End of the month

We made it to the end of the month - hooray! I will have a proper round up of the finances tomorrow when I have had a look through them. I am very pleased (and the FH is extremely chuffed) that we have bought the car and are financially no worse off really, which is a major achievement for us.

The car is a pleasure to drive, goes really well, and I hope it will prove to be economical to run - the tax disc is cheaper, to start with, and the diesel should outperform petrol in the miles per gallon stakes.

The storecupboards are looking bare, though, and I will have to re-stock them over the next week or so - it is typical of me that I had those cupboards groaning before Christmas, absolutely full of food to get us through a tough winter, I believed, when the snow would lay thick on the ground and I would not have to traipse to the shops! The winter has been really mild, the stores have been depleted - and guess what? Those really cold days, with the chance of snow? They are coming this week!!

I am still trying to use stuff up, but the staples like rice, pasta, UHT milk, jam, etc are running out, and so the shopping list will have to go up on the board, and the trip to the shops made. But which shop? I'm not sure that I want to darken the door of Tesco again, but do I cut off my nose to spite my face, so to speak, by not taking advantage of the offers they have? Perhaps I should travel a few more miles and support Morrisons and check out their new M range...don't know yet. Will think about this one more - what do you think?

Hope you are all OK and warm in this chilly weather - we have the fire alight and it is warm and cosy in the sitting room. About to go and dive into a hot-water-bottle-warmed bed now.

The rules don't change

I have just been having a look through one of the issues of the Tightwad Gazette compendiums which I bought years ago - I have all three of them although I know that a bind-up is available as a single volume. The one I was looking at had been published back in 1995, about 17 years ago.

Amy Dacyczyn wrote a newsletter for six years on a monthly basis, whilst raising six children. She had a clear set of goals in mind, and the books are well worth reading (from the library, of course!). I found her books inspirational at the beginning of this journey to live well on little, and still have them all together on the bookshelf; they are invaluable for a boost now and again.

The thing which is so useful is that whilst there are plenty of tips, AD talks about the bigger picture. She is more of the "teach a man to fish and he can feed his family for a lifetime" school of thought, so the ideas are broad reaching and fundamental. The recipes are few and far between, for example, but the Master Muffin recipe is excellent. She puts together a guideline for how to balance a selection of ingredients in order to create your own muffin recipe, based on what you have in stock, what is cheap where you live, and what your family likes.

Watching an interview with AD here, made after she retired from the newsletter to concentrate on family life, she seems content and happy, her kids are older and some have left home, but she is still passionate that this is the best way to live.

Putting it at its most simple, I gleaned these rules from our earliest studies of her work, and these are the ones we still use:

• Save money - save as much as you can, as often as you can!
• Spend less than you have - set a budget and live within it - don't spend what you don't have.
• Watch what you spend - record your spending, and keep track of what you are spending on what. Look for patterns, change the patterns if they are not good ones! Check for deals on everything, buy when sales are on!
• If you can do it yourself, it will save you money - so we would grow vegetables when we can, not buy prepackaged vegetables and salads, no ready meals, no takeaways; we also decorate the house ourselves (although it tends not to be that often!). The FH and UJ also practise this principle in their gardening and DIY, saving screws from salvaged wood, recycling items for new purposes, etc. Making cakes and bakes from scratch is a given - I wouldn't buy a packet mix for a cake.
• Combine to save - combine journeys so that each mile makes the most use of the petrol pound, so to speak. Do all the shopping, library and banking visits on the same day that you have to go to town for the piano lesson, for example, rather than going back on a separate occasion. Combine ownership with relatives - we have the use of a cement mixer, a set of draining rods, a holiday home, and a rotavator, even though we don't actually own any of them. Similarly, we would lend out anything that a friend or relative needed to borrow if we had what they needed. Combine uses - don't acquire gadgets which only do one thing! Multi purpose items are far more cost effective and useful.
• Get creative - make things. Make gifts individual and special so that it doesn't matter that they are home made, they become hand-crafted! Don't pander to snooty relatives and friends who turn up their noses at such offerings. If home made jam is acceptable to HM The Queen, it is good enough for Aunty Joan...
• Make your own rules and stick to them: Rules can vary between the price you are willing to pay for a family holiday, and how often, to your take on overnight school trips (they are a no for us - saves arguments and shocking prices for short trips). But it is key that they OUR rules and we are not swayed by either the media or so called friends trying to persuade us to do something we don't want to do. The girls know that we have a family rule that they do not go on school trips which involve overnight stays - so they have not been to a gallery trip to Liverpool, on a New York half term trip, on a battlefields trip, etc. We have done galleries in Cambridge instead, and she didn't study History at GCSE so the battlefields wasn't missed, and New York? Well, New York will still be there when they are old enough to decide for themselves. And that rule is not entirely financially motivated.
• Don't automatically buy it new. Look for a bargain. When we lived in a town and walked everywhere, I was always popping into the myriad charity shops that were everywhere! I dressed the girls, myself and the FH mostly in charity shop finds, as well as buying other bits and pieces like duvet covers, bedspreads, books, jigsaws, etc. The FH has a pair of Church's shoes worth over £200 which set him back about £4 from a charity shop. Those were the days. Now we live so far from town that when we go to town, we are usually armed with a list of things to do already that there is no time to potter around the half dozen charity shops. That sort of thing is best done several times a week, I found, popping in on the off-chance to see what had come in. That doesn't work for us now, so our charity shop finds are fewer, although I love a good browse when we are on holiday. Our shopping strategy has changed somewhat: I now keep a mental list of who needs what, and I watch online sales closely. When Hawkshead announce a sale, I know that perhaps the EFG needs a new fleece, and I look to see what might be on offer; I remember that Asda's George trousers fit the YFG well, so we notice when they have a sale on and pick up a pair on offer. Shoes are our biggest problem with their wide feet and I am still working on an effective strategy for those, until we move the beach somewhere hot and they can go barefoot permanently!!

