Day 27 of Extremely Frugal February

Day 27 of 28 - the Penultimate Day of this Pound-Stretching Challenge!

Stretching my money as far as possible

 

February has been all about putting even more effort into wasting even less than normal, trying harder to keep the non-essential spending minimised without compromising quality of life and stretching every pound even further. Some might say that my life doesn't consist of much but I happen to like living within my meagre means, maintaining my debt freedom and helping support others who want to try to live a simpler, self-sustainable life. I'm neither penniless nor poverty-stricken, it's a simple case of 'the less I spend, the more I can afford'. Hopefully I'll continue to sleep soundly in my bed at night without worrying about money problems.

 

After last night's efforts at baking the chocolate cake in a mug, I had a second attempt at lunchtime today, this time using quarter of the mix in each mug. This worked out far better and tasted just as delicious as last night's, although this time it was served with some of the homemade coconut and mango ice cream.

 

It's pure greed, really, because despite breakfast being porridge, lunch was filling homemade soup with a thick slice of homemade bread, followed by the delicious 'cakiness' of the Guinness and chocolate sponge cake. I should have used up the remaining pittas from the open pack, so they'll need to get 'pizzafied' tomorrow lunchtime.

 

The big pan of soup has now been decanted into recycled margarine tubs and moved into the freezer for safe keeping. After having had two lunches for two from it, there's still enough in the freezer for another 16 good-sized servings. That's 20 servings for less than £2.00!

 

Today is National Chili Day (possibly more of a celebration in USA), so I thought we'd celebrate with the addition of some chilli in tonight's frugal dinner. The little character on the left is 'Chilli McGonk'. I made him for a  local start-up company that is now growing from strength to strength, (no pun intended) with their chilli based preserves. (www.gallowaychillies.co.uk) Being a frugaler, I make all my own preserves but it doesn't mean I don't try my best to help support local business.

 

I'd taken a carton of the 'Nile' mince from the freezer to defrost, then had a quick survey of the fridge for any leftovers - it brought about an odd combination!

 

I still have several tins of the 9p Red Kidney Beans in Chilli Sauce, so guess what all got added to the mince and left to simmer while the rice cooked?



Dinner was a somewhat strange chilli concoction, rather than con carne! The 'Nile' mince already had peas, carrots and sweetcorn in it, then there was the addition of a couple of cooked potatoes, along with the last of the steamed red cabbage and the last of the bottle of Guinness.

Tasted fine but was very filling - definitely no pudding required.

 

I've been pricing dehumidifiers for H's studio but this is definitely the wrong time of year to be looking for a bargain in that department, what with the general winter weather and the atrocious flooding in England. A temporary compromise has had to be made, so the bargain air conditioner, which also has a dehumidifier, has been retrieved from its space in the shed and is being cleaned up to prepare it for going into the studio.

This worked well for drying clothes last year, so let's hope it can help stabilise the temperature and clear the dampness in the studio while helping to create better atmospheric conditions for fine artwork. If it doesn't suit the purpose, this unit will end up being sold. IU traded through our local LETS group for this one so, technically, homemade lemon curd and eggs from the garden feathered friends paid for it.

Having raked out all my seeds this week and discovering that the dampness had got into the beans and peas, I was loath to throw them out, despite the crumbling, green fuzzy appearance of some of them... so I washed each and every one of them! A few disintegrated and a few more felt a bit too delicate for washing individually, so I dumped them all into a dish of water last night and left them to soak. By this morning, the absolute worst of them were floating, so I scooped those out for the compost bin, rinsed the others again and will soak them another night. They are looking quite rejuvenated, don't you think?

I really hope some of the peas and beans grow. I know fine well that most other 'normal' people would simply have binned these, but we don't really do 'normal' here in Frugaldom. If I hadn't challenged myself to a fantastic frugal February, I have to admit to the fact that I would have binned these! There is a mix of runner beans, dwarf beans and peas. I'll get them started off in March and keep my gingers crossed that some of them grow.

