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)

Yes I agree, but less than the tumble dryer and less harsh on your clothes. Plus it’s better for the house than wet washing all over.

You want to try "I can't believe it's not butter" I could fully believe it because it tasted FA like butter. Bin.

Agree about the heated clothes drier. Absolute waste of money. Only a third of the clothes actually dried, and it really stank. I now just put the heating on and pop the stuff on the radiators (on little racks that hang off them.) This is during the 4 months of the cold/wet/dreary weather obvs. The other two thirds of the year it goes outside.

Also agree about cook-from-scratch. It's a waste of life cooking from scratch. And a waste of gas too. And it often costs way more than buying stuff pre-cooked/pre made. I've got better things to do with my life than spend it cooking from scratch ............. BLEUGH fuck that! 😩

Last year spent about £5 on lots of tomato plants at a street sale, all died except one plant which produced one tomato !

Putting the washing machine on a delay timer to take advantage of E7 electricity rates. DH threw a few bits it too, one of which had dried bleach on it, entire wash ruined. And the fucker kept me awake half the night too.

I find this also

Oxtail!

Would having the oven on all day not cost a lot??

Ours was not using the heating at all until December, we have a flat and it wasn't that bad the cost when we did then put it on for a bit mornings and night on the timer. It was a bit bleak

@Orangesandlemons77

oh, this was a few years ago 🙂

Yes to dried beans...waste of money.

Slow cooker - all it makes is mush. Supposedly you can batch cook and freeze it, but then you just have defrosted watery ultramush for weeks. I ended up following each meal a packet of crisps or loads of toast just to get some crunch.

Cutting dishwasher tablets in half - turns out you do need a whole one otherwise two cycles are needed. So I now have a bag of dust and crumbling tablets to use up as well.

Agree about the heated clothes drier. Absolute waste of money. Only a third of the clothes actually dried, and it really stank.

This also. I have a dehumidifier so it doesn’t stink, I also open the window and have a cover for the heater airer. It’s still crap, a normal airer and a radiator/dehumidifier/open window does a significantly better job and costs less.

Cheap store brand coffee gave me heartburn. It was half the cost of what I was buying - but not worth it. Something about how coffee beans are grown....

Surprised by the beans. I cook a load, chuck in the freezer and then just break off a chunk or two when I need some.

This week I brought reduced price hot cross buns to save money for Easter weekend. Nope we just ate them all up cause they are yummy. Will still need to buy more.

Another one here is buying 'yellow label' reduced items meaning to freeze them but often we didn't need them to start with e.g. unusual puddings or the like

Sometimes there is a reason they are reduced in the first place

I bought sausages from Lidl - even the cat wouldn't eat them!

Same here - go in for milk (so £1ish spending) and come out with £10 of impulsive "bargains" that I didn't need 😂

What she said

Years ago I bought The Pauper's Cookbook. Great for some maybe, but I don't have the freezer space to batch cook nor the cupboard space for giant sacks of rice and pulses. Nor do I wish to spend hours batch cooking at the weekend when I've worked all week. Nor do I particularly enjoy heated up freezer food, even if it was freshly cooked to start with.

What does work: shopping at Aldi, eating mostly vegetarian food, making meals with short cooking time to save both time and energy cost, using the BBC Good Food website for cheap, easy family meal ideas, planning meals.

We save money using meal boxes because there's no waste and I'm not tempted to by extra things.

For dried beans the answer is a pressure cooker! Works best economically for those eating a lot of beans of course. Mostly I use tins but never had an issue with dried being under or over cooked, even on the hob

Am a bit amazed at all the slow cooker hate. Ours is on at least twice a week and produces delicious food. You must all be doing it wrong.

*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?*

@Labraradabrador

Cooking from scratch is really only cheaper because the cost of meal planning and prep is not factored in, the time you spend doing that is discounted.

Fair enough if you are happy to make that contribution to the household.

Otherwise ...

The cheapest butter is ironically M&S at £2...

I bought supermarket brand washing up liquid, instead of Fairy.

It was 60% of the cost, but the entire bottle was gone in less than half of the time that Fairy lasts.

Also: Remember those energy saving bulbs that took longer to switch on than it took you to walk up the stairs / find what you needed in a room / do a wee? I guess, in a way they saved me money because they trained me to live in the dark.

Booked 'the cheap hotel' on holiday. We were on a large complex, there were 2 hotels, one was £200 more than the other, we could afford the more expensive one. I booked the cheaper one, it was absolutely rubbish, tatty, awful food, small freezing saltwater pool. The more expensive one was about a 1 minute walk away and you had to walk through it to get to the beach, it was absolutely divine, lovely pools, lovely rooms that we saw, lovely restaurants, lovely everything, if it had been £2000 more I wouldn't have been surprised. Those in the cheaper one weren't allowed to use the facilities, basically ruined the holiday spending 10 days looking at what I should have booked if I wasn't such a cheapskate!