Steel Kitten

Too much temptation for a cat

Georgie shows me just how appreciative he is of my housekeeping efforts. He came along and decided the freshly ironed pile was the PERFECT warm spot for a sleep. After he'd dragged around the sheet to his exact requirments first. 

Pancakes, and liver and bacon hotpot

  

The day started off in a very yummy way and ended the same. Nothing beats Saturday morning pancakes, but we're both purists when it comes to what we put on them. Lemon and sugar only. Adding in fruit or chocolate or syrup makes it seem too much like a pudding.

Then later an immensely filling, but cheap and nutritious liver and bacon hotpot for dinner. 

Liver is a weird one isn't it.

You can split a room of people cleanly down the middle about it. You like it or you loathe it. I used to know someone who would gag at the mention of it. It's smell and taste is so powerful the feelings associated with it stayed amazingly strongly at the front of their brain. 

I like it, so does Martin, in fact sometimes I crave it, but somewhere along the way while I'm eating it my brain says enough now and my gag reflex kicks in. Maybe my body craves something in liver and when it knows its loaded up it says stop. 

Anyway, tonight I had the liver craving and knocked up a liver hotpot for us. It's a great cheap recipe but once a month or so is plenty for us!

Liver and bacon hotpot

400g of lamb's liver

2 rashers of back bacon, rind removed and chopped small

1.5lbs of potatoes, thinly sliced

3 big carrots, sliced

1 large onion, sliced or two medium leeks, sliced

2 tbsp of flour

400ml of chicken stock

1tsp of dried sage

Salt and pepper

 

Parboil the potatoe slices for 5 mins, drain and out aside. 

Brown the liver on both sides of each piece in a little oil for about a minute and put into the bottom of a casserole dish. 

Cook the onions, carrots and bacon in the same pan for about 8-10 minutes stirring frequently.

In the meantime, make up the stock and add the sage to it. Add the flour into the pan, stir in and then add the stock stirring.You should now have your vegetables in a nice thick gravy.

Season the mixture with salt and pepper then pour everything over the liver and arrange the potato slices over the top. Brush over a little melted butter. 

Cook at about 200oC for 45 minutes until the potatoes are browned. 

 Major yum.

What is going on over here?

 

If it's not the cats, it's the chickens. If not the chickens then it's the cats.The last few months has been one animal health problem after another and, as if reading my mind, Cooperative Insurance published their study on the British pet population's health.

Apparently, the British spend an average of £326 on the pets every year for depression, anxiety and obesity-related problems. So I thought I'd work out how much we had spent. Now I've picked myself up off the floor and given thanks on high for having a savings account, I'll share the bad news.

The chickens were attacked by red mite in June, necessitating a new coop, some kick-butt Total Mite Kill and nutrient vitamin solution for their water.

Then Marybelle had a prolapsed vent, so I bought out the local pharmacy of self-sdhesive strapping, haemorrhoid cream, vaseline, cotton wool, wound pads, high-dose vitamins for sick birds, disinfectant and gloves to sort that out. 

Fleagle picked up some ticks from the back fields, which we could not get off with either of our newly purchased tick removers. Cut vet visit, although they took pity on us and didn't charge us as the ticks were .."a bit stubborn..." and they wanted to have a chat about her weight any way (oops - another story).

Once I had that sorted, Georgie had a bout of cystitis that had had me grovelling on the floor and both of us admiring his bladder capacity. Cue vet bill and urinary food (at £10.70 for 12 pouches). 

All the cats suddenly got fleas, so I had to buy Frontline. Then I figured I might as well worm them, although Sophie is highly resistent to pills of any kind being put down her so that was a traumatic waste of time and money.

Then the chickens got worms for the first time in yonks. Of course the wormer was out of date so I had to purchase fresh wormer.

Then Sophie started peeing horizontally over the walls and cupboards behind her tray, so a new completely covered litter tray was purchased. She simply went to another litter tray and peed horizontally behind that. No solution to that one at the moment.

Then last week I came in from Glasgow to find Sophie suffering and blood and urine everywhere. She didn't seem to be able to pee or poo any more despite what she had done during the day, so bearing in mind her age we did an emergency call out at the vets at 10:30pm (our lovely, lovely vet prised himself out of bed and opened up the whole surgery for us). She had a severely swollen bladder that had blocked everything off and had an ENORMOUS needle full off jollop and more urinary food. That one cost £176.

We were advised to find out what was causing the sudden urinary problems, and have put it down to the new drive, lots of new clutter in the hallway and the night's drawing in quickly. Cue £40 on feliway sprays and plug-ins.

