Keeping down spending on "stuff"

alliboy03

lisa_75 wrote:

With the going out, how do you cope with birthdays/christenings/aniversarys /weddings? This month alone I have been invited to a christening (that I have to attend), an anniversay party (that i have to attend) and a wedding (that I have lied and said I can't go to). All these need a gift/ money for the bar etc. Do you just simply not go to things like this? The kids are also always being invited to parties at school.

As for £10 on a gift, what kids of things do you buy? I would really love some ideas. I have my mum and best friend to buy for this month. I would usually spend £50 each at least as my best friend spent £150 on me last birthday. I am going to feel so awful only spending so little when I get such nice gifts.

why dont you try shopping on ebay or other auction sites i do and save loads of money on presants, i'm not working at the moment and i try not to spend more than a fiver on other peoples kids, look in the sales, bargins galore.:money:

bj-sailaway

Go round the house looking for prezzies that people have bought you and you've never used, if they are still pristine, put them in a box and use them as gifts - but not for the person who bought them in the first place!

If our family and best friend love you, they'd be devastated that your spending what you can't afford on them.

My husband and I gave up buying each otehr birthday and christmas presents years ago, just more financial stress - we enjoy watching the kids open their prezzies and that's good enough for us.

Wasn't there a thread around Christmas about cheap gift ideas?

franr43

I think the biggest obstacle is about thinking it in terms of going to a shop and buying the things.

1)Gifts for adults. The gifts that everyone remembers and welcome most are the plants I give (cuttings I have grown on, vegetable plants and seeds etc) and the home made preserves. For example I'll often give people a basket of preserves (basket from charity shop filled with coloured shredded paper (office waste shredded) with some marrow chutney, green tomato chutney (both marrows and green tomatoes thrown away by many people in late september/October they've so many!) some spiced wine vinegar (rosemary, garlic chilli etc) or oil (similar spices) and maybe an orange pomander stuck with cloves, jams made with fruit gluts, there's loads you can do. People love them. Freshly made chocolate truffles making and christmas pudding making is a very satisfying family activity and make great presents far tastier than you can buy. likewise christmas mincemeat. I've chosen these because they're rediculously easy (jam is trickier) reliably produce something of infinetely superior flavour and appearance to top range shop stuff and are a very personal kind of gift.

2)Gifts for children. children love growing things (this time of year often seeds sold off half price, children love climbing beans, sunflowers,courgettes all grow dramatically with spectacular flowers and edible fruit. You can get immaculate books second hand from car boots, charity shops etc (with charoity shops you're actually giving twice, once to the charity and a second time to the child.

3)Charity shops and car boots often have fantastic stuff for gifts and party bags e.g. for my kids parties the party bag contains things like dinosaurs, racing cars, pencils, seed packets, all from these kinds of sources. Like another responder, I have a 'present box' which gets filled through the year with the many nice things I see (I use the rule would I like to recieve it myelf or for my child?)

4)Cards. I buy boxes of attractive cards to suit a variety of themes and xmas cards in January - then I don't need to waste time shopping for a card when I need one and I can give lovely cards which are much much cheaper.

Going to shops just when you need something is mind numbing and paralysing - think outside the box to solve this one.

RedBooties_2

lisa_75 wrote:

Thanks. The internet is not in my name. My husband is very reluctant to downgrade it.

On the one hand I can understand his reluctance. It's more pleasant knowing you have the extra capacity on hand should you need it than it is if you hit the bottleneck and spend time waiting for things to download.

On the other hand, the chances are he isn't going to need it. Those who've already mentioned it are correct; going down to 2Mbps, or further if it will help keep the pennies in your pockets, is not going to be all that noticeable. Of course it depends what it is being used for, but as a rough example, at work we have been on a 512Kbps connection for years and it's never been a huge problem for any one of the 20 of us.

lisa_75 wrote:

My phone calls cost £10 a month. I am with telewest. Which company do you use if you don't mind me asking?

We use the BT with free evening and weekend calls up to one hour. I only ever phone landlines, and when it gets to 55 minutes, I tell the person I'm calling that I'll hang up and call them back. This way we only pay the line rental at £18 (£6 each). (I'm always at work during weekdays so using it outside the 'evenings and weekends' period isn't an issue).

