Austerity in October - *blows the budgeteering bugle*

[claretandamberforever]

In here please.....

Pinch punch, first of the month.

Can I join?

I know I'm a bit late to the party....I have been over on MSE but it's all a bit overwhelming to be honest.

My October challenge is £50 per week to feed family of four 99% organic food and that's with sending DC with packed lunches. Our usual budget is £70 per week but I'm saving to over-pay our mortgage payments. If I save £20 per week for the five weekends in October that's £100 extra to over pay with. I managed to over pay £209 last month and shaved two months of our mortgage and saved our future selves over £700 in interest!! To imply mind that's incredible and well worth being frugal for! It does mean more time spent in the kitchen though...

Everybody's welcome

Get a Halifax account, that's a £100 switching bonus straightaway

Fluffy I switched when the offer was £50 I like them though, £60 a year for staying credit is a good offer. My intention was to save it but it gets spent every month.

Rogue I've been busy crafting. Everyone, apart from the dc, is getting something knitted and some jam. I honestly think it's appreciated more than yet another box of chocolates.

To add my pennys worth, I'm also going to give a thumbs down for bread and butter pudding. Try bread pudding, great hot wif custard or cold on its own.

Have done small top up shop of about £30. I'm hoping that's me finished spending for the month. Month ends next Thursday. Need to get train tickets today, should have bought them ages ago when they were super cheap. Oh well.

Just got in from paying first £20 mortgage over -payment for October over the counter at Nationwide.

Went to supermarket and spent 46 p on two tins of broken Mandarin pieces in juice for the DC to take to harvest festival tomorrow at school.

Also spent 41 p on a pack of plasters as we had run out.

Having a frugal meal tonight, DC are having eggs on toast and me and DH are having grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches after the children are in bed. I'm using a loaf of bread I made in the breadmaker last night. So easy for me tonight!

Rejoining! Was here earlier in the year but had ds2 end of July so havent been that frugal.

Aiming to do survey sites during feeding time, aside from yougov & valuedopinions are there others worth doing?

Took hd off the sky package earlier; £10pm saving!

Congrats on DS2 Gary and Well done on the saving.

Well done to you too on the mortgage over payment Mininmilist

Think I'll be having an NSD, can't think of anything I need to buy.

MinimalistMommi I am interested you are managing to stick to organic. How often do you eat meat? You are an inspiration as I'm doing my best to be organic and on a bigger budget (about £80/week but I'm sure less as unexpected things come up; this am I was asked to sponsor a friend's child's charity walk for example. So I should probably try and shave it to £60 to allow for emergencies or saving !).

We still have our weekly Riverford box as I find it good value but we just eat far less meat than used to. More eggs and fish (DS aged 2 thank goodness is embracing tinned sardines!)
I'm making gluten free pizza tonight.

Our car needs petrol too which I haven't been budgeting for so have been in denial and just avoiding using it. Which is good I guess!

By the way what are your gas and electricity bills like everyone? Ours combined was £128 today which is fairly typical for the month. Is that a lot for a small 2 bed flat given we haven't put on our heating?!

I've just spotted the separate electricity thread! We've started turning our boiler off except just before a bath or wash load as it heats within a minute so it'll be interesting whether that helps.
I must be sounding quite boring!! but relieved i'm finally sorting my overspending . I wish I'd started 10 years ago as I always bought whatever food I liked and never budgeted

yes it just seems like if we don't have the time to do some batch cooking especially if we are working ft then alot of frugality goes out the window (plus food choice!). Tonight I think it's going to be spaghetti meatballs...ARGH!!!

looseleaf not boring to any of us . That energy bill sounds a lot to me. Ours is £90 for a 3 bed semi.
Blimey this month's thread is fast moving. Welcome to all newbies .

I've had a good week spending wise. Dd, my mum and I are going away for the weekend which I have budgeted for. The budget is quite generous so I'm hoping to come back with a surplus. Am leaving dh with ds so trusting them to stick to their budget too!

Ooh lovely Northender! I hope you have a fabulous weekend. And thanks for confirming our electricity appears high, I must pay more attention to it as never done so before!

Congratulations on your baby gary.

loose try looking at the thermostat on the hot water tank if you have one, whenever I've moved it's always been set to 70, 60 is sufficient & also look at how long it's on for, 20 minutes is enough for modern tanks but if you are on E10 or E7 it will be on for hours heating & cooling & heating back up again.

If the water tanks cupboard is warm insulate the copper piping & put another jacket on it. The show home here has its hot water on a lot & it's like a flipping oven in there, mines on 20 minutes & the lovely site manager lagged all the pipes for me. That is not a euphemism by the way.

£10 on petrol
£15 on a thermal top for dh from John Lewis because he will be out in all weathers and I want him to be toasty.

I'm wearing my new thermals, outlet.marksandspencer.com/b/2963414031 and I am cosy, got windows open and I'm still warm.

