2008 - Live on £4000 for a full year.

stefejb

£9.97 in Lidl - mostly buying seeds which will hopefully allow me to cancel the veg box in a few months. Actually I noticed that they do have some orgaic veg so might just cancel it anyway which will save £9.00 pw. I had to put a butter dish back to keep under £10. dd11 needs new glasses and although they're free i need to find £12 for the anti-scratch coating she has - it really does make you question what you're spending doing this challenge.

Frugaldom

Good afternoon to all and welcome to our 2 newest converts - Gemgems and DFW844 :T :T

Before I forget to ask... stefejb, have you got 11 children?? :eek: Apologies if I've misread or if it's a typo or if I just don't know how to read the abbreviations on here, but DD11? I read that as 11th daughter Someone please put me right with this before I make a total 'eejit' of myself again .

We have sunshine here today! Isn't that just typical? I stuck all the washing in the tumbledryer last night and burned an extra 3 units on the meter!!

On a more positive note, the chicken that I cooked last night has split down and will do us 4 meals and that's not counting the soup! It was MASSIVE! (they are on special offer at the summer meadows supermarket, so I got a couple of them yesterday) I've carved it up and stuck 3/4 of it in the freezer. I'll need to make pies with the mince that's in the slow cooker and then freeze them, too, as I now have TOO MUCH food cooked. Pre-frugalism, we would just eat loads extra to save it going to waste. Now, however, it's looking more and more like the preparatory stages of cupboard hoarding in preparation for war breaking out somewhere close! My DD looked in the cupboard this morning and commented on my YELLOW packed shelves! :rotfl:Almost everything in the store cupboard is summer meadows savers!

We have now completely finished the apples from the tree in the garden. These stewed really well and have gradually been used up as apple sauce, apple sponge, apple pie, stewed apples with anything.

On the veggie front - I have diced and frozen the remains of my peppers and have the seeds drying on paper towel so I can try planting these. The peppers freeze fine, I just chop them up, dry them as best I can with towel and then freeze them loose lying flat in a plastic bag. This way, you can shake them out and they don't all stick together. I've also sliced and frozen the extra mushrooms and now have quite a substantial stock of frozen hm mashed potato.

Shopping - I tend to keep quite well stocked up and then do small top-up shops (the £10 shopping game) and take advantage of the BOGOFs and discounted goods if they can be frozen. What I need to practice, however, is home made pizza. I do bake bread but don't have a breadmaker.

Back to work now, only one more day until premium bond checking and I'll know for sure how much I've managed to rescue from my crashed shares later today! :mad:

Postman's been - brought neither freebies nor winnings of any description today - all I got was a hamper company catalogue that I'd ordered (so I could get the points from the site to make up enough for another free voucher ) After having a quick flick through, I am baffled by the whole concept. The stuff is extortionate! Wouldn't it be better to save the same amount of money in the bank, earn some interest and then go frugal shopping for Christmas pressies? Or am I missing something here?

Mollymop5

Morning Nyk.
Did you post a while back about cheap calls to Australia? or was it someone else?9your name seems to have stuck with me but that might be just from this challenge lol).I have a friend out there who I'd love to surpeise with a call

Mollymop5

oops just realised its afternoon need to get on with some jobs.

slowlyfading

:hello: everyone! Been swimming this morning, so that cost me £3.20 am going to aim to go 3 times a week, so that'll add onto my spends a bit, but I'm just trying to do some more exercise!
nykmedia, you are very organised with all your frozen foods and whatnot! I must learn to be the same - I always end up throwing food away because its gone off in the fridge, so I should freeze it instead. We got a chicken on sunday for the uni flat (there's 6 of us) and it fed us all and there was some left over! Its amazing just how much meat you can get off a big chicken and people say they're too expensive! For that amount of meals, they're not! Hope you're having a good afternoon

Frugaldom

Hi Mollymop - I use www.dialwise.co.uk for the codes and have tried several of them. They have different ones for landlines and mobiles, so make sure you use the right one There's also an international call checker link at the right hand side of the MSE pages under the section titled 'Free Tools', so you could take a look at that, too.

