FRUGAL LIVING CHALLENGE 2010, part 1. (Living on £4,000 a year)

candygirl

Grrrr I left my seatbelt trapped in car door last night when bringing DGD in from the rain, and it left my light on all night and I needed a new battery:(:(£55 out of budget:(:(so i'm sending myself dodgy hugs :grouphug:
On the bright side had a fab party for dgd who was 1 today:D:D:D

jtb2412

cw18 wrote: »

Our schedules are a bit out-of-sync for the next 10 days or so, so unlikely to see him again until at least a week on Friday - and could easily be the following week. But I think it's safe to refer to him as my OH now

CW, that's really great You absolutely deserve some happiness and I sincerely hope there's lots more of it to come for both of you xx

rozeepozee

Yay, Cheryl. Glad to hear romance is going so well. Long may it last.

Nuala happy belated birthday to you.

I'm on the horns of a dilemma and not feeling very frugal - can I justify being here when I've just upped the budget to £11.5K/annum?

The big spends seem to be on food and petrol. Looking closely at the grocery bill it works out about £7/day for me, DP and DS (plus, I'm eating for 3!) and I can't see how I can reduce this without reducing the quality of what we eat. It's nearly all fresh produce, fruit and veg, then there's fish, meat and dairy (we eat quite a bit of the latter, loads of milk and cheeses, even though I think I'm probably allergic so I am going to cut it out for me once the babies are here). There's no convenience or junk food in there as it's all cooked from scratch, we bake our own bread etc. As for petrol, I've not been walking anywhere during the later stages of this pregnancy and so using more petrol, but I can't see the annual budget reducing now we have our campervan as we want to use it for days out and holidays.

I'm delighted with how this thread has helped me to understand and take control of our household finances and we seem not to waste food anymore (the SC helps with that), but I don't think I could say I'm living frugally at the moment! It'll be interesting to see if the food spend goes down in the summer. Last year we lived almost daily on huge salads we'd grown ourselves. I suspect we mayn't save much after you factor in the spend on seeds and growing equipmemt/materials, but it's certainly the tastiest grub we've eaten in a long time. Nothing like a crisp plate of leaves and summer veg fresh from your own garden flavoured with herb dressing grown from your own herb bed. Chuck in a tin of tuna, anchovies, olives and some capers and bob's your uncle! Mmmmm.

Anyway, I digress. My annoyance at this "failure" spurred me into changing energy providers from npower to ovo which will apparently save me £211 per year, so I'm feeling slightly better about the first quarter.

Am getting loads of practice contractions lately and twin 1's head is way down there so if I seem to disappear at any point, you know why. I'm 35 weeks pregnant now!

NualaBuala

Hi frunchkins :wave:

Thanks a million to everyone for all the birthday wishes - made my day! :T:T:T Would love to have heard you singing Ceridwen - not sure about the cider though, heard it just went up in the Budget so not very frugal. :rotfl: Blairweech, sorry the invite didn't arrive but I sent it by carrier pigeon to save the price of a stamp.

Lynz, I really feel for you with your hand, It's terrible to feel you have to go to work when you're genuinely not able to do your job through no fault of your own. I think your Mum is right about using your health plan. Do take it easy as best you can, easier said than done I'm sure. Sorry to hear about your Grandad's health - and your poor Grandma and Mum. These things are so hard on families. Big (gentle) hugs to you.

Hugs Erme, I think ice cream sounds like just the thing if you're feeling rotten and hormonal. Even if it is freezing outside! Hope your period arrives soon. Speaking of which, I'm looking into making reusable sanitary stuff for eco/frugal reasons - it was you who put the idea in my head. I'm on FB (is that the blue and white one?) but haven't been on in yonks. I tend to go through phases of these things and use them to distract me when I'm supposed to be doing something else. :rotfl:

cw18 wrote: »

Many Happy (if late) Returns. And I'm with you on the h/m being better than a take-away..... I gave up on the latter some years ago, as I just didn't enjoy them enough for what they cost!!
......

Thanks Cheryl - I feel dead guilty now cos I ended up getting a takeaway tonight.:o *hangs head in shame*. I used a load of coins I had saved to pay for it so it's not out of my budget money although I will include it in my total spent. And it wasn't nearly as nice as the HM dinner I had yesterday.
Am thrilled for you that last night went well. Wouldn't be keen on the mussels but the rest sounds lovely - he sounds like a nice guy! I will stay tuned to find out what happens next time.

candygirl wrote: »

Grrrr I left my seatbelt trapped in car door last night when bringing DGD in from the rain, and it left my light on all night and I needed a new battery:(:(£55 out of budget:(:(so i'm sending myself dodgy hugs :grouphug:
On the bright side had a fab party for dgd who was 1 today:D:D:D

Doh! Have some more dodgy hugs from me too! :grouphug::grouphug::grouphug: Glad your dgd had a great party - the perfect antidote to having to spend money on a new battery.


So I've done my totals and so far this year I've spent €1892.61 out of a €10,000 budget so doing ok so far. I still have "biggies" like TV licence and house insurance to pay so that will push up the total a lot - am crossing fingers the insurance hasn't gone up too much from last year. I'm considering selling the TV to raise some money towards my loans and also wouldn't have to pay the licence fee any more. I do enjoy watching certain programmes, mainly films, but it's a luxury, not a need.

Welcome to anyone joining in and good luck to everyone going on to the 2nd quarter of 2010! Yay for frugal living! :j

NualaBuala

Thanks for birthday wishes Rozee.

