£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

emmie26

Had a slight catch-up but you are so busy it is hard to keep up with what's going on.
My food bill is an ongoing battle and will continue to be so for the rest of time I think, but hey ho, life would be boring without a few challenges.
You are doing great, even if you are just posting and making sure you are aware of your spending I really think that is half the battle.

Raspberry_Queen

Regarding the Colombian bean stew, I'm pretty sure you can make the suggested side of fried plantains, with green or green-tipped bananas instead of the plantains. That would be a cheap and interesting side.

Also, since you seem to be into nutrition, you could sprout the dried beans before cooking them. It doesn't take much time, but requires organisation. You soak them for 8-12 hours in lukewarm water about 3 days before you intend to cook them, then rinse them in lukewarm water 2-3 time per day. Sprouting beans and seeds drastically increases the vitamin content, makes them more digestible, and decreases the cooking time.

Treadingonplaymobil

Suffolk_lass wrote: »

I was just going to say well done for resolving that call with HMRC. Is that a one-month unexpected boost or a term thing?

Re your camping supplies - I am currently checking the GoOutdoors web pages to see what they have for either clearance or end of season. This month is a tad early but I know what I am after and I don't want to pay full price. There are a few small tents and groundsheets for specific tents at the moment but between now and March I expect what I'm looking for to come up. Is that a similar approach to yours? - I know what I want and I know I have to get it. I just don't want to do a one-off compare and just take that price.

I saw a cold box that connects to a car power socket at the end of August in our local hardware store, mentioned it to husband and he bought it! - We're going to use it for weekend camping but I'm going to put my items for the freezer/ fridge in it for my supermarket shopping in the meantime so it is in the boot, ready to plug in. It's meant to keep stuff 15 degrees below ambient temperature, and you still have the option with freezer packs to start you off. I hope it works OK.

We already had a gas camping "fridge" but it is too big for our small tent (and they are close to £200 while the power-box was £30!).

You are welcome to have a little vent re the web-site BTW - it does seem to have been going on for a while. You know we will empathise, even if we can't help

Good idea to keep checking back! Really need to get on and write a list today.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 30: Day 7

How pleasing, made it through the week without a top up shop, so our official food spend for week 1 of this month was £41.27, which is pretty good. Maybe I'm finally getting better at this budgeting lark! I know this coming week will be more expensive as we're running out of loads of household things, but I'm aiming for c.£75 (this is only a four-food-shop month, so in theory I could spend up to £90, but since things are so tight I'm going to try to keep it down).

Finally made some website progress yesterday, I'm beginning to feel like it might actually happen now, which is a huge relief (I had been wondering whether I was going to need to start from scratch with someone else). It's going to mean some business spending on things like new business cards, but I have been putting by a bit of money to cover it.

to do today
1. declutter and clean the sitting room.
2. hours and hours and hours of work on the website
3. plan dressing up costume with DC3 for next week.
4. book trampolining for DC1's party.
5. menu plan and mysupermarket for next week's food.

to do this week
1. plan DS1's birthday party. Done, invitations out.
2. get the house tidy and decluttered ready for new term at school. Not exactly done ready for the new term, but at least I've made a start.
3. start a list of camping supplies that need replacing/repairing for next year - will be much better to do that in stages over the winter than in one big spend next May.
4. have a look at last month's food spends and see where improvements can be made.
5. make some packed lunch supplies and freeze for DC3, who will now have lunch at preschool 3 days a week.

to do this month
1. keep the total spend for the month below £3,500 (last month was miles better than the previous average £3,900, going to try to repeat the feat).
2. get my new website finished and launched (crosses fingers, toes and eyes).
3. just work as much as possible and make some money back to recover the enormous shortfall that faces us this month!

wishingthemortgaheaway

Love how you causually drop in that you've been putting aside some money for business cards etc. Woop woop.

Good luck with the website stuff.

Honeysucklelou2

Well done on me on getting the monthly outgoings down by £400. That's fantastic!
Re packed lunches - when I glance around the hall at lunchtimes, the packed lunches are often simple but healthy. Cucumber sticks, a few cherry tomatoes, some soft fruit or boxes of raisins. I have found personally, that a pack of small pots ( have recycled the storage pur!e pots for HM pur!e from when they were babies) will give enough space to put some fruit or veg and prevent them from getting squashed while en route to school.

Interesting reading about your child free 6 hours...have yet to achieve this!!

Wysiwyg49

I do enjoy reading your thread - don't often post but it's great to see your progress! Just dropped in to say I bought a new washing up bowl today and thought of you!! (It was 99p so maybe not up to scratch :rotfl:)

Treadingonplaymobil

Morning! Just popping in for a quick hello. Spending the entire weekend on website work, absolutely nonstop now it's finally making progress. In theory it'll launch within a fortnight, and I can start to try to get some more traffic to it and (fingers crossed) up my income a bit.

