Frugal Living 2010 -The Cost of Living Challenge, INTRO

thriftylass wrote: »

P.s. how do you post tables, do you have to save them as a picture in photobucket?

Yes.

I use screen capture software (King Kong Capture - it's free, and I've been using it for several years without any problems) to get the part of the spreadsheet I want to share as a jpg or gif. Then upload that to photobucket, and use the 'image code' from there.

Here's now my revised budget, wish me strength to follow it



I'll try to have 15 NSD/month and save about 50% of my income for a rainy day, emergency, holidays and towards a deposit.

cw18 wrote: »

Did my latest (!) round of number crunching for my 2010 budget yesterday, and having looked over it again this morning I've decided it's probably as close as I'm going to get for a starting point

Famous last words...... 4 days on and I've done some more tweaking :rolleyes2

My spreadsheet now looks like this.......



All as before with a couple of exceptions......

Grocery budget has increased from £1262 to £1300 (£1.65 per person per day to £1.70), and 'Contingency fund' has increased from £483 to £592. Discovered that while the total at the bottom of the budget column said I'd allocated £8k, I'd actually only allocated £7853 :rolleyes:

I had a row on the spreadsheet where I'd started to allocate a budget, and then changed my mind. I'd changed the colour of the font on the row (to be sure it looked blank), but forgotten to delete the £147 I'd keyed into the budget column



I've also included a new category called 'Stock Pile Fund'.

Having had to dig through cupboards and boxes galore last night (looking for a 'spare' pack of dried spaghetti I knew I had in), I've come to the conclusion I have more groceries and cleaning products stashed away than anyone has any business to have

So my plan is to do a complete stock-take over the Christmas to New Year period, and make an itemised list in my spreadsheet of all unopened tins, packets, boxes, jars etc (which I've already started). When I use something from that list during 2010 my spreadsheet is now set to reduce the appropriate budget by what that item cost me and add the value to my 'stock pile' category (which is starting at zero, so that I have to use before I can add more to it).

As most of my stock-piling has been done to take advantage of Whoopsies, App Foods bargains, or store closures (so good dates, but Whoopsie level prices), my stock pile budget won't grow by enough to replace everything on a 1-to-1 basis - which I'm hoping means I'll have less of a stock-pile by the end of 2010 (and hopefully enough room in my kitchen for most of the stuff I then have in)..... plus money in hand to take advantage of the Christmas Eve/New Years Eve reductions in December 2010 to fill my freezers with meat for the start of 2011 !!!

Well I have set myself a budget of £16500 all in but that includes everything!! If I do not return to work our income for the year will £26000 so leaving an excess of £9500.

However there is a possibility that I will return to work and OH be a SAHD so then our income will change to £29000.

Good plan for the stockpile cw.

What kind of things are you thinking of making tl ?

I have been beavering away knitting and sewing for newest gd will post pics later.