Missy's spend £10 a week on groceries get the house sorted & hit this debt hard diary

I have been reading your posts and think well done, you are working out the best way to get your debts under control.

I live alone and can easily manage on a budget of £60.00 a month as I do my best to make everything from scratch. I am not keen of junk food or 'instant' stuff, but then I come from a generation of 'make-doers' and grew with rationing, and a very canny little Scots mum who could streetch a ten bob note until it almost twanged :)

I usually have only five dinners a week to cook as I am always out on a Sunday at my Dds and Tuesday night is pub quiz night where for £2.00 (comes from my seperate 'entertainment budget )i get to go to a quiz and we get a small cooked meal thrown in usually some sort of pasta or jacket spud with cheese and beans and once a month its sausages and chips so very good value and a night off from cooking.

So my budget is around £15.00 per week and about a third of that goes on fruit and veg I don't eat or buy bread, and eat instead crackers

I enjoy porridge or bran flakes for breakfast and make quite a bit of HM soup with usually any veg in season or reduced in the shops.My favourite is carrot and coriander (I like lots of spicy food ) or parsnip and apple ,but a hearty leek and potato soup will fill most tummies up on a cold winters day.

I bake my own cakes and biscuits(although I don't eat a great deal of those really but bake them for my DGS. Pastry costs pennies to make and half a pound of mince with a bit of diced onion and a diced carrot will make several pasties for the freezer,also filling with mash and veg or even with salad in the summer .

Quiches are great for chucking in odds and ends (I love the cooking bacon bits) you can buy very cheaply and even if there are a few fatty bits they take seconds to trim off (I even render the fatty bits down for a small bowl of lard for frying in ) the remaining bacon bits are brilliant as done to a crisp add flavour to pasta,a filled jacket spud of even with left over cabbage as bubble and squeak.

Meat is quite expensive but I go buy the rule of less is more and meat should really only be per portion about the size of the palm of your hand and not the main part of a meal.

I don't compromise of sausages as I would rather have one decent banger with mash and veg that two or three inferior ones.By that I mean one with a good high percentage of pork and not the 'filler' that a lot of sausages are made with.

Casseroles in the slow cooker are brilliant for the cheaper cuts of meat and I bought in Aldis a few weeks ago a piece of unsalted gammon (what used to be called boiling bacon ) and slow cooked it and let it get cold,and for £2.99 it made such a lot of sliced ham ,some of which I froze in slices and the odd bits left over I used in a quiche with cheese a couple of egs and a few diced up onion slices

I always buy the onions when on offer in Aldis and take them home peel,dice and freeze triple wrapped in a bag in the freezer ,then can use as much or as little as I need for flavouring .

I came home from my holidays last Friday and went shopping on Saturday and the first shop of this month cam to around £15.00 odd and I really don't need to shop for about 10 days now as I have more than enough in when I add my store cupboard and my stack filled freezer so I shall be spending probably a bit less this month than usual..At the end of the month any left over cash gets swept into a seperate holiday account for next years holidays.
Its often quite surprising what you can make out of almost anything really and at a fraction of the cost .obviously children 's food is a different matter, but as I grew up fairly healthy during an era when one piece of fruit was a miracle and certainly not every day and as I am now in my 70s and still alive and kicking I doubt I could actually eat five bits of fruit a day anyway
Fishcakes can be made quite inexpensively ,even with a tin of sardines and don't cost a great deal ,only time to make they too freeze well.
You are doing really well and by being focussed on what you are buying and spending will make a great deal of difference in the end .Way back in time in the 1960s when I too had two small children to feed on a restricted income (mortgage was enormous) we managed ,sometimes things got a bit lean but we survived and all the bills were paid and the roof was kept over our heads and the wolf ,although knocking at the door, was never allowed in Good luck I shall continue to read your journey

JackieO xx

Have you tried going to bed later, so your are really tired? Not sure if the lush moisturiser is a fad, but I know people swear by it. also, are you having some "shut off" time before sleep, like watching TV, reading etc? I sometimes struggle to sleep if I have just finished dong something and then go to sleep xx

Maybe don't go for that then!!