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

LolaLemon

read page 1 and page 12 (the last page just now) and the context is still the same so i'll add my tuppence worth

im os as its just me, i go through phases of being fantastically os and other times of being Mr T's wet dream!
I only shop at MrT's as they do the goats milk that me and my son drink, plus i pick up points (£160 to spend soon )

Growing up, my family didnt have a lot of money, but i rarely went without, by the mid 1990's my parents where more comfortable money wise, just as well as they had 2 more kids then lol

When i moved out at the grand old age of 21, my first house with mortagage, i remmeber being soo skint that i was surviving on tea and toast! I even remember spending my last £10 on beer for a guy i fancied, for the first time he came to mine, remember thinking 'hmm, what am i going to do about the mortgage?' the relationship didnt last but i got the best present ever - my son. since having him, i sold up, bought a bigger house witha garden (front and back lol) breastfed, cloth nappied, changed my toiletries to ones with less/no chemicals, used halos and horns for us both (great as shampoo n conditioner but nothing for my frizzy hair lol) after maternity leave i went back to work (still breastfeeding at a year) and my work where horrible, blatant sexual discrimination, pulled me in for meetings ALL the time, unwilling to help with shifts wher i could get childcare, ended up off sick for a year and a half, then got paid off, that was last christmas (thanks BIG mobile fone company!) since then ive went to college (technically i was sacked in sept so i started the course but they didnt finalise it till dec) now at uni, and no longer an 'attached' parent - that is my biggest regret from bettering myself.
Ive not been getting all the student loans that i should (dam SAAS!!!) so im really struggling and im now attempting to do more to be frugal

Just realised it the 1st tomorrow and i dont know if i have enough in the bank to cover the mortgage!

LolaLemon

LolaLemon wrote: »

Just realised it the 1st tomorrow and i dont know if i have enough in the bank to cover the mortgage!

Went to bank, and YES! mortgage is paid! woohoo :beer:

Well for another month anyways!

Mrs_Bones

I'm just being curious here, after reading another thread where someone is feeling overwhelm with all her OS stuff. Now I'm wondering why it is other people get in to OS and what bits are important to them.

I think I've always been OS in someways but became more so when I finished work. It was a combination of having more time and less money. The main plus of being OS for me are;

Meal planning, cooking from scratch and know what has gone in to my food.
Being aware of my food, where it has come from and try to eat seasonal.
Having a store cupboard so I don't panic if I can't get out.
Not wasting things and making the best use of my money.
Trying to use natural / hand made products.
Only having the gadgets I will use in my kitchen and house, decluttering.
Going back to a slower simpler life and trying to get out of the materialism rat race.
Less stress.
Enjoying life in the moment.


For me it does not mean;

I have to do everything and be completely self sufficent.
Be really super efficent at homemaking / cleaning
I will feel guilty if I can't be bother to bake a cake so go and buy one.
Persist in doing things I don't enjoy just because they are OS

[Deleted User]

I think I am OS mainly because I am old in years, but not in mind IYSWIM.I was brought up in an age of austerity and rationing and I feel that the older you get the more you tend to stick to what you are used to.Obviously I don't have a mangle to wind, or a coal fire to set every morning and I wouldn't want it, but I do cook from scratch mainly because I always have.I am not a lover of take-aways (apart from the odd fish & chips ) and I like to use the food I buy to the best way I can.I was brought up in the era of 'plain cooking' mainly because thats all there was to eat I love having the ability to use herbs and spices in my cooking to bring out the flavour. I can only remember my Mum having salt pepper and vinegar in our house as herbs and spices just wern't available .It sounds odd I know, but the first time I tasted a curry I absolutely loved it and that was in 1959 when I was 16. I was in Belgium at the time, and came home raving about these lovely tastes that I had tried.My old Mum bless her said 'That foreign stuff will never catch on over here'.She would be shocked at how the food has changed over the past 50 years I think to the better in my mind. My grandchildren all enjoy tastes that I would never have dreamed of even trying when I was a little girl.
My most important flavourings in my cupboords are garlic,pepper,tumeric,and all my multi assortments of herbs.Thinking back I don't think our food was better during the 1940s-50s in fact it was at times very stodgy and bland but what you've never had you wouldn't miss.
I prefer todays stuff and enjoy trying out something new.but I also like a good old fashioned lamb stew and dumplings to keep me warm on a cold winters day .Stew tases even better when its a day old.
So although I am OS when it comes to my housekeeping I also like to mix new things in with the old I wouldn't want to go back to outside loos, and baths once a week, or lino on the floor and freezing bedrooms .

rosieben

there's a really long thread called WHY are you old style which has some interesting answers

to me, being OS means getting the best value for my money (not necessarily the cheapest) and living a less complicated life whilst avoiding the lure of clever marketing bods trying to part me from my money

Penelope_Penguin

As this has fallen from the front page of OS, I'll add it to the thread rosiben links to, to give you more ideas.

