2022 Frugal Living Challenge

zafiro1984

Just had a huge increase in the cost of our animal feed, delivered today and it's gone up by 65%, that's over £1k a month,- you can't feed them less!!
We can't use red diesel now in the tractor or the rest of the machinery as we don't qualify for it any more, and the cost of white diesel is almost 100% more. 
How on earth are we supposed to survive?

Primrose

Zafiro. People moan about the cost of food  but don't always realise that the producers are facing the same challenges. Sadly there,s little anybody can do until the world energy crisis lessens, and even then i wonder how soon producers will actually reflect reduced costs in their prices.  All suppliers being  honest and reflecting reductions as well as increases is the only way this crisis will eventually ease.

meanwhile, I,ve taken to marking many of our consumer items with a felt tip pen with starting use date so i can see how long they actually last. This will hopeful help storecupboard planning,  ie

hair shampoo bottles
toothpaste tubes,
smoke alarm batteries,
replacement light bulbs 
Fairy Liquid  etc

dreamyd

Heads up to anyone that uses Zoom free basic account... 
I use Zoom for work and I host the meetings. Up until today you could have 3 people in a meeting for free over 40 minutes. But from today 2 May they have limited even those to 40 minutes and you will get a prompt to upgrade. It will affect any meetings you have scheduled before 2 May too.
It is quite pricey to subscribe to the Pro account (£119 annual before tax) and there are alternatives out there, like Teams and Skype.
But if you need to use Zoom for work like me, there are some discount coupons ZOOMCARES or ZMCARES give 20% off the cost before tax. Made it a little less painful today. 

Hi- just spotted this.  Google has a video meeting attachment (think it's either Chat or Meeting) for people wanting to use a similar service without paying for it.  You'd need a Gmail account, but that's very easy to set up and there's no time limit for meetings.

zafiro1984

Primrose said:

Zafiro. People moan about the cost of food  but don't always realise that the producers are facing the same challenges. Sadly there,s little anybody can do until the world energy crisis lessens, and even then i wonder how soon producers will actually reflect reduced costs in their prices.  All suppliers being  honest and reflecting reductions as well as increases is the only way this crisis will eventually ease.

I understand what you are trying to say, but in our case we set our prices annually on the 1st Jan each year and do not alter them during the year. You infer that businesses will take advantage and not drop their prices if or when costs reduce. Not all businesses are in that category - we are one of them. We have no choice but to stand the cost of increases so life is getting very precarious.

Primrose

oh Zaffiro, I certainly wasn't suggesting that smaller suppliers, probably like yourselves, were guilty of this practice.   I was thinking more of the giant energy suppliers and  the banks who I suspect are building up some very generous money surpluses due to market conditions, and whose purses are not easily unlocked when doing so  could make a large difference to members of the public.    I suspect that small producers and providers are very much victims in the same way that the general public are.

RateTartExtraordinaire

dreamyd said:

Hi- just spotted this.  Google has a video meeting attachment (think it's either Chat or Meeting) for people wanting to use a similar service without paying for it.  You'd need a Gmail account, but that's very easy to set up and there's no time limit for meetings.

Thanks @dreamyd,
I've read a few reviews and G Meet has a lot of good points (as well as being free!)
I need quite a lot of features like the annotation tools and screen sharing for presentations and websites (flipping between the two). Also, I need to be quite careful with permissions to keep it secure and limit what the people on the call do. I use apps linked to my Zm account to add a timer / link to my work calendar.

Maybe I'm just being lazy, I've got used to it and it's easy. I'm sure that is what the company is relying on, the inertia of people like me. It could loose a lot of customers with this charge to smaller users.
 

missymoo81

I noticed the zoom 40 minutes when I was rudely Thrown out of a session! I can’t afford the £10 a month so shall
see about switching. I’m really struggling with food prices at the moment and the availability of the cheaper items. Going shopping shortly so will see how I do!

Wicked_Lady

I've only ever had the free Zoom account so, if I'm hosting anything, I make people aware that we can sign back in using the same info.
These are only ever sessions for friends/people I know and they're usually music sessions where we take it in turn to lead tunes.

Sweetlittledaydreams

I had my best olio haul this weekend just gone, picked up 4 bread rolls, 2 fruit scones and 2 bags of salad leaves, gave one bag and a scone to a friend who isn't too fussy about best before dates either and the rest has been used for my lunches, so much better than it going to waste.
Some good news is that my neighbours had their house valued, their extension is a bit bigger but otherwise the houses are the same, and based on their valuation (minus say £10k for the extension difference) then I will have made £32k on mine which I'm very pleased about. Also very pleased because I requested a mortgage balance and I have less left to pay off than I thought, so things are looking up! 
Going to carry on working all these extra hours and squirelling away the savings this year, then next year if I haven't settled down with anybody then I think I'm going to go travelling around the UK. I can make better money on an agency and work here there and anywhere really as my job is in demand, I could work in specialist areas even as agency and be paid more but I dont think I would want that stress again after working through the pandemic, plus it would limit me to staying in bigger towns and cities when it's the more remote places I'm interested in. Anyway 5am start so think I'd better stop daydreaming and do some actual dreaming instead. Night!

Beshki

Struggling with lunch ideas. Frugal and healthy seem difficult to fulfil, I don’t eat meat or dairy and am lacking inspiration and spending too much on what im taking. 

Have started to pop odd bits of cash away for Christmas/unexpected bills .