Put away your purse & become debt-averse

wishingthemortgaheaway

At least it was a fiver found and not a fiver lost.

foxgloves

Wishingthe mortgageaway - Yes, you are so right. I always think I've made a mistake in my calculations when there is spare money & have to check evetything in case it comes back to haunt me later. So different from my old pre-LBM budgeting method of looking at my statement balance for about 1 second with my eyes closed, before shoving it in a drawer!

foxgloves

A nice little £10 gift card arrived in the post (survey income). I'd normally use this for a household or grocery items & pay the equivalent cash into the Loan Pay Down Fund, but not this time. Mr f has a big birthday at the end of this year & I am saving all vouchers for this particular store to put towards his present.
Friday is my weekly cleaning day, so I've been busy with that & am now sitting by the fire in a clean tidy house. I don't know how anyone else feels, but one of my bugbears is the ridiculous amount of cleaning products on supermarket shelves. Do we really need so many different products (invariably in planet polluting plastic bottles) for every cleaning job? How can there be so much difference between cleaning a bathroom & cleaning a kichen that we need 2 separate products. When did we get suckered into believing all that hype?
I use 'Stardrops'.....neat on tough jobs & diluted in an old spray bottle for most jobs & one bottle of the concentrate lasts months. I also buy washing up liquid, supermarket own label loo cleaner & laundry detergent. I like multi-use things, so washing-up liquid is also used for pre-treating stains on clothes before washing & with a dash of vinegar to clean windows, polished off with scrunched up newspaper. We buy the old fashioned bags of soda crystals for tough jobs....pre-soaking whites, cleaning the oven, unblocking sinks, etc. Even my floor mop is an old style string one on a wooden handle. I've tried various higher spec ones in the past - all more expensive, all non-recyclable plastic & none of them did the job any better. There are whole categories of this stuff I just can't see the point in......fabric softeners to perfume my washing, plug-in plastic air-fresheners, loo blocks in little plastic cages, gizmos to drop into my vacuum cleaner cylinder to puff out a chemical fragrance while I'm hoovering......
Oh, & I use polish on wooden furniture now & again....I like the old-fashioned beeswax polish in jars or tins. It lasts ages as you only need a tidsy bit.
So when I go down the cleaning aisle in the supermarket & am assailed by all those plastic bottles.....not to mention how many chemicals we are inhaling over a lifetime of sustained use, I do feel our choice to use just a very small selection is probably good for more than just financial reasons.
Must go & let cat in now. He's sitting on our front wall telling anyone who goes by that we are horrid cat-hating meanies who don't feed him!
Have a good Friday night all,
F x

Baileys_Babe

I so agree with you regarding cleaning products. We use washing powder, soda crystals, vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, washing up liquid, beeswax polish, toilet cleaner and dishwasher powder. Which to me seems so much. Where possible I use things for multi purpose ie vinegar - rince aid (dw), cleaning the windows, in wm (where the fabric softener goes), on our chips.
Where possible I try to avoid buying things in plastic, our dw powder comes in a cardboard box and our laundry powder comes in a large paper sack.
To cut down on packaging and to reduce how often we go to the shops we try to buy in bulk and decant to a smaller container if necessary. For example we buy wu liquid in 5 litre container, laundry powder sack lasts 9 months, box of dw powder lasts 4 months.
I also prefer to use powder to tablets in the dw & wm as it is easy to adjust the amount of product you use dependent on how soiled the load is.
I absolutely loathe air freshers and other things that put artificial fragrance into my life. The scent is vile as well I often react by coughing or sneezing or runny eyes or nose, also I find they effect the taste of any food or drink I consume in an environment that contains them.

foxgloves

Baileysbabe - I so agree. Back before the LBM, I used to buy quite a lot of 'green' household cleaning brands, but the simple truth is that as soon as I was budgeting properly, I could see that we couldn't afford them. This was disappointing at first, but our environmental contribution now is that we buy only a very few products & use them sparingly. I only buy laundry powder in cardboard boxes. I did once try some laundry tablets which were half price but the packaging was utterly ridiculous.....a solid plastic bucket thing with a lid made from a different type of hard plastic & a handle. It was a shape which made re-use practically impossible & neither of the plastic types were recyclable. And the branded tablets were no better than my usual box of A*di Almat powder. I think future generations will surely look back at these times & question the sanity of our lifestyles regarding such a casual attitude to waste, especially plastics. I can barely get my head around the fact that every piece of plastic ever made is 'still there'. We may throw it away, but the reality is that there IS no 'away' for
plastic.
Today might be very good for the budget......so much snow overnight, I'm not sure we'll be going anywhere. Mr f is currently digging out the cat flap while cat stares out in horror at the state of outside!
Stay warm all.

foxgloves

Garden still looking pretty snowmongous, but managed to get to Aldi, followed by toasted teacakes & free coffees in Waitrose cafe, which worked out a good bit cheaper than the city centre trip we had originally planned for today - no car park charges for starters.

