Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Lol, yes @Blackcats, but he is now the owner of a sparkling fluffy backside! We get a bit of 'red arrows' bowl activity as well. They are usually both given the same flavour of stinky pouch, but you know how it is, the chunks in the other bowl always seem to look more exciting.
@Sun_Addict - Yes, both of us would rather administer back-of-the-neck treatments than the long psychological warfare involved in getting pills down cats.

@Baileys_Babe - Thanks for Netflix thoughts. We had the standard plan, but we are a single-TV household & have no interest in watching films/programmes on titchy screens, so we do only ever watch on the one device - our TV. We will have a think about packages when we decide to re-subscribe. I think there are enough interesting foreign language crime & drama series available for free on 4OD alone to keep me in viewing material atm.
I occasionally see comments or posts from @DNMS on Facebook so she is still around. I expect she's very busy studying.
The wraps are just made with bog standard plain white flour. I don't have corn oil, so I just used rapeseed. Mr F took some for his packed lunch yesterday. They are smaller than the bought ones, so I filled & rolled 3, but he said they were more filling than the bought ones & still had more flavour, even when cold & his packed lunch was made the evening before, so he reckons he only needs two in future.
F

Sun_Addict

My cats always pinch the dog's food but if I put dog food in their bowls they'd sniff it and walk off. We have the £6.99 Netflix (it was £5.99 until recently). I don't watch it much but Mr SA does. I just don't have the spare time to watch a lot of TV.

foxgloves

Hello m'dears,
I don't seem to have achieved much today, although we've cleaned the house between us & I've done next week's meal plans & the grocery shopping list. Had to pop out for a routine breast screening appointment early doors - Mr F, who was off this morning, picked me up afterwards & we went for cappuccino & scones.......& what did we talk about while we were in the coffee shop? Well, we'd thoroughly chewed over the report about disgusting behaviour at a certain address in Downing St last night......& so the only other major topic of conversation atm is.......yes, damned energy bills! There were 2 parts to this conversation - firstly that I have not received our usual monthly energy bill/statement from the tentacled ones (usually lands in my inbox on 20th of the month so nearly a week late) & secondly that we could do with having some sort of a plan going into the Autumn re any further ways we can cut our usage. 
I know there have been many instances in the past when Mr F has been irritated with me for turning lights off that he's left on & my regular comments that our upstairs is lit up 'like bloody Blackpool' (he is much better now at switching stuff off) but we are definitely on the same page now with being extremely careful with energy use, & he agrees with me that it is the only part of the whole crazy tariff scenario over which any of us currently have any agency. Anyway, we'd only been home about 10 mins when there was a knock at the door & coincidentally, it was a chap doing meter readings for the cephalopods. I was surprised as we have a smart meter, but after he'd gone, we wondered whether there's a round of meter readings going on for households which are well in credit to check if the meters are working, etc. It did seem a coincidence, because about an hour or so after he'd tapped the readings into his little gizmo & left, I received an email to say our direct debit would be going out on the normal day at the beginning of June & would not be increasing  - it's currently £119 for both gas & electricity combined. It also stated our account credit balance which was a lot higher than last month. Unusually, there was no monthly bill, no attachment with the usual full breakdown of what we've used & what it cost. I got my trusty money book out, as I log our energy account figures each month & that was when I realised that the increase in our balance is simply the £119 monthly payment for April to May. This gives a completely meaningless figure because they haven't taken off what they have charged us for the gas & electricity we used that month. It certainly wasn't free, so what's going on? I have emailed them to request our usual monthly bill asap. 
However, the lack of proper billing information from their end does make me think that they have put us on a list for meter reading before they send it. I did also wonder whether there has possibly been some kind of breakdown of communication between them & our smart meter - a wi-fi outage at a crucial point, maybe? I don't know.
So that was one energy thing. The planning for the colder months is in progress. Years ago, I was given a book about how to be a more environmentally responsible household. It is set out like an audit where you can go through & tick boxes if you already do the thing suggested, & is divided into improvements you can make for free, for a small outlay, for a big outlay, etc. I dug it out last night to read the chapter on energy saving. I already do a lot of the things suggested, as I think will most of us on here, but I am going to go through it properly over the coming week & see if there is anything we are not currently doing which would make a contribution to mitigating costs. I intend to write a list in my notebook of all the things we currently do & others which we (or I, depending on what they are) plan to do to be ready for Autumn/Winter, when of course the increased costs converge with the colder weather. I might share the 'plan' on my diary if it doesn't sound too desperately boring.
Oh dear, this is another long post. I must go & see how the greenhouse veg is getting on. Cold wind again here today, in fact colder than yesterday, so I still haven't felt able to plant out the rest of the tender veg. 
Cardis out again.....if they ever went away!
F x