If I need to contact someone on their mobile, I use sms instead. I *never* use my mobile for making calls. I'm on PAYG, and if I have a message that is, say, 180 characters, I go back through it to get it down to below 160 so it becomes one message, not two. This way, I must put about £20/year in my phone. If that.

In fact, as an aside, I was called by someone acting on behalf of my operator, asking if I wanted to switch to a contract. They asked how much I put in my phone and when I told them they couldn't wait to put the phone down on me!

If, say you were on the above plan, and you needed to call someone during a weekday, you could always use Skype or similar, seeing as you already have the broadband (may as well try and use some of that capacity, eh? )

KARENW wrote:

Apart from buying gifts well in advance in the sales, it also often works out good value to buy joint gifts.
[snip]
ALso you could club together with someone else to buy a bigger gift for example for my parents ruby wedding anniversary my sister and I and our OH's bought them tea at the ritz.

I was going to mention this myself; that this also works another way, where you can club together with others who would be buying gifts for the same person. I usually insist that my family spend the money on themselves as I really don't need anything; I don't cost much to run Usually, they like to buy me something anyway, so to appease them I tell them to club together and buy me just one thing. This usually means that they spend less individually than they would have otherwise.

In fact, this year is the only one that is bucking that trend - I've completely run out of things that I 'need' or that 'would be nice', so for my birthday I'm getting underpants! They should be cheap enough.

As for cards, I don't have trouble buying those - I don't believe in them (I see them as a waste (even if they plant new trees in place of the ones they cut down) and only serve to line fat cats' pockets. Instead, IMNSHO, it's much better (more rewarding) to give them a telephone call (partitioned into 55 minute blocks of course ) and just have a good chat. This works in reverse too, of course, because I request that people don't send me cards either.

The real moneysaver for me, when it comes to buying gifts, is that I sometimes go years without buying anyone birthday gifts. This is mostly because I'm very forgetful when it comes to dates and I don't bother sending belated ones. A nice bonus is that people have come to expect this and are actually pleasantly surprised when I do turn up with a gift

And finally... I never buy gifts for friends or non-close family members. That usually means that I only have to buy for my Brother, Mother, Grandmother and Grandfather, and my Great Grandfather.

This is easier for me of course, because it's just the way it is (my friends have never bought me gifts, nor have I ever bought them any; that's the way it's always been). As you've already got into the habit of spending a lot on your friend/s you really need to nip that in the bud by setting - as others have said - an upper limit, or by doing the token gifts thing.

Oh I do go on. I'll stop now.

seven-day-weekend

lisa_75 wrote:

Thanks Dotty. I really have no idea how to manage on that little. £120 per year per person on clothes would only just cover 2 sets of school uniform, school shoes and a coat for my one of my kids. What about all the other clothes they need?

Also there are 4 of us. That makes £480 per year for Christmas/birthdays. Including us I have 18 relatives and friends that need Christmas and birthday gifts every year. Also there are fathers/mothers day/anniversary. If i just buy Chritsmas and Birthday gifts that is only £13 per person per gift. What on earth can I buy for that? Also the kids at Christmas/Birthdays. I can't only spend £13 on them, they would be devastated.

As for £120 per person on hobbies, My daughters brownie holiday is £90 alone, not including the weekly subs and uniform.

I am not being difficult, but I really need some advice on how to manage on
so little.

I don't see why you have to buy all those Christmas/Birthday presents. Same for Mothers' Day/Fathers' Day. Just buy (or make) a small token gift and if they are not satisfied, tough. I think £13 is heaps. I personally wouldn't buy other than token presents at all for these people (I haven't actually bought ANY for years - just told everyone I couldn't afford it when my husband was a student and never went back to buying them.)

As for the kids being 'devastated' if you didn't spend enough money on them, well a) if you don't spend on other people you'll have more to spend on them and it won't hurt them to realise that it doesn't grow on trees. There's loads you can do to give them a nice time without spending tons of money. I gave my son an IOU for Christmas once because what he wanted would almost certainly be much cheaper in the January Sales. He didn't have a problem with that when I explained why. Some things can be bought seecond-hand off eBay - why should it matter how much it costs? Kids are actually very supportive and forgiving I've found, and although they won't remember the expensive presents, they WILL remember a mum who did her very best for them on a limited budget.

