Not Buying It- A Consumer Holiday 2016

I'm sitting in waiting for 2 deliveries today so decided to sort out the freezer as there's a few spaces appearing at last!

Anyhow, I've ended up defrosting it, washing all the trays out and sorting it as I put everything back in. Still have loads but other than a few odds and ends it's nearly all packs of mince, ribs, chicken etc so now I've had a tidy up I can start to make things to use these up.

So lunch was a quesadilla using sweetcorn & grated chilli cheese from freezer, mixed with 2 lanky spring onions from fridge, a tin of tuna & some mayonnaise, inside a tortilla wrap also from freezer.

Tea will be a portion of HM chilli from freezer, mixed with last of frozen sweetcorn and some rice.

I've also left out the last of the frozen ginger cake which I'll use up sometime this week with custard.

Now to find something else productive to do while I wait for my parcels!

I didn't realise so many others on here are studying with Future Learn. Not only thrifty but brainy too!
Slimming World tonight and I avoided buying the new magazine, any cereal bars or raffle tickets. Temptation waved at me but I didn't crumble. I love my class. It's a bit of a social evening but you can end up opening your purse. I'm a lifetime member and one of the incentives for me getting to target was knowing that it would be free one I got there. At the moment the ready meals that Slimming World are making with Iceland are what everyone seems to be buying. I did try one with a voucher but ready meals are an expensive way of eating and to be honest I always feel that I could make something much tastier for half the cost. Losing weight doesn't have to cost a fortune!

chirpycheap wrote: »

I didn't realise so many others on here are studying with Future Learn. Not only thrifty but brainy too!
Slimming World tonight and I avoided buying the new magazine, any cereal bars or raffle tickets. Temptation waved at me but I didn't crumble. I love my class. It's a bit of a social evening but you can end up opening your purse. I'm a lifetime member and one of the incentives for me getting to target was knowing that it would be free one I got there. At the moment the ready meals that Slimming World are making with Iceland are what everyone seems to be buying. I did try one with a voucher but ready meals are an expensive way of eating and to be honest I always feel that I could make something much tastier for half the cost. Losing weight doesn't have to cost a fortune!

Hi

I personally won't eat a ready meal, unless it's one I made and bunged in the freezer, but I think the WW and SW ready meals are just wrong and won't help anyone lose weight in the long term.

I don't understand how these meals educate people how to lose weight and keep it off, how do they learn to eat everyday food with their friends/family if all they've done is eat prepared ready meals?

Would they know how to cook the same meal for the whole family without adding unwanted calories & fat?

My Not Buying It story for today......I took our gas and electricity meter readings and input them online, as I do every month. A message appeared saying "Congratulations, you are today's lucky customer! Do a quick survey and get a reward worth at least £50!"

I thought, might as well...Did the survey (7 easy questions including how easy is their website and would I recommend the utility company to others) then looked at the reward.

Today's reward , either one or both of....a Premium E Cigarette Kit and a pot of Anti-Ageing Face Cream apparently worth £89!!!!!

I don't smoke, and was not over impressed by the face cream. It was free, but I still would have to pay £4.95 delivery. I decided not to bother. A message appeared saying "are you sure? We can pay 60% of the delivery charge for you!"

I thought about it. I would still be paying out something like £1.95 for a pot of overpriced moisturiser, and I wouldn't even give it as a present to someone - it seems an insult giving someone anti-ageing cream as a present, like saying "Here, happy birthday you decrepit old hag!"

Plus....this company selling the face cream would have my name and address for bombarding me with marketing emails in the future.

So, no thank you, I am Not Buying It!

Hello All

Well, I seem to be doing rather well for conferences in posh hotels lately, as had another one today (twice in a fortnight) - but unlikely to see another one for at least a year! So had free food and drink all day and filled my boots!

Nipped into aldi on way home to get cat food as we had completely run out (down to giving them tins of tuna long forsaken in the cupboard- good it's finally been used!!), and was very restrained, did not even look at the aisle of doom, just got bleach and loo roll, dull but necessary. Helped by the fact that the conference had overrun and I was desperate to get home and was still stuck in middle of city 50 mins from where I live, so was motivated to get out of the shop asap.

We have now got a whiteboard in the kitchen and I scribble on it every time we run out of/are about to run out of something, then when there's a few items on there, I take a photo of it on my phone and then call in at the shop as I'm going past. This is really helping me - I have always done a big monthly shop before, but really struggle to concentrate on a) writing a long monthly shop list, going through all the cupboards etc, and b) going round the shop and buying it all. This way is much easier - I don't have to generate the list as it generates itself, and I only have to concentrate on a few items in the shop. Plus it takes less time. Am hoping it's saving money too, as am not standing in middle of shop panicking and guessing at how many packs of spaghetti etc we need, but am just buying one at a time. The food mountain is reduced, I can see what we have in the freezer and I've even made some random meals from long-lost meat buried in the depths for goodness knows how long! I used to have a stockpile mentality, and it feels quite liberating to let that go and think, do you know what, we're hardly stuck out in some remote desert - if we do run out of spaghetti, and we need it urgently, the coop is only 5 minutes away. Or we can eat fusilli instead.

Nargleblast - well done on Not Buying It - I have also recently started to think harder about 'freebies' etc - esp when I realised I was often driving several miles to the shop to use my coupon for free item (and then also buying other stuff while there), and was paying more than the cost of the free item in petrol to do so. So sometimes it is cheaper not to get the freebie - it took me a while to work that out!

Lyn, I did an MSc. so learnt some critical analysis skills there, especially re sample sizes, confounding factors, bias etc. The ads that get me are the ones where '82% of women said their skin looked better' etc.... I do product testing for a few companies, and while I try my hardest to be honest when doing the surveys, I think some respondents would be a bit more inclined to be positive about a product that has been given to them for free, especially when they are banking on staying on the testing panel long-term. And half the time they only surveyed about 60 people, hardly a representative sample of the millions of potential users out there.

Anyway. I'm still trying really hard with NBI, as we are still working on paying off our house renovation debts (although there will be more to come) and my pay will reduce this year as my pay protection will be running out (am in the public sector and a lot of us have had our salary down-graded). And in fact, it's not looking too bad, we're doing better than I thought, and hopefully my living room will not have holes in all the walls and ceiling (new electrics, moving doorways etc) for too much longer.