Lending money with conditions

[p5oebe]

Dh has been made redundant (bloody brexit) & frantically searching for another job but its really difficult as his work is very specific. I work but low paid & we have a max mortgage that we can only afford with his salary. I also have two pre schoolers at home.

Dm has very kindly offered to tide us over if it comes to that, they are very well off & adore the grandkids & extremely generous with gifts for them etc

The only thing is she has insisted we stop shopping at Waitrose, Boden & our favourite shops basically she is a reverse snob (?) and doesnt miss an opportunity to tell me what a waste Waitrose is. I am very particular about food & what the kids eat. We dont have a freezer or microwave & i find it so much easier to shop fresh somewhere i trust. I spend approx £150 a week for the four of us.
We hardly drink & rarely buy clothes for dh & I but obviously the kids need new clothes regularly. She's basically said i don't want you to waste my money!

What you're learning OP is what many others know already: the time/money equation.

If you have the money, convenience is easy. If you don't have the money, you pay with time. You learn which shops are likely to have what, at the lowest price, and so on.

This CAN'T be real, surely? £150 A WEEK?

I feed DH and myself for £40 a week. Cheaper supermarkets are fine.

Wow, so I can only protect my child's health if I get all our food from Waitrose?

Here. Have a op. I should warn you though, it's a Tesco's one. Value at that.

I can understand how it takes a while to adjust to a sudden drop in income. You might not necessarily want to make immediate drastic changes to your lifestyle in the hope that it is a short term blip.

Several years ago my DH lost his job and at first we did try to carry on as normal. We still had lunches out, paid for a cleaning lady, went on holiday etc. In our case it was a bit more manageable because I worked full time and earned a decent salary and we had a fair amount of savings. No wealthy parents to bail us out though!

Eventually though when the savings were starting to dwindle and there was still no sign of a job we had to start economising and cutting out cloth accordingly. Thankfully DH did get something else before the savings ran out and the situation got serious.

What strikes me is that your Mum has said she will help to "tide you over" which implied she hasn't put a time limit on that. If she had said something like "I can lend you £5K" to keep you going then, arguably, it is not up to her how you spend it since if you fritter it away in 6 weeks or 6 months it is the end of her commitment. However, if she is offering to help indefinitely, or even for a fixed period of time, then it is very much her business how you spend the money as it is her money you are spending.

Good luck.

Oh thats a hard one....

Take the money so generously offered and spend according to the money you actually have coming into the house.

Take the money and keep spending £150 a week on food (WTF?) Then go running to DM for more money when you havent a bean to pay the bills.

Refuse their money on priciple and go to the bank for a loan. Oh wait you wont get one as dh isnt working! Then hope your memories of waitrose keeps you warm when you lose your house and are all cramped in a one bed emergency house with 6 other families.

Seriously you do whatrever it takes to get you through the lean times to keep a roof over your kids heads, put food on the table, its not rocket science. Aldi have organic and free range foods, its not rotting rejects!
Batch cook, freeze, plain yogurt add fruit so much nicer than pre made yogurts, ebay, charity shops, you may surprise yourself.

But Aeroflot, she can actually be fussy for much much cheaper. I think that's what a lot of people are getting at.

Instead of blindly believing the advertising OP try to find out where things actually come from and read the ingredients on the back of packets. Many things are identical but just in a different packet.

Tbh you have two choices OP- continue with your Waitrose and Boden obsession and not accept your DM money.

Accept your DM help and realise that you don't have the money to spend like you used to!

Oh give over. Friggin ridiculous. You can't afford that lifestyle anymore.

I love Boden, White Stuff etc. But, I buy them all on Ebay - wear them (and the kids did a bit, when they were younger) and then sell them on. Ebay is brilliant for clothes.

As for supermarkets - my sisters used to strawberry pick and collect eggs for supermarkets as holiday jobs. Same farms, same farmer, same chicken or strawberry plant - different packaging and final price point.

The really worrying part is that you've had to turn to your mum for help as soon as your husband lost your job. So you have no savings to tide you over in an emergency. Yet you shopped in Waitrose and Boden. Do you not see that actually you have been chronically living beyond your means, so much so that you had zero buffer?? You could have shopped more economically during the flush times and put away money, like most sensible people do. I'm not surprised your mother is not offering money without strings attached.

Exactly . Define waste. Is it a waste to protect your children's health?

So are the rest of us failing to protect our children's health by buying our veg in Aldi rather than Waitrose?

"Waste" is spending £150 a week on groceries for two adults and two pre-school children when there is absolutely not need to do so.

OP you are the advertising industries dream
Dont believe all the hipe , dont believe that by shopping at premium shops you are necessarily getting a better quality .
Cut your cloth accordingly as my nan used to say

erm... yanbu... in that i think either your mum tides u over with a set amount each month that u as an adult budget.

it's unreasonable tho to expect your mother to give u more so u can afford to shop at waitrose.

i shop around. it's a pita but i like meat from the local butcher, veg from the greengrocer, i buy tins/cereal/stuff that's the same wherever u buy it from asda and cleaning products and toiletries from wilko/home bargains. this means i save in lots of ways but done compromise on my meat and veg.

you are lucky to have the help. don't piss ur mother off by acting spoilt. the situation is a compromise, more so on your part.

I feel for your husband losing his job OP.

But you have made yourself look foolish here.

Times have changed for you and you have to ride it out. As another poster said you have been offered a life line and unless you have another plan I would take it.

Your MIL sounds like mine, probably not a "reverse sob" but thrifty and used to making money go along way. Probably 99% of posters would agree that shopping at Waitrose and Boden is nice but never thrifty.

