2020 Frugal Living Challenge

Frugaldom

Deleted_User said:

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I have been rereading the first original 'live on £4000 per year' challenge. It has encouraged me to look hard at my own figures again and see where I could make savings for next year. Having looked closely at everything, excluding mortgage and council tax, my annual direct debits total just over £2600. I am therefore going to set myself a personal challenge of living on £5000 next year. After deducting my direct debits, this will leave me with just under £200 per calendar month for food, school trips, clothing, treats etc. This does sound tight however I am determined to give it my best go. The children are both still young and do not have any expensive hobbies.

I am very excited and looking forward to it already. I am not waiting until January to start, the hard-core frugal fun begins now. My main motivation for doing this, is that if I am able to live off that amount for a full 12 months I will be in a position next year whereby I will have saved enough to pay a vast chunk of my mortgage. It wouldn't quite make me a mortgage free, but close. Who needs more motivation than that?!👑👑

Woohoo! Hardcore frugaling, just what I LOVE! I am seriously proud of you for giving extreme frugal living a go and am almost sure you will love the results. We all need our treats and luxuries sometimes but when you have a supportive network building up around you, it makes things so much more enjoyable or, for some, more bearable, depending on your mindset. Really driving home the zero waste ethos in life pays its own dividends and whether you call it karma, fate or divine intervention, good always begets good in the longrun.

Being able to help others come to see that wanton waste is bad can be a tough job but it really is a case of looking at everything that goes into the bin and remembering your money paid for it somewhere along the line. But don't give up on waste, as it's often what would otherwise have been binned that comes with all the additional packaging. It is a sad fact that the less I spend on groceries, the more rubbish I seem to accrue for the bin, because all those yellow stickers and plastic packaging mount up. I think we need some form of filtered incineration units that both heat water and the home while burning all the rubbish and producing no toxic fumes. How can that be done? And how would we dispose of the toxins trapped by the filtration material even if it could be done? Tese are the types of ponderings that can keep me awake for hours

Homemade soup made from free carrots, homegrown leeks and homegrown onions. Id to use ham stock cubes, though, because the price of a ham hough has shot through the roof. I used to pay 75p and get a couple of meals out of it after making the soup stock but I am seeing them now listed at as much as £4.50! Even the lardons are £10+ per kilo now. At least we can still get packs of cooking bacon, even if they are no longer 39p  Prices are seriously hiking up on one side and pack sizes reducing on the other. Adapting your diet accordingly is the only way to survive an extremely frugal budget - and not being ashasmed of rescuing food.

ldee2111

sashacat said:

Good evening all, 
and well done to everyone on budgeting and debt reduction. 
Great  news on Olio Frugaldom. It is unbelievable how much food went into landfill.
I have joined but my nearest food hero is about 7 miles away and everything seems to be late at night. But I will keep looking. 
I went for a lovely autumn walk with a friend yesterday and as we were returning another villager pointed to the step outside outer Covid closed village pub. ( we have no shops, street lights, pavements or buses...but we do have a lovely pub) .
there were trays of eggs piled up....at least 20 trays and lots of pumpkins and squashes. 
There was a notice saying to help ourselves so I now have a free tray of 30 eggs and a butternut squash. I could not believe it. 
Poached eggs for tonight’s meal. I will make soup from the squash. 
I needed to buy eggs so that has saved me quite a bit of money that I will transfer to savings. 
I want to go travelling when this pandemic is over so I am quite literally saving every penny. 

