My challenge - living on virtually nothing!

8pnoodles

I am going to try and convert myself from chocolate to carrots and bananas. I love eating raw carrot, would quite happily take one or two for lunch at work.

I barely eat anything, I tend to eat as little as possible, and then fill up on high carb stuff. I don't know what it is, I just really don't like eating and hate the feeling of being full. But hopefuly if I fill up on cheap foods like rice and pasta I won't need to hit the high carb expensive junk.

Cooking is a really issue in my house. I lived in a shared house with two girls who LOVE to cook. They tend to take over the whole kitchen, one after the other. So it's hard for me to find the space to cook really. Our kitchen is huge but very badly designed so we only have one tiny bit of workspace and a small dining table to do food prep on and only one person at a time can get to the stove/cooker as it's in the corner!

I did manage to live on £30 a week for a few weeks, until a vet's bill wiped me out, followed by a prescription charge. Then yep, I hit the "I don't care any more" and splurged a bit.

I wasn't doing a spending diary at the time, and I find that really helps though, hence the blog. I'm hoping if I get enough people following what I'm doing, I won't mess it up!

My plan is sort of to do this until maybe January, or a bit longer, then at least I'll have paid off a big chunk of my debt.

I know I make a lot of food then just throw it away and don't eat it so I need to focus on this.

MsLondon my aim is to see exactly how little I can live on. I was reading somewhere if you asked someone whether they wanted to buy a house or a cup of frothy coffee, everyone would want to save to buy a house. But everyone really buys the coffee.

S I'm going to say to myself any time I'm tempted, do I really want to spend yet ANOTHER month living miles away from my boyfriend?

I look over the last year and I could have paid off way more than I have. I feel some debt karma coming on, I need to be harsher with myself.

My entertainment/going out plans are:

Go to the local library and read loads. I used to love doing this but haven't for ages. it's free, and gets me out of the house!

I love going for walks round where I live, listening to music and just walking. Nice and stress relieving.

Learning German! I have tons of learn German tapes and CDs, but I haven't listened to one of them yet!

My bloke has kindly donated me his Xbox and loads of games. He also has the world's largest DVD collection. Very useful guy.

I have my pet rats, they have their own playpen and loads of toys, it's great fun letting them out for the evening. And I should be doing this more than I do too!

My best mate lives miles away but she's promised to come visit for girl's nights in and sitting watching her sex and the city boxed set and drinking Tesco's own brand perry (which is 89p a bottle!).

I also want to learn how to write websites.

All other suggestions gratefully recieved!

Tondella

madfrenchgirl wrote:

I have put into place a food planner which is very very helpful: we only spend 100 pounds a month on food for both of us. You can ask Squeaky where it is. We cook several portions of one meal and then freeze it. It is very practical as we have both long commutes to go to work and dont necessarily have the time to cook everything from scratch every night. And at least we know what has been in our plates!

MadFrenchGirl please can you provide a link to the food planner, food expenditure is something I could really cut back on ... and I don't know who squeaky is!

halloweenqueen_2

Have you bought a season ticket at the doctors - you pay a set 6 month or 12 month fee and every prescription you get in that time is covered by the fee.
If you wanted to round up paying your debts to £500 amonth, that would leave you with roughly 40 a week (60 in dec), over 7 days, that nearly £6 a day. Iceland do meal deals for a fiver so you could have one of them. Obviously the £5.71 would have to cover the rats food and bits and bobs. I'm trying to do my grocery challenge this month for a family but to be fair that is food only. You can't go wrong with the old style money saving forum.

Tondella

8pnoodles wrote:

Cooking is a really issue in my house. I lived in a shared house with two girls who LOVE to cook. They tend to take over the whole kitchen, one after the other. So it's hard for me to find the space to cook really. Our kitchen is huge but very badly designed so we only have one tiny bit of workspace and a small dining table to do food prep on and only one person at a time can get to the stove/cooker as it's in the corner!

