2025 Frugal Living Challenge

fionaandphil

You seem to be coping very well Frugaldom, I am sure we wouldn't be nearly as resilient. I hope you are soon back up and running.

We are having another quiet weekend. We had burns supper last night with the family. All items from the freezer and still using up the 8p veg which is doing very well in the garage. I've slightly overspent on food budget buying post Christmas bargains but I'm hoping it will even itself out in the coming months. Still at around £90 for the month.

Soup prepped for lunches this week and we had a mini roast for tea tonight, again all from stores. I cooked some baked potatoes and crumble at the same time while the oven was on.

Hoping that the weather will remain warmer and calmer in the coming week.

Prudent

Snap @fionaandphil or Burn's Night veg was the cheap Christmas veg. 

There are still people in my area without power. I am very grateful to be okay after the storm. There is still snow on the hills behind us, and it is pretty chilly.

I have managed a low spend month in spite of my trip north. The next two months are going to be extra frugal as I am hoping to reach my retirement goal late April. I am going to try to combine no pre budgeted spends with getting myself back eBaying. I feel I really need to give myself a kick up the bum with eBay as I used to be pretty good about selling things on if I needed to fund a spend. Therefore I am aiming for Flog it February and Move it on March. I also could do with a bit of a kitchen and fitness wear declutter so bags will be going to the charity shop. The goal is to be finished by the end of Arrived at Last April. 

DawnW

Good luck with your cook-a-thon @Frugaldom . I have had to do the same thing myself, not due to power cuts, but my OH inadvertently switching the freezer off. I was cooking well into the night, as there was no way I was going to waste all that food. Some fruit and veg had to be composted as it had defrosted into a mush, but most of it, and all the meat was saved. I have seen on other forums that some people throw everything away when this happens

Blackberrycurved

I also had a burns supper, haggis was made by my local fishmonger and cheap veggies. I'm having the last for lunch today. Prudent if you have fitness wear to declutter I may buy it from you. I need to get fit and obviously I want to buy second hand.

patentgirl

@Katiehound hope your dog improving hugs to you 
@Blackberrycurved welcome
hope everyone else ok living down south can only imagine what everyone been going through with weather and loss of power. 

Nearly end of month everything gone to plan with budget had 22 NSD so far only blot on landscape just back from weekend in London which was budgeted for hotel very reasonable but we went with friends and definitely overspent on drinks and meals out very annoying with myself if we had been on our alone would have been a lot more careful and mindful of what we was spending still done now.

Katiehound

Hound update: he is doing well. 
 He's eating normal food enthusiastically & has been out for short walks but reckons he should go the full distance! Eyes the stairs wistfully but that's a big No No- Victorian terrace with very steep narrow stairs.
 Just wish I could stabilize the tum but I suspect the drugs may be the problem. He's down to 1 per day- looks like about 10 days of them. I am amazed how well he has done in a week.
Thanks for your wishes.

Frugaldom

Thank you @dND, it really is so annoying that we no longer seem to have the image upload option. I will try again to link to my Google based blog as a photo store to see if I can master that on a mobile. Here goes... Nope! That doesn't work either.

4th day of no electricity since the storm. (Or is it 5th day?) Friends had to take their neighbour into hospital as they couldn't keep her generator going long enough to ensure she had her oxygen supply, which she needs constantly. Our remote area isn't exactly high priority so our own 96 year old neighbour, along with many others, have had no outside help as Scottish Power reportedly ran out of generators on day one. I am so pleased that I have my off-grid emergency plan / kit for these challenging times. Often, folks don't think of the consequences of prolonged power cuts (or water shortages if wells dry up or pumps freeze). I highly recommend everyone experiences a day without electricity, running water and central heating to see where changes can be made to safeguard from such events. Standby water, camping stove (with spare gas cylinders), battery pack on solar or wind-up for mobile phone charging, torches, spare batteries, candles, matches, quick cook food (tins & dried), hot water bottles and extra blankets. We also have cylinder gas heaters plus stand alone logburners, as opposed to those connected to back boilers with electric pumps. I keep a cylinder of gas on standby and always have basic stores of tins, pasta, rice, packets, uht & dried powder milk etc because a widespread power outage also affects shops and petrol stations, not just houses. Some neighbours have generators but the last big outage saw them all run out of fuel.

Big pan of soup made, ham cooked to make the stock. There's just a bit chicken and some fish to use up from the defrosted freezer now. I have some dried paella rice mix and long grain so there's enough to make meals for the next few nights. Hopefully, power should be restored by then.

I'm using a solar panel hooked up to a leisure battery plus small power banks that also charge from mini solar panels. There's next to no sun getting through but it's sufficient to keep the mobile phones charged plus run a string of usb lights.

dND

@Frugaldom I feel for you and your neighbours.  It was what I was expecting in rural France but thankfully never experienced.  The Landes area neighboring Lot et Garonne where I was living was badly hit by storms and fire.  The French government insisted that all supplies were put underground so infrastructure was maintained in that area.  It cost a fortune but outages became rare.

I had another play, (and internet search which seems to confirm that you cannot copy from Photos), with the photo problem and may have a workaround but as I haven't had a photo to share I've not been able to confirm if it works.   Share the photo to Notes, open in Notes and copy from there then paste into MSE. 🤞🤞
Still no clue as to why the insert picture link doesn't work in the app.  It might be that the app is tailored for iPhone and not Android so there's nothing we can do. Dx

Cas

@katiehound that's fantastic news, you've made my day! I'm always amazed at how resilient our dogs are. You're probably right about the drugs upsetting his tum so hopefully when he's finished them his system will start to settle down and return to normal.

@frugaldom that's dreadful especially given the ages of some of your neighbours. I hope you're all reconnected soon. I grew up with the power cuts in the 70s so we have a lot of the things you have mentioned (torches, blankets, tins, etc, even have powered milk!) and would be able to cook and get some heat from the gas hob. Our central heating is run off a gas boiler so I think we would have central heating but might not be able to access the controller if we had no wifi. Definitely food for thought, thank you. 

Katiehound

That's really really hard without power for all that length of time- we are just so dependent.
On NYDay we had a power cut for quite some hours (I can't remember how many) but what was so frustrating was no heating- gas but with electrical switch and no solar- again no electricity to let it into the system even 'though the panels were working.

Hopefully you will be connected asap.

I would have thought that elderly neighbours would have been on the priority register, and if they aren't now they need to get on that list for the future. (In  the hope that priority means just that, or as soon as possible.)