Slowlyfading, I am so not organised :rotfl:
My name is NYK and I'm a frugaloholic. This 'illness' came about from my being too disorganised to be able to go out to work for anyone else. Something always cropped up - kids off school, no babysitters, car break downs, workmen in the house, sick relatives... I ended up having to base my work from home. As soon as everything kind of started looking organised, I did go back to work full time, and then DGD1 arrived At that point I gave up working for anyone else completely and am now home fulltime self-employed interspersed with regular babysitting, hence the reason my household is usually 3 adults, one of which is teenage DS, and frequent visits from DD and DGD, who now live within walking distance :rotfl: DD is also self-employed, but not quite a frugaloholic (YET). She has, however, mastered the 'rubber chicken' and has received repeated doses of 'mummy-money-grumbling-treatment' to help curb her shoe-buying addiction. :rolleyes:

Swimming three times per week = almost £10. If you allow for inflation (and for extra transport when they close local pools!) I think you should aim for total swimming frugality and own your own swimming pool! Think what you'd save over a lifetime and you could go swimming every day with no travel expenses That was my excuse for quitting pony trekking and riding lessons and buying my first horse :rotfl:

azjh77

Thought I'd say hello to all fellow frugals. We blew a whole 3 quid yesterday at the farm...they were selling off their 'old' (as in 13 months old) chickens for 50 pence each. We were going to get 4, but saw the place looked like that Hugh Fernly-Woshischops farm (thousands of chickens all in a barn, no feathers etc) so we thought we would liberate a few more, so now the girls' wendy house has 6 straggy hens in it! And when I went to feed them this morning there was an egg! Very suprised by that..they seem happy enough though, they keep poking their heads out of the windows, it's very funny to watch. So we can now save cash on our eggs...although a bag of chicky food cost me six quid...that was one expensive egg !!!

Frugaldom

I just remembered why I came back here My work involves a fair amount of "frugal-related" stuff, hence my incredible interest in money saving and cost-cutting. Ultimate goal - to be as cost-effectively self-sufficient as possible when I have saved enough to buy a house without a mortgage. (OK, it'll be a fixy-up but I'm fully expecting that.) Anyway, are you aware of the fact that grants are available for installing wood burners into your home? I've just been reading up on various energy-related grants and these include installing your own power generating systems (wind turbine/solar panels/water driven etc) and wood/pellet burning stoves for hot water & heating. Just thought I'd let you know and there's loads on site about it at http://www.lowcarbonbuildings.org.uk :T :T Good to know as I'd love to have my own energy supply and will certainly be wanting to live somewhere I can have a woodburner. I hate relying on the power supply companies for everything and having nothing during winter power cuts!

stefejb

nykmedia wrote: »

Good afternoon to all and welcome to our 2 newest converts - Gemgems and DFW844 :T :T

Before I forget to ask... stefejb, have you got 11 children?? :eek: Apologies if I've misread or if it's a typo or if I just don't know how to read the abbreviations on here, but DD11? I read that as 11th daughter Someone please put me right with this before I make a total 'eejit' of myself again .

oh dear me no - dd11 is 11, I have a dd18 and a dd22 as well as a dgs3 - guess how old they are only dd11 lives with me.

whitewing

What a great day!

We put our stuff out for recycling this morning...one tiny foodbag in the massive food recycling bin (and that was for two weeks' worth). Shows how far we have come!

Have done 100 bops this morning, and been out for a 2 hour walk and been invited to aunty's for pancakes tomorrow. (Actually I think we kind of invited ourselves).

And, great, great news. I've won a hand mixer and some Schwartz spices from a comp on this forum. I have only entered 282 comps since Xmas Eve as part of the win £2008 in 2008 challenge. I won a book a couple of weeks ago. And just got an email about this comp. Very, very happy. (And I haven't actually entered anything for about 2 weeks as I've been busy).