Steel Kitten

Going backwards with the gas bill

 

I made a lot of preparations last year for our goal of rebuilding a racing car, all aimed at reducing the household bills and general spending. I purchased a halogen oven back at the beginning of October with the intention of cutting back our gas usage, but until recently I didn't know how much it would actually save.

Now I do :-)

Before I tell you, the Halogen oven cannot claim all the credit for what follows, as we had an unseasonally warm autumn and our heating didn't go on for around three weeks after what we normally would, but I think it has contributed a large amount of the saving.

Between October 15th and January 20th we have used...drumroll please...388 units, a drop of around 200 units over the same period last year. That equates to us using 35% less gas - which is brilliant - and a gas bill of £187 pounds for three months. The electricity bill has also come in and as expected it has increased due to the halogen oven and unexpectedly having to run a fan heater and an oil heater this winter for a couple of days to heat up areas of the house where pipes froze (yes, the water in the washing machine pipes is still freezing in cold weather!). However, it has only increased by around £20, which I'm happy with. Given the recent price rises and the use of expensive fanheaters etc I was expecting a lot more.

Will keep you posted how we get on with this goal for the rest of the year. My hope is that after 12 months our savings will pay us back the original cost of the oven, cover the increase in electricity running it and still leave us with some money to spare afterwards.

Separating the Dream from Reality

 

Now we've decided when we want to be ready to make a move on to the next chapter of our life, the natural step is to fill in some of those gaps about what we want and what we don't.

This I think is the hardest part, because often none of us really knows exactly what we want in any great detail if we haven't been through quite a comprehensive exercise to work it out. If someone said to me right now: "You want that smallholding in the country? Cool...what are you going to do once you're there? What are your plans?"

Ummmm...don't know. Bees? Goats? Origami?

So I've done a bit of reading up on this over the last few days and have a handle on the process I need to go through to figure it out though. I thought I'd share it with you just in case you find it useful.

Not the first clue - usually the first step

If you really have no clue at all about what you really want, figure out what you don't want.  

Few people know what they want, but they will know what they don't want. Get someone to come up with something, anything, for you and then figure out what aspects of it suck! I guarantee you'll pounce on bits you don't rate. So if someone said: "Well you could keep goats and process the milk into your own cheese and butter and stuff, and you could build stables and offer them to rent to people with horses. You could make jams and sell them at farmer's markets," At which point you go "GOATS!! Bleurch...I wouldn't have a goat - I'd have to milk them everyday...and stables? We're thinking of going to Wales and the market is saturated...etc etc."

A bit of a clue - you're either lucky or have been through the first bit above!

You'll probably do this spread over a few days to let the ideas 'ferment' a bit. A nice glass of homemade sloe gin helps as well ;-)

1. What's the dream and what's the reality?

This is where your likes and dislikes come into it, as well as you fears and prejudices. How do you feel about heat, cold, snow, rain, mud, poor roads, power cuts, long journeys to see family? Be honest.

The dream....is to spend every day immersed in smallholding, making jam, pottering around the garden, bottle feeding orphaned lambs and piglets wearing hunter wellies and a Cath Kidston tea dress...the reality could be you're probably not going to have the time to potter due to a part-time job plus the fact the lamb will stick it's poo-covered trotters on you tea dress the second it sees the bottle and the piglet will bite through your expensive wellies. Ask me how I know ;-)

The dream....is to have an old stone cottage with a aga that heats the whole house...the reality is you hate the cold and all that stone will make for a cold damp house if anything goes wrong with the aga or you have a problem getting it lit. It could be you decide to forgo the idea of a stone cottage for a more modern insulated property, or you might decide there needs to be a secondary heating system installed.

The dream....is having a placid jersey cow and making your own dairy products...the reality is there'll have to be a baby cow about the place for part of the year that you may have to sell or send to slaughter, plus if you have a job you may not be enamoured with the idea of milking that cow every single day for months on end come rain, shine, sleet or snow. Who milks her if you're ill?

Here are some other things to consider in your initial plans.

