Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

nuatha, I just look at the prices asked for wet fish these days and wonder who the heck can afford this stuff?!

I'm keeping control of the food budget but am spending more time shopping. I typically hit up a Sains on Tues evening after archery and a Tosspots on Sunday evening just before closing time. Mostly buying meats and cheeses on yellow sticker bargains and salting them away in the freezer.

Fruit and veg, where not home grown, comes from my Magic Greengrocer's dented bargain box, which will normally see me with a carrier bag of stuff for £1. As a result of never knowing what will be on YS or the bargain box, meal planning is erratic. I eat a fair amount of veggie dishes and batch cook and freeze portions.

As recently as a couple of years ago, Mum was Oh I can't be bothered to keep traipsing around different shops and then the prices kept going up and up and I introduced her to Aldee (there's one in the hometown) and also more recently re-introduced her to Icelandia and FarmeFoods. The savings from shopping around can be considerable and she's buying certain things from her Sains and certain others from the cheaper stores and the market, as well as supporting the local indy butcher, who is very good and very appreciative of their custom. The local baker has long gone, sadly, and she'd not interesting in baking her own bread.

My parents used to work in factories for modest wages and are now pensioners. They're not badly off but they are noticing that the costs of living are eroding their ability to add to their savings, although they haven't had to start drawing down on them. We've a low-key sort of family, apt to enjoy peaceable and cheap things like reading and country walks, rather than living it up, but even so, they're seeing their money going less far than it used to.

I'm a [STRIKE]keen observer of human nature[/STRIKE] OK, I'm nosey c0w, and watching people shop for anything, especially food, is quite fascinating. People used to pick up their favourite things and trolley them without much thought, whereas now I see them scowling at the prices, picking things up, putting them down, looking for the Basics ranges and grumbling. And there's a lot of people interested in the yellow labelled goods, although we manage to be affable about it and no one is hogging the goodies to the exclusion of all others, at least where I go.

greenbee, they're barstewards, aren't they? About 20+ years ago I saw a job advert for a grubbyment statistician in the Grauniad. I wished I'd saved it as it was a masterpiece of weasel-wordery which translated as The Successful Applicant Must Be Prepared to Lie Through His or Her Teeth To Use Statistics To Support the Party Line.

I can recall that in 2008, you could get a litre of veg oil for 79p, a Galaxy choc bar for 72p, an 800g loaf for about 80p and a pint of milk sold singly for 25p.

Because I am a devious little shopper, I bought 2 Galaxy bars for £1 (regular offer in F Foods) an 800g Hovis for 10p (YS on Sunday) and several bottles of veg oil reduced to 79p each a few weeks ago. But you have to work at it, bygorry.

maryb

sobering piece by Ambrose in the DT today. Read to the end to see what sort of S might HTF if Russia decides to play nasty

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10771069/US-financial-showdown-with-Russia-is-more-dangerous-than-it-looks-for-both-sides.html

Perplexed_Pineapple

That's a very interesting article maryb, AEP is a professional doomsayer but it behoves us to consider worst case scenarios. I've been trying to work out whether the end of windoze XP support means I should upgrade my old PC, but if cyberwarfare is likely it might be better to just take it off line, and have an internet free workstation to access all those freebie prepping related kindle ebooks and useful articles I've downloaded, without having to worry about becoming part of a Russian botnet. If it all got that serious though we probably won't have a reliable enough power supply to run anything consistently.

GreyQueen

Perplexed_Pineapple wrote: »

That's a very interesting article maryb, AEP is a professional doomsayer but it behoves us to consider worst case scenarios. I've been trying to work out whether the end of windoze XP support means I should upgrade my old PC, but if cyberwarfare is likely it might be better to just take it off line, and have an internet free workstation to access all those freebie prepping related kindle ebooks and useful articles I've downloaded, without having to worry about becoming part of a Russian botnet. If it all got that serious though we probably won't have a reliable enough power supply to run anything consistently.

Interesting article.

What else interests me is this; http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-15/shocking-buying-spree-americas-mysterious-third-largest-treasury-holder-ram

Which entity is using Belgium as a front to buy huge amount of US treasuries (grubbyment paper) and what's their motivation? This is at least the 2nd time ZH has reported on this. Word is not Russia or China, but who? Some country planning to help a takedown of the US economy as a proxy for either Russia or China?

And all the gold which is slipping Chinawards, and all the mutterings about possibly moving to a new world reserve currency, possibly gold-backed basket of currencies chiefly the yuan? We could be seeing the start of an economic war to freeze the US out of position of biggest financial bully on the block.

