Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Evening all,
A quite laid back, but productive day. I got the slow cooker going first thing to make some soup to freeze for mr f's work lunches. I bought a pack of 'meaty bones' yesterday (grand sum of £1.58) & with a round up of veg & a few splashes & pinches of this & that, they've made 5 good hearty portions of soup. He loves it. I don't really like meat-based soups so shall make myself a batch of leek & potato at some point.
Put an hour aside this morning to update budgets but couldn't get to my desk because of all my Christmas shopping, so decided to do a bit of wrapping. This is when my thrifty salvaging of wrapping materials really pays off. I recycle larger pieces of used wrapping paper, ribbons, bits & piwces for making labels, gift bags, etc. I wrapped 10 presents this afternoon & am nowhere near having to cut into a roll of new paper yet. And they all look pretty. I just can't bear lovely paper being ripped off & jettisoned straight into the bin. My Mum used to tell us about getting presents from her aunts who lived abroad. This was during wartime & Mum always said she kept every scrap of the pretty paper they were wrapped in because you couldn't get much of anything here at home & as a small child, the nice paper seemed to her as exciting as the gift within! I think of this story every year when I'm seeing what I can salvage from discarded wrappings.....& yes, if I'm spending Christmas at someone else's house, I still do it. For someone who used to fritter money away right, left & centre, the last ten years or so have seen me become incredibly intolerant of waste.
Mr f bought me a walnut whip on his way home from work, & you'll be glad to hear that I haven't wasted that either.
Enjoy your Saturday night, all.
F x

crazy_cat_lady

I know that Mr S isn't the cheapest of places to shop, but my weekly shop was £75 too yesterday, and not particularly frivolous. Lots of basics like pasta and rice, no meat as I get it from the butcher - I like Mr M but sometimes find it difficult to get stuff the kids ask for in there so don't go often. If I had more time I'd go to Aldee and top up at Mr S. It is just expensive these days.

Onebrokelady

foxgloves wrote: »

My biggest annoyance with couriers is not giving people sufficient time to open the door. I told one off earlier this year. I was only sitting about 4 metres from the front door when he knocked. I jumped up immediately & went straight to the door to find him already back down the drive making a note that I was out!! To get there that quickly, he must have knocked & not waited any time whatsoever. Anyway, he got short shrift from me when I called him back!

I've had this too, they move like greased lightening :rotfl:

Onebrokelady

foxgloves wrote: »

Evening all,
A quite laid back, but productive day. I got the slow cooker going first thing to make some soup to freeze for mr f's work lunches. I bought a pack of 'meaty bones' yesterday (grand sum of £1.58) & with a round up of veg & a few splashes & pinches of this & that, they've made 5 good hearty portions of soup. He loves it. I don't really like meat-based soups so shall make myself a batch of leek & potato at some point.
Put an hour aside this morning to update budgets but couldn't get to my desk because of all my Christmas shopping, so decided to do a bit of wrapping. This is when my thrifty salvaging of wrapping materials really pays off. I recycle larger pieces of used wrapping paper, ribbons, bits & piwces for making labels, gift bags, etc. I wrapped 10 presents this afternoon & am nowhere near having to cut into a roll of new paper yet. And they all look pretty. I just can't bear lovely paper being ripped off & jettisoned straight into the bin. My Mum used to tell us about getting presents from her aunts who lived abroad. This was during wartime & Mum always said she kept every scrap of the pretty paper they were wrapped in because you couldn't get much of anything here at home & as a small child, the nice paper seemed to her as exciting as the gift within! I think of this story every year when I'm seeing what I can salvage from discarded wrappings.....& yes, if I'm spending Christmas at someone else's house, I still do it. For someone who used to fritter money away right, left & centre, the last ten years or so have seen me become incredibly intolerant of waste.
Mr f bought me a walnut whip on his way home from work, & you'll be glad to hear that I haven't wasted that either.
Enjoy your Saturday night, all.
F x

I save gift bags if I get any but have never managed to save wrapping paper as everyone in my family go completly ferral when unwrapping presents,I did console myself with putting it in the recycling bin until I found out last year that most of it isn't recycleable:eek: I was toying with using brown paper this year and maybe decorating it,but I think this will end up costing too much to be practical

I still haven't bought any walnut whips, I really want one now but will have to wait until tomorrow,I might end up in town so will be able to get one then:j

foxgloves

CCL - Yes, our shopping was the same - very little in it other than basics - we doubled up on coffee & cat meat because it was on offer, but there was no big joint of meat or box of washing powder or lots of frivolous extras. I think we will go back to shopping at A*ld next week. We do have a branch in town, but it is on the outskirts & so it involves moving the car to a different car park if we also need lots of stuff from the market or we have heavy charity shop bags to drop off, etc. 'Shopping from home' is going to be a massive theme of the week ahead - see post to come.

OBL - Have you tried the M&S ones? Box of three walnut whips - a standard one, a double chocolate one which has chocolate sauce at the bottom under the mallow fluff & a toffee pecan one which has toffee sauce. If not, I think you defo need to put those on your Santa list!