Bella79

Hello all,


I was sat early looking though some old bank statments and can not beleive how much i used to spend at sainsburys,tescos etc, plus the odd trip to local stores, in one month i saw it was at £700 !:eek: for 2 of us, this was when we had our own business and it was doing well.

My oh my how times have changed the business ended up dead and we had to close it down, i dont work due to some ill health and my husband is now on min wage.

Things are sooooo tight for us at the moment im budgeting left right and center, this really came to light today when i nipped to bank and dd wanted a small cone of chips from fish shop and i had to tell her no, and give her the sandiwch i made earlier in my bag

But it got me thinking i live like this at the moment because we HAVE to, we have no choice at all, i wouldnt mind so much living like this if it was a pro-active choice ie: WE will live/budget like this for 6/12/2 year and then we can afford / or pay this and that off.

But we are living like this, paying min on everything and still dont have any spare money at all, i think its easier living this way if you know your doing it for a nice reason, like to save £ and see it build in the bank, or to pay for that once in a lifetime holiday, clearing a mountain of debt, at least your achiving something something positive.

But to live like this for the rest of our/my life i dont seem to be getting anywhere, are there others like us ? no spare money at all, and not because there saving or paying debt ?, we have a small balance on a c/c but i honestly do not know how we are ever going to clear it struggling to pay the min everymonth.

Im doing all i can with the weekly spends, mealplanning etc (we now have dd 4yr) this week was great i only spent £27.00 so a big thumbs up. I have ebayed everything we dont use or need, which has come in for all the things i just cant afford like new school shoes for dd, uniform, her birthday.

Luckily last christmas a total one off we won some money which enabled us to get a few gifts for dd, and my mum and family helped out with food, i just dont know what we are going to do this year, i know ppl say save so much a week/month but we have nothing spare to save.

Sorry for the long moany post, but i do feel better now :@) lol

raphanius

10 years ago OH and I were in a similar position, the shop we ran went belly up and left us with £21000 worth of debt. for a couple of years we just ignored them but eventually we faced up to the problem and called in a debt management company. we still pay £90 a month toward paying off our debts BUT we have paid some off completely since I began money saving using this forum. we have paid off several significant debts and now have savings incase of future hard times. like yourself when we 'had it all' i shopped on the plastic and we smoked and drank an alarming amount of money away. we are both non-smokers now and only drink when its on special offer.

I wouldn't say OS living was a choice but I would never go back now, I sleep so much better knowing what I own I have paid for with cash. Unless you've had the knock on the door its hard to explain what it feels like to face the reality of repo. a big plus is that DS is a money saver too and has learnt to be cynical over advertising. fingers crossed he will never get into debt like his parents did. i would whole heartedly recommend saying no to the chips and getting out the HM sandwich because it not only saves money but teaches a greater lesson. being OS really does make us realise there is more to life than money!

mancbird

Originally living OS wasn't a choice for us. We both had debt accumulated from our student days and the time immediately after that so we had to budget but as time has gone on it's becoming more of a choice.

I will be going on maternity leave soon so we will have reduced money coming into the house and once baby is here we plan for me to set up my own small business so I can work from home rather than pay childcare. I will also get a small part time job so we have a regular income.

But I also have the option of going back to full time work and seeing my wages swallowed up by childcare and commuting costs. We have chosen that that is probably not the best solution for our family.

I have noticed that the longer we have been doing this, the more horrified I am by how much money, food, resources, etc we used to waste. I know we couldn't go back to how we were.

One thing that has helped us is trying to make it into a bit of a game. Can we beat our grocery spends for the last month? How many nsds can we have this month and so on. I also take pleasure in bargain spotting and getting one over on the big supermarkets, bit sad I know! Lol

The point of all my rambling is that I'm trying to say that our mindset has changed. Being OS is a positive thing for us. It saves us money but I feel like we are doing our bit for the environment too by reusing and recycling

Mancbird xxx

freudianslip

I'm here living as closely to OS as possible because I have to, circumstances have made me need to pull our belt in and find a way to cope BUT I stay living OS and will do for the rest of my days now because it's a satisfying way to live.