School Uniform, sometimes the school sells it second-hand, or you can buy things like shirts from cheap shops. Brownie/Guides can be bought second-hand too.

Hope this helps and I also hope it hasn't come across as judgemental, it honestly isn't meant that way - just to give you some tips on managing on a small budget. :beer:

m.r.davies

Lisa

Good luck with all this,
This country is known as rip off Britain! we have to be savvy in this day and age.

I've sent you a private message.

One thing i do is have account for different things (i got 10 in total)
One for DD's and standing orders,
one for Cheques
one each for personal money
one for food and petrol and general stuff

This gives me more control over money and you shouldn't get the old..."oh rubbish i forgot about that"

I also have a spread sheet i could send you if you like, it has all the ins and outs, just put in your income and out goings, i find it helpful when i need to see how much money i could have left at the end of the month

you need to get your hubby on side, make sure he fills up in the cheapest petrol station and that his tyre pressure isn't too low etc...

You'll be suprised how much you can save when you put your mind to it

justruth

Just a couple of points as everyone here have already given me inspiration, never mind you!

1. Your family and friends love you because you're you, the presents are unimportant.

2. You seem to have a lot of small debts, If you cut back enough (£5 off gas, £5 off electric, £10 off groceries, £80 off phone etc) and believe me they really are all achievable without even noticing, you would have £100 extra to pay off some of this debt you already have, such as the Capital one credit card and £13 on Next, pay off Next on the next month (£100 from cutting back, £10 from not having to pay capital one) and have £33 off the simply be. In 3 months you could have eliminated three of your debtors. conventional wisdom is to clear the debts with the highest APR first, but using this method by christmas you will have got rid of the Abound debt as well, then you can look at the longer term objective of clearing the total debt having effectively gained £40 a month.

No one seems to have touched on the debt side of things, I'm off christmas shopping in charity shops now!

SusanCarter

m.r.davies mentioned multiple accounts. Although we don't have quite so many accounts, when we got married, my husband and I each set up a personal account separate from our joint account. We agreed a monthly amount to go into them by standing order (currently £40/month) and use this to buy "personal" things.

By "personal" I mean things for ourselves such as spending money on hobbies or luxuries which we couldn't justify using the joint account for. It also means we can buy each other presents if we want and the recipient is not going to be thinking about whether we could afford it. I spend most of mine on books and stamps and he spends his mainly on beer,crisps and pop. It means we can buy these things without feeling guilty that we might be spending more for ourselves than the other person. It helps make it fair and keeps a control on it as there is a limit to the money allocated.

Anything we want to buy from the joint account is agreed upon before it is bought unless it is rountine stuff like groceries or something very cheap. I was originally better at getting good deals and general moneysaving than my husband but now we are about the same. We try to remember to switch things off and if possible make phonecalls when they are cheaper. He tends not to remember when it's cheaper on the landline as he only had a mobile phone before which is the same price all the time. He has improved dramatically just by me mentioning when would be a better time to make the phonecall and why. He also used to buy the cheapest packet of something rather than looking at what was the best value but know he is better than me at checking because I always told him when I was checking. I think you have to be patient and just keep mentioning little things and eventually he will come round to the idea of saving money by changing things.

Hope I haven't rambled too much and that some of it is helpful.

katiev007_2

try https://www.flylady.net

this lady knows about having too much STUFF (something that undermines family fun....)
This is a slightly wacky website but there is a good little workbook here for bringing the finances under control
look here http://www.flylady.net/images/FACE2004.pdf

mongo_bongocat

This might sound a bit 'twee' or 'naive' but my other half actually started making her own birthday and christmas cards. You would be surprised how many people appreciate something that has been hand crafted (and you can get all the stuff you need for many cards from Argos or similar for a fraction of the cost). Why stop there? If you have a bit of an artistic streak get some canvas boards and paint and give people a nice picture for that special occassion (I'll stop now because I'm starting to sound like the 'Top Tips' they used to print in Viz).