Help me get over my Finest habit

Plum_Pie

I buy ceylon leaf tea in 1k bags for £1.80. If you can be bothered with an infuser and/or a tea pot, it's worth it. I buy it in my local Turkish-owned shop, but you can find it at most "Best-In" shops.

(They are also, often, good sources for cheap pulses and cheap, fantastic quality Italian dried pasta, btw.)

pink_princess

hi about the coffee exc when we started cutting back a few months ago i couldn t stand the thought of value foods.so to slowly adjust we started mixing things a bit of bisto a bit of sainsburys own,then we just slowly reduced the quantity of the bisto till we didn t realise we d changed.You could try this by just trying the shop s own filter coffee .You don t want all basic s life has to have some perks.

thriftmonster

Don't give up on changing some things even if you find there are some branded things you prefer. We all have our last holdouts - ours are teabags (Teadirect) and English mustard (Colmans), HP sauce and Maldon sea salt. I will also only buy free range eggs and fairtrade bananas and cocoa. But everything else I regard as fair game.

But the key thing is that we didn't work this out overnight - I have been working on it for several years now.

Good luck!

procrastinator

1274 wrote: »

Thanks all for your comments. It's not that my heart isn't committed to economising but, like Stephen says, supermarket shopping is a strange mix of head (am I getting enough nutrition to survive?) and heart (does it taste/smell nice / work well for me?). Sure, I could sort the head bit out on T's value, but the heart bit's proving more difficult. Like, is it worth me wasting at least 5 minutes trying to get cling film off a value roll (good tip about changing the box though - I might decant it into a proper box next time and give it another try). Doesn't sound too long but wrapping a sandwich shouldn't be that much work.

I think the bad Finest habits are especially with the "indulgence" things in life like filter coffee and tea. Part of me thinks it's OK to have these things in Finest or Waitrose, because they're the little things that make life more pleasurable, but part of me is beating myself up when I know I'm paying for the branding and not the product. Oh, and if any of you love coffee and are in London, have you tried the Monmouth chain (Covent Garden and Borough Market)? My favourite!

Your signature intrigues me. The debt has gone up but you are doing OK on the live on 4K a year. 800 left isn't so bad you must have been cutting back somewhere and the extra debt cannot all be down to your indulgences. Don't be so hard on yourself, if what you need is a new way of looking at the value stuff consider the 'extra' value you get from home made ie. I buy value ingredients and use them to make my own meals which have not been packaged, nor left for days from processing to eating. Real value is the time and care you put into presenting alternatives. Of course you should have SOME of the finer things - which ones just take a little time in finding the right alternatives and only you can decide.

moanymoany

We use Tesco value plastic wrap - no problems. The package is useless and we used an old expensive wrap box till it fell apart. Now I use a pair of scissors.

I also use value foil - no packaging - very green.

patchwork_cat

Douwe Egberts is quite often on a BOGOF or 2 for £. We never use clingfilm - pack up lunches in a plastic box. Better still would be to use greaseproof paper to wrap sandwiches - less cancer causing synthetic oestrogens.

shaz_mum_of__2

thriftmonster wrote: »

Don't give up on changing some things even if you find there are some branded things you prefer. We all have our last holdouts - ours are teabags (Teadirect) and English mustard (Colmans), HP sauce and Maldon sea salt. I will also only buy free range eggs and fairtrade bananas and cocoa. Good luck!

I agree i use loads of value stuff but still buy proper cola occasionally and it has got to be the purple- pint and half choccy too;)

Some things like capers artichokes etc are not available in value because they are by definition luxury items you still have a choice:

accept them as a luxury and buy them or change your habits and go without only you can decide which is right for you

the way i look at it what i save on beans and paper products makes up for choccy !!!

small changes add up to big ones

Shaz

We actually prefer Mr T gold instant coffee to the branded one!!

wigglebeena

shaz_mum_of__2 wrote: »

the way i look at it what i save on beans and paper products makes up for choccy !!!

small changes add up to big ones

yup. i fill my trolley up with white labels and presto! the half bottle of gin is entirely justified!

1274

Thanks for all your replies. I feel a bit better now about the 5 or 6 Finest or branded items I buy along with the T's own brand stuff. I'm always reading OS (but this was my first post here) and got caught by the keeping up (down?) with the Jones' on the grocery spend. I think I'll try to accept that I'll want to buy some Finest/Waitrose things and feel OK about it since most of my shopping is T's own brand. Thanks to your good tips on here which I can try also, like decanting stuff out of its carp packaging and accepting that some of the nice deli stuff won't come in own brand. And I agree that internet shopping (with MSE voucher) saves lots of cash (popped into M&S for emergency butter yesterday and came out £5 lighter (and not all of that was due to the butter price!) I may even consider joining the GC, if they'll have me LOL!

Nice to know that there's a few other people out there who don't compromise on their coffee/tea too! I'd buy G&B choc if I wasn't on a neverending diet :rolleyes:

1274

procrastinator wrote: »

Your signature intrigues me. The debt has gone up but you are doing OK on the live on 4K a year. 800 left isn't so bad you must have been cutting back somewhere and the extra debt cannot all be down to your indulgences. Don't be so hard on yourself, if what you need is a new way of looking at the value stuff consider the 'extra' value you get from home made ie. I buy value ingredients and use them to make my own meals which have not been packaged, nor left for days from processing to eating. Real value is the time and care you put into presenting alternatives. Of course you should have SOME of the finer things - which ones just take a little time in finding the right alternatives and only you can decide.

Hi. My debt's actually going down thanks to MSE, the £40K is mortgage and the £30K is my target for 2010. Couldn't have done it though without reading OS and some of DFW daily, and everyone in the DFW £4K challenge thread and those in the MFW mortgage free in 3 thread. Some of the great tips I use from OS include: diluting FF milk so I pop to the shops less, bulking with lentils and veg (not Finest LOL) and generally cooking more (I now have a SC and use it)