Steel Kitten

Save time and money with meal plans

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the basis of the frugality Martin and I practice and I've realised it all boils down to one thing: meal plans. That may sound overly simplistic, but in reality the way you plan and shop for food during the month determines whether you are in or out of control with your household budget. 

If you go to the supermarket and buy a whole bunch of foodstuffs on impulse because you haven't done a meal plan, you'll find some of that food will end up the bin or becoming a science project in the back of the fridge. You won't have bought everything you need because Sod's Law says you'll forget half of it while wandering the aisles and you'll have to go back a couple of days later. At the same time, something else will catch your eye and into the basket it goes. Then two things suddenly become ten and you're down another £20. There may even come a time when you feel you spend your life visiting the supermarket and become thoroughly sick of the sight of the place. 

Having a meal plan stops all this. I've got our meal planning to the point where we shop in bulk once a month and Martin tops up about once a week with milk, yoghurt and cream and the odd bit of seasonal fruit and veg that I don't grow. 

This small amount of time spent planning has a number of major benefits:

1. It saves me from having to wander the soul-destroying, advert-ridden aisles of a supermarket for hours a month.
2. It helps me keep our household budget to a steady £120-£140 a month. This includes cat food, but not chicken food which we buy in bulk bags every few months.
3. The price per 100g is much cheaper because I buy in bulk 
4. It evens out food price rises. 
5. I rarely run out of anything and have to emergency shop
6. It allows me to take full advantage of special offers
7. If anything ever happens to either of us, there'll be a stock of food to keep things functioning on automatic pilot for quite a while. The last thing you want to be doing in a crisis is spending appreciable amount of time or money shopping. 

So, if you've never done meal planning before and want to have a go, this is how to go about it. By the way don't feel obliged to do a monthly one like I do. Start small and do a weekly one until you've been doing it a few months and feel comfortable scaling up. This plan makes an assumption that the supermarket is your main source of food shopping. 

The basics

Step 1

What have you got in your cupboards, fridge and freezer? An inventory of what you have got to use up is the fundamental basis of a good menu plan. 

Step 2

Write down all the favourite meals you eat and the main ingredients. This may seem a bind but you'll only have to do this once. 

Step 3

Make a list or table plan of the breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for each day of your meal plan. You might want to do this on the computer rather than paper as you may have to change things around in the next step. 

For example:

Sunday

Breakfast - pancakes with lemon and sugar, fresh fruit 

Lunch - cheese on toast, fresh fruit

Dinner - spicy pasta with tuna and broccoli

Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit mix, yoghurt

Those meals that will use up oddments in the fridge, like half a jar of pasta sauce or some leftover rice, put in within the first couple of days of the plan otherwise they will go off and end up being thrown away. 

Step 4

Now look at each meal and check the ingredients required against what you have in your inventory. Anything you need goes onto the shopping list. Don't forget to check things like condiments, sauces and snacks. 

Step 5

Put the plan down for a bit and go make a cup of tea.

Step 6

Come back with tea and fresh eyes, then go through your list and make sure it doesn't generate waste and is realistic. For example, if you have a meal planned that uses 1/2 a bag of prepared salad, make sure you have plans to use the rest within a couple of days or you'll end up throwing it in the bin at the end of the week. Ditto half used cans and things like yoghurt, creme fraiche or cream. You might find you can freeze the excess ingredient straight away, but it's likely you will need to eat it the following day. 

For example:

Sunday

Breakfast - pancakes with lemon and sugar, fresh fruit 

Lunch - cheese on toast, fresh fruit

Dinner - spicy pasta with tuna and broccoli

Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit mix

Monday

Breakfast - toast and marmite

Lunch - Tuna sandwich, fresh fruit

Dinner - meatballs with tangy barbecue sauce, mash and mixed veg, fresh fruit and cream

Snacks - fresh fruit, flapjacks, dried fruit and nut mix

On Sunday you might use half a big jar of pasta sauce (if you don't make your own sauce from scratch) and half of a large can of tuna. The following day, the leftover sauce is used as a base for the meatball sauce while any tuna goes into a sandwich for lunch. Any left over cream from Monday's dessert could be used on Tuesday or Wednesday to make a carbonara sauce with some ham and mushrooms etc etc. 

