Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

D&DD wrote: »

GQ the beans are on offer at MrT 4 for £1.24 I think??

I will check it out but I have plenty and am holding out for 4/£1. I am a tough nut when it comes to bargaineering. They might not be in my MrT as it's a Metro and doesn't have a lot of the stuff you'd find in the big ones. It majors on sandwiches and booze, not bargain packs of beans, more's the pity. But thanks for the heads-up.

They pop up at Liddly from time to time, but sell like hot cakes, which is kinda amusing, if you think about it.

Time was, branded items used to fluctuate in only a couple of pence per store, these days it's sometimes 50-100% differential, which makes shopping around an important matter not a trivial one.

GreyQueen

:eek: Here's a thing.................


http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-05-15/no-bank-deposits-will-be-spared-confiscation

I kinda knew this anyways but it's shocking to see it spelled out in black and white.

Cheapskate

Blimming 'eck, GQ! :eek: I agree, sort of knew, but it's scary reading it out loud! DH thinks I'm several sarnies short of a picnic with my jars of coins lurking all over the house, but, at last count, we'd manage for nearly a month on very short rations. Think I'll continue like this and add to me food stocks, ever so quietly and slowly.....you never know!

Been using freezer stocks, now have some space to re-jig the remainder and refill next week. Also found some elderly bread flour and yeast in the baking cupboard, so feel a few experiments coming on.

A xo

Butterfly_Brain

GQ........ Thieving barstewards :mad::mad: That is why I have other ways of hiding my money, it is dotted all over the place, credit union, penny jar, food stores, seeds and survivalist stuff, wood burning stove fund and I try and pull out every meagre penny that isn't needed for Direct Debits and use cash for everything that I can.

GreyQueen

30+ years ago, I did O Level ecomonics (for younger readers, these were pre-GCSEs. Allegedly harder exams, lol).

I recall being absolutely flabbergasted by the understanding that the whole financial system was nothing more than a confidence trick; lose the confidence and the trick doesn't work any more. It makes the proverbial house of cards look stable.

And that very few people understand this. When the news came that Northern Rock was in trouble, but don't panic, I thought if I had money in there, I'd bliddy well be on their doorstep after it getting it back. I then got to witness something I never thought to see; a run on a bank.

I recall reading about the hyperinflation in Germany, back in the day. How the same sum of cash could buy you a bottle of champagne in the evening, and only a box of matches in the morning. About using a suitcase of cash to buy a loaf of bread.

I was having a thought today as I removed some folding stuff from the hole-in-the-wall, about the daily withdrawal limit of cash.

Mine's £300. Has been for an awful long time. Before that it was £250, and was that forever, it seems. But inflation has doubled the costs of many of the things I pay cash for in the past 4 years, and I am sure it has for you, too.

Wouldn't it have been logical for the max cash withdrawal from banks to have moved up a tad? Say £350 or £400 by now? Interestingly, it hasn't. I expect that is to protect the fractional reserve system so that they are able to hold even smaller reserves in their system, thus maximising their profits but leaving the rest of us perilously exposed.

If you add to things going on globally as various governments try to repatirate gold reserves held for safekeeping overseas, and you wonder what the national banks know that they're not telling us. And exactly why no one has audited the gold in Fort Knox for 60 years (perhaps because it isn't there anymore?) and you get a wee bit antsy.

I'd loved to be a fly on the wall when the Americans tried to explain to Mrs Merkel why the few tonnes of Germany's gold reserves that they've been looking after, and which they've been asked to return, can't be given back for 7 years.

Call me a tin hatter but it don't take that blinking long to crate the stuff and organise heavy security.........but it might if you'd flogged it off on the sly and were going to have to buy it back again on the open market.

Buy baked beans, and hang on to any scrap gold you may have on the premises, the septic tanks will be on a shopping spree once they've driven the price down.

pineapple

I love the blind faith in the government's deposit guarantee. Financial institutions would not be able to pay out in a bank run (so best be first in the queue if things look dodgy eh?) and the question has to be asked - how long would it take for the government to settle claims under their guarantee and what would your money be worth if and when you got it? In a major belly up situation, what price the guarantee anyway?
Anyway - looking at my paltry savings, the even paltrier interest rates and the humungous price increases I've noticed recently - it becomes ever clearer that investment in goods you routinely use or spending on self sustainability is the best way of saving.
Meanwhile up here in the wild and woolly north I'm debating what I should be planting and when. Frost, hail and even snow in some places! !!!!!!... :eek:
Pineapple's wardrobe is in a betwixt and between stage. Summer one day, winter the next. It can even change within the day itself. I'm either freezing me socks off in summer clothing or I find myself got up like Nanook of the North in a sudden heatwave. I give up.

