Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves · 20 May 2018 at 9:14PM

Redrose - that's all sounding like a great start!
Vamps - I'll try & remember to post those recipes up for you tomorrow.....actually, I wrote some notes re the pickled courgettes, but I seem to remember I did a mash-up of 2 recipes & kind of made it my own.

Evening everyone else,
Just a quick post to say my job list is firmly in the bullet diary for tomorrow. I have to wait in for a parcel delivery, but have plenty of tasks to be getting on with indoors, many of them of a rather frugal money saving nature. I'm feeling quite positive about getting the week off to a good start & it will culminate in my Big Budget Day on Friday, as pay-day is a little earlier this month due to the bank holiday. My personal spends for May are down to about £5 so it's a good job I don't need to go anywhere or buy anything more expensive than two 2nd class stamps!
So it's a cheap week planned chez Foxgloves..Looking forward to getting an early start & seeing all those jobs crossed off the list as I go on.
Hope you all get off to a great start too. Keep your hands on your pence & think twice before buying any cr*p.......not a verbally elegant mantra, I know, but so important for debt-busting.
Night all,
F x

foxgloves · 22 May 2018 at 7:51PM

Ok, Vamps - I'll have to hang fire with the pickled courgettes as I can't find my recipe, which is a mash-up. But basically, they are courgettes sliced thinly & pickled with sliced onions & garlic. They are in a sweet vinegar with spices in, not a sharp vinegar like pickled onions.

But here is how I make garlic flatbreads:
400g self-raising flour
2 level tsp baking powder
2 crushed garlic cloves
250g low fat plain yoghurt
1 tsp salt
About 100ml water
Teensy bit of oil for greasing pan
Sieve the flour, baking powder & salt. Add the garlic & yoghurt. Mix together, gradually adding enough of the water to be able to bring it into a softish ball of dough. Divide it into 8 pieces. Roll each one out into a sort of oval shape, think of a pitta for size. Heat a griddle pan (ordinary non-stick frying pan works fine too) & wipe a tiny bit of oil around it. Cook each flatbread for around 2 mins per side. You know when they're ready to turn as they puff up a bit & are easy to lift. Keep warm in a tea towel until all cooked & ready to serve. They freeze well. I always think these must just cost pence per flatbread.
If you have spare milk & a half lemon, esp if you want to use up 'on the turn' milk, you can add lemon juice & leave it for half an hour, then use instead of yoghurt, but try them with yoghurt first as that's the proper recipe.
Hope you enjoy them.
F

foxgloves · 22 May 2018 at 8:22PM

Evening Debtbusters,
Well, a few things of usefulness today. Firstly, the only spend has been 3 stamps. One to post a card, one for a letter & a spare one. Not a penny more has left my purse today.
We emptied out our Paypal account last night & there was more in it than I thought - from all sorts of bits & pieces.....ebay sales, Ziffit payments, selling a couple of crafted items, so I transferred £79 to our Loan Pay Down Fund, followed by an extra £4.53 so as to break the £800 mark. LPDF now £800-01. Funny how that extra 1p somehow just made me feel more positive!
A little shopping from home too, today, as I was just fancying a biscuit.....& that's the problem, I can never just eat one of the damn things, & was toying with the idea of texting mr f to pick some treats up on his way home, but I didn't want to set that particular naughty little habit in motion again. It was something we did a lot of back in the Spendy Decades. You know the drill......fancy a biscuit, call in to the shop, can't decide.......so 2 packets, now I need something savoury (posh crisps) or shall I get nuts as healthier (get both just in case). That's it. Oh hang on, it's not, because Green & Blacks is on offer - that's a dark one so full of anti-oxidants & that one's got fruit in so that's practically one of my 5-a-day.... & I haven't had a magazine for ages (buys three)....and on my worst excursions, I would also buy something for that night's meal EVEN THOUGH I had already got something out of the freezer at home! I would often have called in after work when I'd be hungry & would see something I fancied more. What a wasteful madam I was, back in the day!! I guess that once the resolve cracked on a couple of items, the other 10 were then that much easier.
ANYWAY!! That's how I USED to be! So no tricksy little biscuit run today. Shopped from home instead. Went down the garden to pick some rhubarb & baked a batch of rhubarb & ginger muffins. Enjoyed one warm from the oven with a cafetiere. All ingredients already in stock & plenty of muffins frozen for another time.
So I have still only bought 3 stamps today!
Hope you've all got off to a decent start this week.
F x

moving_forward · 23 May 2018 at 7:16PM

Hello it's me *vamps using my proper user name. It had been so long since I used the old vamps one I made a new account but then logged in the other day on the old old one

Ooh thanks for the flat bread recipe. Will certainly be trying that over the weekend.

