2020 Frugal Living Challenge

[Deleted User]

I'm another one who is still harvesting tomatoes! 🙌 I'm dehydrating the ones I get today along with lots of sage from the garden - ive also got some purple basil and courgettes to do 😉
Thankfully my supplies of food, toiletries and cleaning stuff are really good - I buy my dried/tinned etc stuff once or twice a year from a wholesaler -  dd went shopping this week and said that people have obviously been panic buying 🙈 
My oil tank is full and I have plenty of wood and coal should we end up with power cuts- we had quite a few this weekend due to gales and torrential rain but thankfully it was so mild the residual heat in the house was sufficient. I do need a powerbank for my mobile phone though - I ended up sitting in my car to charge it at the weekend!! 😂

[Deleted User]

@willow_loulou - sorry, forgot to put this in my last post! 

Dumplings

Ingredients

• 115g vegan butter/marg (doesn't need to be vegan but I am so that's what I use! 😉)
• 200g flour
• 3 Tbsp Water (plus more - see instructions)

Instructions

1. In a mixing bowl, combine the flour and butter using your finger tips - rub it together to form a crumb dry
2. Then, add in the 3 tbsp of water - and stir using a spoon. Then, take your hands and stir/press it together, keep adding water - a tablespoon at a time, and mixing it in until a soft dough ball forms. Don't add much water at once, it can easily become too wet!
3. Once your soft dough is formed, use floured hands to roll into 10 dumplings (or, however many you can depending on the size you want - remember, they'll grow as they cook)
4. Place the dumplings in the top of your stew or casserole, when there's 25 minutes cooking time left* (remember, the dumplings will soak up some liquid so make sure you have enough liquid in your stew
5. Put the lid on the stew or casserole, and cook for 25 minutes - or until the dumplings are soft and cooked through
6. Optional: Cook for a further 5 mins with the lid off if you're making a casserole and want the dumplings to be a bit crunchy on top

willow_loulou

Thank you @smushesma that’s brilliant x

Bluegreen143

Thought I’d pop back on with this October budget - I will work out the budget for this last quarter of the year tonight. Thank you for the welcome @Frugaldom! I’m sure Red would love to help out with your caravan if he could, he’s currently spending his furlough wisely by making a garden seating pod thing for my mum (a good deal for both of us - she’s giving him some money but not what she was looking at paying a professional, but Red is always happy to help family out anyway and Mum wanted to give us money anyway so now gets something out of it 😂).

OCT BUDGET

INCOME minimum £1,750 
Red salary - he’s sent me £1,600 this month & kept £250 for his own phone bill and spending money 
UC - not sure yet but think a minimum £150 - this is a new thing for us because of furlough pay

Child ben - saved separately 

BILLS £900 
- mortgage £421
- council tax £153 (over 12 months)
- life/illness ins £49
- gas & electricity £93
- internet £23
- tv license £13
- home ins £10 (saved up as we pay annually)
- car running £70 (insurance, tax, MOT/service - set aside for paying annually) 

- nursery school fund £25
- my phone & spotify music subscription £44 (yes too expensive, I’m locked in the phone contract til next summer and we use the Spotify subscription daily as we don’t have CDs etc)

I do have a couple of subscriptions we pay annually - amazon prime, Disney+ (we let a friend use our log in and in return we get use of their Netflix) and YNAB budgeting app. So I’m not budgeting for these and have instead challenged us to try to make enough from selling or other odd jobs to cover them by their renewal dates next spring/summer.

HOUSEHOLD SPENDING £500
This is for the below, breakdown is approximate as I move money between the pots as needed:
- food £300 inc weekly fruit box & veg box delivered 
- other household consumables like toiletries, cleaning stuff, lightbulbs, seeds etc £60
- petrol £60
- clothes (mainly for the kids as we adults don’t buy much and get vouchers etc for birthdays, or take it out of our own spending allowances) £40
- any misc stuff like parking charges, fines, things I’ve forgotten to budget for £40

FUN MONEY £100 (Red keeps track of his own)

Mine £50 
Family/kids £50 (eg we get a takeaway maybe once a month, or if we take the kids to any kind of paid activities or buy them books etc)

TOTAL £1,500

BIRTHDAYS/CHRISTMAS/SPECIAL OUTINGS 
Separately to the main budget, I save my child benefit which is £140 every four weeks and then this pays for any gifts like weddings, birthdays, new babies, Christmas costs, going to festive events etc 

SAVINGS £250 minimum 
I’m currently putting most of this into paying off my MIL which will be down to £50 after next payday (and if we get more than I’ve worked out from UC I could then pay it off totally). And then I’ll be concentrating on building a £1,000 emergency fund before thinking of longer term stuff like mortgage overpayment and saving for a car replacement (ours is 11yo). Oh and we often have home/garden projects which we save up for but we do any work needed ourselves to keep costs down.

[Deleted User]

Hello frugal friends,

Lovely to log on and see so many posts. I have still been frugalling along; Monday-Friday I don't spend any money at all (I get my lunch free at work). I am very pleased I took the step of getting the loft insulated. The house does feel warmer and despite a notable drop in temperatures the heating hasn't gone on yet. I have however lit the woodburner a couple of times which is just so cosy, with the added bonus that the laundry dries very nicely In front of it! I am also still running the DW on alternate days only, and limiting laundry loads to three per week. 

Our energy switch to Bulb is complete which brings our payment down by £10 per month, I have also cancelled our Homeserve policy, yes it was only £4 per month but I didn't need it, also cancelled the window cleaner - he does a really substandard job and has done for a long time. I have all the kit to do it myself, so that's £15 every four weeks saved.

