My Weaknesses and how to address them

Prothet_of_Doom

Okay take your £40 in cash, go to the butchers, and buy the best and biggest hunk of meat, for £35, and go and buy the cheapest red wine at aldi for 3.99. and On Saturday afternoon, throw the hunk of meat in the oven, with some potatoes, and just before you want to watch the film, serve it out. Don't bother with veg.
You'll have enough left for sandwiches on Sunday, so I reckon I've just saved you £3.
Now I know that's not much, but I bet it tasted better than the takeaway, and took no longer to achieve.

darrensurrey

nolongerindenial wrote: »

1. Food! We overspend monthly on our food budget, we have a reasonably good food budget of an average of £80 per week for the 3 of us (1 Son, Me and my wife), barely throw anything away but go overbudget by upto 25% per week

2. Takeaways! We work very long hours (Were both self employed, im working in the home office tonight and will be 6 nights out of 7 (7:30pm-~2:30am Sun-Fri) as well as 9:30-5pm(Mon-Fri), on a saturday night we love to have a takeaway and a few drinks and watch a film (usually borrowed), this is costing a fortune (£40 per weekend ) and whilst I eat any leftovers for the next day or two, its my one big massive regular weakness

3. Cars: Cars are my hobby, I enjoy nothing more than working on them and typically as the parts are bought as and when I can afford them (or full cars bought and purchase price recouped from selling the unwanted parts and weighing in the rest), they cost very little / provide funds for themselves. as there of the road there is no specific ongoing costs, I get very stressed when I have weeks without being able to be alone and just work on them, and some of the parts I sell regularly contribute to the household budget, last year provided a surplus of around £400, this year so far a loss of around £150.

1 - learn to enjoy value/basics food. Buy uncooked stuff in bulk. 1kg of Basics chicken portions is £5 and will last a week with 3 of you, 2 main meals a day (assuming you eat at home!).

2 - learn to cook quick meals. I eat a lot of couscous salad which takes minutes and is dirt cheap but may not be palatable to you so you'll have to experiment.

3 - if you're handy with a spanner, why you're not making a lot of money breaking cars I don't know. Buy a dead premium brand car (Audi, BMW) for £500 and sell the parts.

mobo1980

Hi nolongerindenial

enjoyed reading your thread , takeaways are my complete weakness hardly ever treat myself to new clothes etc although im desperate for them but probably have 4-8 takeaways a month mostly at weekends when we have a drink and am then too tired too cook

Have just joined the NSD thread though so hopefully this will encourage me to prepare more so I don't have a spendy day

Mobo xx

hohum

Takeout coffee, my biggest weakness. Even when I had literally no money (moved back home, no job) I walked an hour each way to my temp job so I could treat myself to a coffee at the end of the week.

Not planning my lunches is the other, end up with cut price ready meals. That's a weakness in my personal organisation rather than I really like cut price ready meals So knocking that one on the head.

Brightspark87

Hi Good luck with all these great steps. I find that sometimes I take a moment to think about things. For example the other day I really wanted an takeaway. These would normally be about £25 for us. So I thought of all the calories, cost etc. Then I made sweet potato curry instead! Taking the time to think of things really helps.

MallyGirl

I have been working on cutting down on DH's Friday night Indian takeaway obsession. I googled British Indian Takeaways and found some recipes which approximate what they do in the restaurants where things can't bubble away for hours like the authentic versions. Most involve cooking up a base sauce - which you freeze most of in portion sizes - and precooking the meat (again freeze most in portions). Once you have the building blocks the actual curries can be assembled in the time it takes to cook the rice. A fraction of the cost and calories

mobo1980

Ok so thanks to this thread I am gonna make a beef curry from scratch on saturday :money:
,have everything in only need to buy the meat , just hope we can make it through friday - takeaway free

Mobo xx

Cottage_Economy

Takeaways are our splurge, and we have one once a month.

Usually a chinese at around £10-£15 (we pad out with our own rice made at home) or a dominos at £17-ish and only on a 2 for 1 deal so we have lots of slices left over for lunch and snacks. Used to have whopping massive curry at about £25 until I started getting heartburn afterwards so curries no more.

Did used to have KFC as well until we discovered ALDI's southern fried chicken and we've never had a KFC since. At about £4 for a 1kg of chicken drums and thighs plus £1 for a bag of chips, with a pot of coleslaw and some beans it doesn't come to much more than £6 and we have chicken left over.

Also used to have the odd kebab until I discovered The Takeaway Secret book and now I can make one that's tastier than i've ever bought, so that's something that we no longer have as a takeaway.

rockm87

a little tip, i got to quidco, then just eat for our takeaways, a few pennies back is always helpful on those occasional treats!

nolongerindenial

darrensurrey wrote: »

1 - learn to enjoy value/basics food. Buy uncooked stuff in bulk. 1kg of Basics chicken portions is £5 and will last a week with 3 of you, 2 main meals a day (assuming you eat at home!).

2 - learn to cook quick meals. I eat a lot of couscous salad which takes minutes and is dirt cheap but may not be palatable to you so you'll have to experiment.

3 - if you're handy with a spanner, why you're not making a lot of money breaking cars I don't know. Buy a dead premium brand car (Audi, BMW) for £500 and sell the parts.

With Number 1, Ive just stuck to the budget today (well a little over but our shredder disintegrated today and so needed to buy a new one and a ream of paper but that is a business expense),

With number 2 - we got some cheap pizzas for the weekend - £2.50 and will get a couple of bags of chips so cutting down to £4.50 for our weekend takeaway this weekend

With number 3 - Space is the reason I dont regularly break cars, I had one car not to long ago I bought for the interior (seats, doorcard and dash for my project car), being that these cars are popular for the kit car scene, I had sold the running gear for 3 times what I paid for the car by the time it got delivered. leaving body panels which I still have 6 months on as I got let down by the buyer of those, the car was here 8 weeks in total. My time is more profitable spent on my main career track which I am self employed in making a reasonable living