A frugal life is an easy life!

I love watching those TV programs where a "celeb" attempts to help members of the public, with their amazing new found wisdom.
I have yet to see a single program that can beat my record for eating prime cuts of meat, plenty of fresh fruit and veg (that lasts) at prices I can find.

This weekends food shopping:

• Meat and cheese - Local butchers - chicken breast fillets, 8 slices (fair big ones as well) of lean braising steak, a huge block of fresh locally made lancashire cheese (enough for the week and my mini flans I'll be making to put in the freezer!) and a pot of local korma sauce.
  Normally I would get just 4 large slices of braising steak, which makes a korma or a spag bol, steak and gravy (done in the pressure cooker in 20 minutes) etc, but I want to make a couple of steak plate pies and freeze them.
  Buying slices of Braising steak (rather than the butcher's own diced version) means I can cut out what little fat is in the meat, plus, I know it is fresh, not old stock mixed with new.
  Total cost of meat and cheese: £17
• Fresh fruit and vegetables - Local market stall - 10 huge carrots, 7 bananas, 4 oranges, 1 large broccoli, 2lb of washed new potatoes, 5lb of king edwards, 1 cucumber, 2lb of loose mushrooms and 3 pomegranates.
  The beauty of buying from a market stall is that you can knock them down in price, you can pick up freebees that they are struggling to shift, everything is genuinely FRESH as they have nowhere to store it, they have to clear their stall each week, nothing is stored for weeks in fridges, it comes in, it goes out, thats it.
  Their stock is not shipping in from china, grown in huge greenhouses and artificially filled with chemicals to make the fruit retain water, etc, as it is in most supermarkets. You will not pay over the top prices for loose produce either! You try getting five pounds of loose potatoes in a supermarket, then take them to a checkout to pay for them - you will be stunned at the price! (often more than double the price of their 5lb bags that are prepackaged and stored in fridges for weeks)
  Total cost of fresh fruit and vegetables for the week: £8.20

The total cost of meat, veg, cheese and fruit, all fresh, that will last longer than a week, £25.20 (add on another £6 if I want a nice big piece of cod or plaice that will feed 4 people, from the fresh fish market stall).

Now the brilliant part, when I visit the supermarket after dropping my fresh produce at home, to pick up some tinned goods and bread, I can now bypass all the supermarket's marketing!
I walk straight past the pizza/bakery sections, straight past the fruit and veg section (where I see people with more money than sense buying cold stored stock at prices above what I am paying on the market) and past all the prepacked meat freezers, I pick up some marg, then I am on to the bread section.
I have got 2 loaves in my basket, a large tub of flora and I have passed more than a third of the store without falling for their over priced marketing!

I pick up what tinned goods I need, but only when they are on special offer - I watch the prices each week, I will only buy heinz beans and sausages when they are reduced from the 90p my supermarket put them up to. Three months ago they were expensive at 62p, so I wait until the 2 for a £1 offer comes on and pick up four tins. Same with soup etc. Walk on by the biscuit and cakes aisles, straight to cat food and then on to the baby aisle for nappies, then hit the checkout.

I can be in and out of the supermarket in about 20 minutes (my record is 8 minutes) I regularly only spend around £25 in there.
My tin cupboard is packed full with enough tins to last me a good three weeks if I am stuck.
If I need biscuits then I get home made ones from my friend at the market stall in the town where the supermarket is, they are fresh and last me around two weeks (as I buy them in bulk) costing around £4 but it is a carrier bag full.

So my shop, for a family of four (three adults) is give or take a £1, is between £50-£55.

That is eating prime cuts of meat (4 meat dishes per week), top quality local fruit, veg and cheese, often more than can be eaten in a week and a tin cupboard with enough tins in reserve I could easily manage to live for three weeks without leaving the house.

Is that good value? You tell me....

I have had a mobile phone for about 9 years now, the past 7 years, I have been on contracts.
I paid £30 per month at first, but for the past 5 years, just £20 per month. This is not because o2 offer great deals, this is because when my contract is up for renewal, I don't speak to upgrades, I contact "retentions dept" and ask for a PAC code. They don't want to lose my custom so they offer me a deal to stay, be it more texts/minutes etc.