• How isolated do you want to be?
• How's your health and will it stand up to what you want to do?
• How far from a main town?
• How far from neighbours?
• How much land is enough and how much will be too big an area to maintain?
• You can cope with it now, but what about in 10 years time when your back hurts a lot more?
• Do you consider "privacy," to be the last house on the way out of a village or a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere?
• Do you want mains gas, or will you settle for an oil or a wood burning range as your only source of heat?
• Do you want to be able to drive in snow in bad weather or are you happy to be snowed in for a few days with no ill effects?
• At what point would you feel trapped and start to panic?

Now you won't get everything you want, so you will have to compromise. What will you compromise on? Write it all down. You may not want neighbours within five miles of you, but if the reality is that you have a health problem and you could need their help one day, perhaps no more than a mile away would be better.

2. Write down pieces of your dream and join them together.

Now you have a handle on what you don't want, what the realities are and what you could compromise on, you can start to actually write down what the Dream looks like. For example your Dream might look like "...20 acres with a stream running through it. A couple of good fields for horses and stabling. Preferably on flat land with a south facing kitchen garden. England only, no further North than the west midlands to ensure a decent length of growing season without needing a polytunnel. About a mile from any neighbours and within 10 miles of a main town. Would like some woodland to coppice firewood from. Ideally a three bedroom stone house with outbuildings. Concrete or stone pigsties. etc etc..."

4. Gain experience and skill

Now you have the Dream written down, what life experiences do you need to make it a success? Will you need to learn to garden, to can and preserve food, to hunt, fish or forage,to keep animals for meat and other products, to use and maintain a chainsaw, to have first aid training (should go hand in hand with learning to use a chainsaw), to build outbuildings or animal houses, to learn to drive a tractor to help maintain a crop, pasture or meadow land? Will you need a 4x4 if you live somewhere that can’t be accessed well in bad weather or you have to drive over very poor road surfaces to get to your home? If so, how much will that cost you to buy and maintain - could you maintain it yourself if money was tight?

Whatever you think you will need, spend the time until you can implement your dream getting the experience you need. Read books, go on courses, try experience days at farms and smallholdings, have working holidays on farms. Take tiny baby step steps forward, have a go then alter you plans as you get a better idea of how those pieces of your dream match up to reality.

4. What you think you will need

As you start to get some of these skills you may soon realise you're going to need a whole lot of stuff so start a 'Dream box'. You'll probably need three types of 'boxes' - a physical box or space, a digital box and a mental box to collect all the tools, equipment, supplies, safety gear, reference information and knowledge slowly and thoughtfully in advance.

5. Now imagine you're living the Dream; practice with mini challenges.

What do you need? If necessary create the same conditions as you might experience to practice. If you know the area you will be going is off-grid or experiences power cuts in bad weather, try living without your electric for a couple of days and see how you do. Can you live comfortably rather than just survive?Can you stand each other’s company without the distractions of the computer and TV?

Farming experiences are ideal to get more experience of this and many places offer weekend deals that could provide all the challenge you need if you ask the owners for it. Does your Dream start to change after two days getting up at 4am, you're dog tired and the goat bites you?

6. Finally money, moolah, reddies - a few helpful suggestions in the money department.

Whatever you decide to do, money will be vital. I've never met anyone or read anything that advocated starting this life with a large mortgage and debt. It starts you off at a disadvantage immediately and one financial problem could lead you onto a slippery downward slide from which you may never recover. Also, if you plan on setting up a business you'll need every ounce of credit you may have until you are established.

Have no payments for anything debt-related, including mortgage if possible.

Pay off your credit cards then cut most of them up bar one for dire emergencies. Put that one in a block of ice in the freezer.

Pay cash for your house, land, tools and animals.

Get all the dental work done that you need and any nagging health problems addressed. Don't put off having a knee joint replaced that's hurting all the time, otherwise it could seriously impact on the lifestyle you want to have. As mercenary as it sounds if you're employed and get sick pay, now is the time to get it done not when you're struggling to establish income sources and keep a holding going.

Try and get stash of money togther as an emergency fund for after the move. Things always need replacing after a move or an opportunity may come your way shortly after that you want to capitalise on.

Develop your talents into something you can market and set up a few income streams from before you're scratching around for cash. Do your research though.



***

So there you have it. That's what I've managed to glean so far from all of my wandering across the internet.

Is there anything else you think should go in here?

It's all got very real

 

Our cat Georgie when he first saw the chickens

Something odd happened last night (by the way, the photos on this post are just ones I happen to like, rather than specific to the post!). Our retirement dream took a step closer. Nothing physical happened bar a bit internet surfing, but a major shift happened where it needed to happen first: in our minds.

