Reality check

In Survival Guide for the Skint there is a budget table for you to use in working out how much money you need to live on.  I did this exercise myself some while ago but recently wondered how it compared to reality.  So I sat down and added up what I had spent for this last year.  It took me a a bit of time but the results were very interesting.

As you’d expect there were clear variations in my spend some months compared to the norm.  When I added up all the months to get my year’s total spend it was different to the budget – actually it was lower.  Being a cautious kind of person I must have put conservative estimates in my budget.  Also I had an item actually called ‘contingencies’.  I didn’t use it this year but another year I might if something like the washing machine breaks and needs replacing.  I was also able to see the type of things I spend my money on and to consider whether I was happy with that.

 

Awareness is so important but people hardly ever bother to find out what their financial reality is.  You can have control only if you know what’s going on.  Why not put the kettle on, collect your paperwork and invest in your own understanding of your monetary world.  Then you’ll know if you need to take any action.

Eat well and save money!

Channel 4′s Super scripmers recently featured a family who bought almost exclusively processed food.  In my book Survival Guide for the Skint, I talk about how you are really employing a personal chef when you buy ready prepared food.  If we’re honest, most of us are not rich enough to pay someone else to cook for us.

The family in question held a dinner party and prepared a three-course meal for 7 adults and 2 children for £15.  The same event would usually have cost the around £80.

The couple also discovered to their surprise that cooking is a lot easier than they expected.  How much money could you save by learning a few simple skills?

Even better news – everyone agreed that the meal tasted better than the ready made stuff!

I’m very keen to spread the word that eating real food is better for you than buying products.  If you’ve been put off by fears that fresh ingredients would cost too much, this will reassure you.

Buy natural foods, cook delicious food, save money and improve your health.  You win all round!

This is a joint Survival Guide for the Skint and Learn to Eat Well blog post.

Do you KNOW what you spend?

I was thinking the other day about how much I spend on different things.  For reasons now lost to me, I’ve been keeping notes of clothes that I buy.  At this time of year, I add up my spend for the year.  It can be rather surprising.

 

If there’s something you like to buy and buy regularly, do you actually know how much it costs you over the course of a year?  Estimates are usually wrong – on the low side.  Keeping a record can be very revealing.  Awareness as they say is curative in itself.  It’s all about you being in control of your money and for that you need to know where it goes.

 

It might be music, cosmetics or computer games that you buy now and then.  Or magazines that you get every week/month.  Or you might like to buy takeaways,  go out for meals or have your hair and nails done.

 

Pick one thing that you might be spending more on than you realise and write down the amount every time you do.

Have a go for the next 3 months and let me know what you discover.

Love leftovers

Here’s a joint Learn to Eat Well and Survival Guide for the Skint blog post for Christmas.

 

We throw away a staggering 8.3million tonnes of food every year in this country. That’s a shocking figure and something a skint person can’t afford to contribute to.

 

 

Reasons why you might end up wasting food this Christmas

 

• Shops are desperate to sell you more than you need. Beware the eye-catching special offers that encourage you to get larger quantities. They can be very good value if you actually use the food. If you end up throwing it away, they’re very bad value.
• Cooking for a different number of people to usual can make it tricky to gauge exactly how much you need.
• You keep extra food in the house in case of unexpected guests and visitors.

 

 

Reduce the amount of waste that you create

 

• Plan meals ahead and use a list when you shop.
• Look at sell-by dates on any multiple offers. Buy only things that will last long enough for you to be sure that you can use them.
• Buy food that freezes well and can be used later when you need it. I made my mince pies a couple of weeks ago and froze them. They’re lovely warmed up.
• Use serving dishes when people come to dinner. You might overestimate their appetite or want to appear generous and overload their plate. Over-facing people means they are embarrassed and they’ll make themselves suffer by forcing down more than they need. Let them serve themselves so they can take exactly what they want and eat all of it.

 

 

Make best use of what’s left

 

Buying or preparing too much food needn’t mean that any is wasted.

 

• Invest in a range of clip-top boxes. I often buy cream cheese and keep the containers which are a handy size for storing food for lunches.
• Keep leftovers in the fridge for one or two days if you can think of exactly when you’ll eat them. ‘Just in case’ usually means ‘not at all’ then when you later find them covered in mould they have to go in the bin). So if you can’t identify just when you’ll eat your leftovers, put them in the freezer, in useful portions.

