can actually see times became more consistent perhaps because of that mindset. I think with a few days recovery, I could beat the PB of 6:30 – which as you will note from the challenge log, I clocked on the very last run I did this morning, I guess that previous conservative mindset went out the window knowing that I don’t have to run tomorrow!

 

50 Press Ups/50 Burpees

My arms and legs ache a lot, is the main conclusion from this part of the challenge! I feel I have gotten slightly better at doing these exercises but not monumentally so. As I improved I changed it up from doing shorter bursts and tried to do 25 at a time, and then a short break followed by the remaining 25. I don’t think I could have done that consistently at the start of the challenge, so a small win in that respect. As in the running challenge though, I felt like by the end of week 2 that I’d reached the point of diminishing returns of doing it every day, and my muscles needed a day or two off to recover and replenish. The last few days I could barely do 15 press ups in a row again! We’ll see how I fare in a few days when I try again, maybe I will be able to do all 50 in a row! (Not likely! 🙂 )

 

A Sustainable Exercise Plan

As stated above, I think your body definitely needs time off to recover from even quick bursts of exercise (well mine certainly does anyway). I guess the people that evangelise serious exercise everyday are either built differently or are just a lot fitter than I am, which is fine. The key thing with any excecise plan is to know your own body and current level of fitness and tailor what you are doing to that. It has to be sustainable, whilst also pushing ever so slightly at your boundaries. This is what increases fitness and makes long term gains possible. So anyway, my new, in no way set in stone regime will be roughly what I have done in January, but will consist of segments of:

  • One day on, one day off
  • Two days on, one day off
  • One day on, two days off
  • Two days on, two days off

This actually allows for an enormous amount flexibility, while still ensuring I will never go two days without some sort of exercise, and likewise do not knacker myself out by doing too much. If I am busy doing other stuff for a couple of days in a row, I will have to find time on the third day. Seeing as I found time every day for a month, this should seem like a piece of cake! It will also allow me to run for longer than a mile when I do exercise, as I think 1 mile is not really enough when you are training for longer runs (but it’s better than nothing of course!)

I am hoping my exploits in this challenge have given you some insight into and inspiration for cutting out the bad stuff and increasing the good stuff in your life!

 

 

If you have done anything similar please share your story in the comments section! What did you give up and why? Did it make you feel any better? What are your expert exercise tips?

 

 

ecothriftyliving.com

12 Comments

Why you need a financial independence plan right now! (And so do I…)

Jan28
by TFS on January 28, 2014 at 9:18 am
Posted In: Financial Independence, Financial Independence Planning

 

The long path: Your Financial Independence Plan

The long path to Financial Independence

It’s been around a year since the concept of financial independence was introduced to me now, and although I latched onto it straight away – with it’s promise of a life without alarm clocks, bundles more free time to spend with loved ones, enjoying inexpensive but fun hobbies at my own leisure, and engaging in “work like” activities that I think will make the world a better place without having to worry about compensation – I still haven’t made a proper plan on how to reach financial independence yet. I’ve written a few posts with some really rather splendid spreadsheets about the basic maths of how to achieve financial independence, but I haven’t developed a proper (and realistic) savings plan and run the numbers for myself yet. We’ve optimised our lifestyle and are definitely spending less and saving more than we ever have, but to be honest I have no idea exactly what our savings percentage is right now!

So I am currently missing the key ingredient for any hair-brained scheme genius idea to work, which is, in case you hadn’t guessed by now, a plan. Without a proper financial independence plan I am missing out on the following benefits:

  1. Action: Or more precisely, it forces me to stop procrastination. It’s often been said a mediocre plan executed well is better than a genius plan executed poorly.
  2. Evaluation: Decisive measurements can be taken to assess progress.
  3. Optimisation: Tweaking the plan as new knowledge is acquired.
  4. Gratification: of setting and hitting intermediate milestones.
  5. Motivation: it’s a long path and without a proper plan I am much more likely to stray of course.
  6. Clarity: I like knowing exactly where I stand. Having an overall picture of how well I am doing financially and in relation to the plan will be invaluable.
If you haven’t got a plan yet then like me, you need to make one! Now!

