Live on £4,000 for a year - 2009, Part 3

Frugaldom

Good evening from soggy Scotland

Spent this afternoon next door playing with SM's new pasta machine and then I guess both households must have had tagliatelle for tea, along with SM's homemade bread. It started out a nice day but by late afternoon the rain had arrived, so 'm going to get soaked tonight again, as I hate missing my walk.

CW, that's a good carbon score you have. Mine could be better if DS didn't need to drive 23 miles a day for work and we didn't need the open fire for winter heat.

Bails, hope your dream of owning the cottage comes true, bad luck about the property valuation difference, I'm sure the prices will increase again soon. Have fun at your festival. Had to G00gle to see what it was, as my first thought was Brighton Festival isn't until Wednesday/Thursday.:rotfl: Sorry, now I know Gay Pride isn't a race horse.

:hello:SFT if you get the chance to read. Hope you're having a fab time.

jtb2412

Morning everyone,

Tis a lovely day here (was awful yesterday - rained all day so we spent the afternoon watching the Indiana Jones trilogy on movies . Not much done at all !)

I did the carbon footprint calculator too and we came in at about 740 which was good ! I think we offset quite a bit because we grow our own and don't go on foreign holidays - I do use quite a bit of gas/electric though (still!) so I'll be looking at ways to cut down on that when winter gets here. I've got loads of wool in the loft (freecycle) so might learn to knit/crochet and do us some blankets/door draught thingys - although not sure that I'll have them done by the winter :rotfl::rolleyes:.

We're off to the car boot sale this morning - decided to reward our hard work over the last few weeks and have a morning off from the allotment/garden/house. It's a massive one so will take most of the morning to get round.

Bails sounds like the cottage is still within your grasp - I'm really pleased for you . Hope you had fun at Pride - nearly went ourselves but the weather put us off a bit, not fun with 3 kids moaning about the rain (they're not very 'hard' when it comes to the weather :rolleyes:).

NYK sounds like you had fun with the pasta machine - got one here too but DH is better than I am, I nearly pasta my fingers so it's a bit dangerous for me :rotfl:. Have you done any costings on whether it's cheaper to make own pasta or buy?

Hester can fully sympathise with your DD - used to live in a village where there was nothing to do in the hols. Used to keep them entertained with lots of cooking, nature walks, making mud pies, buckets of water (when the weather was hot enough!) and let their friends round to play. It was often easier to look after 5 or 6 than just my 3 !

Right off to the booty ! Have a lovely Sunday everyone

JAMIEDODGER

morning everyone!

finally have my laptop fixed and i am getting back on track! will be working out all my figures over the next couple of weeks as the bank statements come in as I have been mainly tracking expenses on scraps of paper. Now I have laptop again, I will be sorting out spreadsheet and updating everything.

Found that article about Carbon Trading very interesting NYK! Will probably spend the next few days catching up on what everyone has been up to as the forum was a nightmare to read on my phone!

Must get up and sorted now as the kids are starting to wake up!

Frugaldom

Good morning frugaldonians,

Hi Jamiedodger, glad to see you've got your laptop back.

JTB, I hadn't thought about the carbon offsetting, does that mean my garden practices offset my electricity useage? I have planted 9 fruit trees, am growing loads of veggies and have opted to burn locally cut logs rather than coal, as the logs are supposed to be carbon neutral. Pasta costings - fresh egg pasta isn't something I would normally buy, as it doesn't fit in with a tight grocery budget, but 450g plain flour costs less than 20p if using the cheap stuff and eggs are readily available from my hens in the garden. It's one of those really frugal foods that would, otherwise, be considered as a bit of a luxury, as are things like globe artichokes (if they grow), hm lemon curd and, even, champagne. All these things are cheap if home produced. (We have already tasted the elderflower champagne and it is lovely!)

Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend and that those who are off on their hols are having a great time.

cw18

Nyk, I think growing your own food is seen more as 'carbon neutral' due to not having the airmiles (and lack of 'processing') along the route.

Changing my profile from 'I dont try to buy or grow in season food' to 'I try to buy or grow some in season food' drops my footprint from 7.84 tonnes to 7.71 tonnes.

Then changing that to 'I only ever buy or grow in season food' drops again to 7.45 tonnes

Changing a different selection in my profile from 'some of the food I buy or grow is organic' to 'all of the food I buy or grow is organic' drops is further to 7.32 tonnes


So (for me) the biggest individual difference I can make is to always/only buy/grow in season foods - saving 0.39 tonnes. Changing to completely organic produce (from where I am now) would only save me 0.18 tonnes. Changing both would save me 0.52 tonnes, so not a simple case of adding the two together

BigMummaF

nykmedia wrote: »

It's mainly grocery shopping that's crippling the budget, but only because I choose to give gifts at Christmas and include this as an essential. The seasonal splurge needs to be budgetted for throughout the year or else I'd run the risk of being tempted back into the 'buy now, pay later', mindset. I could easily blow the budget on food and solve the Christmas problem the plastic way, but this would be very anti-MSE.