I can hardly believe that tomorrow is the last day of the month! One more day of extreme frugaling and it will need to include using up the rest of tonight's chilli and the leftover rice, as I cooked a little too much. The bantams have laid us another egg, the coal has been sufficient to see out the month, we still have some logs remaining and joy oh joys... I checked my Topcashback* account and found £24.57 waiting to be collected. This 'cyberdosh' (money I raise through my online endeavours) will go into my Amazon vouchers account towards gifts and any little extras I need.

NYK, Frugaldom

* Denotes my friend referral link

Welcome to Frugal Living and my Annual Money Challenges

For the Benefit of Newcomers to my Concept of Frugaldom

Frugal living may not be for everyone and it does take quite a bit of explaining to some who can neither see the need, nor have ever experienced the need for trying it. But it is a lifestyle choice that's made by many, nonetheless.

Having already posted about my annual household budget - the £4,000 - I would now like to go over the cost implications of everything else that needs paying. Like I already said, frugal living gave us the ability to save for and buy a very cheap fixy-up over the space of a very short period of time but I did throw in my lot with A. N. Other to buy a 3-bedroom house with a big garden rather than a small flat with no garden. But no matter which way you look at it, £4,000 just won't last a year if you need to count in rent or mortgage and any outside the household expenses, which is why none of these things are included in my £4,000.00 However, this does include the costs of working from home, some of which are tax deductible at the end of each financial year. For everything else, I have a separate kitty, known as...

My Everything Else Kitty - E.E.K.

My Everything Else Kitty

There's no escaping the fact that life costs cash and we need to be really flexible in order to fit everything into the box that is our lifestyle. As you can see by the antics of the frugal puss, even she is a contortionist when it comes to making sure she gets in on the action - if, at first, you don't think you can fit something into your affordability box,  keep trying from different angles until you've found a way succeeding.

Everything else outside of the standard necessities are, for me, paid from my 'EEK'. This is the cash kitty that gets topped up by a tiny drip of interest from savings, gift certificates, points, cash back, winnings, sales of surplus eggs, de-cluttered goods and any cash gifts that happen to come my way at birthdays or Christmas time. Let's face it, keeping hens, ducks, quail, a cat and, now, two giant loppy-lug rabbits isn't through real necessity, its more for the fun than the frugality.

It's great having fresh eggs for cooking and baking but we can't possibly eat them all, so I trade many of them for other things and need to raise any extra cash to cover the costs of feeding the feathered and furry friends, keeping them all bedded down at night and keeping them healthy. I also have my wormery, the pet worms that help recycle household waste into liquid fertiliser that cucumbers seem to thrive on, judging by the enormous crop we had last year.

But how does my 'EEK' work in real terms?

Last year ended with an overall balance of £39.70, so that has been carried over and popped into the 'EEK' savings. On top of that, I have a voucher balance of £30.54 in my Amazon account and have just requested payment of another £8 worth of Amazon vouchers via Topcashback*, which gives me cash back on anything I buy using links from their website. There's also £7 of credit lying in my Approved Food* account, which will more than cover the postage of my next order when I need heavy, long shelf-life goods - they normally do regular offers on bread flour, which is how I can bake a loaf for around 25p.

Cashback Credit Cards

The use of credit cards may be seen by some as incurring debt but I have one golden rule - if I can't afford to pay something in full at the time then I don't put it on the credit card. Online shopping and being self-employed means that I have some added protection by using a credit, as opposed to a debit, card, so absolutely everything goes onto it that possibly can - even my 12 months' BT line rental. Why? Because as long as I pay in full within the interest free timeframe, I get an automatic 1% cash back that costs me nothing and gets paid in a lump sum around the end of each financial year.

Spending £4,000 on the household budget almost exclusively paying by card means brings almost £40 of free cash into the 'EEK' by April of each year, plus whatever else I have paid for by this method. While renovating, almost all of the building materials have been paid this way and in addition to that the livestock feeding, garden-related purchases and any extras that can be added get paid this way. Last year's free money courtesy of the credit card company amounted to £68.94 and that's not to be sneezed at when you see cheap flights, train fairs, ferry fairs or short breaks advertised for less!

All these little bits and pieces add up over the year and, with luck and careful spending, can cover everything else I need to buy. Sales of surplus eggs would normally cover the cost of feed and bedding or else what I exchange for the eggs helps reduce the grocery budget. It is a simple case of not buying anything unless we can realistically afford it and if we can't afford it (or don't see the need to buy it) we can attempt to make it.