I really feel for you on this issue as sharing a tiny kitchen made me unhappy and more prone to buying convenience food or living on toast! However your housemates might be amenable to a cooking rota, where you each take turns in cooking for the whole house. This has a couple of advantages, firstly you get to take advantage of your two housemates' excellent cooking skills and maybe learn a few tips from them, secondly scaling up recipes is generally cheaper than cooking three seperate meals for one.

PS I love snacking on raw carrots too, my mum used to send me to school with a raw carrot wrapped in tin foil when everyone else had kitkats, consequently I got knicknamed bugs bunny!

8pnoodles

There's no way we'd all cook together. It's just not going to happen. I'm too fussy about my food (although I am trying) and neither of them care about saving money so would whinge if I ever bought value stuff. Lastly one has spent the last 6 months b*tching to all and sundry about my cooking (it's not that bad!) and I couldn't face it.

Ok, how do you go about freezing food?

My freezer space is limited but I reckon I can plan and be clever and maximise space.

Do you let it cool down before freezing it? And how do you know how long to microwave/heat it up for and at what temperature?

Cheers guys, this is all helpful beyond belief.

Love the eating for two days for a pound thread! Gonna HAVE to get myself to start liking baked beans I think!

8pnoodles

The season ticket for prescriptions isn't really an option, I have a chronic illness that only flares up from time to time, so I'd pay more with the season ticket than i would just as and when I need to pay for stuff.

One thing I found though was to tell my GP I'm actually taking more tablets a day than I am. GPs have a thing now where they won't give you more than one month's prescription of drugs. So say i only take 2-4 tablets a day. I am allowed by my gp to judge how many I need to take. But if I tell him I'm often taking 6 a day at the moment, I can get more and make them last much longer than a month.

Have an appointment on Thursday, wish me luck!

System

Tondella wrote:

ooh ooh I forgot to mention beans and pulses, very very good for you and very very filling, I make a mean chickpea stew using 1 tin of chickpeas 1 tin tomatoes, half onion, couple of cloves of garlic, scrape of root ginger, few pinches of various spices, handful of fresh spinach if I'm feeling flush, tastes fab, lasts forever!

Got to agree how fantastic beans, pulses, rice and grains are. You can save even more by buying dried beans (even though you have to soak them overnight and cook for up to 2 hours!). Also, if you've got a decent Asian supermarket by you, you should be able to get beans and rice even cheaper. I get 2kg of dried chickpeas for about £1.50. Although did find that bizarrely Sainsbury's worked out cheaper on basmati rice!

Do you like porridge? You can get the Tesco value porridge for about 45p per kg.

I'd personally steer clear of noodles and pasta, unless they're wholewheat versions, as they're full of processed wheat flour which isn't very good for you.

Also, might help if you cut and paste all your income and expenses on here that you listed on your blog.

madfrenchgirl

here is the link to the food planner thread...

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=88723&highlight=food+planner

8pnoodles

lol believe me even processed flour type pasta will be way better than what I'm eating at the moment.

For example, today's food consisted of:

Missing breakfast, then at work eating a bag of mini cheddars, monster munch, a bar of Thornton's chocolate, a pepperami, a banana and some prepacked melon chunks. No sandwiches as I ran out of bread yesterday.

Dinner on a bad day is just chocolate.

The two lots of fruit I'm eating today is unheard of, I've got people in the office giving me shocked looks and asking if I feel ok!

So I'm aiming to get to a normal level of eating, rather than to go over the top healthy in one go as I wouldn't stick to it.

Can't have porridge to whoever suggested it, no dairy sorry.

I am going to wean myself off the complete junk onto easy to cook things like smash and mince, pasta and ready made sauce, etc. Then go from there. I NEED to learn to like baked beans though!

Ideas for breakfasts please? I should start eating it. I currently have toast or microwaveable egg fried rice. Told you I was weird! I went through a phase of scrambled eggs for a bit but can't seem to stomach them now.

Anyone know how to cook a boiled egg that keeps the yolk runny but the white bit solid?

And anyone think of something I can use to improvise as an egg cup?

voodoozoe

Use the egg box...while egg boils, get scissors and cut out its little home(you can shape it a bit if you want!!). After eating egg, throw disposable egg cup away...no washing up!!!! :T