So ... What DID I Buy with my Vouchers

After the last post I thought it only fair that I came back on and tell you what I did actually decide to buy with my Tesco and M&S vouchers.  I had no fixed idea of what I intended to get until I got to Tesco and then I thought what would give be the absolute best value for my vouchers in terms of food shopping that would be useful for next year when we have decided to scrimp and save on the housekeeping to help us save to pay off the mortgage.

Dried goods it had to be then.  

The Basmati rice was £5.70 for 4kg, the Red Lentils £1.80, the Pearl Barley and the Yellow Split Peas came in at 55p each .... just 10p over my £8.50 worth of vouchers.

I could have gotten more rice for my money if I had gone for the Everyday Value long grain rice ... a whopping 12kgs in fact ... and we might be eating that by the end of year, but how much better to start the year with a decent supply of our favourite rice.

Today I nipped into Marks and Spencer while I was in Llandudno and decided on the spur of the moment to get treats with the £6 I had in vouchers from there.  So mince pies for Christmas for Alan and some sweets for the cinema for me.

My trip to Tesco also threw up some yellow stickered bargains.

A selection of meats for the freezer ...

... a tray of Mediterranean vegetables, that worked out cheaper than buying a couple of courgettes to go with veggies I already had at home.

And a bag of nice baking potatoes ....

... that will be in use as soon as we have finished the last of our homegrown ones.

Not a bad little shopping spree :-)

Sue xx

Stocked Up for Winter

 

It might be Austerity August but when an opportunity to get stocked up for Winter comes your way you simply have to take it.

 

The other day I got my usual daily email from Approved Foods and on it was a brilliant offer for cake mixes.  Now cake is not something I eat a lot of, honest .....  but Lovely Hubby is very partial to a nice slice of cake with his morning or afternoon coffee when he's been doing physical work on the land and who am I to deprive a man of obviously much needed sustenance.  He's also rather partial to a slice smothered in custard for his supper after a hard day at the office and then I'm usually quite happy to join him on that occasion.

 

 

And these were all on at a brilliant price.

 

I got 12 packs of Madera Cake Mix, 4 packs of Ginger Cake mix and 8 packs of Oaty Crumble mix all for just 25p each, a total of £5.50 for all these cakes and crumbles.  With our own eggs and using powdered milk and the only expensive thing I have to add is a spoonful of butter to each cake mix, which means we have 16 cakes that will come in at around 40p each.

 

 

As I have tipped all the Oaty Crumble mix into a tub in the freezer I can make many more than 8 crumbles with it, possibly up to 14 crumbles for two people I would say, we like our crumble thick on top of the homegrown fruit.  With nothing to add to that it means 14 nice crumbly desserts for two people for around 15p each.

 

 

I also got six boxes of Carrot Cake mix, which comes with everything you need for the cake and frosting, again I just need to add powdered milk, butter and eggs, these were also just 25p each (and still well in date).  So that's another six cakes for around 40p each.

 

 

I ordered three packs of shortbread for £1.20, I normally pay 50p each for something very similar from Sainsbury's, but I thought I would try these while the order was going in and there's still a small saving.

 

Some of LH's favourite salad dressing at 60p a jar. (Also in date until the end of the year.)

 

Enough tea bags to keep my man happy for at least eighteen months both at home and at work at just £3.49 a box  ...

 

... and enough Vegetable Bouillon Mix to keep us both happy in veggie friendly stews and soups for a lot longer, for just £1 for a 2.5kg tub.

 

 

Also, very unusually for me I was in the right place at the right time and they had some of their Lucky Boxes available, they have a hundred or so every now and then, you get about £5 worth of food for £1. 

 

Now when I was little I loved the Lucky Bags you used to get from the sweetie shop.  Never knowing what sweets or little gift you were going to get was a brilliant way to surprise yourself with your spends every now and then.  Obviously this mentality has stayed with me :-)  so I ordered one ...

 

... and was pleasantly surprised. 

 

 Lots of lovely goodies and well worth my £1 outlay.  Lovely Hubby's eyes lit up when he saw the jam tarts.  Everything was well within it's sell by date and fine to pop in the cupboard to use whenever we need them.  Luckily with our eating our way through the cupboards there is room for all the new purchases ... just!!

 

 



 

And following on from yesterdays 're-use, recycle and repurpose' mantra once I had unpacked all this lovely store cupboard stock I had some bubble wrap and nine cardboard boxes to use for our impending move, two large, six medium and one small.

 

And one bemused little Pug that was obviously wondering what on earth Mum was up to yet again!!

 

And I have to stand up and confess to buying a few little naughty treats, well it would have been rude not too!  The Yorkie was a freebie for ordering more than £25 worth of goods and the box full of Snickers Cruncher just could not be ignored at only £2.99, making them 12p each.  These have now been reduced again and are £1 for a case of 24 making them now only 4p each - WOW, I missed out on that one!! 

 

The Easter Eggs ..... well who can resist a cute chicken and cow with Easter eggs AND fillings for just 50p each - nope not me!!

 

Obviously with our juicing journey still being well and truly ON, these treats are to be rationed out and we have decided that cake and chocolate will only be consumed in moderation and only at weekends if we have worked hard enough to earn them.  So no dossing on the couch and munching our way through the cupboard :-)

 

I've temporarily moved the Approved Foods link to the top of the sidebar if you want to nip over and have a look at any of these goodies for yourself. 

#

To look at any of the pictures, especially if you want to read the prices on the invoice a bit more easily just click on the pictures and they should enlarge.

 

Now I'm off to pack up one of the boxes with some of the things that we have been buying for the new house with our Car Boot sale profits, I'll be back tomorrow to show you what we bought.