We've batted around ideas before about what we want.

• somewhere with a small detached house to live in
• a few decent outbuildings for Martin to tinker with cars in peace
• probably rural for privacy
• an attempt at smallholding

But that's been it. Batting ideas. Nothing concrete had actually been decided and by when it would happen. So we used to wander round remarking on how lovely it would be to have more outbuildings. How lovely it would be if we were retired. How lovely it would be to grow our own food, including the animals for meat. How lovely it would be to have a smaller cosier house.  Or worked from home.

It was almost like if we said it often enough we would come to believe it might be possible. Because we didn't really you know. Not really. Things like that don't happen to little people like us, they happen to people with money and grand plans and confidence. People like us get a gold carriage clock for 30 years service and sit in front of a one bar fire watching daytime TV as inflation eats into our meagre pensions.

So as well as our minds putting up irrational fear-driven obstacles, we were also wrestling with the real practical obstacles. A rural detached house with outbuildings is expensive everywhere you go. Every time we looked we found more than we were willing to spend. Much more. Somehow we thought Wales would be cheaper, but we weren't even close. Run-down hovels with outside toilets and postage stamp gardens are going for big money. Around £100k more than we would have after the house was sold and that's just plain disheartening. It would mean more mortgage. Which means going backwards, not forwards.

We got three meals-worth out of this onion

And then there's smallholding itself. It's no secret I like the idea of having a smallholding, but I've been changing my mind about it as time goes by and never really admitted it. I've been lurking on forums for years, reading people's posts about how difficult it is, how they live hand to mouth and never break even. Being in cold and draughty houses, not knowing how to pay big vets bills if they came in. A few enjoyed the life but on the whole people seemed to be really struggling.  I don't want to do that, but still I wandered round talking about getting goats and geese and being self-sufficient. 

Anyway, everything shifted yesterday. A chance surfing session before I cooked dinner led to us finding a way to have the small house and the outbuildings in the country for what we would get for this house, if not less. Suddenly the gold watch has disappeared (or in my case a meagre whip round in the office with a speech and some Marks and Spencer vouchers) and a plan appeared before our eyes.

It was like the yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz - suddenly there is a very visible path in front of us that would be difficult NOT to follow.

My favourite colour - tomato red

Now, it won't happen for at least three years. We have the car to rebuild which takes us to August this year and then we want to spend a two years paying down the mortgage (so up to midsummer 2014). We also want to test how it might work if I carried on working and Martin retired by him taking a year's sabattical across 2013 and 2014 and learning how to generate income from some of the things he loves doing. So realistically, we won't be go anywhere until mid-2014 to the beginning of 2015, but the point is we have a date when we could start the process.  

And then it clicked that I actually was doing smallholding skills voluntarily and with a lot of enjoyment...like making cider and liquers...cooking from scratch...keeping chickens...growing fruit and veg...well...

...suddenly it's all got very real. And very do-able.

They spank the gas bill

Credit: science photo library

Well, we had a lovely surprise last night when we got in from the hospital. There on the mat were the gas and electric bills. Cue yucky faces being pulled. We knew the electric bill would be around £120 and we weren't far off at £125. Our consumption hasn't increased a great deal this year but obviously the price per unit has. Still, it's pretty good.

But then there was the gas. Martin opened this one with some trepedation, expecting to run round the house exclaiming "you CANNOT be serious".

He remarked how calm I looked and why did I have a little smile? I had a little smile because I know what the gas reading was as I took it shortly after we bought our halogen oven. It was better than I could have hoped though.

We were £11 in credit! So no gas bill for us to pay this autumn. Which is just as well considering how much I forked out on the pets this month. That's a story I shall bore you with another day, probably tomorrow as I'm still smarting over the whole thing, but at least I've stopped gibbering with rage.

Anyway, I think part of the reason for the low gas usage this time has been the boiler. We've had such problems with it over the last few months that most of the time we've been doing everything in cold water. It simply wouldn't stay fired up for any length of time to heat the water up and it took a good six weeks, if not longer, to sort that out. So there was a silver lining to that cloud after all.