In terms of the realism factor, you may decide you're going to have a go at that extra complicated recipe with scores of ingredients and three hours of stove time one evening after work. But if you're too tired to cook fancy after work and just about manage to crawl into bed without a care assistant, forget it. The food will just sit there in the fridge and rot. 

Step 7

So once you've rejigged your list of meals and your shopping list, it's time to think about household bits and pieces, such as shampoos and toilet rolls and headache pills, and any events you want to buy something for, like birthdays, Easter etc. 

Step 8

Now it's time to shop. Clutching your list in your hand, hit the supermarket. Try and stick to the list unless there is an exceptional deal on and you know you will either eat the extra stuff or can freeze it until you know what you're going to do with it. This is a fine art and takes a lot of discipline. A bargain isn't a bargain if you didn't need it in the first place. 

For example, Martin once came home with several boxes of Findus frozen crispy pancakes because he walked past them in the frozen section and they were on offer. For a start I hate them, so only one of us was able to eat them, and with Martin's appetite he was wolfing a box down in one go to get enough nutrition out of the tiny things, Even if they were 'cheap', they were expensive as a meal compared to anything I could have done and a hell of a lot less nutritious as well. They are also riddled with preservatives and food colourings. I suspect the reason they were cheap is because no else likes the horrible things and they were being sold off as loss leaders. 

On the other hand, I very rarely buy those Mexican meal kits because I think they are horrendously expensive for what they are, but occasionally when they go on a 2 for 1 offer I'm in there stocking up for a few months. 

Step 9

Pay for goods, get them home ASAP and store them properly. If you have bought cold food in bulk, make sure you have containers or bags to split it up into usable portions and freeze individually (if it can be frozen). There's no point buying pounds of mince for example if you end up having to take the whole lot out of the freezer just for a small amount, leaving you with loads of the stuff that can't be refrozen and has to be cooked within a couple of days. 

Step 10

Now implement your meal plan. You can be flexible and switch around different meals, but try and bear in mind that some of your meals may have to go together on consecutive nights to avoid waste. 

7 clever ways to make your household budget work harder

 

Once you've got the hang of the basics, it time to implement a few tricks to help save a few more pennies and make you a bit more of a savvy shopper.

1. Check out deals in advance and decide if they're worthwhile including them in your meal plan. There are a few deal comparison sites out there like this one and this one. This can be a good way to stock up on favourite foods cheaply. 

2. Be careful with coupons from supermarket loyalty cards. They're not what they appear. For example, you might be offered a 30p saving if you buy a branded butter or pizza, but if you only ever use non-branded and there's a whacking great price difference even after taking account of the coupon, you'll end up spending more money than you would have ordinarily done. Do the math and don't be taken in by them. Coupon does not necessarily mean cheap. 

3. If you get Tesco vouchers, don't redeem them for shopping. They are worth four times their face value in 'Deals" which include magazine subscriptions, days out and cinema tickets, all of which can be useful gifts. 

4. The brand challenge. Make a point of trying food a brand below what you would normally buy. So if you buy from a supermarket's 'best' range, try the same item from the supermarket's own brand to see if there is any difference. Martin Lewis from moneysavingexpert.com believes most people can shave at least a third off their shopping by doing this regularly. You don't have to go overboard immediately and buy everything non-branded or value, but be prepared to give something a go every week. I think the only things I regularly buy branded now are Atora suet, Marmite and Nando's peri peri sauce.  

5. Stop going to supermarkets for fruit and veg. Buy from markets and farms. One unfortunate by-product of supermarket shopping is it insulates us from the real cost of things. If I asked you how much a 1lb of potatoes was (or half a kilo if you want to go all metric on me), would you know what the average price is and whether the supermarket is more or less expensive than other sources? I can tell you now, you could buy the equivalent weight of potatoes from a farm or market much, much cheaper than a supermarket, but we've been conditioned into believing supermarkets are cheaper by constant TV advertising. And now all the prices are on the shelves, instead of on the food packaging, we have an even harder struggle to keep track of prices as we shop. 