Information Overload

I could give you many reasons for procrastinating on this for so long, but I will give you just two. The first is that we were saving for a wedding for most of last year so the savings pot only started growing properly in October, and the second is that I have been reading up on so much new information it is kind of mind blowing at first. There are so many variables to take into account into a financial independence plan it really can be mind bogglingly overwhelming when you first dip your toe in water. Here are some of the high level topics and questions you will need to consider when planning and estimating your time to FIRE:

  • Spending less than you earn: What percentage of your earnings can you save? Can you make a realistic budget? (Make sure you don’t forget to budget in the “unknowns”)
  • Investing in the stock market: What % return will you estimate you’ll get? What is your asset allocation? How aggressive and risk averse are you?
  • Tax-advantaged retirement accounts: How much are you willing to put away into a pre-tax retirement account? (You cannot access this money until you are 55 in the UK)
  • Property/Real Estate: Can you hack the hassle of landlording? Is it (or will it be) the right time to buy when you have enough cash to put down?
  • Side business – Are you the sort of person to be able to set up a side business, keep it going along with your full time job, and still lead a happy life?
  • Tax – Learn the tax rules of the country you are in and how to use them to your advantage! (Please note this is not a question! 🙂 )
  • Net Worth – What is your current Net-Worth? Can you give a good estimate of how it will go up (hopefully not down anyway!) each year?
  • Part-time work – Are you happy to do a bit of part time work once FI? (then your savings don’t have to be as large before you quit)
  • Children – Are you planning to have (more) kids soon, or if you already have them remember to extrapolate costs into your future budget as they generally become more expensive as they get older. Same with any other future potential costs you can attempt to forsee.

And that’s just the high level stuff! Within each category there is a lot of extra information to delve into.

Introducing the Financial Independence Planning Series

Seeing as I have spent nearly a whole year reading this stuff, I am going to be a good sport and condense all the good bits you need to know into a short(ish) article series which I am going to stamp with the rather sober name of the “Financial Independence Planning” series. Look, hey, this is kind of serious stuff so it deserves respect.
The list above should have given you a good idea of what we’ll cover already, but just to give you a sneak preview, here is the list of working titles I have planned for the series. If anyone has any other topics they’d like me to cover though, please do let me know!
Why You need a finanial independence plan right now! (And so do I) – What you are reading right now.
Building a finanial independence plan – Calculating Net Worth, Income, Expenses, Projecting estimates into the future. Setting Milestones.
Example Finanial Independence Plan One – Achieving FIRE using tax advantaged accounts
Example Finanial Independence Plan Two – Achieving FIRE using property
Example Finanial Independence Plan Three – Achieving FIRE with business ventures
A more realistic Finanial Independence plan – A mixture of all three above
Part time work and FI
Planning to pay no taxes whilst FI
Budgeting once FI
Until next time, start thinking about how your plan might look incorporating the above topics, and we’ll delve into them further posthaste!
TFS
9 Comments

Free E-Books

Jan23
by TFS on January 23, 2014 at 8:10 am
Posted In: Blogging, Free stuff, Fun

Happy free e-book Thursday everyone! Yes it’s only one more day till the weekend so to celebrate I will share with you my short list of free e-books that I’ve found on my epic journeys through the hills and valleys of internetland over the past few months. I also have a few blog announcement type things to say underneath if you have a very long attention span and aren’t already devouring your free e-books at the total exclusion of everything else in your life.

Free E-Book #1: Mt Bullshit

I came across a like-minded soul a few weeks back called John who runs the excellent website Practical Civilization. Not only is he an entertaining and informative writer, but is also generous to fault, as he is giving away a free e-book called Mt Bullshit. You should probably be warned that one of his favourite words is Bullshit (in case you hadn’t already guessed) but a healthy dose of swearing never hurt anyone in my opinion. The e-book is concise, an easy read, funny in many places, but also contains lots of useful information about how to live a life on a different path than the one sold to us by the media and main stream society. What are you waiting for? Sign up and download it now here, before we call bullshit on your sorry ass!

Free E-Book #2: Gods Debris

Written by the creator of Dilbert (the comic strip) Scott Adams, I had my reservations about this one but couldn’t really argue with the price, so downloaded it anyway. Well, I have to say, it’s probably one of the best books I have ever read! I won’t ruin the story line but will just say it makes you think, really think deeply about certain so called truths about the world and life in general, has some great advice in there. And you get that nice warm glow feeling at the end that only an experienced author can give you. The only criticism I could volley it’s way would be that it is too short, as I wanted it to continue. I might read it again today in fact! Download it here.

(There is a sequel called The Religion War which I haven’t read yet and isn’t available as a free e-book, but it’s on my reading list)

Free E-Book #3: The Moneyless Manifesto

This should really be top of the list as it sounds right up this bloggers alley, but I haven’t actually had time to read it yet, so can’t give you a hearty recommendation. My new blogging buddy Zoe at Eco Thrifty Living put me onto it and in fact has been raving about it, so it must be damn good. Download it here.

