Live on £4000 for a year - part 4 (Oct - Dec 2008)

Brighton_belle

Just put our readings in to imeasure and we are on a c rating this week, and our averages compared to comparable hsehols are well down so I'm very please. OUr elec use has continued to drop and we are using less now than when we started in Sept. The bulb switching and switching off stuff at night must be working.

thriftylass

I sat down and put together the budget I’ll go on for 2009.

As you will notice, for some items BF and I share the payments. For others, one of us is solely responsible. We worked out the fractions and who pays what by comparing our incomes and by what is simply convenient. But this challenge is only for my part of the bills. I love him to bits but it’s easier to talk to a dead tree then telling him about this or trying to get him to join. Maybe I’ll try again when I show him my savings account balance at the end of next year and point out the hopefully non-existent drastic life style change that was associated with it.

Anyhoo, here it goes…

£ 0 telephone/internet/tv (paid by BF)
£ 10 my mobile PAYG
£ 40 electricity (paid by me)
£ 7 pet insurance (paid by me)
£ 27 long term storage (only my stuff, includes insurance for it; our house is just too small and there are things I definitely can’t part with)
£150 groceries +hh (paid by me solely; includes food for two and my work lunches,
pet food, toiletries, house hold items)
£166 going out, clothing, gifts, miscellaneous (this will be the hardest to keep
down)
£400 per month

£4800 per year (plus £500 contingency for the whole year (emergencies, also to take pressure off a bit in case I run over the budget)

I won’t include

£500 contribution to BF’s mortgage etc (includes council tax, tv licence, home
insurance etc)
£ X holidays and trips to parents country (I do that challenge so I have money
saved for holidays)
£ X saving (I do that challenge so I can save more money for rainy day/future)

I’ll keep doing the free scratch cards (should yield at least £90/year), I start a new sealed pot that I open probably before next Christmas (goal £100) and I aim for 100 NSDs for the whole year. I also try to make the most out of cashback sites and surveys. The rest I’ll take as it comes.

My three months test run budget was £1500 and I’ll probably just about make it. Although that budget had ~£500 month in it and the 2009 is only £400 I’m confident I can make it because I made loads of changes to my spending. This resulted in me constantly reducing it over the last three months from ~£700 (Oct) to ~£400 (Nov) and (very likely) ~£300 (Dec).

dND

Hi Janey,

It's one of those tips I cam across so many years ago I've totally forgotten where I read it, though it was probably in one of the 70s/80's lentil/pulses cookbooks but it said that all peas, beans and lentils toughen if cooked with salt, hence cooking peas with a little sugar instead. And the marmite and stock cubes I highlighted because in the beginning I would diligently omit the 'add x tsp salt' from the recipe but without making the salt connection, happily stir in the stock cubes or marmite! :rotfl:

redglass_2

I second the advice about putting a chicken in a slow-cooker - use some olive oil and garlic and you get the moistest, juiciest chicken ever (though you don't get the crispy skin). If it's a free-range bird you get a thick chicken-flavoured jelly too, you can put it on toast or in soup or whatever. I also like putting chicken in an oval roaster - that way you get the tenderness AND the yummy skin, but it's not as frugal. Oooh, want to eat chicken now! I use my SC to make rice pudding overnight, sometimes, and eat a bit of the lovely hot pud for breakfast....it's also brill for veggie stews like ratatouille.

Right now i have a MASSIVE pot of mushroom, leek and kidney bean soup on the go, all the veggies were whoopsied and the soup would probably feed me for a month if I wasn't so greedy...I might reduce some of it into thick sauce and use for lasagne, a layer of that with added cheese and a layer of tomato... Yum!!!

mumzyof2

does anyone know what thatbook is called where that woman lived off £1 a day

redglass_2

mumzyof2 wrote: »

does anyone know what thatbook is called where that woman lived off £1 a day

Hi Mumzy

'How I LIved on Just a Pound a Day' (not the catchiest title ever!) by Kath Kelly.

shaz_mum_of__2

1274 re pudding

why not try christmas pud ice cream

crumble a chrismas pud into crumbs mix into a tub of posh vanilla ice cream and put into a pudding basin then back in the freezer until about half an hour before eatind and turn out onto a plate

Looks really good and light too (you could add a glug of brandy too)


sophiesmum made your broccoli and stilton soup today it is yummy used the costello blue cheese thats on offer everywhere and frozen broccoli languishing in freezer !!made about 6 portions for £1.50ish


Shaz

Penny2myName

HRH Princess Ann came to college today, security swarming all over the place. When I heard she was in the Library, I avoided it like the plague and went up to my room instead. I knew she was visiting the main church in town, just not the college till I got there. One of lads from my course saw her, and complained that she looked just like any other old biddy..lmao, ahh the youthful age of 19

Janey51

Brighton belle I have never used dried eggs before. I read about them in WW2 cookery books.
Can you use them as ordinary eggs for baking?
How much are they and what section in Lidl would you find them?

Frugaldom

Hi Fruguys!

Better late than never, sorry not to have checked in before now, but I decided that I wanted all my work up to date so I could spend the afternoon putting gran's folder together for Christmas. All I need to do now is await the arrival of extra photographs emailed from my sisters to include all the great grand children. Great, great grand child (my DGD), already has multiple entries within the pages. I've included a photographic guided tour of the new place and will be able to send a new page to her each month to keep it up to date. At least I know she'll be able to read it, as it's all in large print.

If anyone is in Mr T's, they have an assortment of glazed, frozen white fish portions on offer at 99p per pack of 4 fillets. I think it was Kintyre, the name on the packs. I got 3 [acks last time I was in - tomato & herb, cajun spice, and lemon & dill - and can now confirm that these cook up lovely! Even DS, who doesn't normally eat fish, ate all of his. If I had known that, I'd have stocked up with them, but won't be near Mr T's again until next year. Still, if anyone else likes fish, have a look in the frozen food section for them.

Thriftylass, your budget is looking good for 2009! Thanks for posting it. :T

Janey, my spreadsheet for annual spends is nothing like my spending diary because I am deducting whatever savings, winnings and cashback I can, so I can see how far off I am from neutralising all my spending, so feel free to offset against whatever spare cash you have accumulated and well done on accumulating it! :beer:

dND, I didn't know that about the pulses either! That would explain why my split peas don't soften properly when I do pea & ham soup. (Janey, now I know why that soup had hard peas in it, I'll make sure it gets done properly for your next visit! :rotfl: )

Lyndasharp, good luck with the house move preparations, did you get around to knitting some steel wool sleeves and leggings before meeting that kitten again? (I not only want a kitten, I now want to make sorbet, too.)

Hi MollyMop :hello: Hope everything is going alright for you and that you are keeping well. Nice to see you popping in here again.

Not long to go until 2009 challenge so we can all start again. Is anyone still trying the free bingo? My Internet connection here isn't stable enough to have the sites running in the background, but I do try to grab a couple of tickets on a Thursday if I can. Free scratchcards are doing OK, though, and I would love to stick at that and offset next year's mobile phone costs, as they are so low for us here. It's mainly through lack of reception, so I only put enough into the PAYG handsets to prevent them disconnecting completely. Orange has intermittent reception, but neither T Mobile nor 02 can find networks. :rolleyes:

Dried eggs - thanks for asking about them, Janey, as I was wondering about these some time back. I read that you can use them for baking no problem and wondered if they would work out cheaper than fresh eggs, which I'm still trying to calculate against the cost of keeping chickens next year.