Then Sophie went back for a second ENORMOUS needle full off jollop, more urinary food and a wormer on Monday, which set us back another £32. Amazingly she nearly got one over on the vet. He put the worming pill in her mouth, held it shut for a couple of minutes and then let go confident that she had swallowed. Just as she opened her mouth to heck back out the pill that was still sitting on the back of her tongue, he saw it and swiftly yammed his forefinger in her mouth to poke it down her throat. I'm not sure if she was more surprised by the speed of his reaction or he was.

Then I went into the chicken pen Wednesday to find Marybelle hobbling. She's going through the moult and her leg and foot scales had naturally raised. So being a stupid chicken she picked them all off, leaving her feet swollen and encrusted with blood, sheets of dry skin and open wounds. Horrific. After bathing both feet in savlon and covering them with thick vaseline, I look around and find that Oxo and Lulu have scaly leg.

Arrggghhhh. Cue more foot bathing, lice treatment for all and vaseline plus a Lulu so traumatised by being captured the neighbour thought we were actually dispatching her for the pot. Now she's gone completely hoarse and croaks, and I've run out of vaseline.

I sat and added it up today. All told, since we came back from holiday in June we've forked out more than £750 on the cats and chickens. That doesn't include food, litter or cat insurance by the way, the latter of which we haven't claimed on yet as it hasn't been worth it due to the high excess we have to keep the costs down.

What is going on over here?

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.

What's in the knitting bag?

I keep alluding to knitting stuff in my posts don't I? I do have something on the needles at the moment, and it's rapidly turning into a huge bit of knitting.

Every day I go for a walk round a lake by my office. It's about 1.75 miles, although I can add extra bits of path here and there to take it another 0.25 to 0.5 extra miles depending on how energetic I feel.

Photo: copyright Mitch11, supplied by Panoramio

One side of the lake is quite sheltered, with lots of tall rustling trees and willow by the water's edge. Here all the ducks accumulate for feeding, squabbbling and snoozing.The other side of the lake is a different proposition. Open ground. High wind. Brrrrr. It's not winter yet and already the wind is shooting down my ear canals and leaving them and my neck sore from cold.

So, I rooted through my wool stash and found a half finished jumper I got from a a fellow freecycler. I'm now reusing the wool and knitting a cowl of what appears to be ginormous proportions BUT it may actually be just the right size once sewn up and worn.

Not a very difficult pattern either.

I cast on about 180 stitches (or so). The pattern is odd rows knit, evens purl until I get to row 10, which should be a purl but instead I knit again. This leaves a single row ridge, then I start the 10 rows again. Very easy. I need about 19 to 20 repeats of the pattern. However, that many stitches with this type of chunky wool means it doesn't fit on two normal needles so I'm using a circular needle. I've not been blessed with enough brain power at the moment to figure out how to join the circle and knit in the round, so I just use it as a set of extra large needles and will sew it up at the end. I'm thinking I might also crochet the edge to stop it rolling up so much.

I'm looking forward to finishing it - the winter weather is starting to draw in!

What are you knitting?

An enforced calmness

You'll be pleased to know I'm being a lot calmer this weekend than I was last, but it is an enforced calmness I'm afraid. My 81 year old father-in-law was rushed to hospital on Friday afternoon with chronic pain due to a flair up of his multiple myeloma. He could no longer walk or keep down any of his drugs and the morphine pills just weren't cutting it any more. An MRI that evening revealed the worst - in the five weeks since his last MRI he has got a new growth on his spine that is aggressive and compressing his spinal cord. The doctors no longer want to wait for a biopsy before treating him, and yesterday he went straight for the first of five radiotherapy sessions to a nearby oncology centre. This will be swiftly followed by chemotherapy next week. 

So I've spent the weekend flitting between hospital and home, and deliberately tried to do as little housework as possible. The washing and ironing got done, the bed changed, the downstairs bathroom given a cursory swish and wipe, and the kitchen is in good shape as I made sure I did most of the chores here Friday night. I've managed to make a little cider this afternoon with some apples that were almost too ripe to use, and an apple cake with the left over pulp thanks to a lovely recipe by Rhonda at Down to Earth. In between there has been some knitting and a film running in the background. 

Martin has just come in from the hospital (oncology wards usually turn a blind eye to visiting times as the patients are so ill) so I'm sorting him out some food. But good news, that one radiotherapy session yesterday has done wonders - father-in-law has had no pain today and needed no morphine at all. He can sit up and move around fine. He's actually chirpy.