 

 

How to use leftovers

 

• My lunch very often happens like this:

 

I put a good knob of butter in a small pan, add half a stick of celery cut into little pieces, pop in my leftovers (might be some mince, chicken, fish, veg etc), perhaps throw in a handful of spinach leaves or a bit of carrot (leftovers again). When it has warmed through I might put some cream cheese in and stir it round to make a sort of sauce. I usually serve it with a buttered rice cake. Delicious.

 

If I’m working away from home, I can take a container of salad with leftover meat or fish.

 

• Make soup. For Christmas, I’ll strip the carcass after the meal and boil up the bones to make stock. The remaining meat can be fried with leftover potatoes and veg plus mushrooms to make a delicious Boxing Day tea. Then I’ll make chicken soup with the stock and throw in anything else that’s leftover.

 

• www.lovefoodhatewaste.com is a site full of ideas on what to do with your leftovers. (Great recipes although personally I never cook with vegetable oil as it is unsaturated fat and therefore becomes damaged when heated.)

 

 

I wish all my readers a very Merry Christmas and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2012.

 

Jackie

Recycled fashion

I’ve just been to the Harrogate needlework show which is always inspiring; people have such zany ideas and so much talent to execute them.

One stall that caught my imagination this time was an organisation called zincwhite that uses waste materials (pencils, audio cassettets, shirts, buttons, tents, typewriters etc ) to make jewelery, bags, cushions and more.  Check it out.

I turn old cards into little boxes for gifts.

Still functional

I looked at my hands in the sink the other day, noticed that they were different colours and wondered if that was normal.  It had never occurred to me before that perhaps not everyone uses old washing up gloves the way I do.

You see, it’s always my right glove that springs a leak first so I end up with lots of left gloves that are still functional.  Of course, I could throw them away and get out a new pair every time.   Rubber gloves are not hugely expensive so is it worth bothering to use two left gloves as a pair by turning one inside out?  Perhaps I started doing it when I was at my most skint and the pennies I saved were vitally important.

Really it’s more to do with a change of mindset and that can be very worth while indeed.  It’s about not throwing away things that still work.  It ab0ut carrying on using things until they no longer fulfil their intended function.  It isn’t something I even think about any more.  Once you’ve formed a money saving habit, it seems you can carry on reaping the benefits for many years.

Next time you’re about to throw something away, pause and ask yourself, ‘Is it still functional?’

Food Waste – how did it go?

I’ve been keeping an eye on how much food I throw away.  What I found really interesting was the big difference between cooking at home and eating out while away.

At home, the only waste is a few pence a day (not more than 5p) in vegetable peelings, salad trimmings and meat bones.  In terms of food that could be eaten, then the amount wasted is none.  Usually there are no leftovers but sometimes I cook extra so that I can keep some to use for my lunch another day.

When I’m away it’s a different story.  We’ve had a long weekend break and spent time walking in woods.  What was left of my packed lunch went in the bin at a cost of about 15p.  When we had a pub meal one evening, I asked for a half portion of chips with my chicken pie.  They wrote it on the order but still gave me enough for someone twice my size so I left a heap of those that probably cost 50p.

Another evening we visited relatives and had a takeaway.  There was some left but that was collected up to be eaten by them the next day.

I took my sprouting trays away with me.  I ate sprouted mung beans and green lentils with lunch.  Then they grew to the point where they were tough and bitter so those went on the compost heap when I got home.  Cost probably 10p.

So it seems that being in control is a big part of avoiding waste.  When you can choose the portions and cook the right quantity to suit your family, it’s easy to minimise the money you throw away.

 

As soon as you give control to someone else, by eating out or having a takeaway or ready meal, you are much more likely to end up with the wrong amount.  You’ll either bin it or eat more than your body wants – which amounts to the same thing since your body will have to work hard to get rid of the excess.  As I said last time, it’s better not to treat your body as a dustbin.

If the average food wasted is £13 a week per household and mine was about 90p on an unusually bad week, then some households are wasting a lot more.  It’s a lot of money if you’re skint.   How much was yours?

Food waste

Watching Countryfile the other day, I was reminded again about the unbelievable amount of food that is thrown away in Britain – 16million tonnes!

 

Now some of this is beyond our direct control, it’s down to the supermarkets forcing farmers to destroy perfectly good produce that doesn’t meet their exacting specifications. All of it would have been good to eat and could have helped hundreds of hard-up families to put good meals on the table. But I’ll resist the temptation to get on my soap box because this post is really about what you and I do.

 

What about the food that each of us throws away at home. On average each household wastes £680 of food a year. That means a lot of households are wasting considerably more.