6. Bulk cook. There are two ways of doing this. One is to spend time cooking all your meals for a week in advance so you have less to do during the week. A popular method is to cook up a big batch of a base ingredient to which you can add extra ingredients to, such as a base red sauce that could have mince added for a bolognese or chilli, or cooked chicken or tuna for a pasta meal. The other way of doing it - and this tends to be the method I use - is to make a bigger batch of a meal and freeze the leftover portion. That way I save myself the time of cooking it (and therefore save money on the utilities as well) and make sure I don't end up with half eaten pots or cans of food in the fridge. 

7. And finally, a little known tip: if your supermarket has a "foods of the world section' check that out before you buy any tinned or packet goods. I've found the same products much cheaper here, sometimes as much as half price. For example, coconut milk is now about £1.29 a can if you get it from its usual home in the Asian cooking section, but pop along a couple of aisles to 'foods of the world' and you'll find it for about 40p. Chickpeas are also cheaper.  

******

This has turned into a whacking great post, so I'll leave it there for now. 

Do you have any interesting sneaky tricks you use to save money with your household budget? 

Synchronicity at work again

It's funny. When you make a decision in your life, and it's the right one, the universe will show you somehow that you're on the right track.

In my last post, I talked about how I never wanted to be a big businesswoman, working all hours and damaging my health and relationships. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will probably know that I had a bout of chronic fatigue a couple of years ago around the time I started this blog. It knocked me out for 3-4 months. I never really discussed the circumstances around it, although I have said I passed out one morning and then made changes to my life.

The chronic fatigue was caused by overwork. At the time I was working up to 90 hours a week and my stress levels were made worse by a client who was the Owner and Director of an advertising agency. He was rude, abrupt and very stressed himself, leaving him prone to angry outbursts and insults. He would smoke endlessly to cope with the stress - the whole office used to stink of ciggarette smoke. He would work on me relentlessly to drop my prices all the time, so two years after working with him I was earning much less per hour than I was in the beginning, meaning I had to work more hours to make up the money. He would also accept my estimates for timing then once I had begun writing chase me constantly because he had made unrealistic promises to his clients, which created even more stress.

That fateful morning, I recieved an email pushing me to complete a huge job - I think it was 40 page brochure - in a third of the time I had quoted for.My stress levels suddenly spiked and I passed out. When I came to, it was with complete clarity of thought. He was not that important, the money was not important and I was happy to lose the job and him as a client. Which I subsequently did. I handed the job back and walked away.

Yesterday I received an email from his account manager, asking me if I was still a freelance writer and even though we parted on bad terms would I consider working for them again. That there had been "changes" at the company.

A few minutes searching on the net and I found out what those changes were. According to the local newspaper, the Director and Owner of the company had died of a massive heart attack at the age of 48. He was smoker with asthma and worked extremely long hours. He was also found to have relaxants in his body - notably cannabis and the tranquiliser ketamine.

If ever there was an incident that made me realise how right I am to put my health and enjoyment of my life first, that was it. I'm only 36, but if I had carried on like I was I've no doubt I'd one day end up like him. He had a plan to build the company up and sell it one day then retire somewhere with his family. He'll never get the chance now.

Frucool

It's the new buzz word - apparently it's now really cool to be frugal hence the new word. Thank God. Finally I'm in fashion. I am Frucool. Excuse me if I don't buy the T-shirt, but paint my own. 

Talking of buying, is it my imagination or is this country's officials getting a teensy bit scared that we're not spending any money at the moment?

I keep seeing column inches devoted to this minister or that civil servant imploring me to go on holiday or start buying colour TVs. It's not that I don't have the money. I do. I just don't want to spend it right now thanks. There's no law that says you have to spent all of your income. By not spending money on unnecessary consumer goods, making do with what we have and recycling what we can, I believe we have tremendous power and freedom. Hence the frustrated squeakings from the government and retailers. I think this poster sums it up:

 

Photo by Georgina Coombes

I also thought this was quite funny....

