Are you more thrifty, OS and MSE than your mother?

kittywight

aww what a lovely thread

im 23 and a single mum to a 4 year old ds
tbh i didnt really learn much from my mum or nan, i learnt myself from books and neccesity after my ds was born.
always having little money, i didnt wanna waste it all buying ready meals and other random stuff , although my cooking really took off after ds started eating, he has always been a very active happy child.. bordering on hyperactive and nutty lol so a lot of ready meals and processed stuff he cant have because he goes nuts!! hes quite a food snob now and turns his nose up unless its homemade and in a huge portion bless, i dont think hes gonna enjoy school dinners next year :P... i learnt a lot of ways to keep costs down by cooking from scratch, and over the years i have become quite crafty
my best friend is in her 50s and extremely oldfashioned... she virtually makes everything/makes to sell ect ... i have learnt a lot from her ...
we always try to keep eachother frugal but spend even more when we are together lol ... girly shopping trips ruin all our hard work

i have friends who get more money than me , but constantly seem to be broke ... readymeals 3 times a day and brand new crap whenever they want it must not leave a lot of cash left
with my budgeting i always have a few spare quid left over to take ds somewhere (normally cinema or iceskating) and we always have lots of fun getting involved in crafts together and he also enjoys cooking

oldstyle all the way

xx

thriftwizard

D'you know, it's really encouraging reading about how you younger ones are becoming OS of your own free will! I started up my business in part because I was so worried that there's a new generation growing up who have no experience of OS living at all; many of my kids' friends, for example, were shocked rigid, then delighted, by the idea of home-made jam from home-grown or foraged fruit. Or home-made biscuits, brownies, even bread. And the idea of sewing buttons back onto their uniforms, in one case, because his Mum would have thought she needed to buy a whole new blazer & he was almost afraid to go home!

I have a feeling we may need these skills again, one day, if transporting stuff halfway round the world becomes even more expensive. And even more than that, the "can do" attitude & the habit of having a little extra tucked away. Wish my 23 y.o. could come & learn a few lessons from you, kittywight, Aarons mummy & skintmum2012, though he's beginning to get the idea of cooking for himself, at least, but sadly his flatmates have yet to find a problem that they can't throw money at...

mardatha

I think everything goes full circle if you wait long enough. But I hope things don't go back to the days when people couldn't go to work because they had no shoes or were too hungry to manage. I do think we might be going back to using less electricity so it would be a good move to buy/learn OS stuff so you can do without it, or use less. The price is going to keep on rising too. Sorry wandering a wee bit OT here but it's just what I been thinking lately. That and always having some savings in the house in cash, for emergencies -now that the job centres are sending people to food banks etc - that's like the 20s or 30s!

MandM90

I'm 21 and my mum worked 12+ hours a day running her own company. My sister and I were brought up by au pairs and lived off convenience food; strangely, both my parents loved cooking and gardening but just didn't have the time. My mum knows how to sew and cook and decorate herself but has only just started it again since going part time/semi-retiring. My grandmother, however, was a mum of 7 who had never worked a day in her life; she married my grandfather at the age of 17! :eek:

I think we're somewhere in between. We are both women so we share things very equally; we both work and both do a lot around the house, though I'm more into sewing etc. and she longs for a garden. I still want a good career but I don't think there is any reason why I can't have that and still provide lovely home cooked meals and have family time too.

Callie22

I wouldn't say that either my grandparents or parents were/are particularly 'old style'. My gran used to knit and sew (and taught me) but she used to be quite shocked about some of the things I do (buying whoopsies, home baking, sewing, being careful about heating etc) because to her there was no need to do those things, and doing these things blatantly was perhaps seen as a sign of 'poverty' to her generation. It definitely wasn't 'cool' to be seen as thrifty - not in the way it is today - it was just what you did and in a lot of cases it was something to be ashamed of. To my gran, 'shop cake' was always more of a treat than homemade!

I think it's great that we're turning back to the older ways of doing stuff, and that old skills are being relearnt. But we should be honest too - we're lucky to be in a situation where being OS is a lifestyle choice that we can make, rather than a way of life we have to follow. I wouldn't want to be without my washing machine, and central heating!

Alison_Funnell

thriftwizard wrote: »

I'm kind of from the generation in between - twice your age, skintmum2012 - and I felt like a Martian at times in the 90s, being (mostly) a SAHM who survived by not spending money, rather than going out & earning loadsamoney to buy my kids a "lifestyle" like most of my neighbours. So - does the OS gene skip a generation, perhaps?!

Thriftwizard, that sounds identical to me.:beer:

My mum is OS but not great at it if that makes sense. Same with my gran. My cooking/sewing skills are far better but our DD has NO OS skills at all, despite growing up surrounded by it.:eek: My MIL is far more OS than most people I know, so we can't say she hasn't had the OS 'genes' from them either. :rotfl:

Aarons_mummy

Can I just say I don't be oldstyle (or at least partly!) to be cool or because it's in fashion, neither on the other end of the scale do I do it out of complete necessity. I do it because I enjoy it, because I like seeing my son enjoying baking some cakes, icing them and generally doing things that don't involve being sat in front the TV all day.

I also like the fact and hope with everything I have that my son will grow up and have at least some of the oldstyle way in him. The money you can save by doing things cleverly makes sense to me and I hope that he will feel the same. I think children have far too much these days, spend too much time in front the tv and have no respect for where things come from generally. I don't want my son to be that way, I want him to understand that life is hard but he can make it easier for himself by adopting this way of life.

I went a bit off track there but I just wanted to clarify that.

mardatha

Callie, that's very true re my mum at least. Because she was poor Irish from a big family, they had nothing. So to scrimp and save was probably the only way they could live, and once times got better then they wouldnt want to be reminded of the bad times. We all do this for different reasons AM, but we all walk the same road

squeaky

Hi all

There's a very similar thread here:- Ask yer Granny!

I'll add this one to it later.

Spendless

No not on my side of the family has anyone been OS from choice. For my G-grandmothers there was no alternative. My Grandmothers were mid-teens as WW2 broke out and married adults with kids as rationing stopped and even my Mum had her 2nd child and was a housewife for a while during the 1970s a time of raging inflation and 3 day weeks. In each case they stopped making/baking/mending as they became 'time poor' either because they returned to f-time paid employment as their kids got older or they became carers for their husbands. The only 'old fashioned' thing I would say my maternal family has done is to always put away savings regularly, even very sparse ones if that was all they could afford.

You'd have to go to my MIL to find someone OS, which is a combo of her enjoying it, being good at it and not having much money.