Reasonable Amount to Live on Per Week?

in_my_wellies

Congratulations on the baby!
I wanted baby things and got everything I needed at a local carboot sale and all as good as new (very modern pushcair with rainhood etc for £8, new wooden cot £10, baby gym toy £1, mat 50p) and remember babies don't really need that much. So much stuff is just clever marketing to made you spend your money!

It would be terry nappies every time for me. I had four in six years and only used disposables in emergencies (I kept the freebies in my bag) I'm know they're more modern these days, all folded etc, but really terry square on the line and a baby with a big fat snuggly bum - what could be better!

in_my_wellies

I thought of something else. Will you be at home? Do you have a garden? Why not grow a few fruits and vegetables. When our son was born we didn't have room for a tree so we bought a blackcurrant bush, (about £2.99 even todays prices). You plant it and cut off the branches 10cm from the ground. Push the offcuts into the ground about 25cm and firm them in. After six months you have several bushes. Soon they grow and produce lots of fruit for your freezer! My son is 19 and we have about 10 bushes now all from the first one. Same goes for redcurrants, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, just buy one and grow your own.

Vegetables are just as easy too and save you a fortune and so healthy for baby. I bought Japanese onions and broad beans today. In October I will plant them. I plant about 25 onions in one square meter of soil, so tht only takes a few minute to dig (really) Just push them in so they are peeping out of the soil. They don't do much, then in the spring they grow,swell up and in late May you have big fat onions. Do the same for broad beans. Plant the 12-15cm apart, 5-8cm deep and leave them. They will grow all by themselves and you can pick them in June - just ready for weaning your baby. Get him/her used to new tastes.
Good Luck.

stellagypsy

When I was really hard up, when DS was little, I used a daily budget - I divided what bit I had by the number of days it had to cover and shopped every day for the next day's food. I only carried that amount of money in my purse and no debit card. I also shopped with a hand basket NOT a trolley as then you can only buy what you can carry in the basket. I bought essentials at the start of every month (toiletries, loo rolls, cleaning products etc) so everything I had left was just for food. I kept track of it by writing it all down - if I had £30 for 6 days, I worked out how much I should have left at the end of each day and made sure I counted up every night / checked receipts etc. Any money left (yes, even on a budget so tight there WAS some left) I put aside in a jar to cover food-triggred emergencies like birthday parties or unexpected mealtime guests.

Surprisingly, it worked as if you work out when to hit the local Co-op, you get to buy reductions / bogofs and use seasonal ingredients (all this happened to me pre-Aldi and the like, I could do it for less now). I became very creative, making extra one day to use the next so I could have a "free" day. I think my most creative invention was bolognese pie - DS loved it! Make some pastry and fill a blind baked pie case with left over bolognese (include some pasta too if not much meat sauce left), put some cheese on top, make a lattice on top with some pastry scraps / cut letters from the scraps + bake till top cooked - he never knew how desperate I was, just thought it was cool to have a pie with his name on it!!

You can also knock up a lasagne out of virtually any leftover meat / fish / meal if you make the sauce a bit runnier / stick a tin of tomatoes in it and knock up a white sauce to pour over it. I've even done potato lasagne, baked bean lasagne, fish lasagne (with uneaten cooked fish fingers!!!!!) - mealtimes in my house were certainly not without adventure!

Jut a few tips from my vast repertiore - having to revisit these as I tighten my belt again to find DS's Uni fees in a few weeks EEEEEK!!!!

HTH, Stella xx

MATH

stellagypsy wrote:

Jut a few tips from my vast repertiore - having to revisit these as I tighten my belt again to find DS's Uni fees in a few weeks EEEEEK!!!!

HTH, Stella xx

LOL - I know just what you mean. Chez MATH is about to do a major belt tightening excercise due to Mrs MATH being made redundant. I'm quite looking forward to it (in an odd way) the last year or so since we have got ourselves financially sorted (thanks to MSE) we've become a bit lazy. I remember the surprise at getting to the end of the month without starving to death and the satisfaction of scraping a few quid of a projected budget. Bring it on;)

stellagypsy

LOL Math, you are so right, it just shows how lazy I have become with my budgeting! Just to further stress me out, OH has also booked a skiing hol for us which is about same £ as DS's fees and has to be paid in Feb so effectively I have to find double the amount!

Now if I can pull in my budget for the next 6 months to find approx £2,200, I intend to do likewise for the remaining 7 months (I get 13 paydays a year) so that should give me a nice wad of about £2500 to act as a "cushion" for next year. If necessary I will go back to daily budgeting, don't think I will have to but as a last resort, I will. It certainly worked for me.

Off to do an inventory of my freezer contents (heaven only knows what is lurking in there!) - may as well look at how many "free days" I can scrape up!

Stella xx

Spendless

MATH wrote:

LOL - I know just what you mean. Chez MATH is about to do a major belt tightening excercise due to Mrs MATH being made redundant. I'm quite looking forward to it (in an odd way) the last year or so since we have got ourselves financially sorted (thanks to MSE) we've become a bit lazy. I remember the surprise at getting to the end of the month without starving to death and the satisfaction of scraping a few quid of a projected budget. Bring it on;)

Sorry to hear Mrs MATH is loosing her job. It is looking increasingly likely that I will be giving up my job to start a new college course in Jan, and we will have to pay out quite a lot in nursery fees for daughter whilst I do course so we are also going to have to tighten our belts.

jos_4

If "formula feeding" buy the formula from your local health centre where it will be cheaper than the supermarket. If you don't like the idea of cloth nappies own brand (not value) are just as good as pampers and huggies but about £1.50-£2 cheaper.

16011996

math, sorry to hear about Mrs Math, but if anyone can cope with it Math, it will be you. big hugs to you all.
back to the thread, for money saving, if you can cook in bulk, you'll find ingerdients go further and you can freeze the unused portions to save a lot of time. i did this before all my kids were born, so when i came home from hospital it made life simpler too.

ancasta_2

ah my "baby" of a thread gets a mention.im all proud

Personally, i would say £107 is VERY livable if that is the amount you have after you pay all your bills and petrol!

nicki_2

IMHO it's very do-able, but then OH and I don't go out. We've allocated £5 a week each as pocket money and we just save it up if we want to go and see a film (also means that the cinema isn't as busy if we don't go and see a film opening weekend) or out for a meal. We have £29 a week on petrol, but we're getting a new-to-us car so we'll have to see how that works out. With £40 a week for ALL groceries (2 adults, 1 4-year-old all with big appetites ) we have plenty of money left each week.

When we first had DD, we were living on Income Support (Council Tax benefit and most of our rent paid as well), which covered all our bills including debt repayment (e.g. £1500 overdraft of OHs plus money owed to friends) and managed to survive on £40 for groceries a week including buying Pampers nappies. We shopped in Aldi or Asda and ate well now we're sticking to the same type of budget but we have more debts to pay off but if we just stuck to minimum payments we'd have £200+ a month to spare now that OH is in a well paid job as we are putting the majority of tax credits to paying off the debt (after Christmas I plan on putting £30 of the £34 a week to debts. ATM £9 a week is going on Christmas or school related stuff).

It can easily be done, if I had £107 a week for groceries and spends I think we'd probably still stick to our current budget and put the rest into debt repayment or savings but thats just my "I don't want to be in debt to anyone for the rest of my life" attitude