I realised that whenever there's a slight gap in your posting I wonder if there's twin news. I reckon we should get Kate Humble from BBC's Autumnwatch/Lambingwatch etc to stake out your house and keep us posted on any developments. The lambing one was especially fab - the ewes did this thing called "moongazing" where they threw their heads back before the lambs were born so if you notice anything similar maybe it's twin-time! I have everything crossed for you!

cw18

Rozee - your grocery budget doesn't sound bad to me..... I'm on £1.70 per person per day, so even just for you, your OH and DS that would come to £5.10/day. And that's buying as much as I can on Whoopsie and using cheap cuts of meat when I can't get Whoopsied ones.

As long as you have the income to cover the increase in your budget, then I don't see it as a problem. Doing initial estimates can be very tricky, and with the changing/expanding family you have I would imagine it's going to be a lot trickier for you than for a 'simple' household like mine

Just finishing off my s/sheet updates now, so will hopefully be back very soon to post my current position.......

Blairweech

January




February



March

Blairweech

As you can see from the above, I am almost 2/3rds through my budget for the year. Curses. I expected to have spent a LOT as I am including everything (eg all my rent/bills for Jan and Feb), but I did not expect to spend almost £700 in March, with NO bills (apart from my loan). Admittedly over £200 of this is for Ebay (still unsure whether or not to include...). Also includes several 'one off' expenses e.g. van hire, mail redirection etc. Guess it will take a bit of tweaking.

I have not included the sale of the car as yet, as that money will be used to purchase a new car and tax it. Any money left over will be transferred to savings and treated as such Managed a NSD today too.

Have written a list of things I 'might' buy in April (another wii remote and some hooks for the back of my door). Not necessary, so will try not to - have stuck it in my purse. Other than that no planned spends for the month, so need to be reallllllllllly frugal. Just wish the weather would improve, then I could be filling my time with walks and bike rides etc.

Micron - :wave:
Phoebe - :think: Not sure, as you are heating the milk so maybe this would stop it turning? And in my experience, commercial yoghurt doesn't go off, it just gets more yoghurty...
Kezlou - Well done on your weight loss. I need to go the other way, put weight on before I can fit into a pair of jeans!
Lynz - I hope your wrist gets better soon - I know it is easy for me to say but please try and take it easy!
CG - Could you not have jumped the car? I did the same thing last year (isn't it irritating!!), but then my battery would not hold a charge

cw18

Figures for end of Q1 are as follows



Council Tax well under due to the 2 'non payment' months

Water is showing as being over budget, but this is because I've had my 6 monthly review and my payments are about to drop - so I've adjusted my annual budget to reflect this. Should balance by year end.

Gas/Electricity fractionally under - due to my budget being a shade higher than 12x my current payment (as also using up a credit balance at the moment)

C/H cover showing as under as I've not yet had my pament plan for 2010-11 so am working on a guesstimate (should arrive in the next 4-6 weeks)

Phone & B/band showing as under. Discount on plan ended in Jan (so payment that month well below rest of year), but can shop around again come July.

TV License showing as 'bang on', but I've had my revised payment plan so need to look at this (and adjust as appropriate) during April

Mobile phone showing as slightly over budget - this is due to my package apparently not including viewing picture messages I get sent, and when DD sends one it arrives 4 or 5 times in the course of 3 days!!! Must remember to tell her not to send me any more :mad:

Endowment showing as under, but only due to my budget having been rounded up to exact £££s a month

Windows showing as fractionally under. Should end year about £4 under budget as they missed the first of the year (weather)

Dog Expenses showing as waaaaaaay over budget, but this is down to having stockpiled on dog food this month (while it was on offer). Should have enough to last me until October

Vets bills will probably show as over budget until year end, although only other anticipated bills will be October (boosters) and November (calming meds for Bonfire night)

Presents showing as under, but having started to stock up for Christmas as early as normal.....

Petrol showing as under budget, but not as much as it could have been (;)). May have to increase this budget later in the year, but not going to bump it up until I get a clearer picture of by how much

Work related is nicely under budget

Groceries - I'm slightly under budget as a whole, but have used the majority of what I should have put to one side for later stock-piling. However, most of this has been spent stockpiling things for the next few months rather than for next year, so I should hopefully be able to balance it back out before toooo long

Toiletries/Cleaning is well under budget. Think I may have well over-estimated this one, but leaving it for now while I keep a close eye on it (and my stocks)

Anything else is running close to the wire despite my annual budget having been increased. Don't really want to increase this again, so will have to monitor closely and think twice about anything that falls into this.

The other categories (the titles in red) are all 'one-off annual payments', and I'm still in the position of only having had to pay 2 of them. Between the 6 categories I should have put £249 to one side, and I've paid out £189.50 - so actually 'in credit' with these for the moment.

Contingency has been increased due to managing to shave costs off some of the other areas - and I've just realised I've shaved £25 off my grocery budget this evening (DS2 is going away for 4 days and DS1 isn't staying here for his Easter leave) but haven't added it to my contingency. So the annual budget for this one should now read as a whopping £648


Overall, my £8k budget would have allowed for my having spent £2100 by the end of today (I work groceris and toiletries/cleaning according to number of days in month rather than 1/12th annual total, hence quarterly allowance isn't 3/12ths of my annual budget). But total spend to date is £1748.34, meaning I still have £351.66 in the bank despite the overspends (esp the animal related ones)

Frugaldom

TIME FOR PART 2 OF THIS THREAD

Sorry I haven't read any of the past 2 pages of threads. We had a 16 hour powercut, phonelines have been down and there's still no mobile network here. Apart from a little bit of flooding, all is well apart from all the eggs I had in the incubators.

NEW THREAD IS HERE.

Good luck in part 2. I've finished off very, very close to the average, so I do have £3000 left for the next 3 parts of this challenge. Time is becoming more and more limited so apologies for not keeping up here.

IF YOUR NAME ISN'T ON THE CHALLENGER LIST
SEND ME A PM (Private Message) to let me know, thanks.