Frugal Living Challenge 2011 - part 1

minnie2

had to put nother £15.67 in the car today. I can already see where our money is going!! The home insurance came out today so thats another £26 gone and a loan payment £106.

So so far weve spent £969 on household direct debits and £50 on petrol and we are only on day 7!!!! but have not spent a penny on anything else!!!! so thats something i suppose!!

Managed to make up 9 lunches last night to freeze. though hubby forgot his today so had to drop it off to him on my lunch break!

may do a revised budget at the end of this month again, see where the savings have specifically happened!

Also must tackle the spreadsheet cw18, but they are not my good friends!! i do have all the info to transfer but columns tend to do funny things for me!

estimating weve saved atleast £50 so far on money we would usually have wasted if we had it!

midwinter

Thought of a few ebay listings for me to upload too Blairweech!

But my listings will probably have to wait until Sunday.

Just made my cup of coffee. nothing unusual in that, but does anyone else do as I do?..... always fill a flask when I boil the water for a coffee...... and then the remainder is put into the flask for the next 3 cups. So only boilling once

minnie2

does everyone follow from the 1st of the month on this challenge or do people go by their pay days?

Lily_The_Legend

midwinter wrote: »

Just made my cup of coffee. nothing unusual in that, but does anyone else do as I do?..... always fill a flask when I boil the water for a coffee...... and then the remainder is put into the flask for the next 3 cups. So only boilling once

No, but then I am at work and I don't mind using their electricity. :D

Something to think about at home though, thanks.

Lily_The_Legend

minnie2 wrote: »

does everyone follow from the 1st of the month on this challenge or do people go by their pay days?

Budget-wise, I'm going from payday to payday.

dizzy_lizzie

Hi everyone.
ceridwen sorry you couldn't see the angel card. If you click on this link again
http://www.findhorn.org/ and look to the left maybe a little further down you should see an Angel Card with a word for inspiration/meditation on. Today mine says 'Efficiency' which is apt because today I've already done my shopping from the list DD did yesterday. So I've been very efficient
Lots of things happening on here again, some not so nice re ipods and dishwashers Seems we take two steps forward and three back. When our dishwasher washed its last dish OH was ready to get another. I was in my 'blessing my family mode' ala Flylady and said I didn't want one I love washing up it's therapeutic. Now I hate it :mad: Fed up washing everyone else's dishes and can't believe how it gets filled up so quick. Not so therapeutic now Trouble is he put a false board behind and boxed around it so we could put a bin under there and recycling bags, so no room now
Going to make muesli fruit and nut bars posted by iaitm but I haven't any muesli so going to use cornflakes instead.
Blairweech glad you got you're knitting sorted
I don't like leaving people out when quoting but I do read everyone's posts
Luvz Dizzy x

apple_mint

minnie2 wrote: »

does everyone follow from the 1st of the month on this challenge or do people go by their pay days?

We've decided to look at the challenge as being calendar monthly, though I get paid mid-month. Most of the my working life I've been paid on the last day of the month and it's very difficult to shake off that way of thinking. Our direct debits go out through out the first two weeks of the month but I take my food budget from mid month to mid month - confusing isn't it :rotfl:

For the sake of my sanity and my spreadsheets, I'm treating the challenge as calendar monthly.

apple_mint

Does anyone have any ideas for improving the taste of ice-cream?

OH has taken up the challenge with relish. I asked him if he could down grade from his luxury ice-cream treat, thinking that he would go for a tub of plain vanilla ice-cream. He went for Tesco's Value Vanilla Ice Cream. Now, I'm all for giving things a try, and we regularly buy value items such as porridge oats, flour etc. However, I think we've gone a step too far with the value ice cream. Probably because we are used to the taste of premium brands which we treat ourselves to when they are on special offer or our own homemade icecream which we make with cream from the reduced shelf.

We both agreed that there was an aftertaste to the value ice cream which we don't really like. However, we are on a frugal living challenge and no way am I going to give up on a 75p tub (1 litre) of ice cream. :rotfl:It serves us right really, I knew that we should have gone down by degrees rather than straight to value :rotfl:

There is the potential I suppose to let it melt a little and pop it into the ice-cream maker with some other ingredients. I did think about soaking some sultanas and raisins in some rum and experimenting with a rum and raisin flavour - except we have no rum. We do have some whisky that I've been using in a tea loaf recipe but I'm not sure whisky ice cream is the way to go :cool:. I suggested experimenting with milk shakes to OH but he's not sure we'll be able to mask the after-taste.

It may be a case of continuing with the ice cream until we get used to the taste :cool:

23rdspiral

Hi dizzy - i'm totally lacking motivation to clean and tidy today (and i have to today!), so looked up your link above and my angel card said "Intention". yup. totally right, i'm all intention, but no action today... maybe i'll write a lot of lists and plan ahead for things instead of battling with lack of action instead... you never know, i might feel more motivated after that.

(i'm also debugging/defragging the computer so keep wandering back to check, hoping i can turn it off... but it's still not done... so i pop back on here to make more use of the electric! oh dear me.)

Lily_The_Legend

It is probably the synthetic taste you don't like! How about adding a little chocolate sauce and chopped nuts? I can't think of anything else at the moment!