 

A lot of it could be helped by better planning – only buying what’s needed for the meals that week and eating things while they are still fresh enough (only the ‘use by’ date matters here).

 

We’re a great nation of plate-clearers. This social norm doesn’t serve us very well. If you feel full before you’ve finished your meal and you carry on eating, your body will then have to work hard to process and get rid of the excess (or will store it as fat). So once you have had sufficient the rest is already waste whether you eat it or not. You could save the left over bit and have it for a meal another day. My favourite lunches are based on leftovers from evening meals. At the same time make a mental note about the portion size that suits you and buy food in the right quantities. Don’t treat your body like a dustbin.

 

So do you know how much throwing food away is costing you now?

 

You’ll get a clue from your dustbin. Is it always full? Do you have to push the rubbish down to get the lid closed? I’m guessing that I don’t waste much food here.  When we put out our bin for collection, it’s only ¼ full. Your rubbish won’t all be food of course. A lot of people’s rubbish is packaging but remember that you’re paying for that too.

 

Finding out.

How about keeping a note over the next week or two. Put a piece of paper convenient to the kitchen bin. Each time you put some food in the bin write down an estimate of what it cost. At the end of the week add it up.

 

I’ll do the same and report back.

 

Let me know whether you find that it’s more than or less than you expected.

 

Make do and Mend

We live in a throw away society.  If something breaks it’s so easy to just go and buy a new one.  A bit of repair work might be a better way for skint people to live.

It isn’t necessarily that you save a lot of money on every item.  Some mendable things might be quite trivial.  It’s more about altering your mindset so that repair becomes your default option rather than bin.

A dab of glue

It’s remarkable how many things can be salvaged with a little dab of glue.

This file was almost brand new when the side split.  They clearly hadn’t used enough glue when they made it but I could fix that quickly enough.  It was only worth pennies but for the sake of one minute why not save it?

Of higher value, loose soles on my trainers were another easy job to make secure.

A stitch in time

How often have you seen a mangled brolly in a bin looking like a sad lopsided bat?  When I last got caught in horizontal rain, a huge gust turned my umbrella inside out and ripped the fabric off several of the spokes.  It took me less than 5 minutes with a needle and thread to return it to pristine condition.

 

In a similar vein but a bit trickier was when I caught the sleeve of my cardigan and pulled out a thread.  The whole thing would have unravelled if I hadn’t dealt with it straight away.  The tear was a couple of inches long and the fine gauge of the yarn made it a delicate job.  The end result is not an invisible mend though I doubt you’d notice if you saw it and I’ve saved something I like to wear.

More challenging still

My skills were more stretched when I needed to fix the shower and the man in the building supplies shop looked at me strangely as I bought a length of spring and an ‘O’ ring.  It was satisfying to restore a good even flow of water out of the shower head.

More specialist still, my husband sorted out our vacuum cleaner and I know a man who fixed his washing machine.   (Only tackle mechanical and electrical appliances if you know what you’re doing.)

Sexy Summer Body

The summer is almost upon us (well hopefully soon) and many of you will be taking some time out to go on holiday and relax in the sun. This is the time of year when we suddenly remember that our bodies are important. As we strip off, we realise that everyone can see us!

This is a shared Survival Guide for the Skint and Nutrition Coaching blog post. I’m passionate about food and health. The great news is that you can save money in your quest for a great bod.

Processed food is laden with additives and chemicals that your body has to work very hard to get rid of (or to store as fat). You pay mainly for all the preparation, packaging and advertising so the ingredients are rarely good quality. Buy real food and make your own meals to save money and improve your health.

Drinks can add up to a sizable percentage of your weekly shop. Fizzy drinks and alcohol cost loads and only do you harm. Fruit juices are better if taken in moderation. I like to dilute juices. The cheapest drink of all is water and the good news is that your body enjoys water much more than anything else. It’s even better if you filter it; jug filters work fine and are inexpensive.

The cheapest exercise is walking – guess what? Yes, it really is great for your body. It’s low impact so it’s kind to your joints. You can go when you want, for as long as you want and you put in the amount of effort to match your ability. Getting fresh air and sunshine is good for your lungs and skin. Good mental health goes hand in hand with good physical health. Being close to nature is good for you mentally (there are studies proving it’s good for you to be among trees). Walking is a pleasurable experience too. I’ve noticed that runners often look harassed or miserable but people on walks smile and say, ‘hello’. You’re more likely to exercise if you find something that you really enjoy.

So eat, drink and exercise merrily, for tomorrow you don your swimwear!