 

Sue xx

 





Stockpiling to Save Money

At the moment I am taking advantage of lots of offers and building a good stockpile of things that we use on a regular basis.  I am lucky in that we have a spare room, and a large chest freezer and so I can store this mass purchasing without too much upheaval in the house. 

I really need to keep our costs down as low as possible for next year as it is going to be the year of Saving, yes, with a capital S.

Some things like butter are tucked safely in the freezer,

but most are in the spare room tucked away behind rolled up quilts and the like, so it doesn't look too much like a grocery store or chemist,

..or in the larder cupboard in the kitchen handy and ready for use.

I'll be continuing to stockpile whenever I see bargains, even next year when my housekeeping money reaches it's new all time low.  It really is the best way, in my opinion, to make your pennies and pounds go that little bit further.

You can follow my progress and check out the bargains I buy on the stand alone page under the Blog title.

Sue xx

Buying and Storing

 

 

Yes, you've guessed it ..... I went back and got some more!!

 

Now I have a stash of twenty bottles of our favourite shower gel, a good mix of all the scents that we love and this should see us right through next year, after all you can't say no to a price reduction of more than half price.  Usually sold at £2.30 each, these were all bought for £1.

 

My idea of 'brilliant frugality' is to buy something that you love using, that is a good product and one you trust, at a fantastic saving and these fitted the bill perfectly.

 

In my opinion being frugal isn't about penny pinching and using products that are simply cheap it's about finding what you like to use or at the very least don't mind using that save you money, as much money as possible.  In the past I've been 'frugal' out of sheer necessity, then sometimes for experimentation's sake, this time I'm being frugal for a reason, we need to get as much cash together as possible over the next 2 or 3 years to pay for our forever home.

 

 

 

 

And if watching the pennies on a year's supply of something gets us there this is what I intend to do.  I realised yesterday that my No-November has slightly gone out of the window.  I have been spending money much more than I intended to this month, but there are two brilliant reasons for this.  We are slowly being stocked up with lots of basics that will see us through an almost No-Spend 2013 AND at this time of year when folk are going mad buying for Christmas I can feed my slightly obsessive shopping habit (that does sometimes rear it's ugly head when faced with massive over-consumerism all around me) but in a good way.

 

 

 

The bread and yeast and my 10kg of Basmati rice are now packed away and being stored in the spare room where it is nice and dry, so that's us in bread for twelve months.

 

 

 

And the handmade soap is in there too, sliced and drying out and as an added extra making the spare room smell absolutely gorgeous. 

 

A lovely bonus for me that while sorting out in the spare room to make way for all these goodies I found four boxes of bought in Lavender Soaps that I used to sell with little soap dishes on my Farmers Market stall, so now we have a stock of 90 soaps, more than enough to last us for the year, and at no cost to us whatsoever as all the soap supplies were written off when I closed my lavender business. (Pulls happy, smiley face and does a little dance!!)

 

It looks like it is going to be a lovely day here, after a frosty start the sun is shining and the world is just starting to thaw out, with clear blue skies overhead it looks like being one of those Sundays that really recharges the batteries for the week ahead.

 

Enjoy your day, I hope you have sunshine too.

 

Sue xx

 

 

 

A Year of Bread and Rice

 

 

After reading a few Blogs yesterday I noticed that there were mentions of T*sco having a '3 for 2' offer on a lot of their baking ranges so I nipped over to a browse the website and then quickly made the decision to order enough flour and yeast to keep us in bread for a year.

 

12 bags of Strong White Flour



12 bags of Stoneground Wholemeal Flour

(I need both as I mix half white with half brown)

 

 

 

6 tubs of Yeast

 

The price for all the above, thanks to the '3 for 2' offer, came to just £18.48 and will make us around 72 loaves, which after adding in the cost of a spoonful of sugar, another of salt and a dash of oil, will work out at less than 30p a loaf.  Not bad considering the price of a similar, although not as tasty loaf made with cheap ingredients and additives would set us back in a supermarket at today's prices £1.30.  So a saving of £1 per every loaf made which equals £72 over the year.

 

I am going to start a stand alone page charting our money saving for next year so this is going to be the first item listed.

 

 

 

Because I ordered online (to save petrol and the chance that when I got there there would not be enough of what I actually wanted to buy) I also trawled around for other other savings and came upon this one. Ten kilos of aged Basmati Rice for just £8, (available for online orders only, although you can get similar for £9 in store.

 

Now this will keep us in rice for the whole of next year, allowing us just under a kilo of rice per month at only 80p per kilo.  Comparing it against T*sco's own Basmati which is currently £1.57 a kilo this is a saving over the year of £7.70.

 

 

 

If you compare the cost against these microwavable packs (which I do own up to using on occasion), at a cost which works out at £6.36 a kilo, yes you read that right, as there is only 250g in each pack!!  It would be a saving of £55.60 over the course of the year....WOW!!

 

This little plan ahead experiment has inspired me to have a look around at what else is on offer that we can stock up on to save money for next year.  I am going to make a list of everyday essentials and necessities and see what we already have in stock, then I will make a list of what we would need to see us through the year and if I spy anything on a good offer I will buy enough for the year.  Luckily as we have cleared so much of our clutter we are freeing up space in the spare room which could be turned into my store for the year.

 

As of now every penny must count, so if we can save on the day to day necessities as well as cutting back on unnecessary items we will be able to give our savings an even bigger boost in the year to come.  And I thought this year was the 'frugal' one, it's not going to be a patch on next year!

 

What items would you or do you stockpile to last an entire year.

 

Sue xx