Sun_Addict

They might be double checking those with a fair bit of credit. They won’t be knocking on my door that’s for sure 😆

foxgloves

That's all I can think it is, @Sun_Addict. They'll be wanting to get people's monthly DDs increased to meet the higher costs asap, as if they don't, & households are then faced with a huge amount to pay to get their accounts back in credit, the energy companies are going to face even more folk being unable to pay. We have ended up in credit mostly because they never adjusted our monthly dd to take account of a big change in usage patterns when we had a major heating upgrade nearly 2 years ago......despite the fact that we also had a smart meter installed enabling them to see exactly what & how much we were using. 
F

Humdinger1

@foxgloves I couldn't agree with you more re parties!  Quote from Benny of Abba 'You can't call it an Abba party. It is a Johnson party where they happened to play Abba music.'  The thing is, to many in those circles it's not a party without at least 3 people going to A and E...

Baileys_Babe

Please share your plans to reduce your energy usage I for one will appreciate some fresh ideas and reminders of those I have forgotten.

foxgloves

Agree, @Humdinger1 - I now refer to the address concerned as 10 Bullingdon St - absolutely disgraceful behaviour. My friend had 2 people at her dad's funeral because they wrongly understood that the rules applied to everyone. My blood boils practically every time I watch the news......I'm a party political person & a news junkie too, which doesn't help my wind-up levels.

@Baileys_Babe - Happy to share any new (to me) bits & bobs that might be worth adding to all our current energy-saving micro-measures. Ran one from the eco book past Mr F over breakfast to see if he thought the science was sound. He thought it was, but that it was likely to be a very small amount saved over a year. Will share my list when I've finished reading & thinking.
F

foxgloves

Hello Friday Frugalistas,
Well, I've been chased by a researcher to get the next part of a paid survey completed & after 5 attempts to get through the questions indicating that I understand the instructions, I've had to respond with apologies that I simply can't fathom out what I am being asked to do! It's a shame as I've done quite a few surveys this afternoon & was on something of a roll. Never mind, some of us ooze mathsy-logic-skills & some of us don't! I'm in the 2nd category My forte in these things is anything word-based.
Despite my poor showings in maths, I am strong on arithmetic, which I have put to good use as today is my Big Budget Day. I reconciled May's figures & didn't find anything untoward, then set June's. Mr F has had a small pay-rise (massively below inflation, aren't they all?) & a bit of back-pay related to same, so I was able to shore up some of our Savings Pots a bit more. I have 10 in total & 3 of them are at the maximum amount we capped them at (based on perceived need when we sat & discussed it at the start of the year) but most of the others are a fair way off. I'm always torn between looking at what is available in each month's budget & chucking it at a single pot, in order to get them built up quicker, or adding much smaller amounts to multiple pots. I usually go for the latter. 
I haven't yet received a response from the Cephalopods about our lack of May energy bill. I do know that our DD payment isn't changing in June, so I was able to set my budget properly, but I do feel twitchy the longer this lack of information goes on. 
Other money saving wins: Not that many, but I did put a load of towels & household linens in the washer as soon as I spotted blue sky & a breeze blowing this morning. I think rain may be forecast for early next week when I'd normally be doing laundry so I thought it made sense to get at least one whirlygig's worth of free drying. Tonight's meal plan offering is turkey chilli with a bowl of Mr F's lovely home made jacket wedges. Can you believe this is still the chilli from my huge post-Christmas batch-cooking session when I set about using up all our leftovers? It's the recipe from the WI Christmas cook book & I make it every year. Talking of leftovers, we seem to have a lot of milk at the moment & I'm not sure why, as we are drinking our usual copious amounts of coffee......no builders though, & three of those can knock back a fair amount of drinks. I will make a rice pudding tomorrow if we are still looking awash with the stuff. That will please Mr F - probably a good time to ask him to help me do a bit of fir tree wrangling!
Well, I've sat at my desk far too long today, so am going to go & have a walk around before doing all the kitchen tidying tasks I have blithely ignored all day.
Take care all,
F x

Deni_debt-free_dreamer

Evening foxgloves

I have done a couple of surveys this afternoon, thankfully no complex number problems as that is not my forte at all!  I failed O level maths many times  
I've just made a veg lasagne for my DD2 who i'm going to visit tomorrow - it does smell rather yummy
Happy weekend !

Love Deni