With the kids having been back at school for nine weeks, I’ve had a bit of peace to work on a plan to try reduce our household expenditure.

 

The last Prime Minister kept bleating on about how she’d helped the nation, by capping energy rates and standing charges from October so the average household will only pay around £2,500 a year. That’s not much help when you’re not an average household (whatever that may mean ) and you receive an email from your energy supplier advising you they will be taking not the usual £400 pm you pay but £843.02 (minus the generous £67 Government assistance)!!!!

And that’s only a small part of the issue Liz, ………food and fuel bills are also rocketing out of control.

Energy

Once I’d picked myself up off the floor, I decided energy was the place to start. After haggling with the energy company we have agreed to leave my direct debit at £400, which I will top up each month if I need to and we will review in the new year. I’d rather keep the money in my account than the energy company earn interest on it 🤬. I took a reading and paid the bill to start off with a nil balance.

Let’s do this :-

• A couple of days later the Government kindly credited my energy account with £66 👍

• Having an economy 7 meter, where the night time usage is cheaper and has indeed been reduced 👍. I checked with the energy company what hours the cheaper tariff covers (0.15 – 7.15 except during BST then 1.15 – 8.15). So we now need to use the cheap energy where we can 🤞

• Our large 11kg washing machine has a delay timer on it so rather than my daughter & I doing our own washing it all goes into one wash which is timed to start and finish during cheaper hours.

• The lovely autumn weather meant we had still been hanging the washing in the garden until mid October, reverting to airers on wetter days, so our tumble drier has been made redundant and only used in emergencies. Now the weather has turned more winter, the house has reverted to having clothes hanging on every available space to dry 😢😢

• With such a large family we have 2 fridge freezers and 2 stand alone freezers 🙄. We have had a good sort out and tidy up, purchased some silicone (reusable) freezer bags to get rid of boxes & save space meaning we’ve managed to close down one of the freezers.

• Our daughter & son in laws car is fully electric and we have a home charger. Fortunately they are able to use an app to time their charging overnight. 

• Keeping the house warm is a challenge. Being on three floors, the bedrooms at the top become almost too toasty and our bedroom in the basement, or lower ground floor as I prefer to call it, can be quite cold.  When you’re a menopausal woman, having a hot flush, this can be quite nice, but when you wake in the night and your nose has frozen solid, it’s not so nice. 🤷‍♀️ According to the internet, the optimum temperature is between 18-21*c so the thermostat has been turned down to 21*, we’ll see how it goes. Having only recently turned the heating back on, we are limiting times to a couple of hours in the morning to get everyone to work and school and a couple of hours in the evening to get everyone showered, bathed and into bed.

Anything in between and we need to wrap up in something warmer and we purchased the whole family early Christmas presents to keep them snug on cool winter evenings 🤣🤣🤣

 

•Our water is also only being heated a couple of times a day to coincide with the heating.

•Washing the dishes for 9 without a dishwasher would be too much of a chore so a dishwasher is a necessity, but thankfully it also has a timer delay and we try to restrict it to one wash a day  and during the cheap rate.

I’m not sure what else we can do to try to reduce our usage, so we’ll try these out for a couple of months and see how we go 🤞🤞

Food Shopping

If I could do the shopping on my own, I could be quite frugal, but unfortunately we need two trolleys for our weekly shop. If I take the hubby I have to steer him away from the sweet treats and the special aisle! If I take my daughter she makes me doubt whether we’ve run out of something when I was sure we hadn’t and we add it to the trolley!

We are already quite good at:-

• Using a, so called, budget supermarket for our weekly shop.

• Before we go shopping, scouring the fridges and freezers to see what we have to make meals from.

• Making a 7 day meal plan, which includes the veg to accompany each meal.

• Checking the cupboards to see what we’re running out of and adding that to our shopping list.

• Using leftovers for another meal or freezing for the workers lunches.

• Doing a monthly online shop from one of the larger supermarkets, for purchases of bulk bags of things like tea bags, pasta, rice and washing powder.

• Making meals from scratch rather than using convenience foods

We are not so good at:-

• Finding meals that everyone eats. With some finicky eaters it means there’s usually 3 different meals being cooked.

• Lunches – there never seems to be enough variety at lunchtime.

• Not enough cooks in the house, so when the chefs are bored or out there can be too may takeaway deliveries 🙄

• Due to work schedules we can rarely all eat at the same time, meaning mealtime can stretch from 5.30-7.30 😬

• Sticking to shopping lists!

Action Plan:-

• We need to get a bit more help in the kitchen, both in meal planning and preparation.

• Find more meals the majority will eat

• The finicky eaters need persuading to try different foods so that we could cook no more than 2 meals an evening.

• We can do nothing in respect of work schedules but now we are entering the cooler months our slow cooker will be brought back into action, which means a one pot meal and late comers can help themselves (if there’s any left 🤦‍♀️)

Fuel

This is not quite such an issue as our vehicle is a hybrid, our daughters is fully electric and her hubby has a company van.

But we could improve:-

• Our Grandson does a lot of driving for work and his Company haven’t been very good at reimbursing him, so he needs to be a bit more forceful 🤬

• We all probably do too many short journeys, so need to ensure if we need to take the car out that we do ALL our chores in one hit

• Walk more 🤣🤣

Everyone is trying hard to tighten their belts, but we can all only do so much before it affects our quality of life.

I’m old enough to remember the ‘80’s when inflation hit 13% and mortgage rates rose to 16%. With the size of mortgages today we can’t allow history to repeat itself.

I really hope now Liz’s bleating about what she’s done to help with energy has been curtailed and we have a new Prime Minister in situ, the Government can start concentrating on what they can do to stabilise the economy and stop interest rates and prices spiralling.

We await the Autumn Statement next week

If, in the meantime anyone has any money saving tips please share. We can all do with a little bit of help 🙏