Re Russia flexing its muscles, I am glad it's late Spring and not early autumn. In 6 months, when the weather starts to get colder and we understand that he who controls the gas controls us, things will get very interesting indeed.

If you're thinking about going to woodburners, I'd go now. If you burn wood or coal, I'd stockpile as much as you can afford, now. I think wood and coal will get a lot more expensive and scarce than they are now.

I'm using XP too, as are several other persons known to me. My Pooter Wizard is sanguine about the risks of virus writers ecompassing XP in virus going forward. But I don't do online banking or many other things online which seem to be commonplace. If hackers really want into my Recipes Folder, they'll not find much of interest in there, I'm afraid.

The tinhatted have long since suggested having one PC which is never online for doing the Important Stuff, and keeping your online PC for the rest, but treating it at all times as potentially compromised.

There's an article on the Tech page of the Guardian website now about using XP without support, as there are estimated to be 240 million XP machines still running and close to 20% of operating systems in use today are still XP. People tend to like it. I've had mine since 2002 and my pooter won't run a more up-to-date system. I use Win 7 at work and can't say I'm missing out by not having it at home.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Microsarft didn't look at taking XP back into support in the next few weeks/ months. Just a hunchlette.......

maryb

LOL yes, no need to buy apocalyptic fiction, just read one of his columns. Ambrose is also getting all excited about the French National Front doing so well. He thinks this might finally bring about the breakup of the Euro that he longs for. I could just about see it if the French were as dependent as the Germans on Russian gas but they aren't. But times could get interesting in Europe

maryb

I use Microsoft Money which hasn't been supported for about 6 years but still works better than any alternative out there. Most banks, with the irritating exception of Nationwide, still let you download statements in OFX format which import straight into Money.

Re Belgium - could be North Korea? Maybe not using their own money, of course, but that's deniable by whoever is bankrolling it. Would Iran have the resources?

ALIBOBSY

Just looking at that info about what is included in the inflation calcs and nearly laughed out loud at the 2014 inclusion of bird feed, what the heck!

How irrelevant is that to the majority of people. TBH even if you do put out feeders, if the price shoots up you will stop buying. Surely inflation calcs should be based on items its hard to manage without and need to be bought on a regular basis.

Ali x

ALIBOBSY

In fact looking at the ONS's own documentation there is this little gem

"Changes to the baskets in 2014
Changes to the baskets of goods and services this year are being introduced with the February 2014 consumer price inflation statistics published on 25 March 2014. That is, monthly changes in prices between January 2014 and January 2015 are estimated with reference to the updated baskets. The baskets will be updated again at the same time next year."

So basically they have swapped a few items so now ALL the figures in 2014 will be based on ESTIMATED figures. Now that gives plenty of scope to fiddle those numbers up or down to fit what they want to portray. I bet if you asked the majority of people would assume that inflation calcs are based on ACTUAL figures, what a big con. Mind you given how all govs of all parties for the last 20 years of so have been proven to fiddle the stats I don't know why I am suprised lol.

Ali x

pineapple

This was on the radio a couple of nights back.
Sorry if this has already been posted.
It's about American preppers but interesting nonetheless.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01x18sc
Enjoy

Frugalsod

nuatha wrote: »

If rising prices also meant a higher standard of living, I suspect few people would complain, but it seems that the actual producers get less than they used to and the middle men are making the profits while ordinary folk suffer the consequences.

I think I'll be working on a new pricebook, one that details normal and offer prices to help shop for bulk food at the best price I can find.

You can have a higher standard of living with falling prices as long as your wages fall more slowly. The same in reverse. Your wages need to rise faster than inflation. The government is getting nervous about deflation because it will mean ultimately that their entire policy of asset prices rising and fooling people that they are wealthier will come unstuck. If house prices are rising fast you might be wealthier but you cannot spend that wealth unless you can find a way to extract that additional wealth via equity release. The problem with that idea is that interest rates can only really go up from here and so you are looking at much lower disposable incomes once that process starts.

Though with fewer people actually being able to get on the housing ladder thanks to falling or stagnant wages and house prices going up so locking them out. I suspect that 125% mortgages will become acceptable again as the only way of getting buyers back into the market.

The only way a correction can be avoided is to adopt permanently low interest rates That will eventually destroy the pensions industry. They will either require a much higher level of pension contribution to cover the falling returns to ensure that your pension is adequate to cover you in retirement or your pension is so small that you can never afford to retire.

So we will continue to pay for bank bailouts for decades one way or another. The process might be so slow that no one really notices that things are continuing to deteriorate.