Being self employed means keeping up with National Insurance payments, so I have just paid out £70.20, which covers 6 months. This is not part of my household running costs, so does not impact on the £4,000. It is a miniscule sum but it is contributing to my old age pension, so I have no qualms about paying it, even on a voluntary basis when profits aren't sufficient to warrant any further deductions. My monthly savings bond is paid from what I no longer spend on cigarettes and anything else is absolutely mine to do with as I please, even if it's just a few pennies left in my (homemade) purse.

Use it up, Don't Bin it, Burn it or Bury it.

My attempt at zero waste failed dismally owing to the amount of plastic packaging that's used by many companies. Plain brown cardboard is great as it gets rolled up and used in the fire, but plastics are a total pain and need to be binned if it isn't of the type that I can reused - meat packaging, for example! 

We have an open fire and a stove, so anything that is safe to burn gets recycled into fuel and used to heat the house, boil the kettle and even cook food. Recently, I was learning a bit more about recycling wood shavings into eco-fuel and I'm now wondering if it would work using the shavings from the rabbit cages and hen houses, but I'm not too sure how easy it would be to dry the blocks once they are made, or how smelly they might be to make while soaking them for a month at a time - time will tell!

I have a Paper Brick Maker* and it's great for experimenting by adding in things like dried leaves, twigs and shredded paper but, again, the blocks take a long time to dry. I guess I should really try much harder at making a stock pile of these during summer sunshine to help combat rising costs of winter coal. I shall pledge now to make an attempt on the eco-fuel from shavings using this method.

Photos by B.B. Photography



This was our local village main street when the storm surge hit at high tide on Friday (photos taken by a pal's brother), so let's hope things don't get any worse over the coming days. Now I need to wind this up and be prepared for the next storm that seems to be heading our way - we are almost at the top of the hill, so no sea surge reaches us, just the likelihood of power outages and the steam in the garden bursting its banks if the storm force winds drive in torrential rain at the same time as high tide.

The West coast has been taking a real battering recently and the next potential hit isn't looking any less ferocious, so the flasks, candles, torches and hot water bottles are all at the ready plus a stack of wood piled by the stove and an open invitation extended to anyone who may be adversely affected to head up the hill to Frugaldom.

Stay safe, folks, and never forget that no matter how little money you have, your chances of subduing Mother Nature when she is throwing a strop are the exact same as any millionaire - appreciate what you have while you have it and make the most of the important things in life that money cannot buy.

NYK, Frugaldom

PS: We're playing at 'planks'
Several of us take part in whatever free fitness fun we can find, so visit us in the Frugal Forums if you would like to take part. Right now, we're doing the '30 Day Plank Challenge' to prove to ourselves that we do have core muscles and to start toning them up in time for spring.

*I can earn a few extra points or pounds when friends join and use sites via my referral links

Frugal Gardening and Glamorous Gold

Absolutely Fabulous!

Middle of the year after completing the tax return is always a good time for assessing your income and expenditure. You know if you have enough in the kitty to afford the summer holiday or even get things done about the house and garden. It's an absolutely fabulous time to seek out bargains and even look in awe at the ultimate in glamour garden wear...

 

GOLD HUNTER WELLINGTON BOOTS!

 

I kid you not! Here they are in all their golden glory - sadly being discontinued by our Capital city's wellie makers, which seems such a shame seeing as I have only just discovered them. Right now, you can buy a pair of these genuine Hunters for less than £35!

 

Don't get me wrong, I didn't invest in a pair, but I do see good footwear as a long term investment. I simply couldn't warrant such a rash spend while spending on other things. (Aren't gardens addictive once you start seeing what you can BUY for them? My addiction is quickly being curtailed and moulded into one of copycatting, using whatever I can lay my hands on to make similar stuff' without having to buy it. But I digress, yet again. So, if anyone wants to get me a glitzy pair of gold Hunter welly boots them for my next birthday, feel free to try and locate a size 6. I shall treasure them with 'gilty' pleasure.

