Scooter - Acquired!

It was a decidedly unfrugal day for me. While I paid for the scooter a few days back, I had to travel by bus to collect it from Argos. I did manage to make that bus trip do double-duty though, as I met my new boss for a chat (frugal!) but as we were meeting in a coffee house, I had to buy a coffee (not frugal, but at least it was lovely coffee).

So then I went to get the scooter, and of course I didn't have the right allen key to assemble it - and it was far too heavy to carry the scooter home in pieces, in its box, which made for some very awkward box-dragging shenanigans through the shopping mall to buy a set of allen keys. I then sat merrily on the floor of Wilko, ikea'ing myself a scooter. I'm sure the staff were a little bemused. (Yes, "to ikea something" is a verb. Shake your head if you wish, but I guarantee if you tell someone you're ikea'ing some furniture that you have just bought, they will understand immediately what you mean.)

I managed to test the scooter just a little bit after getting off the bus again. Then I stopped in at Tesco for the short list of essentials that I needed, and that has blown the £50/month food budget. Ah well, couldn't be helped, I needed too many things that don't get bought often.

Dinner tonight was a fish finger sandwich with lettuce and mayo. I'm calling this "fast food" as I was tired and didn't feel like creating anything fancy. Besides, I made up for it by eating an apple afterwards. That counts, right?

Hooray Bonuses?

So after the sale of the Helsinki apartment, I knew I'd have a capital gains tax bill. Fortunately I'm UK-resident, where the tax is lower. But this week I learned, while reading another blog, that UK residents also have a capital gains tax-free allowance (currently about £11,000). And I'm well below it. No tax bill for me? Score!

I also listed ten items for sale on eBay. None of them are worth very much but it'll hopefully be a few extra pounds in pocket.

What's been frugal in your week?

Welcome to the super-fancy yogurt corner

One of the guys I used to work with had a yogurt addiction. Now before you all start thinking super-cheeky thoughts, hold your horses. It was these fancy yogurts that come with some kind of stuff to sprinkle into the yogurt. Chocolate, or toasted muesli, or sweets, or whatever fancy new invented sprinkly product they can come up with to get you to part with your cash.

He was eating one of these every day, and that canteen was definitely not supermarket prices. I reckon he lost a fiver each week to this addiction. But seeing them in the shop recently it got me thinking about what might work as an alternative.

Morrison's sells budget yogurts (peach & strawberry) for 8p each! I think you'd have so much choice for what to sprinkle into it and still stay under 25p per yogurt. All you need is a little bag with your chosen sprinkle. Some ideas are crushed digestives, a handful of muesli, sweet cereal, coconut, fresh or dried fruit, choc chips. There are also similar desserts for not much more - like creme caramel and chocolate mousse.

Think about it, if you managed to go for the cheaper option just for a month, you'd have saved enough money to buy a Christmas present for nothing. And I reckon my old workmate could be 200 pounds better off if he managed it all year!

PS. In the interests of scientific research, I tried this with a crumbled digestive biscuit (pictured below - 1p per biscuit, from Tesco). I knew you'd need photographic evidence so I settled the chunks lightly on top, but I made sure not to mix it into the yogurt, just in case I didn't like it. I'm happy to report that not only was it edible, I went back for another biscuit. The chunks stayed crunchy and went really well with the strawberry flavour. It's not miles away from being a slightly runny cheesecakey sort of snack. I have to say it improved my enjoyment immensely and it might just become a permanent habit as a dessert!

10p chunky digestive yogurt- yum!

Five Frugal Fings

Fings? Well, it started with "F". But here are five frugal things I've done recently.

A toast to a new town, anyone?

1. I drank tapwater. I know, I know, plenty of you are probably thinking I was a moron for ever buying bottled water. Even I think I was sort of a moron for buying bottled water. I must admit I hated doing it, but I just couldn't stand the taste of the tapwater. Turns out that my new town has water which tastes great! So I'm very pleased to be back to the free option.

2. I rescued my vegetables. Seems like a silly thing, but I just couldn't stand to see all my vegetables ending up in the bin just because they had defrosted. I turned them into soup.

3. I walked to the supermarket. At the moment I don't have a car, and I could have taken the bus and saved myself the effort. But I saved a few pounds by walking instead. And let's hope it also stopped me from gaining any more weight... a girl can dream, right?

4. I watched tv. My new place is entertainment-central, full of things to do and places to see. When a neighbour remarked that the town carnival was on, I almost went into town. Truth be told, if I hadn't been so tired I might have, but I also know that I would have come home with less money! So I stayed in and watched a stand-up comic programme on the tv.

