Money Monday - small steps

~ Every journey starts with a single step ~

so despite our little blip when Owen was in hospital our spending this month hasnt been to over the top, although this went awol when we had to pay for tunnel fees, hospital food, petrol, but trust me this was a small price to pay, but we have dusted ourselves off and onwards and upwards, small changes we are going to implement this month.

1. Try and meet all direct debit payments, saving bank charges @ £20 per item

2. Stopped our bank account with an overdraft/debit card and changed to bank account with no overdraft facility and one of the new O2 money manager visa cards, a visa card that you load up as and when and can only use what is available, no cross over transactions and text notifications when money is added or debited.

3. Keeping our spending to a limit, our proposed spend on food for October is £200 which averages out at about £50 per month, £50 will be loaded onto the O2 money manager card and kept specifically for food shopping, if we use less then this is carried over to the following week, and any overspend will be saved up for Christmas, which I have always started buying little bits for in September when the kids go back to school

4. Cook properly, I always try to whenever possible cook from scratch, but sometimes I find that it isn't always the most economical way with all the supermarkets competing at the moment, especially when the recipies ask for 1 of and you have to buy a whole packet of, so what I have tried to do is to cook double the quantities of easily freezable stuff (like stews, sauces, cassaroles etc) which I find cheaper and also means that we still have home cooked food on the two days that I do work ( because bless him my hubby still thinks that his version of home cooked is to read the oven instructions !)

5. I am also going to try and eke out meat as much as I can, again working out to be more economical, for example yesterday I cooked a medium chicken for Sunday Lunch, instead of putting loads of meat on the plate I put a little less on and padded the meal out with Vegetables, I took the rest of the meat off the carcass and then boiled the carcass to make a good stock along with whatever meat came off the bones, I can then make a chicken and bacon stew out of the stock and then we can have a chicken omlette with the rest of the meat so out of 1 medium sized chicken we would have made 3 meals

Chicken £ 4.00

Sunday Roast Veg £ 2.00

Stew veg and Bacon £ 1.50

Eggs for omlette £ 1.00

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Total £8.50

For 3 meals for a family of 5 - not bad eh !!

see you next time x