We went chumping on our walk the other day and got lots of wood, so we are set for quite a while on that front 🙂🙂

I hope all are managing to stay safe and well. These are difficult times and although I find work very challenging at the moment (large inner city comp school) I am grateful to be employed. Take care all xx

Frugaldom

@Bluegreen143 Thank you for sharing a detailed breakdown of your budget and I wish you well with your future savings after MIL is paid off completely.

@asparklyblonde, with the savings you are making each month, the annual combined amount is possibly enough to cover the cost of TV licence and car road tax, if needed, so definitely not to be frowned at. I always equate savings made to what they can cover so for me that would be a couple of months' supply of oats for the rescue ponies.

My apple cider vinegar is bubbling away so I'll get the apples strained from it this weekend and then leave the liquid to acidify. I still have a huge bag of pears so I have chopped some of those up and added the last of the plums and a couple of apples then set this off to ferment in a bucket of water and sugar. I'll strain it next weekend and start bottling it up as perry-type drink (low alcohol).  In the garden the next crop of apples will be due to begin this month, as will the crab apples at Frugaldom. I'll stew and freeze what I can and the remnants will then all be made into apple cider vinegar. I have had to invest in some nore 5 litre containers as it was taking forever to source enough used ones. We use gallons of ACV for ponies, both as a tonic and as a hoof scrub so making it myself with homegrown apples means it is affordable. The containers cost just over £1 each including delivery so a dozen should last indefinitely if we reuse them annually.

October plans include starting off a new forest style food garden, doing repairs to the barn and salvaging / renovating the pink caravan. The little caravan has served us well for the past couple of years, being used as a shelter, meeting room, place to make a cuppa/lunch, and as a general store but now it's beginning to fall to pieces. It's an early 1980's tourer that was previously converted into what looks like a nail & beauty 'salon' then later abandoned. Council towed it away and it was eventually rescued from their yard and finally ended up being donated to us - possiby because the cost of scrapping a caravan is hunderds of pounds. 2 years on and I did call the scrappies, naively thinking they paid us for the scrap value. How wrong was I? They wanted £500 to come and take it away to scrap it! Next one I contacted refused caravans completely unless we hired skips, again hundreds of pounds in or area, and chopped the caravan up to fit everything into said skips. So... I joined a caravan renovation group and am learning the hard way on a frugal budget.

Bluegreen143

@Frugaldom I never knew that about scrapping a caravan... I too would have assumed you’d get paid something for scrap value! Hope you can get it fixed up.

Very non frugal today as it was time for our once a month post-payday takeaway - we got a KFC at £15 to feed the family. Quite cheap for a takeaway but expensive when I consider I could easily make three family meals for that. However it was very much enjoyed by all, I enjoyed a night off cooking and the kids (who are normally fed very healthily!) were terribly excited, especially my nearly 5yo son Monkey, who kept shouting about how much he loves popcorn chicken! And that’s us done for takeaways for another month now.

Have redeemed myself slightly by taking a picnic when meeting a friend at the park with our toddlers this morning and also starting a loaf of sourdough (which I’ll bake tomorrow). And I’ve nearly finished a pair of mittens I’m knitting for my nearly 2yo daughter. She has some hats left from last year but I’ve decided to knit all their mittens with yarn I have in stash, and knit a couple of hats for Monkey too. Hopefully save a few £ that way. 

In a moment of madness I nearly ordered Bambi (my daughter) an absolutely beautiful pair of lined boots & two packs of tights from Next as Tesco had none of either in her size when I was in, but it was going to be £50 for the order so I just couldn’t! I’m now winning on a similar style of boots (also Next) second hand on eBay and they will be £8 inc postage if I get them. Still need to source her some tights so may need to go to the even bigger Tesco down the road which has a giant clothes section.

willow_loulou

eBay is fab for things like that Blue, I got dd some trousers she wanted for £4 £28 new! 

I cashed out prolific the other day but didn’t spend it so bought a soup bowl from eBay and a gift from Etsy and still have £5 in PayPal
Back to work Monday 😬 I’m excited but scared. But happy to be going back to a pay rise! 

Bluegreen143

Great deal @willow_loulou! I used to get quite a bit off eBay when my son was little - bundles of clothes for him - out the habit this time round as I’ve got a friend with two wee girls who has given me masses of hand me downs. Plus I’ve kept some stuff from my son eg wellies, waterproofs etc. Does mean strangers continually tell me how cute my wee boy is when I take her out (she’s only now starting to get longer hair) but she’s too young to mind 😂

patentgirl

Hello fellow frugallers not posted much over year but been reading thread still Squirrelling away everything we can to build up our savings pot for retirement, this week finally had enough and handed my notice in so from end of December possibly January as I am too nice will be retired at 60, DH is ok about it as we have discussed it he planning 2 more years dependant on his health taking him up to 64 both several more years till pensions but we have budgeted this into savings we are not big spenders like our holidays mainly Cornwall odd cruise might have to put off planned camper van for few years as prices shot up this year! Treating grandchildren now and again sure we will manage if we don't I will get another job just not management my body cannot take any more stress and heartache. I plan to get all household jobs done. Decorating and we already in middle of making garden more raised veg borders and low maintenance flowers so will carry on with that. Another one here making tomato everything sauces, soups and tomato chilli chutney, using up last of raspberries in sauces, not many courgettes left, spinach and chard been plentiful this year, hope next year we will have same bumper crops when we will need it more!!