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Are you ever embarassed by your money-saving ways?
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I had a meat ploughman's the other day and left a little pack of butter, that came with me!
Littlewoods - £214.82 (DD set up so 0%)
Very - £100 (0% on BNPL - 1/4/13)
CC - £2600/£3533.53 (0% until 1/6/14)
Please tell this to MiL :rolleyes:
She still equates conspicuous consumption with wealth.
I think she'd prefer OH & I to be deeply in debt but buying top brands
I guess the thing is too that my father has never been unemployed - or even worried about it. I, on the other hand, have been unemployed before now - so am well aware that it can happen to anyone (I thought I was immune from it until it did - but found I was wrong:mad:) and I know JUST how appallingly low benefit money is for a childless person:eek::eek: - hence I have had no option whatsoever BUT to be very very careful with the pennies sometimes. I think once one has had one or more spells of unemployment then I guess the fear it could happen again probably doesnt go until one is safely retired and no longer needing a job - and I am certainly well aware that the Dole is now so low that I would worry about the waste if I dropped a piece of toast on the floor and had to throw it away.
mum taught me when young the beauty of charity shops (vintage, unique, charitable AND environmentally friendly, what more could you want!?!)
So now i'm teaching her careful consumerism, prudent purchases and the ability to return goods if they aren't right!! :T
And am slowly turning my friends this way too...:rolleyes:
Living like this makes our money go much further and we're almost out of debt now, we're living within our means and next summer we'll be debt free:j
My kids get the ocassional flash of embarrassment out of my money saving, have to say. Like the time I found a vast shelf of incredible reductions at Boots and made them take one basket each, totted up £5 of bargains into each of three baskets and pay for them seperately so I could get a £5 skincare voucher with each basket! (There was still a ton of stuff left...) Or when they open their packed lunches and there's something from the Tesco Whoopsie shelf in it with a "Reduced to 2p" sticker on it, because I'm not rebagging a 2p doughnut and the sticker won't come off. They've got used to me pulling the car over at skips and raiding them for wood etc for the allotment though. They even made their dad do it once when they saw someone chuck a chimney pot into a skip because "Mum will WANT that!" (I did...)
Hubby doesn't care. He takes bags of whoopsied doughnuts and Danish pastries into the staff tearoom quite happily, and he said the £1 Thorntons Continental cake made him very popular with the departmental secretaries.
I did go out for lunch with a very smart friend a few weeks back. We had our lunch and a long natter then we went our seperate ways as she had errands to run, apparently. I was in an unfamiliar area of the city so decided to look round the charity shops before I went home and who did I bump into? After we had a good laugh about it she told me what charity shop she'd got her coat in and I told her about my cardigan. I do think more and more people are waking up to the fact that they can't just waste money, that they need to be a little more careful. I have this feeling that ten or twenty years from now we'll look back at the first few years of the millenium as the last ones where indiscriminate consumerism ran riot, before we all screwed the head a bit and decided money and buying things wasn't all that made you sucessful and happy. I hope so anyway!
Have to say that they've now come around, though they don't take it as far as I do - well not yet anyway
DS2 is beginning to get a reputation as a skinflint but I know he just wants the very best value for money for his hard-earned. He will search high and low for discounts on everything BUT I can't get him to register with Freecycle just yet - though he asks me to search/request on his behalf!
I totally agree with this one too, my outgoings pre-MSE was nearly five times what I spend now - just think of how much money I could've saved!! :eek: I keep seeing these imaginary piles of cash I could've been rolling in now if I had woken up to the MSE ways earlier...