I've rejoined the Grocery Challenge this month with a total to take me up to year's end. I used to do a monthly goal but it was so very tempting to think I had x amount left so I had a reason to spend it :wall: Anyhoo, I'm giving this way a go now with a view to joining yooze folks for real come 01.01.10. & arrived at a 'guesstimate' of £220 a month on previous figures before I had finished the July totals :eek: Now I'm wondering what on earth I've let myself in for!
I do so admire your abilities to list everything to see where every penny could be allocated but fear this is still a little above my capabilities The most I've been able to manage is to separate my "grocery" spends to see if there are areas where I could do better. At the moment, H&B gets put into "Stores" alongside things like tomato sauce & cornflakes while Gifts go into "Miscellaneous" with the bbq charcoal & garden chairs while they've been on offer.
But to get to why I've picked out the above bit of your post...we were in MrM the other day & the check-out staff asked if we wanted saving stamps. We [me muvva & I] said no but then talked about it on the way home. We have saved in some stores before, but I feel that--with the price wars that happen--we are better off just buying up bits when we see them in whatever store we are in at the time. Like yesterday, MrT had an offer on those cheesie nibbles [shaped like playing card suits & too scrummie for words:drool:] that ends today, so I got three packets to put by for said celebrationary period. For one thing they are a bit difficult to find & another, we don't really splurge on actual crimbo fayre so I just concentrate on what we like but no longer buy throughtout the year.
The majority of gifts for the offspring are 'named' items of clothing from charity shops & again are bought as & when seen, or on offer or sale if underwear. I did curse tho when I spotted the exact same pjs, absolutely brand spanking new in a charity shop, for £4:50 less than I'd "paid" using those complicated MrT double-up vouchers...bad timing follows me like the proverbial pong :rotfl:
I apologise for the waffle but I get so many good ideas from this thread that I wanted to contribute a few of my own. I hope they are of some use, if nothing more than to encourage debate.

cw18

BigMummaF wrote: »

we were in MrM the other day & the check-out staff asked if we wanted saving stamps. We [me muvva & I] said no but then talked about it on the way home. We have saved in some stores before, but I feel that--with the price wars that happen--we are better off just buying up bits when we see them in whatever store we are in at the time.

I've used a savings scheme a couple of times, but more a case of 'ab'used it really

Mr A did have a thing (need to check if they still do), whereby they added to your savings if you had them by a certain date. So if you had £49 they added £1, £97 and they added £3, £145 and they added £5 (or something like that - you certainly did better the more you had in, but they had 3 levels). As you save on a plastic gift card you can actually have multiple cards too. What I did was to whack the money on a week or two before the cut-off date, and then spend them on food to last from then up to and including the season and a few presents (I think they have to be spent in a certain time frame to get the extra as well), and the rest was spent on stock-piling. For the length of time the money had to be on the cards it was a vastly improved interest rate compared to the banks - and that was a few years back when interest rates were much higher than they are now :rolleyes2

thriftylass

Good afternoon!

I consider last month a success. I "only" spent £370 which is much less than the previous months. £113 went on groceries :T, £192 on going out clothes etc and the rest on bills. So there's hope for me yet. The birthday, leaving do and wedding yesterday (yes, three events in one day, were great too although I spent a fair bit.

P.S. I also had a little play with the carbon foot print calculator:

• Your footprint is 8.90 tonnes per year
• The average footprint for people in United Kingdom is 9.80 tonnes
• The average for the industrial nations is about 11 tonnes
• The average worldwide carbon footprint is about 4 tonnes
• The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 tonnes

There's only two of us and I guess it could be lower if BF would use his car less (which he easily could) and I wouldn't have to fly to Germany now and then. Our biggest value was secondary use. But I refuse to turn vegan and buy everything second hand. Plus recycling can be difficult depending where you live. We can only do glass and paper. Not having a bank account reduces it by 0.4 tonnes ?

mama67

This is my result from the Carbon Footprint site.

This is for 4 people, using Coal and oil for heating, also driving a 2ltr engine car.

Your footprint is 8.54 tonnes per year
The average footprint for people in United Kingdom is 9.80 tonnes
The average for the industrial nations is about 11 tonnes
The average worldwide carbon footprint is about 4 tonnes
The worldwide target to combat climate change is 2 tonnes

thriftylass

Got inspired by some of the posts where people publish a to-do-list, made one for this week because there's a few things I've been putting off for ages. This week's list is:

• relist books etc on Am@z0n
• sort out my wardrobe (charity or try to sell stuff I don't wear)
• try to rid my pepper/chilli plants of their pets (little spider mites)
• clean and tidy the house top to bottom esp. kitchen cupboards and floors
• look out books that can go to my work's charity book sale this month
• try not to spent money :rotfl:
• make a list of other things to get done within this month