Dad's gone to Iceland

When my annual income plummeted from £100,000 to £25,000, I carried on spending. Then my wife took away my cash card and put me in charge of the shop. This is how I faced the frugal truth — and it wasn’t all bad

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Andrew Gimson

8 November 2012

I have always thought of myself as a reasonably frugal person. At the age of 54, when I fell out with my employers, my income dropped from about £100,000 a year to about the national average of £25,000, I got the chance to discover whether I really was.

Several large economies could be made at once. I converted to an interest-only mortgage and stopped making pension contributions. To reduce the temptation to spend cash, I reduced the amount of money I took out of ATMs from £200 to £100 a time.

Apart from this I went on behaving pretty much as I had behaved before. Apparently this is what people usually do when their income drops. They do not at first grasp the scale of the change that is required.

Our overdraft rose towards the high limit set by our bank in the days when I was a high earner. My wife Sally, who gets about £10,000 a year for her work as a Camden councillor, is quicker on the uptake than I am, and better at grasping unwelcome problems. She rang the bank and went through our spending line by line. This led to the cancellation of a large number of standing orders.

But it also led to the discovery that in the past month I had withdrawn £1,100 from cash machines.

Where had all this money gone? I drew up a rough tally but could only account for about half of it. The man at the bank, who had a rugged northern accent and during the cull of standing orders had already identified a number of worthless causes which we were supporting (the London Review of Books, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds), now regarded me as a suspect character who was ruining the family by wasting money on secret pleasures.

In vain I protested that I was not keeping a mistress but the man at the bank decided I must no longer be allowed to take any money out of cash machines.

For several weeks Sally bought all the food we needed and I had no money in my pocket. When spending became completely unavoidable I ran up small debts: £6.30 to the local shop, £22 owed to our younger daughter (who had received a gift from her godmother), £26 to our older daughter (who earns money babysitting). Our son remained untouched for money as he did not have any.

There is no doubt that our outgoings were much reduced. We were not discovering what it is like to be poor but we were finding out how to live on much less. At least Sally was. Her creative parsimony put me to shame.

She then had to go away for a few days, to the Labour Party conference, without having time to restock the house. She suggested I do this by going to Iceland, a supermarket I had never used. The wilful ugliness of the shop’s sign had somehow persuaded me that it could not be a place where I would feel at home.

But what a wonderful place it is once you get inside. In the supermarkets I used to visit I often found it quite hard to work out what things cost. In Iceland there is no such difficulty. The price labels are completely clear. Many items cost either £1 or £2. The first thing to catch my eye was a large bottle of Fairy Liquid costing £2. This stuck me as very good value. In our corner shop I usually pay £1.29 for a much smaller one. A litre of Flash cost £1, while some dishwasher tabs for which I would usually expect to pay £2.99 could be had for £1.50.

I became so enthusiastic about this shop, so high on the pleasures of frugality, that I spent £34.25, which was more than I had intended, but which together with some fruit and veg bought off a stall on the other side of Kentish Town Road was enough to keep us going for three days.

Not that everything from Iceland was equally good. A large pork pie that cost only £1 was frankly a disappointment. The fresh spinach at £1 a bag was fine, as were the Herta frankfurters at £3 for 20.

The children have been uncomplaining about the new regime. In negotiations that took place over my head, they obtained in return for certain austerities during the week the promise of a roast dinner each weekend: a demand which, for a time, could be satisfied by the purchase (not by me) of a joint of pork for only £5.60, or £2.70/kg, on special offer (now ended) from Sainsbury’s.

We look back with affection to the days when I would go to Giacobazzi’s, our wonderful local Italian deli, where for a modest sum one could obtain such delights as fresh pasta, pizza, focaccia, pecorino romano cheese, fennel salami and various kinds of olives. For some reason the children especially miss the olives. But there is no doubt Iceland is cheaper.

More expert shoppers will smile at the naivety of these remarks. I realise that if one has enough time and persistence, and is a skilful enough cook, one can obtain the ingredients for cheap and delicious dishes in many different places. Most supermarkets have raised their prices so high that they have had to introduce a range of basics that poor people can actually afford. It is in filling a shopping trolley that you understand the cost of living. Politicians learn the price of a pint of milk, but voters sense that in few cases have our MPs had to worry about the cost of filling a trolley.

Like many well-off people, I used my money to insulate myself from the way poor people live. I became cut off from my own country. My priority was to get the shopping over as quickly as possible, so although I had an old-fashioned prejudice against paying for things with a credit card, I did not worry if I needed to go to the hole in the wall in order to get some extra cash. I congratulated myself on being economical by buying sausages rather than steak from the excellent butchers in England’s Lane, where I liked to go at least once a week.

I have lived a kind of cotton-wool existence, able to buy my way out of any difficult decision, including what to feed the children. Weeks might go past without it even occurring to me to give them baked potatoes. Such wholesome staples as baked beans, which I used to eat straight from the tin when I first arrived in London, had somehow passed out of my life. In 1992, when I met Sally, she possessed a copy of Delia Smith’s Frugal Food, already disintegrating from heavy use, and would think nothing of feeding 20 friends in the youth-hostel-like kitchen above The Green Man in Islington, the pub where she herself rented a room.

We got married and moved to Berlin. By the time we returned, quite a few of our friends had become rich. When they invited us to dinner, they would give us champagne beforehand, and we would sit down at a table that did not in any way remind one of a youth hostel, for even if the occasion was informal, the food was anything but.

Giving a dinner party is a bit like giving a wedding. However much you try to simplify things, it is hard to stop the preparations becoming more elaborate than you originally intended. If 18 months ago your great friends the Joneses gave you champagne, and a meal in which Elizabeth David would find nothing to criticise, it seems a bit mean not to go to as much trouble and expense oneself.

When Disraeli wrote of “two nations”, he meant the rich and the poor, “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws”.

When I bump into my neighbour Ed Miliband in Iceland I will know he is really getting serious about One Nation politics.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

Iceland

Double pepperoni pizza £1.00

Wyke Farms vintage Cheddar £2.50

Wholemeal Burgen bread £1.00

Frozen mixed vegetables £1.00

Eight beef burgers £1.00

12-pack Quaker oats

So Simple Original oats £1.00

Total: £7.50

Waitrose

Thin and crispy pepperoni pizza £4.00

Wyke Farms mature Cheddar £3.79

Wholemeal bread 80p

Mixed vegetables, bag £1.60

Four beef burgers £4.19

400g Bob’s Red Mill

gluten-free rolled oats £3.29

Total: £17.67

Dad's gone to Iceland

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