Besides not spending my money just to annoy government ministers, I also don't spend money because I equate every pound I spend with having to give up a certain number of minutes of my life working.

Once you start to equate consumer goods with the amount of time you'd have to work for it, things suddenly stop looking too attractive. Well it did to me. I used to earn £9 an hour after tax when I worked in an office so every skirt I bought for £40 cost me 4.5 hours of my life. Spending £65 a week on food when I was single because I didn't budget, meal plan or buy smart meant almost one day of my working week was spent grafting to feed me - and a shocking amount of that food ended up in the bin because it was an inpluse buy and I didn't get to eat it before it went off.  

Over the last seven years, I've learnt to value time much more than money. If I get the work done that pays my bills I can then spend time with Martin. Or the chickens. Or in the kitchen garden. Or knitting. All things to me much more worthwhile than killing myself to get more money to pay for a bit of consumer tat. I don't believe in building a business with staff and offices and stationary and stress and long hours just for the possible reward of being able to sell it at some point in the future. My life is happening NOW. I'm not putting it off for some mythical date in the future when I can get loads of wonga, by which time my husband has left me, my family are gone and I'm probably too ill too enjoy it.

No thanks. I think I'm going to have to stay as I am, no matter how much those ministers sqeak with fear.

Do you want to join me?

Don't lose focus

Curry in the slow cooker (just about to serve hence the lid is off!)

I said in my last post I'd talk about how Rhonda's blog has made a difference since I've been reading it. I've felt for a while I've been ready to move onto a new level in my quest to be a bit more frugal and self sufficient, so the timing couldn't have been more perfect. 

The day after reading Rhonda's post about being frugal with utilities it crossed my mind I really hadn't been watching the meters since about November. Normally I'd pretty sure about what we spend gas and electric-wise and check the meters a few times during each billing period, but with the arrival of the hedgehogs and the need for constant warmth for them, I accepted our bill was going to be higher than normal. And with that, for some reason, I stopped monitoring it.

Without the vigilance I became careless and let old bad habits creep in. I stopped putting lids on the saucepans. I used the oven to bake one measly thing at a time. I stopped using the slow cooker and started cooking the same meals in the oven, three or four hours for a casserole or stew (I'm kicking myself as a I type this). That stinking thinking started to move across to turning things off at night. Little red standby lights started appearing all over the house again. The computer was left burning energy all day instead of being switched off when not in use. 

So what I wasn't prepared for two days after I read Rhonda's post was the huge gas bill that dropped onto our doorstep. Now at first glance it didn't look too bad - £186 for three months. Then I realised it was estimated, so as usual I took a reading to check and did a swift calculation of what it should be. Then I nearly fell on the floor.

It should have been £360. I have NEVER paid more than £200 for a winter gas bill in my life. Then the electric turned up - £180 for eight weeks. F*!!*%^$£$

After moping around the house for about two days, I stopped swearing and got proactive. I started reading the meters every day to see where all this energy was going. Now I reckon you've just said to yourself "it's obvious - gas central heating in the winter and price rises". You'd only be half right. But actually, I've discovered that two thirds of my daily gas goes on: cooking and baking. That hour's cooking in the evening plus a few baking sessions during the week has added up to a large amount of money going out the house. Yes there have been price rises, but I've certainly not been careful about usage and have wasted it.

To test this, I've only used the gas cooker twice in the last two weeks for unavoidable baking. I've planned all our meals around the slow cooker, steamer and microwave. Our daily readings have dropped from 10 units (around 110kw) a day to just over 3 units (about 33kw). That's a massive drop. At the same time I'm watching our electric meter like a hawk to see how much that increases, but bearing in mind a slow cooker uses the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb over the same period of time it's not going to be a massive increase. Any cooking in the microwave is for less than five minutes at a time and doesn't happen every day, while the steamer takes the same amount of time to cook rice and pasta as the stove. And I've even figured out how to boil eggs in it!