[Deleted User]

We were talking about water storage and purification the other day and someone mentioned using Milton Sterilising Fluid. I looked in my store this morning and I knew I'd written down the amount to use, which was the question asked, and it had shuffled to the back of the shelf. I checked on the website for the exact amount so

2.5 mls (half a teaspoonful) of Milton Sterilising Fluid
5 litres of water

Add the Milton to the water, give in a shake and leave for 15 minutes before drinking.

Hope that is useful,

Cheers Lyn xxx.

PINEAPPLE it was so cold here yesterday that I walked the boy in my padded winter jacket, it's the middle of May for goodness sake, the Hawthorn still isn't in bloom (has buds now though), neither is my big apple tree, and the weather man said he couldn't see an end to this godawful weather, Happy Summer?????

D&DD

I was thinking of wearing my hat today to walk the doglet as my ears were froze yesterday and this morning it's beautiful and sunny and best of all no wind YAY!!!
I'm going to try and have a day in the garden as the weather doesn't look great for the forseeable does it,at least if everythings planted it'll love the rain.Plants are looking surprisingly happy though here even the ones which have had to grow horizontally due to the gale force winds :rotfl:

Awash with spinach and kale so will make some more kale chips later and have a rummage for some spinach recipes,it goes really well in veg lasagne but I can only eat so much

Have a great day all XX

[Deleted User]

D&DD creamed spinach is lovely and also spinach pesto( half and half spinach and the fresh herb of your choice) is yummy too, but then I really like spinach!!! Cheers Lyn xxx.

GreyQueen

:eek: This weather is bonkers; I actually put the heating on for a couple of hours last night.

Pineapple, I'm also oscillating between wintry and summery clothes, and finding my two fleece waistcoats very useful intermediate garments.

I have decided to see if my Little Mr T does have those baked beans at that price, to add a few more into stocks. I like to keep the quantity of the inventory pretty static, but preserving good rotation. It's reassuring to know where your next meal is coming from, in the event that there is a disruption to the food supplies to the shops.

Went offline last night and resumed reading The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's not a novel, but a measured analysis of what is likely to happen as we run out of oil, and it is beyond horrific. I've long since understood that what was called the green revolution (mass use of oil derived fertilisers, not green in the contemporary sense of the word) means that agriculture as we know it is utterly dependant on oil.

But it is shocking to see the huge increase in our human populations around the world which has been supported by the oil based economy. And to know this cannot continue and that starvation on an unprecidented scale will ensue. It won't be a case of not having out of season veg or tropical fruits flown into these islands, it will be as basic as not eating enough.:(

What makes me really angry is that all this was known 50+ years ago, and there were opportunities for interventions which would have made the decent from Hubbard's Peak less grievous than they will be, and those have been squandered.

A few weeks ago, I went through a village that I know pretty well (we used to live one village over) and which I've passed through several times a year for the past 30 years.

This village, like so many of them, is mostly strung out in a line one house deep along its B grade road, almost a half a mile long. There are a few stubby side-lanes in the middle, not visible from the road, but mostly, what you see from a moving car is all there is to see.

I regard this village's quota of For Sale signs on its houses as an economic bellwether. When the petrol price is higher, relatively speaking, there are a lot more of these houses for sale. When it relapses back, you might see few or none on the market.

There's sometimes only one or two for sale, or even none, in the good times. In the worst of times, I've seen as many as 8-9 up for sale at once. My last trip through saw 13 on the market at once. Never saw that many in my life.

This is a large village, probably several thousand residents. It hasn't got a school, a shop, an employer of any kind, a post office (and it used to have all these things). It's just a pretty dormitory for people who work in the market town 10 miles away or here in Provincial City (20 miles away) or even further afield.

There aren't buses to be had, bar the school bus, so you have your own transport or you stay put. This isn't an ideal environment if you want to prosper, which is why there is no one in my family (and we're country people) under pensionable age, living in our ancestral vilages.

If I was in the market for a family home, to raise a family, I would want to tuck myself up on the edge of a middling-sized market town, to reap maximum convenience with minimum negative effects. I certainly would say to anyone who is arranging life around a commuting lifestyle that you're on a hiding to nowhere.

Hokay, more tea, thank goodness I'm on a late shift today.