Its tough, it will get better and guess what its freezing brrrrr!

sammy_kaye18

Katholics --- it was nothing to do with my win that he was stropping.

but everything is fine now - all sorted. He apologised for being a pain in the backside.

Should just add too that I am not paying is debts off in full. Just his credit card which has £250 on and a debt that keeps gaining interest which is £1,200. He has another debt that he pays £50 a month too that is interest free though which he will still have and have told him if he gets any more debt etc then I'm done. I want the debt free good life so I need to plan for mine and my kids future and if he tries to balls that up then hes on his own.

Rebekah24

I think if we worried about things in these times we would just drown with anxiety. I try to focus on all the lovely things we do have and take 1 day at a time.

Things are all change with my work atm, I know in January things could change for the worse. But for now. Keep on trucking!

I have cut back with my groceries, £1 a day and keep warm without the heating going on - scarves, blankets, hot water bottle and keeping moving!

Xmas is going to be low key as there are more important things to tuck money away for right now! the kids understand its going to be a little xmas, but still just as lovely!!

Far as the heating, mine is staying off this year. £1500 a year isnt feasable for me on my own. Due to the E7 will be trying to move after xmas. For now will be keeping warm in other ways - hot bottle at the ready

Hope that is some help

Fruball

Someone was asking, either on this thread or another one, I cannot remember... about stretching shoes... I found this on Youtube... Basically you half fill freezer bags with water, pop them in the shoes, put in the freezer and as the water freezes and expands, it neatly stretches your shoe

Brilliant!!!

dumpy

squeaky wrote: »

As an example - a couple of years ago they were selling my favourite coffee as a "two for one". Every time I went shopping I bought four times as much as I'd normally use. By the time the offer ended I worked out that I had almost eighteen month's worth of coffee in stock at what was effectively half price. (Which meant not needing to buy coffee for a long time and so releasing a bit more cash for "the pot" as time went by.
:-)

I have just got to the end of a loo roll mountain which has lasted me about 18 months....... It was a very good offer wish I'd bought more.....

[Deleted User]

This site will help to keep track of energy costs. You input readings every week and you get your results in a graph and also the approximate cost from week to week. You can input older data so you get a graph quicker

www.imeasure.org.uk

I also second joining us on the tough thread. Its a community who welcomes people in and is a lifeline to many

furndire

kittie wrote: »

Be very careful re the pv panels. We have 14 on the house and the max kw we have had on the inverter is 1.9kw. Today was lovely and sunny and the max was 500w because the sun is very low. They were already installed. I calculate that they will produce about half of what we use plus we will get the FIT payment so that will mean that our total energy cost, taking the wood pellets for the stove for ch and hot water, will be about zero. Bear in mind that we had to pay over the odds for this house and the normal cost on pv installation would have been about 12k. You need to do the sums and I for one would think twice about payback time for the panels.

That seems very low, have your panels been cleaned at all.
There are so many variables, pitch of roof being one of them, when getting solar panels - we generated 10 kw yesterday, and 12 kw today. 22 panels, 3.96 kwp system. Totally agree though that without the FiT payment, they would certainly not be a viable option.
One thing we discovered is that the bloomin great poplar tree which is a few gardens away from us partially shadows the panels for a short while during the late afternoon while the sun is so low.

Ceridwen have you had a look at this thread https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/38509528#Comment_38509528

Desperate_Housewife_2-2

KittyBoo wrote: »

Hi Lolly
The best thing I do is to buy a sack of potatoes.
.

can I ask how much do you pay for a sack of spuds please, and how many kgs in them? cheers

shelley_crow

Desperate_Housewife wrote: »

can I ask how much do you pay for a sack of spuds please, and how many kgs in them? cheers

I pay £2.50 for a 12.5kg. As there's only two adults, one 5 year old and a baby we don't through a full 25kg sack in time. The 25kg are exactly twice the price of a 12.5kg bag so luckily we aren't losing out.

bluebag

lolly_896 wrote: »

It's getting cold - Energy prices are rising! Money's tight and were due a vat increase!? Anybody else frightened about what this will mean for them and there families?
Our budget has been skimmed back to the basic and were surviving with little surplus. Redundancy is a possibility for myself and i am making myself ill thinking about how i we are going to stay warm and well fed if this happens especially with all the increases!

x

Yes, I am worried too, but within reason. I grew up in the deepest poverty you could imagine and they were the happiest most carefee days of my life.

We had one room heated with a coal fire, we couldn't even afford hot water bottles, they were very expensive in those days. My dads big coat doubled as a blanket.

We ate stuff you couldn't even buy today, sheeps head, pigs trotters, brawn, brains and (ugh!!!) tripe. No fridge or freezer, one cold water tap and an outside (freezing in winter) loo.

I got two outfits of clothing a year and all my clothes would fit in one drawer. If we needed new shoes it would give my mother a nervous breakdown.

We had ONE toy a year and my word, we treasured it.
The TV was on a 6penny slot and when the money ran out, well that was it, didn't matter how the film ended

We walked everywhere and went on holiday once a year for a week in a seaside caravan by coach.

I lived, LOL and was very, very happy. Just remember, if you have any money in the bank, and a few coins in a dish and cash in your purse you are one of the 8% richest people in the world.

Money is useful, but family and freinds are my life.

Rosanna79

Kidcat
Yours strikes me as a very sensible attitude, remaining clear about what you can and cannot afford. Your daughter may well feel this is unfair but I'd say it's essential kids learn that the world IS an unfair place and how superficial some people's values are. Also that a true friend would not give her a hard time because of her family's economic situation.

Your comment about having every penny accounted for by Thursday reminded me of a little story involving my mother and the senior mistress of the grammar school I attended.

Bearing in mind that mother was a feisty Makkam from Sunderland who'd lived through the depression, we then lived on a council estate down the hill from the school. Our cookery teacher had left and we were having supply teachers at the last minute.

Mother insisted that the ingredient lists for the following lesson by a Thursday when Dad was paid. Failure to produce this at the required time meant no ingredients .. so when we received 24 hours notice to acquire ingredients for 'Hungarian Goulash and Cornish pasties' on a Monday evening for the following day , Mother was not amused.

It was the mid sixties and she declared Goulash to be off limits,'never heard of it'!! but had the ingredients for the pasties.

So I was dispatched to school with the latter plus a letter for the teacher who promptly turned this over to the senior mistress.

I was summoned to her office and asked why I could not buy my own ingredients? When I pointed out that I couldn't buy ingredients without money, this spinster who knew absolutely nothing of the reality of working class families' lives demanded,

"Wouldn't SHE give you the money?!"

Knowing my mother wouldn't have the money until Thursday I simply referred her back to the letter. We had a strong sense of family loyalty in those days and as embarrassed as I felt I was more angry with the senior teacher for her insensitivity.

She wrote an unbelievably snotty letter to my mother who wrote an equally snotty one back finishing with the punchline:

"In future do not address me as though I were a deliquent schoolgirl"

For the remainder of my school career she handled me with kid gloves.

It was from my mother I learned the art of stroppy letter writing which decades later I used to good effect when fighting my clients' corners during my h/v days.

I think children who grow up in a family which HAS to stick to a budget actually grow up with far better survival skills in the world than those who're spolilt rotten

She may find it tough now but in later life will be grateful for the brilliant job you've done bringing up your family and the values you've taught her.

Good luck to you and I hope you find it works out well kidcat