 

All the little red standby lights are off again. To make doubly sure we even unplug. The only things permanently on in this house are the fridge and Martin's clock radio. We've tested many other alarm clocks and have always come back to that. Battery powered ones sound great until the day the alarm doesn't go off because they are flat and Martin wakes up 4 hours later than he should do. Royal Mail aren't very understanding about things like that and once too often and you end up getting written warnings.

 

There's only one snag as far as I can work out. Having a slow cooker on for most of the day means by about 2pm you can start to smell the dinner, which has led to both of us to fantasising about food all the time. Instead of being hungry around 6:30-ish, he's peering round doorways enquiring about dinner by 4:30pm. Because I think I'm hungry all the time, I keep diving for the bread and lemon curd every time I pass it so trying to find a scrap of fresh bread in the house by dinner time is like the search for the Holy Grail.

 

It reminds me of that old Chinese proverb: It is not economical to go to bed early to avoid burning candles if the result is twins.

 

I sense I'm going to have to keep a very close eye on the shopping budget now as well. Not to mention expanding waistlines! Perhaps the slow cooker ought to go in the conservatory so we can't smell it...

 

 

Number crunching

Just a quick blog today as it's getting late, but I so had to share this.

Today I did my 2007-2008 taxes. The one thing I've been putting off for months and months. The horrible monster that's been lurking ready to eat me. 

It took from 4:20pm to 10:35pm to do everything from A-Z. The whole shebang, from sorting out the mounds of paperwork to sticking, stapling, filing, filling in the forms and working out the dreaded number. Which wasn't very dreadful because I appear to have stashed too much money in the bank.

Let me repeat that.

A whole year of taxes took just 6hrs 15 mins to sort and compile (so half the time it took my accountant last year) and I have a cash surplus. 

Me. The number klutz. The person who runs from numbers gibbering with fear. 

I feel so good about the whole thing, I've decided next week to bring all of my financial paperwork for 2008-2009 up to date in advance so I can forecast my tax liability early. 

What has happened to me lately? 

A year without spending: update

A momentous decision has been made today. A decision relating to spending nothing for a whole year. My posts from a few weeks ago on this subject have been circulating my brain pretty much constantly since. Every time I see something in a shop I like a little voice in my head says "Do you need it?" then another little voice says "Ahhh, but you haven't decided to go a year without spending yet so you can have it." The first voice - which sounds uncannily like Felicity Kendall in her Barbara Good persona - then comes back with "So when are you going to make a decision on that?" only to find the reply "Soon."

To be quite frank, I feel guilty every time I pick something up and my head hurts with the constant exchanges between Felicity and Co (and the Co is starting to sound a bit like Richard Briars/Tom Good). This is ridiculous! As if I don't have enough to feel guilty about, I've decided to add one more thing to my shoulders in an orgy of martyrdom.

Well no more. For I have come to a decision. And the decision is:

No.

I will not be undertaking the challenge of not spending anything for a year. I spend little enough as it is without cross examining myself every time I pick up the smallest thing and beating myself around the head about it. I felt guilty for handing over 10p at the tip the other day for a fantastic book about Elizabeth I that I'd been trying to find for months - it has gone too far.

I've said before that I'm a very black and white person and treat myself very harshly at times and this is an excellent example of it in action. My brain can persecute me and if I went forward with a non spending plan, I'd spend the better part of a year deeply entrenched in layers of guilt and end up deeply unhappy.

Before I'm castigated for wanting to be be a spendthrift, I can actually tell you exactly what I have spent on myself in the last month just so you understand that I'm not making excuses and do keep a careful eye on the money I have. I have spent £42.10. That £42.10 netted me: an embroidered denim skirt, a sheer flower top (in fact the one in the last wind turbine post), two bikinis, 5 books, a bag of bon bons, a magazine and the most exquisite porcelain tea-for-one set with hand painted ladybugs. I felt bad about every single purchase, even though I know most people's mouths would drop open at how little this is compared to other people. God forbid what could have happened if I'd done something as rash as bought a new DVD or CD for myself. I might have exploded with guilt.

I already spend time and money helping those less fortunate than I am and give thanks for how lucky I am to live in a wealthy country and be able to support myself. So instead I'm going to spend the next year learning how to become a born organiser, a much more necessary and worthwhile endeavour and one that will help me both in my home life and my business. And that will be the subject of another post on another day.