That’s a great freebie find @sashacat. I’ve not been as lucky finding something that saves money but I did come across a ladies’ woolly hat and a toddler-sized zipper lying in the leaves on the ground. Both were sodden wet and had clearly been outside for a while so I did something I hadn’t before and brought them home! Both my toddler and I have been running about with our acquired garments this week 😂 There are few things better than saving to travel in my opinion. Me and the OH saved hard for 4 years to pay for a year travelling around the world. Apart from having our DS, it is the best thing we have ever done. It is worth every single spending sacrifice.

ldee2111

Frugaldom said:

Deleted_User said:

...
I have been rereading the first original 'live on £4000 per year' challenge. It has encouraged me to look hard at my own figures again and see where I could make savings for next year. Having looked closely at everything, excluding mortgage and council tax, my annual direct debits total just over £2600. I am therefore going to set myself a personal challenge of living on £5000 next year. After deducting my direct debits, this will leave me with just under £200 per calendar month for food, school trips, clothing, treats etc. This does sound tight however I am determined to give it my best go. The children are both still young and do not have any expensive hobbies.

I am very excited and looking forward to it already. I am not waiting until January to start, the hard-core frugal fun begins now. My main motivation for doing this, is that if I am able to live off that amount for a full 12 months I will be in a position next year whereby I will have saved enough to pay a vast chunk of my mortgage. It wouldn't quite make me a mortgage free, but close. Who needs more motivation than that?!👑👑

Woohoo! Hardcore frugaling, just what I LOVE! I am seriously proud of you for giving extreme frugal living a go and am almost sure you will love the results. We all need our treats and luxuries sometimes but when you have a supportive network building up around you, it makes things so much more enjoyable or, for some, more bearable, depending on your mindset. Really driving home the zero waste ethos in life pays its own dividends and whether you call it karma, fate or divine intervention, good always begets good in the longrun.

Being able to help others come to see that wanton waste is bad can be a tough job but it really is a case of looking at everything that goes into the bin and remembering your money paid for it somewhere along the line. But don't give up on waste, as it's often what would otherwise have been binned that comes with all the additional packaging. It is a sad fact that the less I spend on groceries, the more rubbish I seem to accrue for the bin, because all those yellow stickers and plastic packaging mount up. I think we need some form of filtered incineration units that both heat water and the home while burning all the rubbish and producing no toxic fumes. How can that be done? And how would we dispose of the toxins trapped by the filtration material even if it could be done? Tese are the types of ponderings that can keep me awake for hours

Homemade soup made from free carrots, homegrown leeks and homegrown onions. Id to use ham stock cubes, though, because the price of a ham hough has shot through the roof. I used to pay 75p and get a couple of meals out of it after making the soup stock but I am seeing them now listed at as much as £4.50! Even the lardons are £10+ per kilo now. At least we can still get packs of cooking bacon, even if they are no longer 39p  Prices are seriously hiking up on one side and pack sizes reducing on the other. Adapting your diet accordingly is the only way to survive an extremely frugal budget - and not being ashasmed of rescuing food.

Sounds like the ultimate frugal challenge! I think I’d struggle with it (OH is not a frugal fan)! I sneak frugal-living in where I can get away with it. Interested to know more about the challenge though - can you tell me how to find it please? 

ldee2111

ldee2111 said:

Thanks for the nice welcome.
I overspent in October so will try my hardest to reign it in this month. Found a game in the local charity shop yesterday that I was going to buy anyway for my toddler’s Christmas. £3 instead of £10 new - happy with that! Played it last night with the OH while wee one was in bed. Also sold an old dvd and speaker system on GT - the thing I’m most happy about with this is having less cables! 

But it’s not all good news - I’ve already overspent on this week’s food budget.  This is happening more and more. Don’t know if it’s because we’re working from home and just eating more! They’ll maybe have to roll us back to the office. I’m going to try not to ‘nip to the shop’ for wee extras for the rest of this week. 

I’ve nipped to the shop the last two days for things I forgot to get in the weekly shop. ☹️ And, of course, I did end up buying a couple of extra things because non-frugal OH was with me. I’m banning myself from the shops for the rest of this week!

Bluegreen143

Sorry I’ve been AWOL for a few days. Just seem to have been busy! I have been updating my diary and YNAB though.