These strategies and rules have kept us in the black for the twenty years we have been together. I am fortunate in that I married another tightwad-type and not a spendthrift. Perhaps having a similar attitude and outlook on life has helped more than anything else, because it has meant continuous support and encouragement in the whole project all these years. If I had had to do it alone, and been fighting someone who wanted to spend as much as I am driven to save, I think it would have been impossible. Well, perhaps not impossible, but much much more difficult.

Do we live a miserable, small life, though, with no joy and not a scrap of fun? No. Not at all. We have holidays and days out, we go to the cinema (Tesco Clubcard vouchers), we buy DVDs and have technology (ipod and Kindle, laptops etc), we do gymnastics, the EFG is starting Hockey club this week, and none of us starve! We run two cars, live in a 4 bedroom house, and support too many chickens and half a dozen rabbits. There are other ways we could cut back but choose not to at the moment.

It is all about moderation, appropriate behaviour, and keeping it all in perspective. It is a challenge, a game, on one hand, but I do not in any way make light of the seriousness of the situations of people who have to do this to scrape from one week to the next. Part of me is saving like mad to keep a safety net in the pot so that I can avoid that situation when the time comes. The plans are in hand but things take time to happen and we can't see the future - we have to trust that we are doing our best for the people we care about and love.

Welcome

A warm welcome to new visitors and friends - lovely to have you popping in!

I can do it!

There is no Council Tax to pay in February and March, so the £154 I would usually be paying out can go straight into the fund to put us back in the black! That's the £144 sorted already...

Savings success

Tomorrow we are going to pick up my new-to-us Skoda Fabia (a black 2005 version of the car above) and I have just been doing some calculations to see what its purchase has done to the family fortunes.

I sold the Vectra for £500 so that is in hand to go towards the Fabia. The Fabia is costing me £1500, so a balance of £1000 has been required to be found.

Today I went to the bank to withdraw that money, so that I can pay the owner the cash in the morning. Tonight, I have been looking at the figures, and have just given the FH the good news:

Due to all the savings, the challenges, the sales of the DVDs, the YouGov contribution and the scrimping I have done in January, although I have just withdrawn £1000 from the bank, we are only actually £144 worse off than we were at the beginning of the month.

Result!

I am fairly sure I can recoup that in February....watch this space!

Catching up

Life gets in the way of blogging, occasionally! Sorry to have kept you hanging on...

The confessions? Well, last weekend I went to Tesco. Personally, that feels like a failure in the challenge, as it meant that I spent way more than the £21 a week limit, and there were lots of offers on! The spending on groceries amounted to £29.20 and brought the total for last week to £55.34 - whoops indeed.

What did I buy? What were the temptations? Why did I even go in?

There were some certain feminine products we needed, and at 8pm on a Friday night, there are a limited number of places to buy them. We ended up buying a selection of other things of which we had run out:

S R flour 52p

squash (3 bottles) £3.74

Weetabix (offer - £1/box) £2.00

sunflower oil £1.39

Baking margerine £2.89 (1kg)

UHT milk (4@49p) £1.96

Frozen mixed peppers (2) £2.00

Pack reduced bananas 28p

Bacon (2 for £4) £4.00

Pink salmon (offer - half price) 4 @ £1.34 = £5.36

Mango £1.50

Sausages £2.56

Twix pack £1.00

The thing with doing these back-to-back challenges is that one runs out of standard stock cupboard items, and then only replaces them if absolutely necessary. There is no budget for stockpiling this cupboard, and this affects the long-term budget. For example, the salmon in the list above - I can make a selection of dishes which will feed us for a main meal with the salmon as the main ingredient - that is cheap at £1.34 when compared with, for example, a meat-based dish which could easily cost £1 per person or more, just for the meat part of the dish. By stocking up on salmon when it is on offer like this, I am able to put together these cheaper meals and reduce the amount spent on meals those days. If I don't buy the salmon because it is a challenge week, I am hampering myself on those other days. Do you see?

We have just 6 days to go to the end of the month, and I am still convinced that these challenges work, since the amount I have spent overall on food this month so far has been less than £97. This is still a success, even though it is a few pounds over the £84 which would have been 4 times the £21 set. I anticipate that by the weekend, I may have spent about another £5 on fruit and veg, but we'll see!

Being given a lot of leeks this month has helped no end as we are eating a lot of leek and potato soup for lunchtimes at home, and I have served it with baguette as an evening meal twice. It has also set me back on the straight and narrow as regards my breakfasts - there is a huge container of oats in the pantry, so I am enjoying porridge for breakfast each day - lots of goodness in there!

It has also been a boon this month that the hens have begun to lay again, so there have been no purchases of eggs. I am not "buying" them from myself, although that might have been a consideration in some methods.

Confessions!

Well, I am afraid that confessions will have to wait until tomorrow now - I wrote the title then was called away, and now I am away to my bed.....Night all xx