Synchronicity at work again....

I've been thinking about this synchronicity thing a bit more today and am realising just how much there is in my life at the moment. In fact, there's so much going on I can't actually write about it all on this blog, but I thought one incident was so worthy of a mention I'd do a second post today about it.

Last week I went on a tip snuffle that proved to be one of the best trips I've ever done. Not because the quantity of things I found or that I discovered something expensive but because of the opportunities that have been presented to me as a result. One of the first things I do when I go to this particular tip is check out the book section. For some reason they usually have particularly decent books turning up and they turf the tat out regularly to make room for new stuff. On this occasion I managed to pick up a load of really good books, including a Rough Guide to Tuscany and Umbria, a Lonely Planet guide to Europe on a Shoestring and amazingly a new copy of The Blue Planet by David Attenborough. I paid about £2 for the lot and wandered off to the car.

Now those of you who read my blog will know that I regularly receive emails from Martin Lewis' site The Money Saving Expert. For those of you who don't get this email go and sign up
for it now. I've lost count of the number of ways I've managed to save money on his advice and the forums are astounding.

I'd been giving some thought to buying his book The Money Diet, as it's on permanent loan from the library with a long list of people waiting for it. The day before my tip snuffle I'd been on Amazon and Play checking out the prices intending to get it the next day. So imagine my delight, as I walked back past the book boxes on the way back to the car, to spot a book I had missed and discovering it's a copy of The Money Diet! Even better, as I'd just bought a stack of books the waste advisor gave it to me for nothing!

If that wasn't enough synchronicity, inside the book was a discussion on personal loans and payment protection insurance, which made me realise, not only has I been mis-sold PPI, but also my loan in
the first place. This has led me to put in a complaint to the bank and I'm waiting for a reply from them and a refund of the totally unnecessary PPI they sold me which they knew I didn't need and would never
be able to get a payout from if anything happened. I firmly believe this has all come about because I decided to shift my beliefs about money and my self-worth and keep my eyes open for the opportunities that present themselves. So, thank you universe. You're help has been much appreciated so far and I'd like some more of it please.

Stuart Wilde's ten laws of abundance

Earlier in the week I found a little gem of a book in the library that I'd been after for a while called The Money Bible (including the ten laws of abundance) by Stuart Wilde.

Now Stuart Wilde always gets mixed reactions from people-in-the-know when you mention his name. When I told a psychiatrist friend of mine I was reading some of Stuart's stuff he raised his eyebrows and said "he's a bit too far out for me". Then again I know others declare him a god. Wilkopedia describes him as a urban mystic and visionary, which doesn't really tell you who is is or what he does.

Bottom line, Stuart is self-help guru. He's into self-empowerment, the metaphysical and helping people free themselves from the restrictions of society. About a year ago I heard a audio of a seminar he did in Australia on money and how our beliefs hold us back and it was the funniest yet uncannily accurate approach to the subject I'd ever heard. Since then I've been reading his books and listening to his audio tapes, although many of his earlier works from the 1990s are no longer in print. That's why I was so delighted to find The Money Bible still in the library. The fact that it's still there after being published 10 years ago is testament to it's popularity.

Stuart puts forward the idea that money is energy that ebbs and flows around all of us. The only reason some of us have less than others is that we stop ourselves. We put emotional and physical obstacles in our way, shoot down our own great ideas and hold resentments about people with money. We end up being emotionally distant and closed from money because we feel pain or shame when we think about it and so sabotage the universe's efforts to give us some.

How many of you have had an opportunity present itself that could have led onto greater things but fear held you back so you passed it up? I know people who have dithered for such a long time over making a decision that could have benefited them enormously that the opportunity just faded away. Irritatingly one person I know constantly laments the fact that their big opportunity had 'got away' and how it could have changed their life. THEN WHY DID YOU LET IT GO YOU BLOODY NUMBSKULL? (Even worse they normally end up on my sofa bemoaning their fate and how life is unfair. Meanwhile another opportunity whizzes past their left ear as they waste time......)