Free E-Book #4: Makers

I started to read this on my last holiday but never got round to finishing it, but it started well and could be very interesting. It is kind of geeky new-skool sci-fi, or something like that. Anyway, if you have a spare few hours or are struggling to find something to occupy you, I think it will be definitely worth a read. Download it here.

Free E-Book #5: The Richest Man in Babylon

I think I read this about five years ago on a free kindle download but I am not 100% sure. It is an old book (first published 1926) so the style is somewhat strange if you are not used to that sort of thing, but I quite like it – it makes you feel you are reading some long lost wisdom. Oftentimes the oldest ideas are the best! Anyway this is a book that contains the basic methods of how to become wealthy, which have not really changed over the years, so it is still very relevant today. Download it here.

Free E-Book #6: The Newbies Guide To Publishing

Another one I haven’t actually read, but it is over 1000 pages long! It is actually a huge collection of blog posts from the site with the same title, assembled in some sort of order. Looks to be very useful for any kind of aspiring writer, and there is a whole section on the internet and blogging, which is where I am naturally going to start. Hopefully we’ll all be rocking some legendary posts that take the blogosphere by storm before you can say “404 page not found”! Download it here.

Blog updates

Well that was my collection of free e-books, hope you enjoyed one of more them! If you have any others you would recommend please let me know down below (that is, in the comments section, not in my nether regions!).

I thought it might be worth doing a quick update on how the blog is doing seeing as people tend to like this sort of thing. When I say people I think I mean “other bloggers”, but maybe real people also like to see progress as well.

Well, I have just hit over 1000 unique visitors in a month for the first time, so I am happy with that. Some other blogs I have been following have grown far quicker in shorter amount of time, but on the other hand some of the others haven’t, or have just dissapeared off the face of the Earth. So on the grand scale of things I think I am doing ok. There have been 152 geniune comments and a further 2454 spam comments, and unfortunately I only recently realised that all of my pingback comments (this is where wordpress software tells you someone has linked to your website) were going into spam, so I need to work out why that happened. It is obviously useful to know automatically when someone links to your site!

Since discovering the pingback issue I realised I have been included or featured on the following blogging/personal finance carnivals:

Lifestyle Carnival 87th Edition

Carnival of Financial Independence, 44th edition

Carnival of Personal Finance #435, on the road again edition

And also on The Simple Dollar Weekly Roundup: Taking Things for Granted Edition which caused a huge spike in traffic back in October, which to be honest I really wasn’t ready for (and happened while I was on holiday!) so unfortunately I don’t think many of those people stuck around. No bother, slow and steady growth is the name of the game.

Well that is where we are my friends! My final task for this post is to thank everyone who has been reading so far, I sincerely hope you stick around for the upcoming months. It’s going to be a lot of fun I think.

TFS.x

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4 Comments

20 Minute Pork Stir Fry

Jan20
by TFS on January 20, 2014 at 9:32 am
Posted In: Bad Ass Cookery Class, Frugal Food

Today we are going to be making a quick, easy, and healthy stir fry recipe. This is a perfect meal to brush up on some of the efficient skills you learnt in Bad Ass Cookery Class 101 as there is a lot of veg to cut up. Remember, keep it rough and ready, your taste buds won’t know the difference! Please note I have changed the name of my recipe series from “Frugal Food Friday” for two reasons, the first is that I am far too unorganised to consistently post a cooking post every Friday, the second is that “Bad Ass Cooking Class” sounds approxiamately 300 times cooler. So this is what we are going to be calling it from now on, I hope everyone is ok with that! I will still try to post one recipe per week on average but it won’t always be on a Friday (as you probably have already gathered). Enough talk already! On with the deliciousness!

Pork Stir Fry Ingredients

Pork Stir Fry Ingredients

Bask in the natural glow of healthiness! (Also 10 internet points if you can spot the missing key ingredient)

To make four portions:

400g Pork (if not pre-cut is more expensive then buy chops and cut them up, I got these on offer) – £2.39

3 carrots – £0.20

Half a leek (or one white onion) – £0.15

One red onion – £0.12

Cherry tomatoes – £0.30

Mange Tout – £0.50

White cabbage – £0.15

2 cloves garlic – £0.05

Generous splash of soy sauce – £0.05

1 tsp wholegrain mustard (or any kind you have laying around) – £0.05

Pork stock / cube – £0.10

Splash of olive oil – £0.05

Dry egg noodles – £0.40

(You can use any kind of noodles you like or rice instead of course!)