I bung about £15 a week into the electric, and I don't know what into the gas, a fiver in the summer and anything up to £30 quid when it's below freezing and we're all at home. Meters though. I turn the heating off at night unless it's absolutely freezing, and it's off most of the day too.

Loose I pay £140 a month for a 3 bedroom semi where the family are out at school and work all day.

You need to make sure your meter is read every month cos the gas companies are buggers and they will tell you your monthly DD's are low, not read your meter for a year, then when they do read your meter, you'll owe them hundreds of quid and therefore can't afford to move to a cheaper supplier.

Also, stupid question, but check what type of boiler you have. It turned out that my hot water advance has been on 24/7 for 8 years! The previous occupiers must have left it to constant and never having had a conventional boiler and only having had a combi boiler I didn't realise just how much it would cost, as we moved in to it being switched on the whole time I thought that was normal! So I couldn't understand how we were using so much gas. Last winter we had a phase where we nearly froze as I didn't dare put the heater on. It was only after posting on MSE I discovered it was the water heater!

So this month I used £27 of gas and the same quarter last year £61.89 - and that was a summer bill! I used a bit more electric this month than I did the same month last year but I've been using the tumble drier a lot more.

I also bought a £20 electric fan heater which costs around 25p an hour to run just to heat up the front room and take the chill off.

Last month I used £60 in electric as we leave everything on standby and I've been using the tumble drier more frequently and the electric heater so we could cut down on that and really I need to keep up to date with my clothes washing and not let stuff build up.

Thanks Fluffy & Adora!
Fluffy, double thanks for the thermals link, I shall stock up.

I don't know if it's all Sainsburys but the one at Crayford sent me an email to let me know their diesel was down to 137.9p a litre, 'cheap' compared to everywhere else (£67 to fill up our car instead of £89 like we've been paying recently).

loose we pay £56pm for leccy only in our 2 bed flat (economy7) so it sounds slightly higher than should be?

NSD today for me, even more so because DS2's football practice has been called off as the weather has turned so that's £3 in my pocket (woo)

Congrats on the baby Gary

looseleaf I'd say that is a lot. We were paying a capped rate dd of about £100 at our old house, a 3-bed mid-terraced house.

LSD today - just £3.09 at McDonald's on a breakfast meal as a treat for myself on the first full child-free day I've had in 2.5 years (well, 8.50am-3.10pm, anyway). DS2 has just upped his hours at nursery from Thursday & Friday mornings to all day Thursday & Friday mornings. He loves it, although he did cry at drop-off & I'm hoping that his 2-year funding for his speech delay will be approved soon, which will help finances hugely.

Thank you all for your help with our electricity. I will Make sure I crack this issue! We definitely left the hot water on too much and too high which only changed last week. Also I do a lot of washing (1 load a day average for our family of 4) so maybe could cut that a bit.

I've downloaded an app called Budgets and was really pleased with how I was doing this week until checked it against my online banking today and quite a bit had disappeared on our council tax bill . At least I'm finding it funny but still not very good at this!

www.maplin.co.uk/13a-plug-in-energy-saving-monitor-223573 I have one of these, bit fiddly to set up but it works well when it's up and running.

It's brilliant, I was using a wash cycle that cost 8p (ok it's not a fortune) now it costs 2.5p. I rinse the machine after doing whites or dh moans about fluff & it costs 0.5p to do it now not 2p.

Over the course of a year savings really add up.

If you have a dishwasher that saves lots on electric bills opposed to washing up by hand.

Loose I'm a life long vegetarian! sorry should have mentioned that! X

Hi again, reading with interest, especially utilities, we pay about €250 per 3 month period combined Gas/Electric.
4 bed Semi. Am conscious that Gas has increased by about 30 per cent over past 2-3 years.
What a nightmare CLARET to have that bill foisted upon you!

Evening all. It's been a rotten few days in the picnmix household. DS was sick again yesterday morning so no nursery for him and no work for me. I then started being sick yesterday afternoon so a lot of cbeebies was watched I took him to nursery this morning but he ended up being taken to hospital by ambulance as they thought he'd stopped breathing! He's fine now and hospital were not worried about him. I don't really understand what happened though. He's asleep now and I've just been sick again. Im hoping we're both better tomorrow! So not a lot spent bar hospital parking today.

Today I spent £5.27 on food and gave DD £2.50 for lunch.

My friend who is a gardener came to tidy up my back garden. Getting invoice for that tomorrow.

I was good and wasn't tempted by goodies for sale and raffle at Weight Watchers meeting. I even cycled there!

All this talk of electricity, I've had a closer look at our fuel bills and what they estimate we will use. I have made a note and will try to stay under the readings.

Correction, our gas/electric bills are €250 combined per MONTH, this I definitely want to reduce, so following with interest any energy saving tips : )