I paid off my last £300 of debt (except student loan and mortgage). So now it’ll be focusing on savings. I can’t exactly decide what to prioritise - first I want to build up a £1,000 emergency fund but after that I’m not sure. We have 29 years and £115k left on our mortgage so perhaps we should really focus on overpaying. Another option is building up savings and investments instead. Or do I do a bit of both? 

LOVING the extreme frugal budget posted above and am seriously considering trying to tighten mine up now. I’d tentatively thought of around £115 a week/£6k a year but that was after excluding all bills. That would allow us to save at least £300p/m. So maybe we could do even better and shave off another £1k to add to savings - would have to get my husband more on board though.

ldee2111

Congrats @Bluegreen143 on paying off that last £300. 

[Deleted User]

Thank you @Frugaldom. I am seriously excited about it. Granted, it has only been three days, but I haven't spent a thing and have meal planned up to month end using what we have in.

We are very lucky where we are, there are two local food waste groups that offer food out two nights a week, tonight being one of them. It often means queuing in the rain and dark for a while, but I figure that even if it takes me an hour of my time, the value of the food I get in that hour is far greater than what I earn on an hourly basis at work, plus I'm saving food from landfill, so it's a win all round! I haven't bought bread for months now, absolutely no point when there is so much of it that goes in the bin each day. I tend to 'rescue' around three loaves a week from the food share and freeze them. Perfect for toast, and toasties for lunch at the weekend.😊

I also get my lunch for free at work each day, and there are often leftover sandwiches which I can bring home for the children. As DD takes packed lunches, these are a huge help. DS is still in KS1 so in receipt of free school meals for the rest of this academic year. 

My total eBay sales since Saturday are £141, which I am delighted with. All items have been packaged using packaging I have in the house as well. I have some toys to lists but they will go on FB marketplace nearer to Christmas I think. 

Happy frugalling all, remember every pounds a prisoner 🥳🥳😎😎

ETA well done Bluegreen! I personally maintain a SHTF fund of around £2k. The rest goes on the mortgage. At the start of 2015, my mortgage debt was £171k. It's just under £69k now, I earn a modest salary and this has been achieved through frugal living. If I were you, I'd hammer that mortgage hard - it's more addictive than saving and, unless you have some super fab investments with high interest rates, paying off your mortgage is often the best financial option, good luck whatever you decide to do xx

Frugaldom

@ldee2111 welcome to the challenge. Everything is linked to page 1 so you can go back through any of the old challenges or just follow this one   the new challenge for 2021 will be linked here next month.
Well done

@Bluegreen143 and @Deleted_User. It's good to have emergency savings but I'd always advocate paying off debs first. Mortgage over payments can be subject to feed at some stages so don't forget to check how much your lending company allows you to pay down in each year. Even if you only save a pound a week into emergency savings after that, it will be better than nothing. Good luck

H managed to pick up another pallet for us after friend brought 2 along. They'd been sat by roadside with a 'help yourself' sign, so we now have the makings of a new garden gate plus the first spares being saved to help extend the hay store this winter.

willow_loulou

Morning. 

I’m absolutely loving my new in cup coffee filter. It’s no mess and so easy to use and clean. I’m using less coffee as it filters more slowly too. So I think it will save me half a packet of coffee a month buy using less or by not making a pot. That’s a saving of approximately £16 a year. Very happy with that for a £5 investment. 

Just chased the council for a tax rebate too as they’ve still not acknowledged dd student status. 

Going beach combing on the next lovely day here, never know what you will find. 

naomij1411

I am motivated to join I have just given up my job and in the midst of a separation so on the one hand, concerned as it’s not exactly clear what my finances will look like next month/year. On the other hand, I feel relieved and excited that I will be wholly responsible for them and can budget and plan without having to explain myself or make a thing about it. I am fortunate enough to have no debt (apart from student loan) and a secure home, but things are going to be a bit tight. I have a new spreadsheet for weekly/monthly budgeting, but am going to check out this thread as I start to plan for next year.