 

There are other stunning colours available at around the £35 mark but before launching into full blown 'must have' mode, there is a way of bringing that price down even further... here's how:

 

 

By registering through a site like *Topcashback you can visit your chosen online stores via their links and qualify for discounts. Better still, these discounts are paid to you I cash or, as per my preferred method, you can receive a further 5% on top of your cash back by taking it as an *Amazon voucher.

 

 



 

 This evening, I was placing an order through Gardening Direct, as they have a half price sale on and always have some fantastic monthly offers. My basket was bursting, as we frugalers tend to play IE Windows shopping quite often - filling our baskets with all the things we want to buy and then emptying them again - or is that just me? I did leave a couple of items in there but that's another blog post. Anyhow, I spotted the glamorous golden wellies and would have added a pair to my basket had there been any of the correct size. (Probably just as well that there weren't!) At £34.99 they were just too tempting. Here goes for the discounts...

Deducting the future £3.50 cash back brings them down to £31.49, less another 17p for switching cash back to an Amazon voucher, we're now down to £31.32 for a pair of top brand name wellies that can retail at closer to THREE TIMES that price in certain stores. But wait... there's more! If I paid using a 1% cash back credit card, which is seeing only the original £34.99 price tag, that's another 17p off the overall cost, bringing us down to £31.15 - not bad for a pair of Wellington boots that are classy enough for festivals, glitzy enough for fancy dress, comfy enough to walk miles in and durable enough to give you years of pleasure while working in your microholding. And what's even more fabulous about these boots? They are totally waterproof in winter!

You know what? I have almost talked myself into finding me a pair of those super-duper, cheeky, chic, classy, glamorous, glitzy, totally over the top Hunter wellies. I wonder how easy it is to pedal a bike while wearing them?

NB: Many sites charge a delivery fee, don't forget to account for this when working out the best available prices.

* Denotes affiliate or refer-a-friend links

Frugaldom

Edited in - I eventually did find (and am now the proud owner of) a pair of gold metallic Hunter (Huntress) Wellies! :D

Vernal Equinox Updates

When Day Equals Night

Well folks, that's us passed the worst of the winter months where daylight hours were outnumbered by those of darkness. With any luck, the weather will decide to shift in a more sunny direction and allow us to make a proper start on gardening. To date, it has either been too wet or too cold to do anything, not to mentin the place being frozen solid or, in many places, covered in snow. For many, there is the luxury of heated greenhouses but that's not so for the frugal living among us - we have trouble enough heating our homes without trying to heat glass (or plastic) houses.

 

The Frugaldom greenhouse has stood the test of winter this far but to be fair, we get very little snow in comparison to elsewhere and the garden here is far more shetered than previous ones. Nonetheless, the lack of sunshine means there's not a lot happening out there at the moment. I had sown some spring onions and salad leaves into tubs - the spring onions are coming along slowly but the salad leaves are no further along than they were a month ago! The wormery, on the other hand, seems to have thrived in there for shelter. Each time I check, the worms seem to be more and more active. Let's hope the £2 coin savings pot proves to have been invested wisely.

 

The frugal fitness is something I'm still not entirely coninced about, despite having been wthout a car snce the end of November. The trip to the shop is now far less daunting, even on a grey day, and I must be getting fitter, as I can now manage to go for a 10-mile cycle over and above the 7 to 10 miles (depending on route taken) round trip to the village store.

 

Prices are getting to be horrendous. This morning, I cycled down to the store and bought spreading cheese (£1.19), a small block of cheddar (250g), a small pack of oatcakes, 4 bananas and a very extravagant loaf of bread, as a special treat for sandwiches. That little lot set me back almost £8!

 

As followers of a frugal living lifestyle, free from the constraints of the nine to five, the biggest pleasure we have is our ability to get out and about whenever the weather permits. I love exploring, seeking out unusual locations or ones that are a little off the beaten track, while building up a collection of associated photographs and articles relating to these places. Perhaps, one day in the future, you will visit and experience Frugaldon for yourself, and you'll already know which of these places you would like to visit for free.