Anyway, this isn't a rant about self-sabotage or fear of change, it's supposed to be a big thumbs up for The Money Bible. The ten laws are designed to help you think differently about money and your relationship with it but I will say it's only a starting point. Don't read it thinking that suddenly you will change overnight and wads of cash will drop into your life. It's more subtle than that. You're re-aligning yourself and your beliefs so when opportunities that will lead to money come up you immediately see them and take them. I think you have to be at a point where you are so cheesed off with never getting ahead in the financial stakes that you're willing to apply yourself seriously and conscientiously to taking action.

Now, I've been reading Stuart's books on money for some time and recently started combining this with Money Beyond Belief course and listening to affirmations every day. This course of action is working for me. In fact, thinking back if I hadn't read or listened to any of Stuart's works I would never have found the Money Beyond Belief course and wouldn't be where I am today.

It all boils down to something called synchronicity, which is defined by Wilkopedia as: "the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them." After I'd listened to my first seminar by Stuart, I found it so interesting I hunted down some information on the net about his life and works. I found testimonials from people, successful people who were full of admiration for him and his teachings. One of these people was Joe Vitale, an American copywriter that I greatly admire and had already previously bought several books and courses from. More research about Joe led me to discover he also advocates attracting success and wealth into your life in a similar to Stuart and one of the programmes he personally recommends is: Money Beyond Belief.

By the way, those people that owed me money - all paid up. Cheques received for the full amounts less than 48 hours after sending letters out. I've spent months being polite and businesslike, chasing, writing letters, emailing reminders, phone calls etc etc all of which got me nowhere. Now I've finally started to truely value myself, it all starts coming in. Co-incidence? Possibly, though I prefer to believe it's synchronicity. I put the vibes out there and went forward with an open mind and the universe is now delivering.

Setting your priorities....

.....following on from my last post about going for a whole year without spending, as featured in the Ecologist, I sat down with Martin last night and compiled a list of things that would be exempt from the challenge if I went ahead with it. It's an interesting exercise because it forces you to write down in black and white your priorities and sometimes it comes as a bit of shock. We all run around spending willy nilly without giving much thought to how or why we've bought things. We just go into automatic pilot and grab stuff to give us a short thrill. Most of the time don't genuinly appreciate it and tire of it quickly.

For example, some people might not consider bubble bath as essential, but I do! A bath with no bubbles? You might as well take away my left hand. In an effort to be greener I've cut down the amount of baths I take each week to just one and the rest of the time I shower. Now I really appreciate the baths that I do have and good smelling, environmentally-friendly bubble bath at around £7 for a small bottle remains on my list of priorities.

So we've agreed on the following:

• Food, household and medicines - essentials.
• Toiletries - within reason. Carry on using existing brands or similar brands that cost less, but I'm not to switch to £25 luxury shampoos etc to fill a 'gap' because I'm not spending money as I normally would. My bubbles are not to be tampered with in the name of money-saving.
• Health - within reason. I currently spend money every week on a Pilate's class and occasionally we have a game of badminton and these will stay as necessities as they contribute overall to my health and fitness. However, no joining gym's, buying new exercise gear or prowling Holland and Barratt for strange potions with imaginary health benefits. Oh and apparently I have enough essential oils to sink a ship so none of those either (damn two of my weaknesses found).
• Essentials for the kitchen garden - not included are swanky, luxury raised beds, potato barrels, greenhouse watering systems, strawberry growing systems or any of the other paraphernalia on the market that would take the garden from its current humble state to Buckingham Palace. Water butts are allowed as these use a precious natural resource to its fullest, but not tardis-like plastic compost bins as I know I can actually build a better compost pile using three spare pallets. I am also not to get a sudden desire to try hydroponics and all the expensive equipment that would entail.
• House renovations - within reason. At the moment we seek the most cost-effective, green option we can when we buy materials to do the house up and this will continue. I'm not to suddenly decide to spend double what we've budgeted for something because I'm feeling deprived and want to splash out. For example, with cavity wall insulation I've always been for clean, environmentally friendly and super-expensive sheep's wool whereas Martin would be happier with the usual cheap, icky, oozy dangerous-to-health stuff. In his opinion sheep's wool is a waste of money and I'm jumping on the 'green' consumer bandwagon. We may have to compromise on something else that's midway between the two.
• Repairs - if anything I have  breaks or springs a hole, where at all possible I will try and repair it rather than replace it. Big things such as boilers are exempt from this as they are considered essential. However a TV might is not. In this case Martin would have to foot the bill himself if he wanted to replace it as I can quite easily live without TV and squirrel myself away upstairs with the contents of an (as of yet) unopened book box that's been lurking since our move two years agp. However, take Martin away from Nascar for a week and he's climbing walls. When it comes to the computer, we both pay.
• Business expenses - these have to be exempt and are tax deductible. I can't go without an upgrade to my bookkeeping software etc or I'll be up a creek at some point in the future with the IR and networking is essential to me getting new business. However, informational courses, unless directly relevant to work, are out. This is my third weakness - knowledge. For me this will be the hardest one.