Have just done the menu plan for the week, DH going shopping soon. It's quite a pricey week thanks to running out of everything all at once, but I'm pleased to note that the extras that are exclusively for the lunch boxes only come to £4 this week, so fingers crossed I can keep it around that level - £7.50 a week (compared to school dinner prices) for DC1 would be quite a saving.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 31: Day 2

Wow, what a crazy busy weekend! Lots and lots of website progress, literally worked dawn to dusk both days on it. Have a huge list of other things I was supposed to do that I now need to catch up on, and am knackered, but so pleased to see things are moving forwards. This website is a core part of my plans for this year, to try to up my income gradually and move it into a more sustainable direction (ie not just to be selling my time with clients, which always has a fairly low upper limit because of my availability, and depends on people wanting to see me who are geographically close enough). Fingers crossed.

Horribly expensive food shop yesterday, but we have had a run of cheap ones, and it included some treats for DC1's birthday on Sunday - I normally end up doing party food shopping in a whole separate shop and going completely to town on it, but because he's just having two friends and they are going trampolining, I've bought burgers for my three and the two friends and just a few party snacks, plus will make a cake at some stage. I'll break it down properly in my next post.

Have had to keep spending on the CC this month to keep cash flow free in my account for DDs, as all the hours of work I'm putting in are not client facing and not yet reaping their own income, so I'm still not actually bringing in much money this month. I do have a few bookings, but stressing slightly that things aren't picking up as much as I'd hoped in September. Need to pause and take stock at some stage. I know I will earn enough this month to pay off everything I've spent so far on the CC, but my concern is that I haven't yet got enough guaranteed income to get out of this new loop of spending on CC one month, paying it off again next month but needed to spend on it again. This is a side effect of the slow summer and not being fully aware how my income had to stretch, and I think it will be fine (this is the first year I have been hyper aware of the time for work to pick back up again after the summer, usually I would not be remotely concerned at this stage and just merrily spending hundreds and hundreds while my income was zero).

Argh, enormous spider friend is back. Why does it feel the need to pop out at this time in the morning? Not what my barely awake 4am brain needs!

to do today
1. catch up on smaller business.
2. finish contracted work for this week (which will earn me some money, thank goodness).
3. sew on beaver badges, bleurgh.
4. batch cook quiche for packed lunches.
5. cook a chicken to be divided up into several meals (first time we have bought a chicken in about a year! so expensive).
6. buy wrapping paper for DC1's birthday presents.
7. buy bits and bobs needed for DC2's costume for school this week.

to do this week
1. keep the packed lunches coming in on budget.
2. pick up the social media again, which has fallen very much by the wayside recently, and does help increase income.
3. ebay old pram now that DC3 has stopped using it. It's got a broken part, but might get £20 for spares as it was a really expensive one originally (nine years ago! One of those 'buy better, buy once' incidents, where we researched obsessively for weeks and ended up with the perfect pram, which has survived all three DC and only broke a couple of weeks ago Good timing, as DC3 is 3.5).

to do this month
1. keep the total spend for the month below £3,500 (last month was miles better than the previous average £3,900, going to try to repeat the feat).
2. get my new website finished and launched (crosses fingers, toes and eyes).
3. just work as much as possible and make some money back to recover the enormous shortfall that faces us this month!

Treadingonplaymobil

Food shopping. This is the first 'proper' food shop we've needed to do since the summer holidays, and it's quite a big one. My food spend for August and the beginning of September was moderately good (a little high for the last week of August when we were on holiday thanks to dividing food shopping with people who eat more meat and drink miles more than us - must remember to include that in holiday budgeting in future as it always happens), so an expensive week was inevitable, especially with DC1's birthday this weekend.

Menu plan as follows
Monday - baked potatoes, tuna and cheese
Tuesday - chicken and leek pasties
Wednesday - leftover columbian black bean stew
Thursday - dal and rice
Friday - leftover bolognese
Saturday - leek and potato soup
Sunday - burgers, party food
Lunches - ham, cheese, crackers, quiche, leftover pasties, houmuous and veg
Snacks - fruit, cereal bars, hm flapjacks, hm ginger cake

The total food shop was £114 (ouch!), broken down as follows....

£11 on party food - pretty pleased with this.

£29 on lunch and dinner - this is mega high, thanks to (a) chicken, which will be cooked and stripped so will be available next week, and (b) running out of lots of things like rice and lentils all at once. Plus that extra £5 or so on packed lunch bits.

£16 on snacks/treats/puddings (including fruit) - again this is high. DH bought a bit too much fruit (although not acres more) and we needed more ice cream and dark chocolate (well, not needed, but you know what I mean)

£13 on breakfast (includes milk) - again quite high, although £6 of it is milk.

£11 on baking ingredients (some of the butter counted here gets used for toast etc as well).

£34 on household stuff - crazy high. One of those annoying weeks where we ran out of two spray cleaners, laundry liquid, washing up liquid, AA batteries, toothpaste, plasters and a bulb went.

So the big culprits were the household stuff, which is unavoidable and hasn't been stocked up for a few weeks, and the party food. Averaged out with last week's shop it comes to £80 per week. Not horrendous, but I'd like it lower, hopefully next week's will be back down to <£70 as there should be leftover chicken, dal and soup to make evening meals from.