Absolutely amazing that one session can do that. 

 

Little Miss Busy gets cleaning

Yesterday I had to fly to Glasgow for a meeting. While I was hanging around the departure gate at Birmingham airport, I spied a rack with all of Roger Hargreaves Mr Men and Little Miss books. I use to read the Mr Men books when I was little but the Little Miss books were released when I was a teenager so I've never read them.

Until now. Quite what people thought of a grown women sniggering and reading the Little Miss books I'm not sure, but I had a lovely time. However, it appears the universe presented me with a unique opportunity to think about change. The first book I picked up to read was little Miss Busy. Little Miss busy doesn't get enough sleep and scrubs the house from top to bottom and bottom to top until she falls over unwell, and is forced to go to bed until she recovers. Just when she thinks she's better and raring to go, she's told she needs to rest for a bit longer and then she has a relapse with the stress of being forced to rest.

Considering what my weekends are like, it was a highly appropriate cautionary tale (apart from the whole falling over bit), and I think a few changes are in order. In fact, this weekend bordered on manic.

Saturday

If I'm at home, saturday mornings are always pretty busy for me before I even start on deep cleaning.

I usually aim to get done all the washing that needs to be done finished by 1pm - one coloureds, one lights, the towels and the bedding. Sometimes I even put a load on Friday night - mostly our working clothes - so the first load is ready to hang up to dry first thing Saturday. This warm weather has been a godsend and I managed to get two loads done, on the line and dry by midday. By 4pm all the washing was done and almost dry.

Then I get the kitchen shipshape. It's descended into chaos by the weekend, so by Saturday morning I always have to wash up, take the recycling to the main bin outside, change the rubbish bags, wipe down the kitchen counters from back to front, wipe off the cupboards, clean the range (although thanks to the halogen oven it doesn't need a lot of cleaning any more!) and sweep/hoover the floor and under the cabinets.

Somewhere in between that I, Martin and the cats have breakfast and the chickens get opened up and inspected as they troop out. 

To add to the kitchen cleaning this weekend, I unscrewed all the sink drains and cleaned them out to stop the nasty gunge and niffs building up. There's usually a screw in the centre of the plughole which you can undo, but be prepared for what lies beneath. I'd left it so long this time the scum had almost evolved into a living being. Gross. It took me nearly an hour to clean everything in the main sink and the half bowl with bicarb, vinegar and a toothbrush and then reassemble it.  

Then I attacked the downstairs bathroom, which usually doesn't need a great deal doing to it as I keep it clean as I go during the week. The toilet gets a once over, a quick wipe round the sink and then the floors get a wipe over. This weekend I also had to do the shower drain, which had got clogged. I had to use caustic soda to remove the blockage as no amount of poking, bicarb, vinegar, lemon juice and boiling water was shifting it.  Nasty stuff caustic soda and I hate using it, but it shifted the blockage very quickly, and then I gave everything in the shower a scrub down too. 

Tea break time and while sitting there I suddenly remembered I needed to rack off my cider this weekend.

So I spent a hour siphoning off the cider into clean sterilised containers ready to sit and mature for a few more months, and in between the bottles filling up I washed the dirty containers.

Pear cider - made with baking yeast on the left, champagne yeast on the right

Then the bed was changed and the sheets were in the wash shortly after.

By that time I knew I couldn't put off a job that had been building up - cleaning the toilet in the upstairs bathroom. Martin and I rarely use this bathroom during the week, so it was with some shock when I lifted the lid on the toilet to discover a limescale and gunge build up that no amount of scrubbing removed. I used the plunger to push as much of the water in the toilet up into the soil pipe, and then added a litre of malt vinegar. Then I left that for a couple of hours. Later a quick scrub around with a toilet brush and a few flushes and the toilet was sparkling once more.

Instead of having to cook dinner, Saturday night was spent scoffing fish and chips at Martin's parents. I managed to get a few more lines done on my knitting - a cowl for my winter lunchtime walks. I'm making it from a handknitted jumper I found at a car boot sale and unravelled.

Sunday

Up at 8:30 and dished out breakfast to all the living beings in the house and cleaned out the cat's trays. Then I yanked out the ironing board, revved up the iron and while on the phone to my mother and a friend in Australia managed to zip through everything I had washed and dried the previous day plus a few renegade items that seem to sit on the ironing basket for months.

Yes, I was on the phone for that long!

