What have you done to save money which didn’t work out?

[SoBoredHelpMe]

Some of mine :

Buying hubbards tomato sauce instead of Heinz 🤮

Buying cheap plastic lunch boxes (lasted 2 days)

Bought crisps in bulk (just ate more)

bought a slow cooker (never used it)

Cooking from scratch. Everyone on here says it’s a great money saver but unless you have a very well stocked pantry already it costs a sodding fortune.

Downsizing!

Well I’m hoping long term it will be a financial saving but currently it’s costing a fortune in renovations!

I agree! Personally I think we’re saving money now by using gousto. Yes I could do it cheaper but not wasting money on a pantry full of store cupboard staples that end up getting thrown out because they’ve gone past their sell and you’ve only used them once.

Downloaded the plum app because I got told I got £35 credit

you don’t . I didn’t

they saw me coming

I switched my dogs food to save £30pm
wont touch the new food so had to buy old food so instead of £69 this month it’s cost me £108

Dried beans. I spent three days soaking them, missed the microsecond when they were edible, and ended up binning the whole slimy mess.

Urgh I remember going through a phase of doing this years ago.
The kitchen would be full of soaking beans and I would rarely get round to cooking or eating them.
Ridiculous.

Bought cheap spread instead of butter - ended up chucking it and buying Lurpak instead (£2 in the poundshop!!) Life is too short not to have proper butter.

Using half a washing tab instead of a whole one. Ahahahahaha. No. Washing came out nothing-y stale smelling and I had to do it all again anyway.

If you think Hubbards ketchup is bad... don't try the pasta. I've never had bad dried pasta until I tried that one. It had a really odd texture.

Tried cooking oxtail…

it stank….the kitchen stank…. It took all day in oven to produce a hideous jellied mess that the (usually greedy) DDog actually backed away from!!
🤢🤮

But in the long run it is significantly cheaper? I get that loads of spices add up, but I tend to use the same 3- 6 in most dishes, and the rest are accumulated gradually over time.

I guess you have to commit to cooking several times a week, as otherwise the cost of a bottle of cooking oil and a couple of spices does make a one off meal expensive?

not trying to be goady - just genuinely puzzled. Have used gusto and the like, and appreciate it as a convenience service, but it is definitely more expensive vs me cooking throughout the week. Also ready meals are so expensive if feeding more than 2? What exactly is cheaper than scratch cooking?

Dried beans are terrible idea. I bet it costs more to cook them than buying tinned ones. I once forgot and left mine on stove, almost burned house down (with two cats inside). Smell was horrible. I just started crying when I came home, thinking I could kill my cats and destroy our belongings. Since then I never bought any. I don't care about cost and how much I can cook in one go.

I never use ready meals, it’s the inbetween though. For me buying a cheap korma sauce is cheaper than trying to make my own. Cooking chicken nuggets in the oven is way cheaper than buying chicken and breadcrumbing it myself. Buying 10 cheap Ingredients no to make a beef casserole sauce isn’t cheaper than buying a 40p sachet of casserole sauce powder, but obviously I add my own meat and veg to it. Not sure these are the best examples but hopefully you get the idea.

I tried to prep meals for the week and freeze portions.

I got so bored of the predictability I was hoping it would just go off and I could throw it out.

Buying reduced items and then having no space to store them so they ended up going off.

Any basic pasta sauce.

Its more expensive than tinned tomatoes or puree but has no flavour, is brownish, sour and full of gums to make it thick. Its a lot cheaper and tastier to just use tomato puree.

Using a clothes dryer and central heating in the bitter cold months instead of the tumble.

It could take 3 days to dry I would need to have the windows open and heating on all the time. I would end up having to rewash the mildew clothes and blast the kids uniform on the radiator for hours. It was beyond stressful and depressing to have a family of fives clothes hanging everywhere in a small flat.

@Coffeellama ah okay - I think it is a different definition of ‘scratch’. Using a spice packet but cooking everything else would still be ‘scratch cooking’ for me. Maybe not the korma sauce, but as we have curry once a week-ish I tend to make a big batch of curry base and then freeze into portions (reckon about £1 per family size portion that just needs a bit of cream and spice top up). Understand that if this is a once in a while meal all of that wouldn’t make sense cost wise, but it is still a much better curry 😊

Heated clothes dryer didn't work

Slow cooker stank the house out so it had to go

Lurpak isn’t proper butter

Use a dehumidifier in the same room or the moisture has nowhere to go.

@Theredfoxfliesatmidnight I’m with you! Bought utterly butterly its utterly rank. Back to lurpack

That would be another thing to plug in and use electric

Taking a job that provides cooked meals as a perk. Turns out I can’t eat anything cooked in oil - and everything is cooked in sunflower oil. Gall bladder complained big time.

We don’t use any oil or fry anything at home.

Bought a dehumidifier. It took ages (as in most of the day) to dry the clothes and made the room colder for some reason. I reverted to the tumble dryer or hanging stuff over the clothes horse on the landing

What on earth do you mean? I just googled it. Surely it is!

Depends if you mean block Lurpak, which is proper butter (though I’d suggest a better cheaper alternative is own brand block butter than spread) or Lurpak Speadable which is under 65% butter and made up with rapeseed oil as water. I don’t count the latter proper butter and wouldn’t buy it myself.

Ah, okay, neither do I!