F x

foxgloves

Well, I'm still going on about that £22 over budget grocery shop the other day. I've been through the receipt like Mrs Scrooge from Stingyland & there are no errors or overchargings & all the offers/deals went through correctly. That means our trolley load of really very ordinary things really was £22 more than we expected it to be. I toyed with the idea of via-ing some extra money to the grocery budget to make up the shortfall, but I decided not to do this, as we have quite an expensive month coming up, plus there are big worries about the security of mr f's job at the moment. So we talked about it & we decided to use current stores as much as possible & meal plan with this very much in mind. So the big theme of this week & the one after that is going to be 'Shopping from Home'. I haven't been quite as focussed on this over the last few weeks for unavoidable reasons, but I am home now, & am up for the challenge. We have £70 left in the grocery fund until pay-day & lots of food in the pantry & freezer. With a bit of time put into batch cooking & baking, I think I can produce two weeks of meal plans which are both creative & frugal.
So I've started that today, really. I've baked a granary loaf & tomorrow's packed lunch is some tasty leftovers from the freezer. I used up a limp lemon & the last of a bag of dried fruit to make some buns & while I was at it, made a bit more mixture, added almond extract & used it to bake a sponge layer to freeze ready for a Christmas trifle (trifle sponges duly crossed off festive shopping list as we prefer home-made anyway). mr f asked me if I wanted him to pop in M&S Food in his break & get us a treat for dessert. I said 'No' & that I'd make a crumble. I've used our home grown apples & a bag of blackberries from the freezer and as they cooked up into quite a big pan of fruit, I've frozen half of it to go in the trifle instead of buying tins of raspberries. We've used blackberry & apple in a trifle before & everyone said how nice it was........so that was another item crossed off the Christmas food list.
I'm trying a new recipe tonight & there was a little money saving surprise there too. The recipe stated passata, which I had no intention of buying, so I've defrosted a bag of our homegrown tomatoes, have skinned them (really easy after freezing) & will zizz them up & sieve, to make my own. The recipe was from the Waitrose free newspaper - it's Pea & Paneer Curry. It makes double the quantity of sauce required so I will freeze that & can use it as the basis of another meal. Hope it's nice! I was annoyed about the grocery overspend & not very accepting of it, because like CCL with her shop, we hadn't bought anything out of the ordinary & it certainly wasn't a huge trolleyful, but I do feel very much 'in the zone' now for some serious Shopping from Home & that will be the theme of my diary over the next week. I feel I've started as I mean to go on, today. I think I'll do a new freezer list tomorrow.
Hope everyone's had a peaceful & productive day.
F x

joedenise

Think I also need to do a freezer inventory. I've done my indoor freezer but still haven't done the outside one, which being a chest freezer isn't so easy to see what is in there. I know there's quite a bit of meat and a few H ready meals but really need to know else there is!

Denise

joeyjimbles

Just popping on to say that M&S do mini walnut whips too but no walnuts on them.

foxgloves

Ooooh, mini walnut whips, Joeyjimbles! I do like a walnut on top, though.

JoeDenise - Yes, I really must get on with my new freezer list. I have put it on my job list for tomorrow. There could be all sorts of yummy & useful things in there I've forgotten about.

foxgloves

Our latest energy bill landed in my inbox last night & I've had a look at it today. The good news is that we are £266 in credit towards the coldest months. That's always a relief this time of year, isn't it, to see a credit balance? However, I always like to compare this year's bills with the same period last year, & that was interesting, & not such good news, as we have used more units on all 3 tariffs. Our gas use for the period in question is 324 units higher, our daytime electricity is 135 units higher & our night time electricity is 232 units higher. While I'm obviously really pleased we have a credit balance, I am currently baffled by where exactly we are using extra units of energy. I compared units rather than cost for this, as I know our provider (like most of them) has increased unit costs since last autumn, so I've been directly comparing amounts of units used. The only things I have come up with so far are that we had a holiday at the very beginning of November last year, so that would have been a few days where our heating was either off or turned down to an absolute minimum, plus no hot water use (mr f is a bit of a hippo with baths, I'm afraid) at home for that time.....I guess that would make a difference. We haven't acquired any additional appliances & I can't think that we have made any significant changes to our energy use habits. I do think, however, that all the little energy-saving measures I used to do regularly on a daily basis when I was actively trying to reduce our bills, may have been dwindling. I'm talking about only boiling sufficient water for one coffee if that's all I'm making, switching lights off all the time - actually, I'm really hot on this, but mr f will have the kitchen lights on all through the daylight hours & that's a minimum of 6 bulbs.......10 if it's all of them. We do have a dark kitchen, but it's not so dark as to require artificial illumination all day - I think I will step up my annoying (to him!) habit of switching them off when it is perfectly light enough to see what he is doing! Our current washing machine has shorter cycles than our previous one, so I have been using those on 40 degrees instead of mostly using 30 degrees, which I often did with the old machine in order to reduce the ridiculously long cycle times. Now that energy prices have increased, I think I will revisit using 30 degree cycles when appropriate. I mostly find that 30 degrees gets our laundry perfectly clean, so that's maybe another 'green' habit which has slipped a bit.
Anyway, I shall revisit all my good habits, as they have served us well before. Our energy account is well in credit, so I don't want to sound as though I'm moaning, as my heart absolutely goes out to the many people in this 'austerity'-driven country who are struggling to choose between such fundamental needs as heating & eating. I mean more that it is noticeable that we have used more energy than the same period last year, & as energy prices are only likely to keep rising, I think I would like to explore how we have increased our useage.
I think I shall save a little bit now, by switching this laptop off & going to fetch the laundry in!
Hope everyone has got off to a good start to the week - if not, I've said it before, just have a calm evening then start the week again tomorrow.
F x