Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Onebrokelady

Foxgloves.....what you need is a nice Christmas T shirt �� I wear mine with my jeans and it's super stretchy to allow for expansion of mince pie filled tummy

crazy_cat_lady

foxgloves wrote: »

Well would you Christmas Eve it??!
I've just read in the Giardian weekend mag that assymetrical sequins are 'in' - maybe that 'Audrey 2' top was a couple of decades ahead of its time.

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

foxgloves

Noooooooo!! Why did I ever start dredging up all these memories of waste-of-money Christmas outfits? I've just remembered the year I cleverly decided to bypass disappointment in the fitting rooms & bought some shiny silver fabric to make a top, instead.
Did I get round to making it? Yes.
Did it fit? Yes.
Did I wear it on Christmas Day? Yes.
Did it look good? Um...that would be a 'No', unless you count looking like two melons squished up in some Bacofoil as a good result.
Lol, I'm not sure these money wasting memories are doing me any good, but they are definitely mistakes I shan't be repeating!
F x

joeyjimbles

I shall treasure that image - thank you so much.

1LuckyLady

foxgloves wrote: »

Noooooooo!! Why did I ever start dredging up all these memories of waste-of-money Christmas outfits? I've just remembered the year I cleverly decided to bypass disappointment in the fitting rooms & bought some shiny silver fabric to make a top, instead.
Did I get round to making it? Yes.
Did it fit? Yes.
Did I wear it on Christmas Day? Yes.
Did it look good? Um...that would be a 'No', unless you count looking like two melons squished up in some Bacofoil as a good result.
Lol, I'm not sure these money wasting memories are doing me any good, but they are definitely mistakes I shan't be repeating!
F x

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Onebrokelady

Oh dear...........:rotfl:

foxgloves

Hello Debtbusters,
Well, one of the tasks on my list today was filling all our tiny plastic snack boxes with dried fruit. It's something I started doing not that long after the LBM (the big real one, not the two-day wimpy flickers). It started because we used to buy big bags of those little cardboard boxes of raisins to take as not too unhealthy work snacks, & because I like something in my handbag to avoid the grumpy wobbles if I am unexpectedly late for a meal. We'd just started doing proper meal planning & shopping lists and mr f was going the full geek on comparing prices per kilo in the supermarket. He noticed the differential between price per kilo on these little ready-boxed branded raisins, compared with just buying a bag of basic own label sultanas. So I spotted some tiny plastic food boxes in the kitchen section of the '99p shop' & bought a couple of sets of those. They really are small, but were perfect for filling with raisins, nuts, dried apricots, granola & similar for easy on-the-go snacks. I also use them when I want to freeze leftover lemon juice, grated ginger or other small useful leftovers. We were pretty new to all this money saving mullarkey back then & were so proud of ourselves for having worked out this little saving.
The little plastic boxes have earned their keep - I must have re-filled them hundreds of times, I should think. I like to fill them all as a batch so that we can just grab & go.
Hope everyone has had a productive start to the week - if not, pick yourselves up, dust yourselves down & start the week again tomorrow!
Cheers,
F x

1LuckyLady

When the kids were really small I bought some of those boxes, they were really cheap not even a pound, I thought they were great. I had little snacks with me all the time until one day when I put my hand into my bag and pulled out two empty pots! The raisins were spread throughout the baby change bag I wasn't impressed (and neither were the two grumpy little boys who'd been promised a snack!) and to top it all, the baby talc powder had been left open and that was covering everything!

Not long after I saw some similar size boxes but the ones which have flaps that clip shut, I think I paid £2 a set of 4 and 10+yrs on we still have, and use 3 of them most days

foxgloves

They were a good buy, then 1LL. You can't complain at getting 10+ years' use from something you paid £2 for!

