2021 Frugal Living Challenge

Katie_j

Hi everyone, I've kept to my weekly food budget and done online shopping. My pets are now eating supermarket own brand food, not sure if they're going to be impressed but we're all making cut backs . 

the_cross_rabbit

Meal plan for the week sorted, couple of freezer surprises inserted. Hopefully we won’t have that problem again as someone wrote about using masking tape as labels, which we have loads of.
CRx

welshspendthrift

Katie_j said:

Hi everyone, I've kept to my weekly food budget and done online shopping. My pets are now eating supermarket own brand food, not sure if they're going to be impressed but we're all making cut backs . 

Just told my cat that we will be downgrading her food, she didn’t look impressed, we have tried before but won’t eat and then it’s a waste. Will try again with small boxes of cheaper food 

C_J

I keep the fat and jelly leftover from a roast in a little jar in the fridge. I find that a tiny bit of that mixed in with the catfood makes both my fussy cats scoff the whole bowlful without stopping to query whether it is supermarket own brand or not.

welshspendthrift

C_J said:

I keep the fat and jelly leftover from a roast in a little jar in the fridge. I find that a tiny bit of that mixed in with the catfood makes both my fussy cats scoff the whole bowlful without stopping to query whether it is supermarket own brand or not.

Thank you good idea will try that although mine are on dried food, still worth a try though 

mumtoomany

Morning all frugalites. Hugs to all those who need them, congratulations to the lady who's pregnant, sorry can't remember who you are. 
Frugal achievements since i was here last. Leftover carrots, parsnips, roast onions in veg stock, stock blended, added yellow sticker Korma paste and leftover turkey, more onion and reduced peppers. Curry for tea yum. Used the vinegar from a mat of pickled red cabbage (10p from b and m), to clean the toilets. It dissolves limescale, is free and safe in the septic tank. Went in the bath after DD3, saved on water and gas to heat it, downside, I am now glittery, she used a bath bomb! 
Went to take DD3 to work on Saturday, needed milk and squash. Aldi has reduced sliced ham, steak pies, cottage cheese, with75% off and sausage with 30% off. Freezers heaving again!
Not updated signature yet, will try later when not got children.  mumtoomany.

willow_loulou

joedenise said:

We live a long way from shops so decided to start using long life milk and freezing bread so we don't need to pop out for "bits" and end up spending more than necessary between shops.  I buy a dozen litres of milk at a time and 3 or 4 bread to keep in the freezer.  Don't know if you could do that too?  I know UHT isn't for everyone but we often travel to France and it's much easier to get UHT than fresh milk so we decided we might as well use it here too!

Thank you x my freezer is tiny so I tend to buy wraps and make croutons (thanks frugaldom lol) from crusts or old bread. I do have some uht milk but it’s been really hard to get my son to change as he doesn’t like the taste. What brand do you buy? 

joedenise

I use the Lidl skimmed UHT - find it much nicer than the other SMs and generally cheaper.  It also means I can get the same when we are in France as there are Lidl stores in a lot of places.  Find it tastes like semi skimmed fresh and doesn't seem to have tang that a lot of UHT milks have.  I find the semi skimmed too creamy, almost like full fat fresh.

MazzieD

Been offline this morning - changing broadband supplier.  Felt really strange not being able to work online - I work at home (did all offline work instead) but now back to normal.

Did a quick top-up shop early this morning, salad, eggs and a couple of bits of veg.  First spend since about 20 December and only came to £4.70,

Normally I do a monthly shop.at the beginning of the month (average £40+) so a huge saving there.  Even with my stock up of cleaning and toiletries it still comes to far less.  Plenty of food still in the freezer and cupboards so my meal planning and batch cooking will aim to use up some of this.  I even had some meals left over from December so now need to get the slow cooker out (great for batch cooking).  No luck with Olio recently it's been really quiet with very little being listed but hopefully it should get back to being busy shortly.

I've lost a dear friend and work colleague to Covid recently, I just hope that everyone sticks to the rules but I'm surrounded by Covidiots where I live so I'm not holding out much hope.  

MandM90

@mumtoomany sounds very exciting, we'll only have just under 5 acres (only! ha!) My husband is already talking about seeing if we can buy the field behind us, but I think we've enough to be getting on with for now and we won't be getting livestock as we don't eat meat! I'm so impressed with your annual budget of 11k. We spend a lot of money these days but we have a teen, a baby in nursery, rent a house and own a rental property so it's to be expected I suppose.

Back to work for me today, nice in a way to get back into a routine though Christmas was lovely. We didn't spend very much over Xmas at all. Slippers and books for Xmas, apart from for the kids. I invested in a deep fat fryer. I used a work perks Argos discount and Quidco, and we tested it out on Friday and Sunday - I did veggie Guinness battered sausages, chips, falafels and battered courgette sticks. Everything was lush. The idea is that we will use it instead of our weekly takeaway. When we move we will be ~2 miles from the nearest village and veggie options are limited. Where we are now in Belfast I can get vegan sushi, bao buns, pizza...whatever, really...any time of the week. I got a 7.5kilo sack of spuds RTC at 90p so that'll keep us in chips for a while yet. This Friday I'm going to do us chips, veggie nuggets and beans. We're usually healthy in the week (and I usually cook without oil, actually) so I've been resisting a fryer but the fact of the matter is we do always succumb to the takeaway, so it may as well be cheap and full of ingredients we've chosen. I did consider an air fryer but I wanted to be able to do tempura, falafel etc and it just wouldn't work for that. I may reconsider the approach if my waist starts widening but right now I'm breastfeeding and seem to be able to eat what I like.

I also used my work perks to refill my Tesco voucher card - it gets my 4% off. Nothing exciting but better than a kick in the face and I still get clubcard points on spending too. When we moved to NI I tried continuing to shop at my beloved Lidl and then realised it's much more expensive here and, somehow, I was spending less when we shopped at Tesco, so that's where we go. 

Someone mentioned about what we called UFOs (unidentified frozen objects) in this house. We also have that problem. I'm trying to eat down the freezer now but it's hard to motivate myself to reheat and munch ambiguous brown slop (though it often turns out to be very tasty). Must get more disciplined with labelling!