So there you have it.The only question now is will I do it?

A year without spending???

It's Ecologist day. Every month when my copy drops onto the mat I spend all day reading it and getting angry about the horrible, terrible things that are happening throughout the world. We all forget how lucky we all are and what amazing lives we have in our endless rounds of shopping, eating and generally searching for yet more novel ways to enjoy ourselves and drown our work miseries.

I'm no different from anyone else. I complain and bitch and moan and whine about my life and work, forgetting that having my own home, the freedom to be freelance and part-support three psychotic cats is a privilege I should be thankful for. Especially when you consider the terrible depths people in under developed countries have to stoop to earn an absolute pittance that barely keeps their bodies alive, let alone their souls. Or when children have to start work at aged 4 or 5 because their parents can't afford to feed them.

In this month's Ecologist I was immediately struck by an article by actor Robert Llewellyn, who has embarked on a year of buying nothing but food and medicine in an effort to reduce the amount of goods he consumes. Now, this isn't the first time I've heard of this. In fact this is the fifth time I've read an article on someone doing this and personally I don't think it would be too hard for me to do as well.  I already spend very little on myself and what I do spend is generally on second hand stuff anyway because I love the feeling of getting a bargain. However, if I broke down the stuff I buy (excluding food and medicines) into categories it usually falls into: Reading Materials, Gardening Paraphernalia, House Renovation Materials, Gifts and Clothes.

Technically I don't need to spend money on Reading Materials, as the house is overflowing with the stuf not to mention the local libraries. And Clothes? I could  wear a different outfit every day and not have to wash anything for three weeks, so I think I have enough clothes. House Renovation Materials and Gardening Paraphernalia is a different kettle of fish and the amount Martin and I spend can be quite horrendous.

Gardening-wise some of that could legitimately fall into the food category if it relates to the kitchen garden. Generally that would be seeds, blood/fish/bone fertiliser and tomato food, lime, baby plants, horticultural fleece and netting, and pea sticks. However, I have a fairly good stock of all of these already so I wouldn't have to part with much cash for a year. The rest of my expenditure on the garden would have to go. This means all those nice little random plant buys at garden centres, mail order plants, potting compost, large plant pots, landscaping materials such as sand, shingle, slate and stone would be a thing of the past. Then there's outdoor paint and stains, which we use to do up old bits of garden furniture and tired looking fencing. It would all have to go. And I haven't even started yet on the amount we spend doing the house up.

Before I carry on I sense you asking "What about Martin" and "You could get Martin to buy them!". I consider A Year of Not Buying to be a lifestyle choice and a personal challenge - I'm not imposing my views on him and I've no intention of sneakily dumping purchases onto him. The idea is to reduce consumption overall, not shift it around so someone else does it instead. That's cheating.

If I'm going to do it (and I haven't yet decided I will) I would have to draw clear lines in the sand on exactly what would be acceptable expenditure and what would not. I'll have a think about it some more and post some thoughts later. One thing's for certain. Christmas is going to be interesting!

Crocheted pot holder anyone?