Money and other ways to make your life choices that much harder.

There is a hard truth when it comes to doing without the traditional car aspect of getting your family and goods around.

Since being car-less (Landrover has yet to leave the yard :P)I have done a lot of digging around, looking at blogs, reading articles of people who live without a car in their lives.
One of the prevailing common traits ( and although I say common I KNOW its not everyone, before anyone jumps up and down saying "not me!!")is money, as in pleanty of.

Now I don't mean RICH.
Not David Beckham, Donald Trump rich, but nicely comfortable middle class rich. The sort of rich where the juggling of bills is an exception rather than a rule, the kind of house where shopping does not need to be totted up and the none essentials put sadly back on the shelves.

A classic quip is something along the lines of " ...Of course getting bulky things can be tricky, but if I need a sofa DFS deliver so its not really a problem...."

....But it is a problem, for me anyway.

If I need a sofa the furniture shop is not the first place I look. The first place I go sofa hunting is Freecycle and if nothing comes of that then the free papers for a cheap second hand sofa.
Here lies the problem.
Although the big furniture chains will happily deliver your large item, very few private sellers/ freecylers will.

An example is this....
I saw in the free papers last week an unused trail gator, unwanted gift £20.
Now these retail here at @ £60....and I need 2 of them..this should have been fantastic but....it was 25 miles away no where near a bus or train route and much too heavy for it to be worth posting.
I would have used about £5-7 of fuel..just a little over postage and packing from a shop, so I would have still paid a lot less than buying new.

So we see..the comfortable "middle class rich" car-less person would not have been looking in the free papers for a trail gator..they would have just ordered one online and paid the full price.

My bike came through freecycle BUT the girl who brought it was coming to my house anyway to pick up some items I'd listed.

This is the bit I am finding the hardest. Not the day to day stuff of shopping, but the "too good to miss" items on freecycle, the bulky things like second hand windows and bikes that we need to collect.

We are so far away from most of these things (Our freecycle cover's a very large area) that it is getting to the stage where it is almost not worth having it.

How do other people in this situation cope???