Week 3 of March grocery budget & we came in 13p under target. I also took the opportunity to buy the baking ingredients needed for my contribution to our family buffet at Easter weekend, & for the Easter gifts I'm making. I bought everything needed except a dozen eggs & a pint of whole milk, which I'll buy fresh nearer the time. I reckon the whole lot will come in at under £23. I'm pleased with that because it is much less than going along to a big family meal at a restaurant & buying an Easter egg or similar for 6 people. I'd still have made a cake anyway to share with a cup of tea later on, so I am pleased with the saving. And shopping from home first definitely reduced that shopping list!

Another small shopping from home victory this afternoon. Really fancied some chocolate today but had some yesterday, didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I expected & didn't want to pay out again. Came home & baked a small batch of scones instead, using what we'd already got in stock. Made 2 normal size ones, which we enjoyed hot from the oven with a nice hot cafetiere & 8 mini-size ones which will be much easier to integrate into healthy eating. Have frozen them for when the need for a little treat strikes.

Another win......started looking online to see what nice new purses are available. My purse is lovely......it was a present....but the lining has completely unstitched inside the zipped section, making it hard to get my money in & out. Then I just thought.....'Come on, woman....you can SEW, just get it bloody mended!' So that's my next job. It"s not like me these days automatically to think 'buy new', rather than 'mend it'.
So I'm off to do that, then as it's mr f's cooking night, I intend to enjoy some 'bum in chair' time by the fire.
Stay warm all, & keep your pence in your purse!
F x

Onebrokelady

We got totally clobbered by the snow again,it started on Saturday night and went on all day and part of last night,I did manage to get to work this morning though so that was good,the cat and dog were not impressed

foxgloves

Onebrokelady - Yes, us too! Made it back from a 75 mile journey just in time on Sat, as it snowed all evening & all night & we had a good 6cms by Sunday morning. It's melted now. We grow quite a lot of food & I really need some drier, less freezy weather to progress the veggie garden.

foxgloves

Morning readers,
Well yesterday felt like a day of two halves on the money front. On the plus side, there was lots of frugal kitchen activity. I froze some little scones I baked on Sun, shredded blanched & froze 100g chunk of leftover savoy cabbage as I can use that with l/o bacon in the minestrone soup I'm making tomorrow. I also had a look at what fruit is left in the freezer, as I didn't buy much fresh fruit this week. Found a bag of blackberries, which I stewed for using in our Easter trifle, & a big bag of wombled cherry plums. I cooked those up & froze in individual portions. They will do for desserts or in yoghurt or on top of porridge. Also baked quick sponge for Easter trifle. We have custard powder, so will only need to buy cream now.
Last night was 'Freezer dive night' on my meal plans, so I did a pan of rice & we ate that with Hairy Biker channa masala & some dal I batch-cooked a while ago.
I also carried on knitting my current project - a real thrift project this, as am knitting tiny mitred squares from all my odds & ends of leftover sock yarn to make a throw for the back of the sofa.
NOT so good things:
I spent about 40 mins at my desk updating budgets & straightening out those where we'd swapped funds. We often use CCs to buy planned purchases, then pay the money across asap, as we like to maximise loyalty points for vouchers. So I carefully went through everything & made an action list of everything I needed to do to keep different budget pots correct.
Then the phone rang & it was the fresh fish supplier we use, to say they're coming on Mon. I wasn't expecting them till April but I guess Easter hols have altered their scedules, so had not budgeted for our fish order. So that meant going back to my desk & re-doing figures, as I don't like letting our small emergency 'cushion' in current account get too low. So more coffee & calculator, & it still looked as though I'd be able to put a little extra into our Loan Pay Down Fund next week.
Then mr f came home from work & announced that Amazon Prime have taken payment for a further year. I deal with all the bills except Virgin Media & Prime. He apparently thought Prime payment was next month so hadn't flagged it up. So I hadn't allowed for it in March's budget. Bah to continuing payment authority payments which husbands don't tell me about!! Next week's payment to Loan Pay Down Fund probably won't happen now. Grrrrrrr.
Oh well, must see what Cat is up to.....can hear an ominous rug-destroying noise. Have a good day, all x

foxgloves

Have had a tidy-up & stopped thinking about the un-budgeted for payments I was boring you all with earlier.
Was just about to pour off the 'discard' portion of my sourdough jar before feeding it ready to bake a loaf on Thursday & I remembered I'd meant to experiment with using the discarded bit to bake sourdough crackers. Googled a recipe & am now so excited about trying it that I've stopped being annoyed about those 2 extra payments!
So I've got an audiobook playing in the kitchen, I'm looking out on our robins hoovering the last of the food we put out in the snow & I'm about to try mixing up my first batch of sourdough cracker dough. If they turn out nice, my husband will hoover them all when he gets home from work & if they turn out nasty..........he will doubtless still hoover them!
Ok, scales at the ready, oven going on.