To Season: Mixed herbs, Salt and pepper

Optional ingredients to add a bit of spice/mix it up a bit
Jalapeno peppers – £0.10
Splash of chilli infused cooking oil – £0.10
A few teaspoons of sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and pine nuts – £0.30

Cost per person: £1.28

Note: This turned out to be actually quite a meaty stir fry in my opinion. You could easily get the cost per person down and make it slightly healthier just by adding slightly more veg to bulk it out to a 6 person recipe. This should get it to under £1 per serving.

Other Note: There is paprika in the ingredients picture which I didn’t use, and soy sauce missing which I did. Extra points if you spotted both of those!

Pork Stir Fry Cooking Method

1. Chop up all the ingredients. This should take no more than 10 minutes. If you need to cut up the pork do so in thin strips so it cooks nice and quickly. A good stir fry is all about cooking everything on a high heat for a short amount of time. Pour the oil(s) in a wok/pan and heat for 30 seconds while you fill and boil the kettle.

2. Fry off the leak and onions in the oil(s) for 2-3 minutes on a fairly high heat, tossing them about regularly with your trusty wooden spoon, until the onions have at least gone soft. I prefer it when some of them are starting to char a bit – adds more flavour 🙂

P1080990

3. Splash in your soy sauce then add the pork and cook for another 2-3 minutes while stiring regulalry, until the outsides of the meat are all definitely cooked (no pink bits left on view!)

 

P1080991

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4. Chuck all the rest of the veg into the pan. Pour the water from the kettle into a pan and put in the noodles. Set the timer for 3 minutes. Stir all the veg into the stir fry while waiting for the noodles to cook.

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5. Put the herbs, and jalapenoes and seeds on top if you have them, and give another quick stir

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6. Drain the noodles, serve them up and put a generous portion of your stir fry on top.

Pork Stir Fry

The Finished Article!

7. EAT!

This stir fry has a real meaty, tasty, savoury flavour to it with a nice kick in the tail as well if you add the optional extras! Considering it is something I threw together on a whim when I got home late from work last week I am pretty happy with the recipe 🙂

You can of course modify the veg and meat to suit your personal tastes but this combination worked pretty darn well in my opinion and I will be making it again.

As I have probably mentioned I love Thai food so the next Stir Fry recipe I put up on here will most definitely be of the Thai variety. It might take slightly longer (like 5 minutes I am guessing) and require a couple of extra exotic ingredients as I’ve never really cooked a proper Thai stir fry before, but if you have a small bit of extra time I think it will be worth it if you like that sort of thing.

Until next time, happy cooking!

If anyone tries this or has any recommendations to add to the recipe please let me know in the comments what you thought of it!

6 Comments

How to cut your car petrol costs in half

Jan16
by TFS on January 16, 2014 at 7:33 am
Posted In: Frugality, How To
How to cut petrol usage

Avoid these places if possible!

First all of I would like to say that we all know car use is for clowns. But let’s be realistic, I bet 99% of the readers of this site still use one, even if it is only very occasionally. Around 6 months ago our monthly petrol costs (or “gas” to my American friends reading) were coming in at around £150 a month (about 2 tanks worth) and I wanted to do something about it. The two key areas to tackle when you want to reduce petrol costs are:

  • Reducing usage of the car
  • Increasing MPG whilst using the car
There’s not much to be said about number one, you just cycle or in my case walk/run somewhere within a reasonable distance instead of using petrol power. The other alternative is just not to go somewhere, putting off and combining journeys. Do you really need to drive to the retail park just to buy a lightbulb, right now? Or can it wait until there are a few items you need, or can you source the item somewhere else? Simply by using this new perspective on car journeys our petrol costs dropped to about £110 a month. Not bad, but I knew we could do better!