OP lots of foodie, cooking from scratch, quality conscious types choose to shop at Lidl/Aldi. The veg and meat is amazing. And the price is amazing.If you actually tried it (and frankly you sound very uninformed ) I think you might be very shocked how well you can eat on a loads less.

Scratchy clothes? Get a grip. And anyway you can get them all on eBay.

There is nothing new about having to make changes when your income drops. This is one of those times Op.

Hopefully it won't last long for you and I wish you the best of luck with finding a new job but I don't think it's unreasonable for your Mil to expect you to tighten your belts right now.

I can't remember if the money was a loan or an out right gift but by economising you will have Less debt to pay back. It all works in your favour. And trust me your kids will be just as healthy.

I work for a food manufacturer and we produce food for Waitrose, Aldi, Tesco and Sainsbury....and guess what its the same ingredients, the same staff and the same machinery! Some just costs more in some places :-)

I will enjoy this thread with a cup of coffee and a biscuit. From Asda. Sterling work.

Mia is right! I visited a factory whilst at uni and they made ready meals. We got to see the macaroni cheese process for Aldi, Waitrose and Tesco and they slightly tweaked the recipe for each but nothing that would put you off one or favour another!

who would willing give their kids palm oil

My toddler is eating it as we speak.

This has become almost as ridiculous as that Guardian article a few years back where the sahm wife of a high earner complained bitterly that now they were no longer entitled to CB she'd had to cut back on ballet lessons and start shopping at Sainsbury's.

The average good spend for a family of 4 is about £80 so you are spending almost double. I think it's ridiculous to spend so much on food when you can't afford to. I think she is well within her rights to say she wants you to cut back if she is paying for the food. You might prefer waitrose but as my mum would say you have to cut your cloth accordingly. When you can afford your own shopping you can spend what you like. Until then you need to make sacrifices.

OP, I shall try and be helpful because I think you have had enough responses now telling you how snobby you are and you probably understand at this point that your expectations are unrealistic.

I agree that cheap children's clothes can sometimes be thin and scratchy. I always try and make sure that the stuff that's actually touching their skin is the best quality. So for 8mo DD, she has nice thick cotton vests and then it doesn't matter so much about the material that her t shirt is made from.

Boden's children's clothes are nice quality. I've just bought some for DD because there was 20% off. Usually I'd get second hand from eBay. Baby's don't really wear clothes out so they are usually in good nick. Same with other high quality clothes. Next do a really good multibuy offer for leggings and Jersey tops/dresses etc.

I always buy organic meat and eggs because of the welfare standards. That's just something that's important to me (so I do understand your point about having certain standards that you don't like to drop). However this does mean that at times when we are not as flush, I've had to buy less meat and cook with beans and pulses instead. This is the bit you need to wrap your head around.

What PPs have said about cooking from scratch in bulk is very good advice. This will save you loads of money and time too. You can buy excellent quality ingredients, meat, veg etc in Aldi. Lots of their products are identical to other brands (M&S in some cases) just packaged differently. And I mean identical. As in, they come off the same production line and are just put in different boxes. A family member owns a company who produce some stuff for Aldi/M&S/other supermarkets so I can vouch for that.

YABU to say that your mum should not have a say in how you spend the money. She probably has the same principle as I do when it comes to lending cash - don't lend what you aren't prepared to lose. And she may have decided that she's prepared to keep lending to ensure that the grandkids don't go without. In which case, the more money you waste, the more she will have to give you. She is being incredibly kind and generous. Please don't be ungrateful and wasteful with her hard earned money.

I don't know if this will save much, but if you need certain brands etc then it may be worth checking out Amazon Subscribe and Save and Amazon Pantry. I'm not brand loyal, there are only one or two things that I regularly get (DH only eats Heinz baked beans) and those are usually cheaper on sale at Tesco but the gluten free stuff is a little cheaper if I use subscribe and save. Meridian smooth peanut butter is on there currently at £9.94 for two 1kg tubs and you can get 5% off if you use subscribe and save.

Aldi washing power and washing up liquid have been highly rated by Which as better than brand leaders.

Have a look round this mysupermarket which compares prices in different supermarkets. You can often get cheap deliveries if you time the delivery right (Wednesday lunchtime round here)

Have a look at the grocery challenge on moneysaving expert here where people work at lowering their grocery spend and share ideas and recipes. Don't post straight away but take away what you need from the thread.

I know it's tough, but you cannot risk your house. Do everything else, but save your house. That will be the best thing you can do for your little ones.

Good luck.

I have a brand new Audi company car which I love to take to Lidl and join in the fancy car show room of the car park. It's inevitably full of vair posh ladies skulking in the aisles, trying not to cut glass with their voices. As I swan up with my well-used Lidl bags, muddy trousers and hair in ten directions, proudly filling the trolley with piles of random junk from the middle aisles healthy food for about £10.

The OP had to be a piss take, surely. Not quite Tom and Barbara though, is it?

I'm stood in morrisons and spotted this

I noticed at the end of 2016 that Aldi (or Lidl?) had TV adverts where they took a consumer who thought that cheap food = low quality/poor ethics and showed them where the food came from. (There was one about beef and one about mussels) It ends with the sceptical consumer apologising for the poor opinion that they had before.

I bet that you can shave the £150 easily. For starters, compare prices on Supermarket Price Comparison sites and find out if your favourite products are on offer. Get aquainted with discount shops like Poundland, Home Bargains and B&M for household goods and food. Have you tried your local butcher? I bet that there will be products that they can undercut Waitrose on.?