Yesterday was the day the realisation hit me...that I would have to live off £20 a week, and that would have to include bills, food, fuel, travel costs, going out, entertainment and the ever expensive uni books (they're at least £50 each!). I figured if I put £5 a side each week for bills, then I would have £15 left for everything else. But what about savings? I need to save up to pay for my flight back 'home' ( I say 'home' because I lived there for the last 2 years of my schooling, and I now consider it my second home) to Australia in the Summer...so another £5 a week would go towards that. That left me with just £10 a week for food, fuel, travel costs, going out etc etc. Sugar.
I was at work yesterday when I worked all this out, and felt like I was about to burst into tears. And it was raining. Which I find always makes everything ten times worse!
The thing is, I have led a very privileged life so far, and I only realized this yesterday as I lay on my super kingsize bed sobbing my heart out whilst my Mother told me a few home truths. I really am spoilt and ungrateful.
So, this morning I woke up with a whole new look on my situation, I thought of how I could make good out of a bad situation. So I am taking up this challenge. For the next 9 months of the Uni year, from end of September to end of June, I will do this little experiment, I will live off just £10 a week and blog about it every day to see if a middle class student from Surrey, can really live off just £10 a week. This will have to cover food, fuel, travel costs, books, entertainment and all the other things a 19 year old girl needs in her day to day life. Then I thought, why not make it even better...why not get people to sponsor me to do it and raise money for charity at the same time! I always want to give money to charity, but it's a bit hard when I myself hardly have any money to give. So here is the perfect opportunity to do something to help charities.
Then came about choosing a charity, now this was a hard choice. And I still haven't completely decided so I won't post anything until I have decided for definite.
Basically there are 3 or 4 that I can't choose from, so I'm going to fundraise for all of them on 'JustGiving', and people can choose which one of them they donate to.
So here is the end of my first blog.
I probably won't start this 'blogging' thing properly until I start the challenge, on 27th September 2010. I will be setting up a facebook group, a twitter account and my 'Just Giving' pages a few days before that date.
I do apologize for my poor grammar, it has never been a strong point of mine...and I tend to just use punctuation whenever I feel like it. So you may randomly get '...' or '!!!' or brackets in the middle of a sentence when they really aren't needed.
Anyway, until next time.
TPP x
Ps; do I sign off as Ten Pound Pom (TPP) or Catherine?! Or, do I not sign off at all?
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