WHY are you old style?......

sistercas

I really enjoy being OS now. I love cooking from scratch and believe it or not i enjoy food shopping. i do sometimes struggle price wise as I prefer to buy locally produced meats and free range eggs ( from the local farm shop) but i find bulking out meals with oats lentils veg etc( all tips picked up from here) works really well and I need far less meat anyway. I never throw anything away. I cant imagine I will change now x

keelyjrs

Aww this is a lovely thread, it makes you realise that you're not the only one who does things the old fashioned way. For those who take the p.. out of our lifestyle... well at least we aren't throwing money down the drain and as someone said earlier in the thread, we have a lovely sense of family and the things that really mean something.

I guess none of us could say we are totally old style though, I mean I still won't compromise on my yorkshire teabags.. and the occasional family bag of revels that keep the size zero away ha ha (by about 7 sizes lol) :eek:

deborah64

I also love the sense of achievment when i have filled up my freezer with home made meals, and know excatly what went into them.
I also think it goes back to how my grandparents/ gt grandparents lived, i have such vivid wonderful memories of the smell of home baking, i think i want to get some of that back.
Not sure if this is o/s or me being tight, but the cupboard doors under the kitchen sink have had it, so i have taken them off, and i am going into town on saturday to buy material and i,m replacing them with a curtain, lol, who knows if i like the look, the whole kitchen will get a make over

Julu

I was brought up o/s (late 60's and 70's) - my family lived WAY below the poverty line. We had 2 allotments, and from the age of about 8, all our out of school time was spent working there and I was also sent knocking on doors round the neighbourhood, trying to sell homegrown veg and flowers. When drainpipe jeans came in - my dad bought my (flare) jeans from the Army & Navy store. All the kids used to take the pi$$ (clothes, house, lifestyle, MUCH older Father etc), and I got bullied something rotten! I HATED it! Has left me with a lifelong (so far) inferiority complex. I wasn't able to stay on at school for A levels (no money), and stood no chance of Uni - I left home at the earliest possible opportunity!

Probably needless to say, I then proceeded to rack up an immense amount of debt via credit cards and store cards - I had lovely clothes, but to be honest, not much else! I still used to spend all my time broke (the last weekend of the month regularly found me in bed for the whole weekend, as I couldn't afford to eat).

I married and divorced a couple of times, each time ending up with nothing. When I married my current husband, everything changed - we had loads of disposable income - there were virtually no limits. Nice house (check), designer clothes (check), flash cars (check), 6 foreign holidays a year (check), staff at home (check) - you get the picture! And you know what - I have never been more miserable - nothing meant anything. I found that when you can have anything you want - the novelty very quickly wears off!

So - my lightbulb moment, having become increasingly sickened by latent consumerism, the latest 'must haves', shallow values, and just 'too much' everything, I found myself on MSE - and I came home!!!

Now I don't profess to be Barbara Goode - I have a LONG way to go before I would consider myself fully OS (I'm still a relative newbie), but by God, I'm happier then I can ever remember being. No debts (except the mortgage), budget planning, cooking from scratch,batch cooking for the freezer, reusing and recycling. And loads more to learn... I have to say though, it's left DH a little confused lol.

I suppose what my (long, I know) post demonstrates, is that having lived on most sides of the fence (and you thought there were only two!), for me, at least, OS (this time round) has given my life a structure it was previously lacking. No, I don't need to do this for financial reasons (although there is definitely some benefit there), no, I'm not a 'saddo' without a life (although MSE and all its' lovely people have enriched the life I do have), no, I'm not ' a tree hugging' hippy type' (no offence to tree hugging hippy types) - for me - IT JUST WORKS

Trinny

apprentice_tycoon wrote: »

I think that it would be very interesting to find out why we take up old style strategies.

I think that it will fall into 3 main reasons, economy, ecology and healthy living and it would be useful if those reasons had a score between 1 and 10 to show their importance to you and your family.