foxgloves

Greetings Diary Readers,
Hope you are all finding at least a bit of something to feel cheerful about on this dull grey day. I'm feeling a bit 'so-so' generally, but am pleased at a recent bit of financial constraint & common sense shown by the big hairy Beloved & myself this week. It's all about coffee machines here at the moment.
We run on coffee in our house. And we like 'proper' coffee, not instant. We've had various coffee machines over the years & none of them have really turned out to be quite what we wanted.
Back in the distant mists of time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth & I was a student, my housemates clubbed together & bought me a filter coffee machine for my 19th birthday. It was one of the electric drip filter jobbers with a glass jug & a hot plate. And it did the job fantastically well for years......in fact for 16 years........until mr F arrived on the scene, pronounced it 'an effing death trap' & threw it in the bin!! Now to be fair, my attitude to electrical safety wasn't what it could have been back then......& there was the occasional interesting green flash when switching it on, but I was very fond of it & it made damned good coffee.
Next machine was expensive. It came with kit. It frothed milk, it made la-di-dah fancypants coffees as well as filter. It had a permanent filter, so no need to buy all those packs of filter papers. It also had tubes that were very hard to get clean & became a bit of a hygiene risk because of the milk. Then the permanent filter wore into a hole (just after the warranty ran out, as usual) & a new one cost £18. Must have been a different definition of the word 'permanent' to the one I was familiar with. In the end we took it to the tip. We weren't using it for cappucinos, etc, because it couldn't make them as good as local coffee shops with their big cafe-standard machines, which meant it took up an awful lot of space in our kitchen just to be used for filter coffees.
Next in the search, we bought a machine from one of the good German-sounding brands. Now I'll admit it makes good espresso, but I want a normal sized cup of coffee to which I can add a bit of milk & there was the problem - impossible to get a hot cup of coffee if bigger than about an egg cup. Putting milk in cooled it further. Now, I know I can add boiling water, then a bit of milk & have an 'Americano', but that means I have to put the machine on AND the kettle. So apart from making espressos after we've had friends round for dinner, & mr f sometimes fancying on, this not exactly inexpensive machine barely gets used.
In between times, we've fallen back to using a cafetiere, but over the past 2 or 3 years, we can't believe how many replacement filters we've had to buy, plus on one occasion the whole 'press' mechanism as the shop didn't sell the filter discs separately, & our current one is yet again serving up coffee full of grounds. Grrrrr. Time for a change, & that's where I got all nostalgic for my old-style drip filter machine. I knew where I was with that. Beans ground & popped in the top, water in the tank, switch on & a few minutes later, a piping hot jug of coffee. So looked around for something similar on a city centre trip this week. And this is where I get onto the reformed money behaviour, because we found what we thought would be the perfect machine for us. Only problem was I hadn't planned to buy one from this month's budget. Almost put it on a credit card. The decided to go & look in a rival shop to see if it was on sale for a cheaper price. It wasn't. So there we stood in the shop talking ourselves into buying it there & then, before talking ourselves right out of it again! The old pre-LBM us, terrible spendy pair that we were, would have bought it from the first shop without the slightest concern about whether we could afford it. And then we both opened our mouths & spoke at once! I said 'Let's buy it. Put it on your CC. We can pay for it in next month's budget' & at exactly the same time, mr f said 'Let's leave it for now. It might be reduced in the January sales & we'll kick ourselves if we could have got it a lot cheaper'. So that's what we did. We stroked that lovely classy machine (well, I did!), walked away & left it in the shop. It is definitely the model we want, does everything we want it to do & has none of the extra frou-frous we are not bothered about. But December's an expensive month, I hadn't allowed for a £149 spend when I did our budget & in all honesty, I can't easily find that sum now without taking or 'borrowing from' our savings. We will buy it, but it will have to wait. I wonder if our being sensible will be rewarded in the sales by finding it with a nice chunk of money knocked off the price. Hope so!!
I don't have to tell you, that back in the Spendy Years, that machine would already be in pride of place on the kitchen worktop, quite probably with a set of completely unnecessary, but lovely mugs to go with it too!
On balance though, I enjoy being sensible with money much more than I enjoyed being such a frivolous spender. Anyone out there wanting to change & hasn't started yet? Do it! You've nothing to lose but all the worry of seeing those horrible energy-draining debts rise. I can promise you it's a much nicer feeling seeing them come down.
Hope everyone is managing a useful productive - & peaceful day.
F xx