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

warby68

Hope you have a better day ToPM - some days with little ones just have to be written off and most grumps are solved by a good sleep

I have the joy of an OH away, my car frozen solid when it does an interesting thing of refusing to let me open the front doors and I have to scramble in inelegantly from the back plus its a working day so 3h commute with doctor's visit at either end to add to the fun. All while my warring teenagers snooze peacefully for half term. I think your mood will have safely transferred to me today

cocalls

i'm sure there's a spoon monster pinching spoons in our house too, our local charity shop have a big box of assorted ones for the princely sum of 10p each, if yours are going to pack ups at school they dont need to match.

Honeysucklelou2

Can you get teaspoons that have coloured handles? They won't get muddled up with school teaspoons and would hopefully be distinctive for your DCs to spot.

Hope you have a good day with your DCs. Feb half term can be tricky when inclement weather stops any outside activities.

wishingthemortgaheaway

I used to get sent to school with the plastic spoons from the medicine bottles.
Failing that, drill a hole in the end and tether it to the lunchboxes.

enthusiasticsaver

Cars can be budget breakers. I think that is wise to use your excess earnings to put into emergency fund now you have your 3 month buffer.

Sympathy on the grumpy DCs too. We had a clingy and grumpy 2 year old DGD most unhappy on Monday at all the noisy half term kids taking over "her" soft play at our country club. She normally has it to herself :rotfl::rotfl: not sure how she is going to take to her new baby sister in a few months as she is firmly ensconced in the "mine" stage at the moment

Treadingonplaymobil

Honeysucklelou2 good idea about coloured handle teaspoons. I will hunt in charity shop as cocalls suggests and see if I can find some coloured ones! It's the hassle as much as anything else, so even if they're only 10p I'd like to not just run out of them every few weeks.

System

When my children were at school , they had neon coloured ice cream spoons for packed lunches. We still have some left 20 years later. They are selling on Amazon for 4.99 for . 100 may seem excessive but they will last a very long time .

Treadingonplaymobil

On toilet roll and other household supplies...

I've been thinking about trying to reintegrate some more of the more planet- and people-friendly ideas that we used to stick to, but doing them in a way that honours our long term budget restrictions. Obviously going back to buying organic food is out of the question, but I've been researching a few areas where we can be a little bit more thoughtful.

Also related (bear with me), I've been thinking for a while that it would be good to even out some of our household costs in an effort to avoid the swinging pendulum of our food shopping bill - some weeks it can be only £50, whereas in a 'bad' household supplies week it can be more like £100. I'm going to try separating out some sort of household supplies budget from the main food budget, which can then be used for big purchases. I don't actually really know how much we spend on household stuff, so I'm going to start with taking £25 a month from the food budget from next month and see how we go from there.

The first one is toilet roll. Recycled supermarket toilet roll is usually fairly rubbish (or wildly expensive for the nicer stuff), but I've been reading good things about Who Gives A Crap (I wonder if the language censor will allow that brand name in there!) both in terms of their eco credentials and also the niceness of the toilet roll. And the price, while not ridiculously cheap, is comparable with the 'one rung up from standard own brand' toilet roll (not recycled, although most is FSC certified - how insane to be using new trees for bottom wiping though!), which is what we usually buy, as I find that anything cheaper than that we use up incredibly quickly as it's so thin. The quality vs quantity struggle is real when it comes to toilet roll .

I also like the fact that with WGAC as we get to grips with how often we need to replace things like toilet roll (they do tissues and kitchen roll too, although I don't find the supermarket versions of those so annoying) we can set up a 16/12/8 week subscription so it can just be budgeted as a monthly cost and come out regularly without any extra effort.

I had to buy toilet roll when I went to the shop yesterday, but if I can bring next week's shop in at a sensible budget I'm going to get a box of the WGAC toilet roll to give it a try.

I'm pleased to find something like this where the maths doesn't make it unfeasible, we can make a better choice as a family for the environment, and I can slot the cost in as a monthly budget category as I get to grips with it.

I'll post in the next few days on the maths and rationalising I did on a few other things, some successfully and some not.

[Deleted User]

That WGAC looks fab, thank you for suggesting! Will look into it properly later. For us, we buy the eco stuff at more expensive supermarkets and then inevitably spend extra whilst we are in the shop even though weve just gone in for toliet paper! So delivery will probably work out better

Suffolk_lass

WGAC - But it is nearly a pound a roll! That's like wiping with velvet from your scraps basket! I pay no more than 33p a roll from the supermarket and buy them when they are on offer, making sure they are biodegrade. The trees they are from are fast growing sustainable commercial crops that contribute to our environment while they are growing fast and promote the wealth of our community where they are managed. Two sides to ecology, these trees fall down once they are over twelve years old if not harvested and stop contributing to the management of carbon dioxide

I agree with the idea of a stores budget. Mine is slightly more than 13th of my annual budget and so far in 2018 I have spent £52.40 on dry goods, toiletries, loo roll, kitchen paper, laundry detergent, cleaning materials and washing up store cupboard things (liquid when 2 for £1 e.g.). I buy my brands when they are on offer and currently have no deodorant but 6 shower gels. I will only buy one deodorant unless they go on offer before I need it and will add shower gel to my "if it's on offer" list when I get down to two

Re teaspoons - I acquire plastic throw-away spoons from coffee shops or service stations and keep them, wash them and take them to and from work until they get manky, then recycle them. I like the old M&S ones, the Pret ones and our deli at work has bigger cutlery, that lasts ages - they all come in their branded colours so a different one for each child maybe? :money:

On [STRIKE]washing up bowls[/STRIKE] knitting patterns, could you take a photo on your phone and upload it on to your PC and then sell the pattern on? :money: