A Year of Living Frugabulously

taxi73

What a palaver over the keys !!!!Great on the holidays and not needing child care as that must greatly help your funds.Boo to meter readers.Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to pay energy bills?
It's lovely seeing you get stuck in to your own project and missing the office politics.

Shoe_Gal

:mad: to key incident but these things happen!

vasseur

Great news about getting your own project and bah! to problems with keys....what a nightmare.

I'm sure the weather will be lovely soon and you can be out on your bike for hours

Lula-Hula

Beltane blessings to all,

May day & supposedly the first day of summer n all that - hah !, great if you're a duck, otherwise not so.

I counted that it rained here for 19 days since the hose pipe ban was announced until yesterday ( although it did rain during the night).

It means much time has been spent at home, & less out spending, although my final spends for the month reveals that on those few & brief excursions I did manage to spend a fair amount.

Total Grocery spends = £203.86
Total Household / Toiletries etc spends = £51.28 ( cleaning stuff, loo rolls, candles, toiletries & cat food etc)


Total Spends = £255.14

Not a great example of being frugal, so I can certainly cut that down a bit. Would like to knock £50 off that in May ....

Payday fairy has been & the savings funds have all been topped up as follows :

Gas & Electricity = £570 *
Car Tax = £120 ( handy, as that's due for renewal at the end of the month )
Car Maintenance = £235
Car Insurance = £175

Well, that's how it * looked yesterday, then today I received the Gas & Electricity bills at £214 & £96 respectively.

The Gas & Electricity Fund is now actually £310 lighter at £260.

A whopping £3.30 is on it's way to the Holiday Fund from Quidco, I must remember to withdraw the cash for DDs camp trip next week.

I've received £3 in paypal pennies & a £10 Topshop/Dotty P voucher. Getting rather sick of doing surveys so I've cancelled membership of 2 less productive sites & am now up to 4900 on my You Gov account - so excited to think that after years I'm that close to pay out :j.

Work project not as exciting as it first appeared, & in fact the whole situation looking very unsure.

Never mind, what will be will be

bye for now
xx

Karmacat

And there's the advantage of those funds that you run! You just transfer over the money to pay, and hey presto, job done! Good for you

And you do like your groceries, don't you! Hope you had some scrummy meals from that lot.

You put me to shame with your survey-doing, tho - in the far distant past, I did actually get to the magical £50 with yougov, but I've been stuck on £20 or so for years ... must do better. P i n econe didn't want me :rotfl: so I may try to just go back to yougov, and at least get that one to the £50, then abandon it forever!

Hope may goes well for you (and less rain for us all!)
:j

Lula-Hula

Aaah yes Karma,

& not just a peace of mind advantage, but a " I earned a whole £2.70 interest on that account" advantage too .

Today saw the benefit of having slashed the Uncle Richard Media package; the bill was just £29.27 :j I can't remember the last time it was under £40 so that made me very happy.

If I'm careful I can manage to stay within my free mobile calls allowance & then not use the home phone for outgoing at all. Actually, I don't answer it when it does ring, I do the 1471 trick & it's invariably a witheld number.

This refusal to answer the phone is not just about fending off annoying scripted sales call from Mumbai, it's also because I keep getting a crossed line with a doctors surgery in Esher.

They ask for microbiology & insist they've dialled an internal line, I insist that I'm not a microbiologist, but that Im wondering whether perhaps this is an omen & that I should become one as I keep getting these calls.

Actually, I have no idea what a microbiologist is/does but I do now it involves answering calls from harried ( but awfully posh & pleasant) doctors :rotfl:

As to the groceries ... yep, there's no denying I do like to spend rather more on what I put IN my body than what I put ON it .

My thinking is that wearing ebay clothes won't do me any harm, but eating good quality food will probably do me some good.

I've never scrimped on food; since working within the food industry some years ago, I've been far more aware of the varying quality of stuff & different methods of production & I do believe in quality over quantity. So, it's buying British, organic & local wherever possible & if it's not British & has to come from a long way, then it's Fairtrade wherever possible.

No more news today, another survey done & now I'm off for an early bath

taxi73

Very well said Lula.

Lula-Hula

taxi73 wrote: »

Very well said Lula.

Thanks Taxi,

although it's increasingly tricky to keep the costs low. I did a trip to Sainsbugs after work today, & having withdrawn my £50 from the cashpoint, I was very optimistic about spending about £30 ...

Not this week though :rotfl: because even after taking advantage of multi-buy offers; I still paid £46.65 at the till. Admittedly a lot of that was stocking up on things like giant bags of sugar, tea, cofffee & the grocery bit of it came to £40.56 & the other £6.09 was on kitty food & a couple of household bits.

I'm growing sunflowers indoors at the moment ( apparently keeping them inside until they're a bout a foot tall makes them less liable to be slug-munched. All well & good but the trouble is once they're over 3 inches tall they start gong all curly & wayward so I'm using kebab skewers as stakes & sainsbugs do a pack of 70 for £1 .

- I don't have 70 sunflowers, although that would be fab :rotfl:.

My new money saving hobby at the moment is making bread. I love bread & as it's a cake & biccie free month we need a treat to make us feel a bit special.

I've recently cleaned out & re-organised all the kitchen food cupboards & in doing so I discovered a bag of strong breadflour left over from when we had snow a couple of years back. Inspie of it being slightly 'vintage' I decided to have a go & it was very easy to make & super yummy to eat.

I really enjoyed making it too, especially as we had it with home-made butternut squash soup & I was almost overcome with old stylee-ness to the extent of buying myself a pinnie :rotfl:.

I said 'almost'.

It's quite good fun & must be good for working out arm muscles with all the kneading - nope, I don't have a breadmaker - so therefore, any calories consumed by eating of the bread, must surely have already been burned by making of the bread, non ? :D

Today I stocked up on the breadflour, 2 big bags for just 77p each. I didn't get the organic flour I'm afraid, as that was £1.99p a bag :eek:.

Not a lot of home-job earnings this week so just the Xmas & Gift fund topped up to £160 & £120 respectively.

Looking forward to having 4 days off, although I will be very grumpy next week when my working week get's all messed up.

Done well on food - resisted Bicycle Bells ( Tunnocks Teacakes) & Mini Rolls at work today .

fedupandskint

Too right - I too love baking bread. Having said that I don't actually bake it or knead it as my lovely/trusty breadmaker does that! I come home to freshly baked bread.

So much nicer than supermarket stuff too

Anyway, I've had a rubbish week full of ear infections, cold and sore throat and lots of household things going wrong too leaving me throughly fed up indeed. So treated myself to a few sale clothes meaning the NSD may goes out of the window if they fit and I like them. Will see, plus I really needed some new work trousers so will see if I can squeeze into them at the bargain price

My weekend will be full of writing 3 assignments for deadline day on BH Mon - woo hoo, what an exciting weekend, not! Enjoy yours x

taxi73

love h/m bread..well done you making it the old way.I have a B/M and still don't make my own..must try harder.