5. I bar-soaped it. I inherited some lovely, fragrant liquid hand soap here which is a little bit of luxury for free, but I'm not going to get addicted and add to that! Bar soap suits me just fine, so for the shower and my second bathroom, bar soap is what I use.

All up, I'm pretty chuffed at the things I've done lately to save money, but there is always room for improvement. What do you do to save a few pennies, or even a few pounds? I'd love to hear about it.

Frosty Mood For Me

I was quite pleased to nab a loaf of bread for 26p on the weekend because it was close to date. Yellow stickers make me happy :) I promptly bagged most of it into portions and settled it into my tiny freezer compartment, and then ate the remainder fresh for a couple of days.

Well on day three, when I reached in for the frozen bread to stick in the toaster, I was most dismayed to find that the top half of my bread was still soft. Turns out my little freezer compartment just isn't up to the task and only freezes the items right at the bottom. :(

Bread isn't a major cost saving when it comes to using my freezer, so not being able to freeze bread is not really a huge deal. But it sort of throws my general meal planning out of whack and means I'll need to buy the freshest bread I can get instead of yellow-stickered loaves. I hurriedly ate my "treat" meal last night (an instant Thai green chicken curry, which was thankfully frozen solid) and moved my fish fingers down to the bottom.

All this will mean I can't freeze many things from here on and will need to shop more often. More opportunities for temptation, arrrrgh! Give me strength...

El's Budget Hearty Vegetable Soup

Micro-safe soup cup by Sistema, HIGHLY recommended!

As I mentioned earlier, my house move resulted in some very soggy frozen vegetables that I needed to use up. The soup they created was delicious and made lots of leftovers, so I figured I'd share how I made it. It's not rocket surgery - often my cooking is by "feel" and I just throw in whatever I have lying about - but since my kids have become adults and started cooking for themselves, I've realised that not everyone can cook by feel, not everyone can instinctively know what will work in a recipe, and some people prefer a neat and orderly list of what to use. So, here it is :)

Serves 4.

1 can chopped tomatoes
2 cups hot water
1 chicken stock cube
1 sachet chicken & vegetable soup in a cup
2 cups frozen mixed vegetables

Dump the water, chicken stock and chicken soup into a pan and stir it well to make sure there are no lumps in the mix. Stir it over heat until dissolved. Add the other ingredients and simmer until the vegetables are cooked.

Hot tip: to make this go even further, add an extra cup of boiled water and a few tablespoons of tomato ketchup. As you can see, I took the photo before I did this, and my soup was ridiculously thick! :)

Cost (UK - Tesco October 2017)
Tomatoes 31p
Stock cube 5p
Soup sachet 8p
Frozen vegetables 20p

16p per serve
with two slices of buttered bread, about 25p per serve

Move complete!

Some of the food I brought from the old place was in bad shape when I arrived and had to be thrown out (well, these things happen). I then realised the freezer was iced over, so more food thawed while I defrosted the fridge. End result was that I was forced to eat a frozen (thawed) cheesecake, and I cooked a huge batch of vege soup to deal with very soft frozen veg.

And, trolleys cause spending. I guess it's probably not news to most people, but I did a decidedly "duh" thing on my first shop at the new place - I used a shopping trolley instead of a hand basket. Now you'd think I would still be extremely cautious considering it's been an absolutely horrific two weeks in terms of spending. Not so. I went a bit crazy replacing all the things I threw in the bin before moving house, and oh.my.dog. The bill was ridiculous. Not to mention extremely difficult to carry home.

One-third of today's cost was buying new sheets (this new place has more beds than I have linens... ho hum). On the plus side, I paid for it all using a gift card I bought a few months ago. This doesn't make it free, but it does mean my bank account didn't take the hit. And despite the sheer amount I bought, it was a somewhat planned shop, and fingers crossed, should have all I need for two weeks (the convenience store nearby is very expensive and I'm trying to avoid it as much as I can).

Here's the part where I admit to throwing a few too many treats into that supermarket trolley...

I am eyeing off an electric scooter to try to mitigate the 45 minute walk to the supermarket & major bus route. I can see my work commute being rather tedious if I don't speed it up somewhere - as it stands it'd be three buses over two hours in each direction. A scooter could cut that to 90 minutes and two buses. I have a few of them on my watch list on eBay - second-hand :)

Tomorrow: I plan to pamper myself frugally. Relax, take a walk on the beach, then think about baking a cake. The following day it's busy time as I plan to start listing all my gift stash for sale on eBay and make a little bit of cash to stop the savings from haemorrhaging.