There will be some of use who would score economy as the highest, most important reason for using old style ways, there are others who would rate ecology as the main reason, for others it would be healthy living.

For myself I would mark them as

economy = 9
ecology = 5
healthy living = 7

edit - other posters have pointed out another reason, and they're right too - it's doing it because you want too - beating the system, job satisfaction, etc. so for me my fourth reason is

creativity = 10

Anyone else got any views on why you are looking at these pages?

Me and OH have years experience of struggling to make ends meet before we met. We are older - have very little savings - make that nowt this time last year -and we had credit card debts to clear in the year we got married.

We dont earn a fortune and what with moving house last year - and buying somewhere with "potential" rather than style - we have the heating/ wiring etc to do before most other decorating jobs.

We live simply - as we have discovered that there is no greater blessing than to be content with what we have. We also believe in reducing our impact on the planet - and living life generously and open handed.

Our biggest reason - is that we are vehemently anti corporate. We would prefer to support fair trade projects than to keep up with the joneses. We grew veggies out of need before it was fashionable.

We feel you cant take it with you when you "go" - so why not live a simple ethical life. Who says we need to buy "stuff" its certainly not the route to success or happiness or contentment. And as my tag line states - the stuff that really matters is not measured in its financial worth.

My OH says that the best day of his life was when we cut up all the credit cards with the balance at nil.

The feeling of freedom was incredible.

Take care All - sorry for the rant

Trin

Bitsy_Beans

When I look back to the years when we had credit card debt I am appalled at the lack of evidence to show for our spending. Thankfully we no longer have them and with the arrival of our kids and working part time I'd grown attached to cooking from scratch and enjoying the challenge.
Am now on a severely reduced income at the mo so am finding it a challenge to keep the food bill as low as poss but the last two weeks I have managed it.
I am definately getting tight as I get older but I don't see that as a bad thing.

Primrose

For me it's a case of economy, lifestyle and the satisfaction of beating the system. I look around as many people who appear to have conspicuously fashionable materialistic lifestyles and I don't think they're any happier than we are. We still have most of the original furniture we started off with when we were first married many years ago and I'm quite happy living with it. We grow our own vegetables, cook meals from scratch and have always saved for what we wanted rather than go into debt. As long as I feel we can still get our pleasure and contentment from the things which don't cost money I'm happy to keep my train running on its current tracks.

tattoed_bum

it was necessity at first ,due to financial reasons when we first got married .
now i really love the challenge ,i love shopping and if i can get a bargain i will snap it up ,
even down to decorating our home i will try to get the absolute best i can for the cheapest i can instead of buying new curtains i will dye them a different colour to match ,
we arent true os yet as in i dont grow our own veg but i do buy locallygrown from the farm .
i try to recycle as much as we can

so for me it would be
financial 9
eco 8
challenge 10

maro11

I love being OS. I grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland and we grew everything we needed. As kids we hated picking the potatoes or weeding the lettuce but I have very fond memories of that time. We did not keep animals but our neighbour did and we swapped veg for meat/milk/butter.
I work in a 5 star hotel and the waste is shocking. We serve afternoon tea at £32 a head. people come in and sip the tea and don't even eat the cakes/sandwiches etc, why do they order it?
You can take the girl out of the country but never take the country out of the girl.

Sarahsaver

I would like to add that for me in any case the 'ecology' thing happens to me by accident really. I don't try to be 'green' its just that shops charge for bags so i carry a reusable one, littlun uses terry nappies because that is what i did with my other kids, and it saves me from carrying nappies from the shop. if I get organic veg its because its delivered and saves me the hassle of shopping again. I do not drive because I do not want to, not from any environmental concerns but if I did I would never be alone and I do not want to drive a car with my kids in it! (is that just me! LOL)
also I buy from charity shops/second hand stalls so all this considered many people think i am quite an 'eco freak' but i am just being old style and doing it to save money and time, not to save the planet!