While listening to Martin swearing and cursing as he constructed a large 2 metre high cupboard in his hobby room, I tidied and dusted the entire living room, cleaned and polished his silver trophy on the mantlepiece (which he won this year for his dedication and services to his car club), cleaned the fireplace, scraped off all the cat fur from various spots and hoovered. I had to take one of the rugs outside and give it a good slap against a wall a few times to get all the grit out. 

Then it was out to the garden, where I spent an hour rapid planting winter veg - cabbage, purple sprouting broccoli and leeks. They looked a bit sorry for themselves as they had a bit of an exciting journey through the post.

After a restorative cup of tea and half an hour reading Ann Hoffman's Practical Magic, I was back out in the garden. This time the poor chickens got my undivided attention.

I washed and scrubbed their feet with savlon water, sprayed on scaly-leg deterrant, checked their bums and cleaned up any dirty feathers, treated them for lice, fleas and ticks, trimmed their beaks and claws, and then gave them some concentrated vitmain solutions as a booster.

Unfortunately the vitamin booster kicked in while I was cleaning out their coop, so I had five nutty chickens zipping round my legs and clambering into the coop while I was trying to finish off. Lulu was doing laps around the pen at speed for no other reason that she could and was shortly joined by a Georgia-belle doing a roadrunner impression. It was like an athletics meet with all the poultry in motion. Next time I'll clean the coop first ;-)

After a quick freshen up where I removed all the surplus savlon, louse powder, scaly leg spray and chicken poo from my person, I dusted the upstairs bathroom (pausing to admire the sparkly toilet) and our bedroom, before moving on to hoover the entire house from bottom to top. 

The bread machine took care of a loaf of banana bread destined as part of Martin's lunches this week while dinner was slapped into Hal at 6:20pm - a butternut squash curry - and I disappeared into the bath for an hour with a glass of cold cider and a good book. I emerged a new women an hour later ready for eating, watching a film and doing some knitting in the living room. 

At which point Martin looked round and said: "Have you cleaned in here today?"

I almost retreated to bed in a huff.

Little Miss Busy was not amused.

But it does beg the question - why do I put myself through all of this if really no-one but me notices?

I think I'm becoming more like the Hargreaves character every day...

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?

A halogen oven instead of a cardi

 

I had a decision to make last Thursday.

I had earmarked £50 in my clothing budget to update my office wardrobe for winter. Now, I have to admit that last year’s winter office clothes are a tad on the tight side due to my eyes being bigger than belly recently, so I thought maybe I could do a few adjustments to zips and buttons, get a couple of cheap tops and then do a bit of a cover up job with a new long cardigan! That was before I went over to Cottage Smallholder for a mooch early one morning and saw Andrew.

‘Andrew’ is Danny and Fiona’s Halogen cooker (it’s an Andrew James model hence the name). I’d seen him before and been considering getting a halogen oven for about 10 months, but I wasn’t happy with the enormous prices for them – around £90-£120. I’m absolutely convinced of their moneysaving nature – they cook fast and because of this they cost less to run, especially when it comes to gas which is more expensive than electricity.  But the cost for me was prohibitive, and I wasn’t overly happy with only having a 12 month guarantee.

Then I read Fiona and Danny’s updated blog post about them buying a new halogen oven recently and how good value ‘Andrew’ was at the moment. I clicked through the link on their blog to Amazon to see the halogen oven I wanted with spare bulb, cooking accessories and a two year guarantee for the princely sum of £39. I was in there like a rat up a drainpipe. The postage was a bit steep, but still. Just shy of £50 and two days later ‘Hal’ arrived for me to play with. And I haven’t stopped playing since.

All thoughts of winter clothing were forgotten. I haven’t used my gas stove for a main meal since last Friday evening, although I did use some gas to quickly cook up some pasta last night and veg on Sunday (veg can take a ridiculous a mount of time in a halogen cooker so it's easier and quicker to cook them in other ways). But otherwise, scampi and chips, onion rings, bacon and eggs, roast chicken and potatoes, mexican bean burgers, steak and kidney pie, and an apple and cinnamon bake have all been cooked in Hal so far. He's defrosted and heated up chillis, bologneses and soups straight from the freezer and even has a self-washing facility – a few drops of washing up liquid and a couple of inches of water and Hal’s away.

Fiona and Danny have a fan oven and managed to shave 25% off their electric bill - I’m aiming for reduction of 10-15% on our gas bill this winter. And a reduction of half a stone in weight to be comfortable in my winter wardrobe from last year ;-))

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?