I shall be googling sweet.pickling vinegar ideas and attempting my own mash up

moving_forward · 23 May 2018 at 7:19PM

Rubbarb and ginger muffins **where's the drool emoji**

foxgloves · 23 May 2018 at 9:01PM

Lol - MovingForward.....just bake any standard muffin recipe & replace usual flavourings with about 125g chopped rhubarb & 2tsp ground ginger. Cheap as chips if you grow rhubarb & freeze well.

Re pickled courgettes, they are very similar to the old-fashioned 'bread & butter pickles' which our grannies would have known about. I guess they were a cheap thing to eat with bread & butter. Very nice on burgers & in pastrami sandwiches!
F

DawnW · 24 May 2018 at 7:02AM

I make bread and butter pickles most years, due to usually having too many cucumbers - it is just sliced cucumber and onion in a sweet vinegar pickle, and everyone who tries it likes it. It is considered a bit old fashioned, and you don't see recipes for it nearly as often as you do for other preserves. I definitely think it deserves to be more popular, especially as it is so easy to make, and keeps for ages.

Excess courgettes tend to get incorporated into ratatouille round here, as this freezes well and is such a cheering sort of thing to bring out in the winter

foxgloves · 25 May 2018 at 5:13PM

Yes, DawnW, they sound very like my pickled courgettes. I got the idea of making some when I was at a chilli festival with mr f & he had a fancypants burger from a local smokery place, who had a catering van there. There was some pickle in the burger which he was raving about & I investigated it & it appeared to my keen chutney-maker's eye to be vegetables- mostly courgettes & ribbons of carrot - in spiced sweet vinegar. next time we had a courgette glut, I had a go & it's really nice. Lovely on burgers, to top a salad & with BBQ-type foods.

foxgloves · 25 May 2018 at 5:30PM

Hi Debt-busters,
Well, a day at my desk today as pay-day means it's my Big Budget Day. I've still got to finish the last bit of it, as our car has been in for its service today & it felt pointless finalising figures for what we were hoping to put into savings pots/Loan Pay Down Fund, etc, if mr f then phoned & said there was a massive garage bill to pay. Thankfully, I've just heard that the service was defo covered by our monthly service plan (unlike last time!) so the only payment is £52 for a replacement emergency puncture spray jobber. Apparently these are available on ebay for around £20 but we didn't have the confidence to buy one.....knowing our luck, it'd turn out to be full of shaving foam or something! I don't feel I know enough about them to argue with the price!

Anyway, one very useful thing today was that I had a good look at our Holiday Savings Piggy. We don't go abroad. We are a bit hippyfied really, & like cottage holidays somewhere fairly remote (old historic cottages preferred!) & camping. Back before the LBM, we used to have 2 cottage holidays per year & also often a couple of weekend city breaks too. I'd love to say that we always saved for these but of course you've read enough of our behaviour during the Spendy Decades to know this wasn't true! Cottage holidays went on our credit cards. Of course they did!
So what's changed? Well, we still like to book a week in an old cottage, but it is now one per year, & if we don't have sufficient budget for it (I.e because we have another big expense competing for the cash) then we don't go that year. One of our 6 'Savings Piggies' is our holiday fund & I budget £50 per month to be added to it. This pays for 1 week somewhere lovely in the UK in a cottage, plus a few nights away camping in our tent. We decided to take up camping so we could still go away, even if we were unable to afford any other kind of holiday & we absolutely love it! Of course we had to buy some initial kit, but it was amazing just how much stuff we were able to source from what we already had at home (You see, 'shopping from home' again!)
So anyway, back to my Holiday Piggy investigations......we have sufficient to pay the balance for our cottage break already. I did a few projections to look at coverage for the rest of this year's holiday expenses & found that if I continue to pay in at the same amount, we will also have enough for 5 nights camping, a little spending money while we are there & 2 cattery stays for our whiskered friend. I suppose I'm saying that although we go away less, it feels much better being in control of it, rather than having a great time, but then coming back & having the expense of it still sitting on a credit card......& importantly, for whatever reason we can't afford to take a holiday, or can only go camping, then that's what we do.
And now I know how much we've paid out for the car today, I'm off to finish the rest of June's budget.
Wishing everyone a nice Friday night.
F x

joedenise · 25 May 2018 at 9:28PM

Have your thought about joining the Camping and Caravanning Club? You can then go away weekends (and weeks during the summer) for very little money. It's usually less than £10 a night and some of the meets are in lovely places. Might be worth having a look at their website. Annual cost of joining is £39 (digital) or £45 (print), which means you'll get magazines monthly with details of all the meets.

Put away your purse & become debt-averse

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