Be Excellent To Each Other

Fuck's sake. I've got (nearly) two weeks off work starting soon.

Why is this a nay? Because I forgot all about it on Sunday and bought a monthly train ticket, meaning I wasted £200. Fuck beans.

£200 for a month? London be expensive.

-edit- although, if you travel into work 20 times in a month, it works out at £10 per round trip.

I think you can get partial refunds on unused season tickets. I did it once.

Any reason you don't just buy a yearly one?

That's fuck all. My cousin commutes into London, from Chatham I think, and pays £3,600 a year. Madness.

£200 is the half of a month. I need it for the other half.

I am going to look into getting a refund today.

[edit]It totally looks like I can do that - although they'll charge me £10 for the privilege, the thieving gits.

Yikes Scoob!

Fun photo:


And, if I really want to depress myself, I dig the oldies out of my bag:

££££

Yeah, it's a whole chunk of cash in one go, even with a discount.

But the savings!

Also, your work doesn't do an interest free season ticket loan? Seriously? Are they the only company in London to not do that? Even the bloody NHS does it!

Not just London, every company I've worked for up here does it as well.

My work does a loan scheme for annual tickets, but only for First Great Western users, which is annoying as I use Chiltern.

Mine doesn't either, which is why I shell out weekly

I get monthlies for only 68 pounds. I could getvthe year loan thing, but so far have been too lazy/worried aboit its inflexibility.

It's not much of a discount.

Here's the breakdown (savings added are mine, and are based on the saving over a single day)

As you can see, the savings over a daily ticket are huge, but are quite small when you get above a week.

If you factor in weekends (when you won't be using your ticket but pay for it anyway), it not quite such a saving on the dailies:

I use oyster PAYG with autotopup. I don't have the faintest clue how much travel costs me.

See also: Starbucks and the office canteen.

You can use your Oyster card in those too? It really is useful!

Have been able to for a while.

Now all I need is for more bars to let me pay for things automagically and my entire life runs on free money.

Plus with monthlies you have weekend breaks and holidays, that if you plan in advance you don't need to buy the tickets for i.e if it runs out on friday, you don't buy the next till the monday etc...
It works out at pretty much the same price for monthlies or an annual if you take all that into account IME.

Here they are!

Hurrah!

Anyway, to continue, this is the output of my ruby travel costs script I wrote a few weeks back, before I got really bored and gave up.

We should totally rename this "The Yay thread" to signify Grim... working out how to merge topics!

Anyway - this was actually going to be my other story for the Awesome Island game - back in 2003, I managed to get free rail travel for two months by faking a weekly train ticket in Photoshop - the ticket inspectors never took the ticket out of the holder, so it worked fine.

Until it got to December, and I put "DEC" on the ticket, not realising that they put "DMR."

Oops.

That's still over 600 pounds saved over monthlies! If you have the option of a season ticket loan and aren't using it, you're throwing over 600 quid down the tubes.

Not to mention the extreme convenience of not having to buy a ticket for another year!

I don't.

Then tell your work to start doing it.

Didn't you turn your Oyster card into wand, dress up as a wizard and then ponce around London waving it at busses? Or was that someone else on here?

I'm saying it was you or Gazcap.

Disclaimer: Might have dreamt this.

I want to hear some more of your financial advice!

Buy stocks that increase in value and then sell them for a profit!

Wasn't from BeEx, I first heard about it on b3ta I think.

Be more rich.

I'm sure Lave did something like that. Not as mental though.

Nah, it was on here or World Of ('Linda' - Ed) before B3TA as it all went a bit viral.

It was Skeptobot, but he was just doing what someone else had already tried.

http://www.skeptobot.com/2008/05/time-lapse-vid-of-dissolving-oyster.html

I remember seeing the photos of the card falling apart as it sat in solvent over a few days. It was cool.

I also seem to recall it was Lave. Could be wrong though.

£1, 100 Saltaire to Leeds for the year, £5.70 daily.