What Sophie Said

I’ve got a bit of an issue with ‘stuff’. I like having stuff. Then I feel overcrowded and want it out. I go through phases of collecting things, then feel the need to purge and get them all out. It happens with everything. I used to buy so many magazines you wouldn’t believe. When I had no room to keep them, I’d keep a folder of the front covers. One day, I recycled them all. I went through a phase of buying loads of (fairly cheap) clothes, then had a day where I needed to sort through everything and keep only the things that were flattering and that I loved. I bought so much makeup and so many toiletries there’s no way one person could use it all and I was running out of space to store it. Then I suddenly couldn’t bear how many products were crowding me out. I’ve been using everything up, so I can get to the point where I have one of everything, plus a backup if said item is close to running out. I’ve always been like it. I feel such an urge to colle...

I feel like I did a lot of ‘growing up’ over 2015. I learned a lot about myself, about what I want to do, and about where I want to be. One of the things I’ve really been trying to improve on is the way I handle my money. I’m a few months into a new job, a few months into a new city, and a few months into a new living space. I moved to London, which has made the whole money situation even more necessary to think about. Growing up, I was always the one who spent my pocket money as soon as I got it. I did once save a decent amount in my Building Society account, but then spent the majority of it on adopting an orca (a kind of whale) for one year, aged 10. I’ve improved over the course of university and my first couple of years of working, but there are definitely still improvements to be made. Recently, I’ve begun trying to switch my brain out of short-term mode, and focus on both long and short-term when it comes to my money. Throw in the fact that I’m g...

My name is Sophie, and I buy FAR too many magazines. That would have been my confession just six months ago. For as long as I can remember, I have loved the world of magazines. The glossy covers, the beautiful images, that mixture of beauty, fashion, life and advice. Monthly magazines, gossipy weekly magazines, it didn’t matter. I loved them, one and all. Looking back at the amount of money I must have spent on magazines over the years actually now makes me shudder. When you consider your average glossy monthly is around the £4, and I loved far more than one of them… Then, about six months ago, I graduated from university and ‘real life’ begun. I moved back home whilst job hunting, and began work in September of 2013. I realised more than ever that I needed to watch my pennies. Don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot about budgeting at university, but it took starting work and earning an actual salary to really make me think. Flicking through the November issue of a popula...

I held off on posting this at first, as I didn’t want to publicly set myself a challenge I couldn’t stick to! I have decided that I will begin each month by setting myself a challenge, which can cover any aspect of my life, and do little updates on here. It might be a good way to set myself in the routine of new habits, or just prove to myself that I can stick at something for the month. December’s challenge is a toughie: NO spending on toiletries or cosmetics. Anyone that knows me knows I have a huge collection of these things, far more than I could ever be using in one go. My mum moans about it all the time… until she needs to borrow something, that is! Although I don’t waste all my money on these things, and I do budget and have money to save at the end of every month, it can never hurt to save a little more. I thought that, in the months where I was finishing Christmas shopping, it might be a good idea to reduce spending on myself. And so December’s challenge was born. 16 days...

On Monday 18 th February, the Metro headline ‘Red Signal from Train Passengers’ (article by John Higginson) was hardly a surprising one. Let’s face it, trains are pretty rubbish. I know it’s wonderful that they’re available, they travel so quickly, the seats are usually comfortable and it’s possible to get a good deal. But just under two years ago I became ‘A COMMUTER’, and my view on trains changed for the worse. Metro, 18.02.2013, article by John Higginson I travel between Darlington (where my flat is) and York (where I go to university) between two and five days a week. It’s a 24 minute journey. I travel at a mixture of peak and off-peak times. And I have a 16-25 railcard. I book my trains the night before I travel, and I’m a standard class train passenger. One issue is, of course, price. Some train tickets have faced price increases of around 4.2%, despite the fact that we travellers have seen very little visible change in the service we receive. Journeys of compar...