The year of living cheaply

What's the story with living on just a pound a day, asks Conor Pope?

Kath Kelly doesn't sound daft, but after reading her recently published adventures in extreme saving it's hard to escape the notion that there isn't a side to her that is very slightly bonkers.

One evening in June 2006, the 47-year-old from Bristol was out with some friends and, as the wine flowed expensively, the conversation turned to how skint they all were. As a part-time English language teacher earning little more than £10,000 a year, Kelly was probably the poorest of her peers and spent much of the drunken evening moaning about how difficult it was going to be to afford a nice wedding present for her soon-to-be-married brother.

It was while slightly maudlin and slightly drunk that she had a notion which would change her life. She decided that, rather than scrimp and save a little bit and buy the couple some nice towels or a Le Creuset casserole dish as most sane people would have done, she would live on just a £1 (€1.26) a day - excluding rent and utilities - for a whole year and use the money she saved to buy them something really special.

So she did, and she's just published a book documenting her experiences. How I Lived A Year on Just a Pound a Dayhas touched a chord in the UK where it has been flying off the shelves since the beginning of the month as the global economy stumbles and people look for tips on getting by on less.

In truth the book won't be much use as a self-help book unless readers are prepared to give up the pub in favour of drinking cheap lager outdoors, trawl supermarkets before closing time in search of discounted stock, spend a lot of time searching for events at which free sandwiches and maybe the odd glass of wine can be had, and eat an unconscionable amount of cheap, processed food which is fast heading for its expiration date.

Her publisher, Redcliffe Press, has been overwhelmed by the attention the book has recieved; although it has only been out for a couple of weeks, it is already heading for its second print run. Redcliffe's John Sansom told Pricewatch the success of the book "has astonished us".

Kelly is taking her new-found celebrity skinflint status in her stride. When we made contact with her she was just out of a studio where she'd done her third national television interview in as many days.

"I have to say I have been very surprised by the interest," she says. "We timed it, completely by chance, to coincide with the credit crunch at a time when people have a lot less money and are working out ways they can live on less."

The notion to live on less first crossed her mind when she saw an American woman who had resolved to buy nothing but necessities for a year being interviewed on Richard and Judy. The woman had allowed herself to spend whatever she wanted on food and to travel as usual. "Hardly living on the edge," Kelly says. The seed was planted and weeks later it blossomed.

Her friends said her plan was ridiculous but she took to her new frugality with missionary zeal. She was determined not to let it drain the colour from her life.

"I didn't have to spend the year being miserable and frugal sitting at home watching the television. I discovered there were a lot of free events and diversions going on around me all the time," she says. She took advantage of the presents brought by the students in the language school where she worked; the snaffled dates from Dubai, pickled plums from China and dry bean cakes from Taiwan were a welcome change from her monotonous reheated lunches.

She joined her students on their social outings and always accepted the work-related free drink or tickets to musicals or plays that came her way. She got her hair styled for free by trainees at local salons, took advantage of gym open days to go swimming and spent a lot of time in her local library surfing the web for free.

She also took up hitch-hiking and got back into camping - although her food for a weekend's camping sounds a bit grim. It had to be, she explains, "very cheap, easy to carry and non-perishable". So for one weekend trip she lived on cream crackers, cheap biscuits, a couple of loose carrots, bargain basement apples, over-ripe bananas, two tins of sardines, peanuts, a can of bangers and beans and a mini-quiche on its sell-by date.

"It is certainly very extreme, particularly for people with dependents, but there are things in the book that everyone could do to save money, especially when it comes to not wasting money buying things that you don't need. People buy too much food and they end up throwing half of it away."

And, speaking of throwing away, she also found £117 (€147) in loose change in the street - equivalent to a third of her annual budget.

"I always felt that there was a danger of embarrassing myself because of my unwillingness to spend money and I did feel quite stingy when it came to to contributing to presents for work colleagues. That was probably the worst thing - I still tried to be generous, however, in ways that did not involve money."

Surprisingly, she actually found herself gaining weight over the course of the early part of the experiment. "For the first couple of months I was greedy and I ate whatever was going when it came to free samples because I didn't know when I'd get the chance to eat again. After a while, though, I started to put on weight and was living really unhealthily so had to take stock." She also spent a lot of time drinking cheap alcohol outdoors, "even in the winter. I know it has a rather sleazy image but it is not like we were sitting around the brazier like tramps; I would prefer to call them outdoor picnics."

The thing she missed most was not good fresh food or the conviviality of a warm pub on a winter evening but the warmth and familiarity of coffee shops. Before embarking on her project she was spending £25 a week on coffee - "a ridiculous amount to spend" - so big savings were made by just avoiding them altogether.

At the end of the year she had saved enough to spend £1,300 on lifetime membership of the National Trust as a wedding present for her brother - who had better appreciate it.

Now she and her partner, who she met while on her buy-nothing year, are planning a new adventure in extreme frugality and are going to spend a year investigating "uncomfortable ways to save the environment" including living for a month without electricity and making and drinking homebrew beer.

How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Dayby Kath Kelly is published by Redcliffe Press, £6.99