The other reason is that we haven't turned our heating up yet due to the unseasonably warm weather lately. I switched the central heating on at the boiler at the end of september, but turned the thermostat down to 14^oC. That way the heating only kicks in when the temperature drops that low. It's kicked in three times so far this month - one of us usually hears the click and whoosh as the boiler fires up in the night and the radiators still have some tell-tale residual warmth in the morning. 

So that was a really welcome end to a long day.

Martin's father had his last readiotherapy session today, but his doctor wants him to stay in hospital off his feet for another 10 days. FIL is very unhappy about that. However, everyone has told him how close he was to losing the use of his legs as the tumour was pressing down on his spinal column and nerves to his legs, hence the emergency radiotherapy, so he must content himself with being laid up for a bit longer to ensure his future health. I think he had it in mind he would be out of hopsital and going to his car club's annual general meeting on Monday, which goes to show just how much spirit he's still got, but he definitely will not be going. Even if he had have been discharged, the family had decided to collectively sit on him so he couldn't go.

He hates resting for any length of time - he's a Mr Busy that doesn't know when to stop ;-))

We're peas in a pod really.

Pay off a mortgage early

The Urgent/Important list I blogged about last month has lessened somwhat now Martin and I have focused in on what really needed to be done in our lives. A few new bits have made it onto the list, some have come off. There is one very important thing on the list that we both forgot to put on last time, mainly because doing it has become part of the furniture now.

• Pay off mortgage early

We've been overpaying our mortgage for years now, but have been doing it more as somewhere to stash surplus cash and bring the overall term down a bit. We never actually set a target for when we want the mortgage paid by and then moved heaven and earth to find the money.

Yesterday we finally did.

If Martin and I continue as we are the mortgage will be done in around 7 years - that is half the term it would be if we were not overpaying.

If we can find an additional £245 a month to add to our payment and current overpayment, we can be done in five years. Do-able with some stretch.

If we can find an additional £445 a month to add to our payment and current overpayment, we'll be done in four years. Hard - lots of stretch needed - but can be done.

We've both agreed that trying to find an additional £810 a month to add to our payment and current overpayment so we could be finished in three years would be pushing it too far.

So last night we settled on a plan.

We're going to find that additional £245 a month and be done within five years - we're ringing up the bank and telling them to increase the overpayment. Then next month we'll see how we adapt. Can we make/save £245 next month? We're going to find out. 

Then as our income increases, we'll increase the size of the payments using our favourite trick of sneaking things up by £10 a time. Big chunks you miss. £10 here and there you don't and you adapt. I reckon we could be up to that £445 extra overpayment by next summer at the latest, because once Martin and I have an problem to mull over in our heads we automatically begin to align ourselves to a solution without even realising it.

By the way, have you ever used a mortgage overpayment calculator to see how much time and interest you could save on your mortgage? Have a go if you haven't - try this calculator here.

Let's say you have a £100,000 mortgage and you pay it back over 25 years. At the moment with interest rates so low (for example we're on 2.5% variable) you would pay back £134,585 in total.

Now let's say you overpay by £50 a month. You would be done in 21.5 years and have saved £5,010 interest.

What about £100 a month? You'd be done in just over 19 years and have saved £8,740 in interest

But to be honest, it's not really the saving interest that's the attractive thing. It's a) knowing when your big debt will be paid off so you can cut down your hours or even retire b) the pleasure of not letting the bank get the amount of money from you that they think they will and c) making maximum use of the current low interest rates.

So, do you overpay your mortgage?

How many years before you are mortgage-free?

Live like you're skint when you're not

 

A perfect advocado - ripe, ready to eat and 65% less money than it was. Better than the full price hard tennis balls you normally get stuck with.

If I had to come up with the one thing that Martin and I do that makes a massive difference to our personal finances, this would be it:

"We live like we're skint when we're not."

For us to pay off the mortgage, for Martin to retire early, for me to retire early, means we have to have a surplus of cash in our accounts month after month after month to throw at the mortgage and to save for what we want instead of taking on debt. The expenses have to go down, the income has to go up, and it has to stay that way on a consistent basis. 

We've crunched the numbers, we know how much we need to live on once the mortgage is paid off and we know getting there is going to be a hard old slog, especially for Martin as he has a manual job, but you know what? It's a hard old slog living day-to-day anyway so we might as well have a big goal to aim for to make it all worthwhile.

