2018 Frugal Living Challenge

FrankieM · 1 February 2018 at 11:06PM

Evening All

I made chickpea, spinach and potato curry for tea. Very yummy and some left for lunch tomorrow.

I had a spend day today £6.54 spent in Lidl for the fresh stuff. Slightly more than I was hoping for but there should be some left for next week.

I'm going to try and do all my spending at once next week so I don't take my purse to work because that seems to be my most money saving habit.

Right, off to bed

spudsmum · 1 February 2018 at 11:41PM

Moll wrote: »

I feel sorry for all the people with car trouble , wish I could help , as DH is a car mechanic , and he repairs everyones cars around here cheap , and keeps my car going

Bless you Moll,

My step dad's a machanic too but he's too ill to do it now - it breaks his heart that he can no longer fix it for me. Mind you, he never made much money as a mechanic because he was really soft and could never bring himself to charge full price

spudsmum · 2 February 2018 at 12:42AM

LSD today - spent 85p on a bun for DS as his after school club was cancelled.

DH gets paid tomorrow so this is the end of the financial week for me. I have emptied my purse and my envelopes - this week I have come in an amazing £51.64 under budget. Very, very pleased with that and shows how much money I have frittered away in the past. Not expecting to do so well every week but its ai indication of what is possible.

Also have some money from skimming bank accounts and £20 extra that DH will get in his pay tomorrow. This means i can pay some more off my debt this week as well as putting a little more into the emergency (or more probably new car)! fund.

I'm not going to do a monthly summary just yet because I only came to this halfway through the month but I will start keeping a tally of what i am saving throughout february.

The mutant chicken came up trumps again and has fed us for the whole week - tonight's tea was chicken enchiladas made with egg wraps instead of tortillas (DH is on a mostly low carb diet so cant have bread) was a good way to use up a manky pepper thats been languishing at the bottom of the fridge forever together with 6 eggs that were use by tomorrow and a lump of ancient cheese, I'm getting an unreasonable amount of satisfaction from using leftovers that would normally have been destined for the bin - i was planning to go the whole hog and boil the bones to make chicken stock to freeze for soup but DH binned if before I got chance (he probably wont dare make that mistake again :rotfl:) This chicken related frugality means i have enough food for 4-5 of next weeks meals in the freezer so hoping my shopping should be fairly reasonable this week.

evuka · 2 February 2018 at 12:25PM

Tanya12345 wrote: »

This month I am going to work out the clever do'hicky at the bottom of the post to keep a track and actually put numbers in .

Tanya, if you go to User CP at the top, then Edit signature on the left sidebar, you can add your numbers to the bottom. I love reading everyone's sig, some people put quotes and can be hilarious!

LittleGingerFox · 2 February 2018 at 11:10PM

I'm £5 down this week as someone took it from my purse at work

Can only have been a customer when I was out the room. There are no staff lockers and I am kicking myself for bringing my purse to work. Ah well, its a lesson learnt.

cw18 · 2 February 2018 at 11:31PM

Yesterday I bought 2 new inner tubes for my pushbike - and managed to fit them myself

Cost £6.56

Today I cycled to and from work (6.74 miles each way - more downhill than uphill in the morning, but unfortunately a lot of uphill coming home in the afternoon). This is part of my cross-training for the London Marathon, so is something I need to start doing fairly regularly.

Whilst cycling in it dawned on me that I work on 30p/mile for using the car (petrol, plus something towards maintenance based on what that cost me against the number of miles done for a year a few years ago), which means driving to and from work costs me £6.54 (other than a Saturday, when I can take a shorter route in and it works out at closer to £6). For anyone doing the maths, yes my cycling route is shorter than my driving routes - it uses private roads where access is granted (until revoked) for public on foot, but they don't complain about us using pushbikes over it as long as we respect their right of way (lots of farms, so some cars plus tractors and such)

So the one day of cycling has almost exactly recouped the cost of the inner tubes

cw18 · 2 February 2018 at 11:33PM

LittleGingerFox wrote: »

I'm £5 down this week as someone took it from my purse at work

That's a rotten thing to have happen to you

Moll · 2 February 2018 at 11:39PM

LittleGingerFox wrote: »

I'm £5 down this week as someone took it from my purse at work

aww that's terrible , sorry x

spudsmum · 3 February 2018 at 12:10AM

LittleGingerFox wrote: »

I'm £5 down this week as someone took it from my purse at work Can only have been a customer when I was out the room. There are no staff lockers and I am kicking myself for bringing my purse to work. Ah well, its a lesson learnt.

Aww thats an awful thing to happen to you. Happened to me a few years ago - a client stole £20 out of my purse while i was in another room. The annoying thing was that I was in the other room doing him a favour - something that wasnt part of my job and i was just trying to be nice and helpful Its a sickening feeling :mad:

spudsmum · 3 February 2018 at 1:35AM

DH's payday today so I've drawn £200 out of the bank again and my debit card will be going away until next Friday. Like last week I will put £50 of that in an envelope in the cupboard in case it's needed but will try to survive on just the £150 of I can (I'm thinking this will work better than just leaving the £50 on the bank as then it just gets swallow up on nowt (and I get tempted to spend if my bank balance looks too healthy)

I Put the money I saved from my budget last week together with some I skimmed from my bank account and was able to make another payment of £53 on my credit card (that's £203 paid off debt in 3 weeks) - YAY!! Seeing this figure come down makes me very happy.

Also submitted my expenses for work today - good month this month so I will be getting £280 paid in next week. Normally, again, this just tends to get absorbed so I've decided £130 will go into an account to cover the coming months petrol. This leaves £150 to play with - trying to decide whether to put it in the "new car" account, save it for holiday spends or pay some debt (or a combination)

Hmm decisions ..... For once it's a fairly nice problem to have though :-)

2018 Frugal Living Challenge

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