Enter Hyper-Miling

The second point of increasing your MPG (Miles Per Gallon) is all about hyper-miling, a pretty cool sounding term that encompasses a whole range of techniques to make your petrol go further. Here are some of the most easy methods to implement:
  • Over inflate your tyres – I put mine up to 40PSI from the manufacturers recomendation of 36PSI
  • Drive calmly and sensibly – This sounds silly but there are so many irrate and unsensible drivers out there it has to be included as advice. Driving with calm acceleration and braking and not going too fast within any given speed limit will significantly increase your MPG, not to mention reduce the chance of you having a crash.
  • Rolling in neutral – When on a downhill or as soon as you see a car stopping or a red light in front you, simply knock the gearstick into neutral and coast it. This takes a bit of practice so don’t do it in heavy traffic at first, but after a few weeks it becomes second nature.
  • Cut the engine – when waiting at lights or when picking someone up. There is an urban myth that says starting up a car takes more petrol than letting it idle for 30 seconds, this is in fact not true, so you can ignore that and turn off the ignition now instead.
  • Get in the slip stream – Another tip to implement with caution. When on a motorway or highway if you can find a nice big lorry to get up fairly close behind your car will have to do less work pushing the air out of the way in front of it, as the huge vehicle up ahead is doing all the hard work for it. Just think of how teams of cyclists work together in the Olympics or the Tour de France, it’s the same principle! This will save you petrol and increase MPG, or your legs’ energy if you happen to be riding up L’Étape!
  • Ditch the excess baggage – Any extra items in your boot should be removed when not strictly necessary for the journey. I used to forgetfully leave my golf clubs in there sometimes for example, not anymore! You can also take out the spare wheel if you want as they are pretty heavy, but make sure you have some other sort of back up if you get a puncture (those expanding / hardening foam kits you can get should do the trick). It goes without saying that roof racks and what not should be removed as well.
  • Fill up your tank in the morning – Petrol is more dense when it is cold, so if you fill up before the air temperature rises then you should in theory receive more petrol bang for your buck. (I’m quite dubious about this one and sure the petrol pumps take temperature into account, but it’s worth a go I suppose)

The results of Hyper-Miling

I did an experiment to test our mileage on a full tank before and after putting some of the above into practice, the results were as follows:
Before: 394 miles = 29.87 MPG (assuming the full tank was used, so probably slightly over. This is bang on the quoted figures from the manufacturer)
After Tank 1: 410 miles = 31.08 (assuming full tank used)
After Tank 2 (I only used 52.5 litres before I filled up this time, I could tell because that is how much it took to fill up the next time): 405 miles = 35 MPG
Average After figure: 33.07 MPG
This is roughly another 10% increase in mileage, not a show stopper but enough to get our petrol bill down to near £100 a month. Also my method was somewhat unscientific and I could have done with repeating the before and after figures over a few more tanks to get better figures, but you can see there is a clear increase there right off the bat. I am pretty convinced that the whole 10% is just from keeping the tyres inflated to a decent level, so if you enact one piece of advice then make sure it is that one. I rarely drive the car you see and Mrs TFS was not comforable trying the rolling in neutral trick, so the juries out on that one. She has always driven sensibly anyway so no difference in the before and after figures there either, and again there was no excess baggage with either tank. So the takeaway is clearly, check your tyre pressure regularly!
You can read more about hyper-miling here and about many matters on efficiency on Bakari’s excellent blog here. He also has lots of whacky but cool ideas about modifications to engines and the aerodynamics to cars which are  summed up on this instructables page

Meet the new TFS-Mobile!

All of these tips above are great for increasing MPG whatever car you have, but after of all that, it then occured to me that the car you are driving actually is the key factor. This is why one of my tasks on my “to do” list was to get a new car, with better MPG. So without further ado please meet the brand spanking-used TFS-Mobile:

Saving money on Petrol

Saving wads of cash on petrol with a more efficient motor!

The logic behind this was simple: We had a car who’s base rate MPG was around 30 MPG, a Peugeot 306 with a normal 1.8 litre unleaded petrol engine (we should sell this for £500-ish). I liked the old TFS-Mobile a lot (RIP) so had a quick search for what model in the same/similar range had the highest MPG, and it turned out to be the 307 2.0 litre HDI, a diesel engine, weighing in at 55 MPG (We bought one for £1300). With our extra 10% from the hyper-miling techniques we should be able to get that up to 60 MPG, therefore cutting our petrol bill in half compared to a few months ago, and actually destroying it down to 33% compared to 6 months ago, before we stared any of this malarkey. This will net us a sweet petrol cost savings of £1200 per year. That’s pretty impressive, and even though the cost of buying the car and selling the old one is not insignificant, we’ll make the money back within 8-10 months of driving the new car.

Now it’s common knowledge that diesel engines have greater efficiency, I’m not exactly giving you some sort of secret society insider tip here, but how many of you out there are actually driving a diesel right now? How many of even know exactly what MPG you are getting in your current car, or take it into consideration when you buy a new one? I’d be interested to know if people can drop me a comment below! What engine have you got? How much mileage do you do and what MPG are you getting? Has anyone upgraded to any of the newer mega-efficient cars out there? Most importantly have you got any other tips I have missed out, as I’m always looking to squeeze a few extra percentage points out of my MPG stats!?

Thanks for reading and I hope you found the tips useful!

TFS

15 Comments
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