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If your income is limited and you want to look good, you have to learn how to be a knowledgeable shopper both online and in the high street.
Begin by visiting the websites of your preferred clothing stores and seeing if they have any online only sales – sometimes, with large stock runs that haven’t sold, items will be sold direct at a cheaper price than they are being sold in stores to save the cost of transporting goods out to shops.
Online retailers often have excellent offers on multiple items, meaning that if you know you need to buy six shirts for work, or want a dozen T-shirts for the summer, you can get a bulk buy discount that saves you a small fortune.
When you get to the shops, browse the sale rails carefully, you can sometimes find formal clothing like suits or dresses that were originally priced at £100 or more being ‘cleared through’ at under a tenner. Make sure your bargain really is a bargain though, sometimes these are mismatched items or have some damage or fault that isn’t immediately obvious – while shops shouldn’t sell items that are damaged without alerting you to the fault, it can happen that the fault isn’t obvious until you put the garment on, such as one trouser leg being shorter than another, and that’s why it hasn’t sold – the shop isn’t trying to fool you, it’s just that nobody has bothered to tell the staff what’s wrong with the garment.
Use comparison shopping sites to help you get a sense of what items should cost and which are actually bargains. It’s not just the purchase cost of an item that counts, but the length of time it lasts and the cost of keeping it pristine – dry cleaning, for example can double the cost of your clothing within a year if you wear those items regularly. Classic styling and colours can mean that you only need to buy new clothing every couple of years instead of every season, meaning that your T-shirts last all year and your formal shirts can last for three or four, if you ring the changes with other clothing – that can be a huge saving.
Be careful not to overspend when money is tight – 75% off can seem like a bargain, but if you can’t afford the 25% price, it’s still not a bargain for you. It’s tempting to fall into retail therapy but making a list of what you need: work clothes, gym wear and some casual clothing, compared to what you want: Armani suits, a brand new pair of £200 trainers and every designer T-shirt going, helps you understand where your money goes and shows you how much you might be able to save by being a savvy shopper.
Buying for children can be a thankless task, they hate their school uniform and do everything they can to avoid wearing it. But on the other hand, anything you buy them for casualwear is bound to be uncool, non-rad and totally yuck. And children’s clothing can be expensive too, especially once they hit the adolescent years and start to develop designer tastes.
There’s not a lot we can do to help you with the teenage spending drain, but before that, you can save yourself quite a lot of money by sensible purchasing and clothing management.
Buying with a Purpose:
- Kids outgrow trousers much more swiftly than they do strap overalls which can be adjusted for several months more. While they are small enough to wear what you buy, keep them in dungarees!
- If you can’t buy dungarees, remember that cuffed trousers and shirts can be uncuffed as your child grows, to give a longer wearing period before the garment is outgrown.
- Classic clothing like plain T-shirts and blue jeans both last longer and look good longer than faddy items.
- Buy a season in advance – pick up last season’s summer tops at knock-down prices in winter, and in summer, look out for long-sleeved tops and good jackets at bargain prices.
Buying Secondhand:
- If you have a teenager, particularly a girl, get her to resell her ‘old’ clothing via the local paper or ebay to fund new purchases – often girls will wear something for less than a season and it can still be resold for a reasonable price. Trendy T-shirts and tops will often sell fast.
- When buying second hand, look at all garments well, checking buttons, zippers, and seams and turn them inside out to spot stains and worn areas
Caring for Clothing:
If you hope to sell your children’s clothing second hand, you need to take care of it during its lifetime with you. So make sure you deal with any stains immediately and loosen any buttons or buckles that become tight – this keeps the garment in better shape for resale or for handing on to another child. Where possible, fold T-shirts and tops shop-style, rather than in half, as folding down the middle can exacerbate the tendency for cotton to lose its shape, folding sides to middle helps keep a garment’s form.
Form a Buying Consortium:
It sounds really upmarket, but all it means is that you’re buying bulk items: nappies and bibs for babies, T-shirts, polo-shirts and school trousers for kids, socks for teenagers, for say, twelve kids. You can find mums and dads who’d like to consortium buy through schools, sports clubs or youth clubs and by negotiating a group discount or making a bulk purchase, you can save up to 40% off the retail price for the item.
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