The little things in life can end up being the ones that add up and blow the budget. Thinking hard about what you spend on trains and buses can help you avoid the situation where you feel like the only way out is to rub your hands together in the hope that a Cash Genie appears. Thinking about how and when you travel, and which mode of transport to use, should be a good way of keeping your spending low and making sure your finances are in order.
One of the best general rules to be aware of is that the earlier you book, the cheaper the ticket will be. Timing the purchasing carefully can make a significant difference to the price of a train ticket, which these days can be extremely expensive. The key number here is 12 weeks. There is a limited number of cheap fares for each journey, and booking early will mean you snap these up before anybody else. Contractually, Network Rail must have the timetable set 12 weeks in advance. Therefore this is often the point at which train operators release cheap advance tickets. To help make sure you know the best time to buy tickets, Network Rail has a handy travel chart, showing the latest date you can buy advance tickets for each train firm. It is even possible to make sure you are first in the cheap tickets queue by signing up to The Trainline’s ticket alert system, which sends emails as soon as cheap advance tickets for a particular journey go on sale.
It is all very well saying that advance train tickets are a good way of saving money but obviously some journeys cannot be planned very far in advance. That snap decision visit to see a friend on his birthday or train ride to Newcastle to see granny in hospital sometimes cannot be foreseen. What is worth knowing, though, is that you can often buy advance tickets the night before, or even on the way to the station. It is worth finding out if advance tickets are still available, even if you are on the way to the station.
Regular travellers can cut costs by a long way by using railcards or season tickets. You can make a railcard your own personal cash genie by getting lots of savings from just one card. If you are under 26 and a frequent traveller, you can buy a young person’s railcard which will save you one third of the cost of most of your travel.
We all know that travelling can be expensive, but you won’t need to summon your own personal Cash Genie as long as you think as carefully as possible about how to minimise your spending on getting around.
Please visit http://www.cashgenie.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.
http://www.cashgenie.co.uk/
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