Living below your means takes a huge amount of discipline and focus, perhaps even more than being really skint because you know you have the money and you have to fight the temptation to buy stuff all the time. You have to impose your own limits, which the little devil on your shoulder then spends all month trying to wear you down over. When you're really skint, you don't spend. You have bank account limits that you can't go past so when you don't have the money, you don't have the money. The devil is still there, but you are scared of going over a limit and being charged for it so you can ignore the devil. For the most part ;-)

So most of the time Martin and I pretend we’re skint, and that slows down the flow of money leaving the house, along with a few other things we do:

1. Bulk buying – if we know we’ll eat it/use it and it’s on offer, we get a few of them and stash the rest.
2. Use up leftovers – either take them for lunch the next day, freeze them for another day, or make them part of the next night’s dinner. 
3. Cook more at once and freeze the surplus – if we have to cook it, we cook more and stash the rest for another day’s meal
4. Use slow cookers and halogen cookers – they use less energy, we can cook more, and we can have dinner ready when we walk in the door
5. Make takeaways a treat – instead of takeaways because we’re knackered, we make them a treat to celebrate the end of the working week.
6. Grow a few veggies, the odd pot of herbs. It sometimes makes for a simple evening meal
7. Forget brands – we shop around and find non-branded foods that we like. Because we all know that supermarkets pay brand manufacturers to put their products in supermarket own brand packaging, don't we...?
8. Learnt to joint a chicken – for the same price as a pack of 2 chicken breasts we buy a whole chicken and have the legs, wings and everything else for ‘rubber chicken’ menu planning. 
9. Use coupons, vouchers and discount codes where necessary – it’s a no-brainer. That’s like leaving money on the table.
10. If we go to a supermarket, we swing past the clearance sections first – the food is usually one or two days before it’s use by date, and is still good. Go at the right time and we pay half the cost and freeze most of what we buy. This will be changing soon due to the abolition of sell by dates so I may have to go back to the drawing board on this one.
11. Pack your own food on journeys - if we go anywhere, we take our own food and drink. I have to be surgically detached from my flasks.
12. Minimal subscriptions – I’ve whittled our automated subscriptions down to almost nothing. We do not have Sky any more. Magazine subscriptions get bought as presents for us for Christmas and birthdays. We don’t do Lovefilm. We don’t do gyms. We have PAYG phones. I hate seeing lines of automatic debits on my bank statement now.
13. Accept a little inconvenience for the long term gain - Martin and I work 4 minutes drive from one another, but we start 2 hours apart. In order to avoid buying and running a second car, I leave the house at the same time as Martin and get to work two hours early (or get to a local hotel if the office isn’t open). Although he finishes 2-3 hours earlier than me, he comes to pick me up. Even though he does this journey back to my work from home to pick me up, this is still cheaper than me finishing my driving lessons and running a second car for the almost identical 30 minute journey. It’s not convenient granted, but it saves a hell of a lot of money. We're talking hundreds of pounds a month.

But with all things in life you have to have balance:

• It’s proper Marmite all the way in this house and always will be.
• Diito ginger beer - has to be Old Jamaican.
• I still buy ‘country house and garden’s style magazines. It used to be two a month. Now I’m down to one or some months none at all, but I agonise terribly at the magazine rack if I go there. Best to walk straight past without looking.
• I use 4711 eau de cologne in my ironing water and a few drops in my washing.
• Whenever I have to travel by train I buy a large latte at the coffee kiosk at the station.
• I have a Bounty addiction. The chocolate bar, not the kitchen roll.
• I use Chanel foundation. 
• Every now and then for very special occasions, I save up and have a splurge on a couple of bottles of vintage champagne. 

 Living like you're skint when you're not will give you the cash you need to do many things in your life.

1. To pay off debt
2. To pay off the mortgage early
3. To save for something special
4. To give up full-time work
5. To retire early

It may not be a fashionable thing to do, and some people may not be understanding when you decline to go out one evening for an impromptu meal and spend £50-£75. They may not understand the connection between that one meal and you retiring or paying off your mortgage, but when you add up all the things and events that you felt under pressure to spend money on due to others' expectations, that's a lot of money over the years. And those people are not going to be feeling your pain when you're still slogging away at 65 are they?

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...