No Spare Money to repay

matelodave · 27 April 2019 at 11:18AM

As others have said a slow cooker could help, especially if you can get one from Gumtree or a charity shop - lots of them around as people buy them and then get fed up.

Possibly a tabletop oven/hotplate combo. You could then roast a chicken and make soup from the carcass.

We can get four meals out of the chicken meat (there are two of us) two hot, two cold and about six hearty bowls of very substantial soup from the carcass (lots of vegetable, lentils, split peas etc). We've got a pressure cooker (again something from Gumtree or similar) which saves energy. We freeze the soup, so that's eight to ten meals out of a single chicken.

Always make sure that the washing machine is fully loaded. It costs the same to run when is full as when it's half empty. Reduce your use of hot water by rinsing stuff (including your hands etc) in cold water rather than keep running off lots of cold to get hot water.

See if your water co offers water saving implements - a shower and tap restrictors can save water. Take fewer baths or showers. Use less water in the bath or only spend a couple of minutes in the shower.

Turn stuff off at the wall when it's not in use and dont leave lights on when not necessary. Consider getting LEDs in rooms where you use them a lot and definitely swap any halogen downlighters with LED equivalents. You'll save the cost in a very short time (especially if you get ALDI or Poundland lamps)

Savvy_Sue · 27 April 2019 at 10:05PM

FreshStart76 wrote: »

With regards to car Insurance i do not know why it is so high, i have never claimed and have 10+ years of NCB.

make sure you follow Martin's advice on car insurance, it takes a while, but one thing might be if you are the only person insured: if you can add another responsible driver (even if they never actually drive the car!) then that can bring costs down. So probably not your daughter, but if your parents are a 'good risk' then that's potentially worth trying.