Money

My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone's behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow. I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way around basic butchery and was reluctant to let anything go to waste.

‘Bungalows are almost perfect,’ as the old gag goes. ‘They only have one floor.’ But these once unfashionable properties are rapidly becoming anything but a joke. While the mortgage crisis is cooling most sectors of the housing market, demand for bungalows is growing. Estate agents report the properties receiving dozens of offers, selling for tens of thousands over the asking price or being snapped up before officially going on the market. The usual breed of downsizers and retirees looking to replace large family homes with something all on one level are facing stiff competition from budget-conscious purchasers seeking to renovate single-storey homes – and often turn them into family homes with stairs.

Thanks to the recent spike in inflation, never have indisputable luxuries such as Sharwood’s mango chutney or Anchor butter quite so tested the domestic purse strings. The sad truth is, however, that it’s much worse than you think. Because unlike the watched kettle, the frog of devaluation hasn’t just arrived at a nice simmer, it’s begun to boil over. And mango chutney at £4.10 a jar is but the tip of the iceberg. For the long view consider the BBC’s new drama, Ten Pound Poms, about Brits who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s for the princely sum of a £10 processing fee. These days the closest you’ll get to Australia for a tenner is a four-pack of Castlemaine XXXX – and there probably won’t be much change from that either.

You might think someone who grew up in the 356-room Belvoir Castle wouldn't be too worried by a traffic fine. But when Lady Eliza Manners was caught speeding, she avoided paying off the full £100 ticket by claiming ‘financial hardship’. And apparently she’s not the only budget-conscious occupant of the Leicestershire property. Her mother Emma, the Duchess of Rutland, recently claimed she shops in Asda. While it might be hard for those on the actual breadline to sympathise with the troubles of the titled and entitled, such states of affairs do stand to some sort of reason.

At the start of this month, the modish kitchen appliance brand Sub-Zero & Wolf proudly announced the launch of its Classic French Door fridge-freezer. This beast of a machine, featuring Nasa-inspired air purification technology and an automatic ice-maker complete with 'party mode', will set you back £23,868 ­– or the best part of a year's salary for the average UK worker. Admittedly it does look like an impressive piece of kit, what with its nano-coated glass shelves which stop spills from spreading, crisper drawers with humidity levels designed to keep food fresher for longer and shadow-reducing interior lights.

Spring is property auction season, when a motley collection of semi-derelict houses, flats with leases in the single figures and the homes of mortgage defaulters get sold off. This year, though, a scan of the catalogues of some of the UK’s leading property auction houses reveals a new class of property under the hammer: rental flats. Under pressure from rising interest rates and increasing regulation, many landlords are opting for an exit strategy. According to recent research from estate agent Hamptons, Britain’s rental sector is losing homes at a rate of 66 per day. Agents across the country report an influx of instructions from small-time landlords who’ve decided to invest elsewhere.

Would you spend £20 on a burger? To many in Britain, that price would be unaffordable. Possibly this applies to more people in 2023 than it would have done five years ago because the country has become that much more egregious. Financial progress today is an increasingly laughable concept. Unless you own Amazon, that is, or landed a PPE contract in the pandemic.  But there are many others who could afford a £20 burger, yet find the notion of paying that sum unacceptable. This was made glaringly apparent recently when the chef Gary Usher shared the menu from his new Cheshire pub, The White Horse. The pub doesn’t open until 3 March, but already would-be punters have been scoffing at the burger on offer.

‘Pitiful.’ That’s the verdict of Damian Green MP, acting chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, on the payouts that streaming companies such as Spotify and Apple Music provide to musicians. An update to the group’s Economics of Music Streaming report, published on Friday, calls on the government to take a ‘proactive strategic role’ to make sure Britain’s music industry – one of the few that truly is world-beating – gets the cash it deserves. With streaming now accounting for 84 per cent of UK recorded music revenues, its businesses model really matters.

One initially overlooked aspect of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated mini-Budget was the plan to restore VAT-free shopping for tourists. The scheme, which allowed non-EU visitors to claim back 20 per cent on their purchases, was scrapped in 2020 by then chancellor Rishi Sunak but looked set for a comeback. This was excellent news where I live – Japan – and throughout Asia, where holidays are short and shopping plays a big part in overseas trips. But just as tourists were writing up their lists and planning their itineraries, Jeremy Hunt pulled the rug from under their feet by cancelling the uncancelling before it had even reached Kwarteng’s promised consultation phase. Was he right to do so? Almost certainly not.

Are you suffering from SMS? Smart meter stress, that is. When we decided recently to accept our energy provider's offer to install a smart meter, I had no clue how anxiety-inducing the digital display on the little black monitor could be. Smart meters tell us (and our suppliers) how much energy we’re using, minute by minute. In theory they make life easier, helping us identify where we can reduce consumption and sending automatic readings so that we’re less likely to underpay or overpay on our bills. There are already 29.5 million smart meters installed across the UK, and by the end of 2025 every home and office in Britain will have been offered one.