This area of Scotland in littered with cairns, old forts, ruins, caves, church and chapel remains and, of course, we also have hilltops with trig points for 'bagging' - another free hobby. Yesterday, we visited the old site of Chapel Finian, where we ate a frugal packed lunch before stashing the bikes and then setting off to hike up a nearby hill in search of some cairns, ruined homesteads and ancient hut circles. The above photo shows the ruined chapel by the roadside. The trig point number to the left shows the first one we have found at ground level rather than summit - I'm guessing that's why this one has a 'G' number instead of an 'S' number.

 

We didn't have much of a climb before reaching what looked like a ruined homestead with walled fields. I haven't been able to find out any information about this particular location and we didn't have time to exploe it more fully, but its in the diary for future visits (with picnics) and further investigation.

 

A bit more climbing up a very wet and muddy trail that zigzagged up the hill through dead bracken, gorse and brambles soon led us to the biggest cairn we have visited in this area to date. It has to be over 3m high, but felt even bigger than that when I stood next to it and looked out across the bay - what a viewpoint! This particular cairn even had an extra wide base that could have been built for sitting on while keeping watch. (Over or for what, is a mystery.)

 

At this point, we'd to turn and head for home without exploring any further as a shower of sleet began to fall and we could see the cattle on the move. My fear of the bovine beasts means I give them as wide a berth as possible and avoid them completely whenever I can.

 

Back home and the frugaling continues - no further renovation work has been done to the house but I now have the dining bench set moved into the sittingroom where the pot belly stove is almost constantly on the go. The wee stove just ticks over, not quite blazing enough to boil the kettle, but warm enough that the cat is happy to sprawl in front of it for most of the day when the weather is bad. The dried pine cones are fast disappearing, so we really need a few completely dry days to get out and collect some more of those - they burn well.

 

Since giving up the car, our household carbon emissions must surely have dropped and the savings have certainly grown a little quicker. There's very little to spend on nowadays, what with no car running costs or petrol to pay. I may, however, need to invest in some new brake pads for the bike. Switching the worn back brakes for the not-so-worn front brakes will suffice until such times as I have gained sufficient Amazon gift vouchers from my Topcashback account. Since joining a few years ago, I have earned £728.35 cashback! That's a huge amount of free money for a frugaler! The other added bonus for this month is the cashback accrued from the credit card. Where some people hate credit cards, I love mine! It gets used for anything and everthing, paid off in full each month and it also pays 1% cashback on all transactions - fee free! I should manage to recoup about £50+ from that, as things like building materials and poultry feeding got paid with it, as do any online transactions.

 

Now I need to take stock of how the winter has gone and prepare for spring organising and summer fun, including getting some serious crafting done. The McGonks project needs to be cranked up a notch, there's some fndraising to be done for the Ben Nevis hostelling holiday and I'm wanting to make a nice, multi-cloured wooly blanket for over the back of the sofa bed so that there's a cosy, multi-purpose bedsit available for guests brave enough to sample real frugal living.

Earning While Spending... a look at getting cash back.

TopCashBack

This has to be my all time favourite cashback site and I could still kick myself that it took me so long to get into the habit of logging in to use their links to claim my free cash!

Unlike affiliate links you see in websites, having your very own account with a site like Topcashback means that YOU earn the equivalent of advertising revenue rather than it going to the website owners. It won't actually earn you a living, but why pay full price when online shopping when you can access discounts AND get a percentage of what you pay returned to you? It's all the pennies that make the pounds.

To let you understand the concept, almost all companies who sell anything need to advertise themselves. Advertising and marketing is big business, so there's always a good deal of money ploughed into that side of things.

Now, imagine if you are that company and you discovered that you didn't need to sink as many £millions into glossy, shiny, traditional adverts. Imagine if you discovered that millions of people were prepared to advertise your company FREE OF CHARGE, simply by placing links on each of their own websites! It's an amazingly simple concept but, as with all things, few people like to help big companies earn even more money without being rewarded. That's where commissions come into it. Affiliate marketing is all about promoting and advertising other people's goods and services in exchange for a tiny percentage of any sales you generate on their behalf.

Great! Website owners everywhere can generate a flow of cash by way of advertising in exchange for sales commissions... but that still doesn't help you, the price conscious customer.

