So it Begins - The Accountability

sams247

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82035482#Comment_82035482

Cutting my own hair!!! Cant imagine :D

But ……..

Anyway, Todays plan went a tad off piste, as I ended up in hospital with an injury. Nothing like sitting for four hours to build up an appetite. Sadly when I am hungry I go into the mode where I feel I havent eaten for a week or more and then eat a heap of rubbish. So a bounty bar and chips later……

I went into M&S food with the plan to spend no more than £5. I only went into M&S as it was the closest to the hospital and I wanted to get home before the painkillers worse off. I spent £3.95 and was pleased with that. Forced myself not to buy all the bits I wanted to and stuck to the fruit and tablets I went in to get.

Todays lunch was missed due to hospital so that is now tea, and the chilli has been thrown into the freezer.

I am tired now. My plan this evening is to start making lists of what I buy and where and see what I might be able to change. I'm convincing myself this is my new hobby.

warby68

Very best wishes to you. It sounds as if you have a workable plan for you and certainly having a good awareness of what you spend and where (and possibly why) is very useful for changing habits as the advantages and disadvantages of those habits start to become very clear. So good luck with your new 'hobby' too.

I'm not sure how your food abundance issue affects you financially but just to say I don't, in isolation, see keeping fridge and freezer full as long as it doesn't prompt wastefulness. In more light-hearted terms, I wonder if getting a smaller fridge and freezer might help just as they advise you to eat from a smaller plate when trying to lose weight.

Hope the injury is soon resolved. We have an M&S INSIDE our hospital, although I suspect its more to target staff than patients given what it stocks (unless the number of ready meals and sandwiches is a rather blatant did at hospital food)

Lolina

Hello Sams,

I've just joined the forum and can relate a lot to what you are saying around food, really looking forward to following your journey! I think a food diary is a great idea, and great that you've got most of the debts on 0% interest.

Hope your injury is not too bad, and that you are healing. You can do this! As you say… so it begins :)

sams247

Thank you

Food is a big deal and it impacts by becoming one of my largest bills. I live alone and spend about £200 a month on food, and thats not the most I can spend. I bought a second freezer as my normal family size one was full. It truly is a problem! I am aware of it, have tried to tackle it and sometimes I manage for ages. Then I get upset, or something triggers me and I am in the supermarket like a famine has been announced. It took me years to acknowledge this as a problem, so now I cannot turn my back on that. But I truly do understand from the outside it simply seems as if I am being well stocked.

Debt today
I have put the rest of my cash into the car as diesel. That'll get me to payday. I have no other purchase need so I am going to aim for NSD until Saturday.
I am trawling through ideas on here too, and have signed up to YouGov. I did this years ago and although it was soooo slow, I recall the joy when I got to that target.

Food
Meusli with yoghurt and prunes for breakfast
Lunch will be marmite pasta with tomatoes and sweetcorn
Tea will be a piece of cod with new pots and veg - cod and veg from the freezer

Injury - thank you for kind words
Will heal now. Its annoying but less pain today so I am being positive :)

Moment of joy
Watching the birds feed their little ones in the garden today. I put out all sorts of seeds, nuts etc and they ignored those and went for the cornflakes that had spilt on the way to the house.

Catscoffeecake

Have you thought about getting yourself some kind of white board you could keep an inventory on. See if that helps. Also I would suggest going through it once a month to check dates and make sure you are using up items which go out of date first.

Good luck with your debt busting, it sounds difficult. I am a massive emotional eater and once have that urge there's nothing stopping me getting something to make me 'feel' better

sams247

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82037372#Comment_82037372

Ooooh white board sounds like a plan! I will scour the charity shops.
Checking dates……. yeah I am bad at that. I have been known to have to throw food away, mostly from the fridge :(

I am 100% understanding of that emotional eating journey but trying my darndest to overcome it, or at least make friends with it and see if I can help myself in other ways. I mean….. is it a sign that I looked at your online name and thought ooooohhh coffee cake….. :)

sams247

In order to convince myself that doing all my shopping in one go would be better than my current plan of shopping weekly I made a huge food list. It felt quite daunting even though I obviously buy it anyway. And, to be truthful, why I'm trying to stop shopping weekly is that I always over shop whenever I go to a supermarket, so the less I go logically the less I should buy.  And then I got obsessed with the idea of how much do I spend. So I took that food shopping list and I made an Excel spreadsheet for Tsco, Oc!do (which I usually use), Morrisns, Aldo and Wtrose. (Why do we not use their real names?  I’ve changed these as I see people do that, is it to not promote them??)

I then spent a peculiarly happy evening pricing up every item I would buy and put it in each of those columns. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Oc!do came out the most expensive, 2nd to that Wtrose, then Tsco’s, then Morrisns than Aldo. In fact Aldo was £40 cheaper than Oc!do! To be clear I ignored all offers, three for one, buy one get one half price, et cetera, because I stuck literally to that shopping list and didn't put in any extras anywhere. Currently I have an offer if I spend £60 at Morrisns I get £13 off, but even taking that off Aldo was still a lot cheaper. 

And then I realised that spending an evening working this out means I have no life ha ha

So for this month, I am going to try this new way of shopping, buying everything I need in one go. I know I will buy extra food during the week but hopefully a lot a lot less than I normally do.

Debt, 
I don't think there is probably much to report on this today. No money going out and definitely no money coming in. And I'm probably going to take a day off of spreadsheets as yesterday was spreadsheet extravaganza.

Having said that I am a tad frustrated to realise all the things I have bought over the past couple of months that I could've used top cashback for,  but we live and learn. I used to go to the community food shop regularly and I have fallen out of habit with doing that, so I possibly need to add one or two visits there as well.

Food
Well, I think I've pretty much covered it above. I've run out of muesli and normally that would send me down to the shops to buy more muesli, and spend about £30 with extra stuff I didn't know I needed it until I was in the shop buying it. So today I decided to use up the leftover roast potatoes, I crushed them and put them in the frying pan with some rather sad looking tomatoes, fried them up together, covered them in baked beans, grated over a little bit of cheese, a sprinkle of salt and there was breakfast.

Lunch will be a cheese and tomato omelette with the last of the cucumber and tea will be the rest of the three bean chilli rescued from the freezer with rice.

Injury
Getting better….. less painkillers = result!

Moment of joy - Waking at 5am, lay listening to the birds already singing before I fell back asleep

InDebtEnby

I have a chest freezer so I have a list on my phone of what's in there, I also plan my meals weekly and shop just for the things I need that week. I used to buy the same things every month and just make meals from what I had in, but weekly works a lot better for me. I also live alone and so every time I cook I make at least 4 portions so the extra goes in the freezer for another day. Some weeks there are enough meals ready defrost and cook.

MillQueen

Gosh you're all so organised - I'm always amazed by people that actually cook and eat the things they buy.

£200 (to me) doesn't sound the most unreasonable it could be, but there is definitely room to spend less, even if you just had one week per month where you set yourself a challenge to eat out of the freezer and then put the money saved, e.g. £50, into a savings account for a non-food related treat when you get to a specified amount. I think making things fun keeps it more interesting than forcing yourself to quit things.

ArtyJ931

I use their names. No idea why others don’t.