Step forward the concept of CASH BACK. It's such a simple idea that most shoppers still think it's too good to be true. This is where many of you are now losing out on some completely FREE MONEY! This is my story of how I discovered the joys of being paid cash back, simply by shopping online via someone else's links. It goes completely against the whole concept of cutting out the middle man because, in this case, you NEED the middle man! This is, afterall, the person who pays your share of the advertising revenue simply for your being a customer on their website.

Late in 2007, I discovered a website called Topcashback. Like many, I was dubious of their third party links and didn't like registering my details for anything. I disliked the idea of having to do my research online and then still having to log into yet another site to seach for the appropriate companies - it was as though time was so precious that I couldn't afford the hassle of doing all this extra 'farfing' around when I could simply go directly to my chosen website, be it Tesco, Argos or eBay etc. But I decided to give it a go.

Woolworths was still trading in its original form and I had a large order going in during their pre-Christmas sale. I say large, as it was for me! I'm a frugal pennypincher! However, this order was Christmas shopping for the family and it amounted to almost £300 by the time a friend added a few items to share the delivery costs! I took the time (a few seconds) to log into Topcashback, I used their link - I even used a discount code! I paid using my cashback credit card, which gets paid in full, faithfully, every month. As you'll perhaps know, followers of the frugaldom lifestyle are hell bent on clearing (and then avoiding) all forms of debt. But I digress... My Woolies' order went through as normal and there was no resulting deluge of spam emails and no financial repercussions with regards to my having registered through an unheard of (to me) website.

That was it! Nothing else happened - my order arrived safely, Christmas 2007 came and went and I eventually remembered to check my Topcashback account... and there it was! My FREE cash! It was only £6, but it was mine and it went sailing straight into my bank account without any problems, whatsoever. That was how I discovered the joys of cashback!

Being a frugaler means I don't spend an awful lot on non-essentials, it's necessities only and nothing more. But we still need things like home insurance, car insurace and gifts. I began playing the cashback game. By the end of that first year, I had claimed back over £100 from Topcashback. Not only that, I was spreading the word about the site - advertising it for free on my own and encoraging all my friends to join, too. In return for this, the site allocates you a unique link for recommending friends so you can track the success of your own advertising campaign carried out on behalf of the cashback site. In return, they will pay you a small fee if and when any of your friends generates sufficient cashback to warrant such a payment.

To my utter disbelief, having told everyone I know about Topcashback both in person and online. 778 people clicked through my referal link to read about it but of those, only 50 individuals decided to register and try it out for themselves. How many of those people do you think actually continued to log into their accounts and start to claim free cashback?

The answer to the above question is 10! Their loss, I guess, but I'm delighted with the results produced by my sparing a few minutes extra to check for cashback before buying anything online. I mean, why would you NOT want to get paid a few pence every time you buy something on eBay or shop online? Why would you NOT want up to £50 in free cash just for going via a cashback link for your insurance or to switch your utilities service provider? I'm dumbfounded!

Since joining Topcashback, I have generated a grand total of £536.79 and I'm an extremely frugal online shopper!

What's more, there is an option to transfer your cashback into Amazon vouchers, which is what I am doing for 2011. This means I get about an extra 0.5% on top of the cash amount. THIS is how I intend to pay for family gifts during my 2011 Frugal Living Challenge. I don't need to set aside a budget for such things when Topcashback is giving me money! It's a no brainer!

Insurance companies pay top rates of cash back and often have great deals available. In 2009, I paid around £55 for my home contents insurance and the cashback promotion was offering about £75... it meant that I GOT PAID to insure my own belongings. The economic climate has changed over the past couple of years, so I only clocked up £35 cashback on my contents policy for this year... how much did you pay for your insurance? What did you receive in return, other than a policy?

And lest we forget - cashback credit cards are still an option. American Express is often cited as being one of the best introductory deals and guess what? You can even get cash back for applying online through, you got it... Topcashback!

So, not only have I generated my Topcashback money, I've also been accruing a tidy little cashback sum by paying with a credit card. I've paid not a penny in interest, because the bill is always cleared in full each month, and the card company pays out my cashback once a year, around April. Now that's what I call cyberdosh - extra cash generated through the wonderful world of the Internet.

Don't forget to join us for some fun money-making, debt-busting or money-saving challenges in the free Frugaldom Forums... unless, of course, you're too rich to care about the pennies that make the pounds. :)