Last month, my bill for the month for my mobile phone, rose to £27. My 18 month contract had come to its end and without any notification, they removed the discounts from my account. The price went up to what it should have been.
I rang them for my PAC code, they could only offer less minutes and less texts and they removed the option for unused ones to "roll over" to the next month!
They tried to get me to sign on with their "only £10 per month, because you keep your existing handset!" - this would still be £120 per year.
I had a look at their handsets online, the choice was abismal!

I do not know if this applies only to o2, but out of more than 80 Nokia mobile phones currently available, o2 are offering a wide range of 5 (yes just five) nokia mobile phones to keep their customers with them.
Two are worse than one I have now
One has the same quality/features as my current mobile, but looks like a brick
One has the same quality/features as mine, but is almost twice as big in size
The last one looks okay, smaller than mine with a couple of new features, shame I am being punished for being a "light user" and would have to pay £195 for the handset!

All this got me thinking: Why do I need a mobile phone?
I don't use it for calling people much
I don't always update my handset (I wouldn't be doing so this time!)
I don't get many texts anymore

I worked out that this year alone my mobile phone has cost me £247!
That's a years car tax and a night out
That is jetting off for a week in the sun
That is our food budget for four weeks!

So as of tomorrow, I'll be turning it off and cancelling it, I may put it back on when the better half returns to work, but until then, I do not need it.
£247  more in my family's pocket - that's a good result I think.

Life wears me out (being a 40 year old codger) having to battle against the business and government world every week, why does it have to be so difficult?

I don't want much, I just want to be treated equally, fairly and in a way that I used to be, where the mistakes of others don't cost me an hour on the phone, don't involve yet another 18 page form or complaints procedure, don't leave me waiting "3-4 working days" for a problem to be sorted out.

All the money spent on new technologies and passed on to us all via high prices for goods and services, we were told that life would be easier and more convenient for everybody.
Increased security costs (once again passed on to us) for new security systems like chip and pin or one time passcodes, which are designed to protect us, invariably end up costing us all more time and money and do not sort out the problems they were brought in to resolve.
The simple bank account:
Pay your bills using it, have your wages paid into it, manage your money they tell us and should it go wrong, they will fix it swiftly and accurately, or you can complain to yet another taxpayer funded body.
Sounds good? It never works out that way though does it.
To avoid employing many thousands of people, and at extra cost to the customer, the banks provide a 24 hour banking service - banking online (again at our cost) - or you can still go into the odd branch, if you can find one.

When something goes wrong though, it is a different story!
First you ring the telephone 24 hour banking, they cannot help and pass you to the ebanking department, who assure you there is nothing wrong with their systems (despite a clear problem with your account that they cannot solve) their investigation promises and the call back do not come. The next day, you are on the phone again, this time your information has been lost and they can't help, the result of another hour on the phone and three advisors later, is an email to another department to sort the problem out.
The problem is not resolved, so you are on the phone again for a third day running, sorting out THEIR faults.
They cannot help and now suggest a complaint is registered and that you the customer, travels to find a branch and try and resolve their problem.
There is no reply to the complaint (despite them telling you they will respond within 24 hours) after three days, the problem is not resolved, so it is back on to the telephone again and another hour (at cost to you) and another set of promises this time with an increased timescale.

Three weeks later and the problem maybe fixed, but of course "we cannot guarantee that it will be sorted out at this time"
When I asked the simple question, of why have 24 hour telephone banking (the clue is in the 24 hour banking terminology) when this service can never do anything to help a customer having problems, it is always "the system!"
So for all this technology that makes banking more convenient (costs passed on to the customer in higher charges) when there is a problem, noone at the bank can do anything except "understand your concerns" - it really isn't good enough!

The examples are endless, wether it's big business or official bodies, our lives are so complicated and our rights under law are often broken and we are fobbed off with pathetic excuses and blatant lies.
What ever happened to, "The customer is always right?"

Exactly what is going on with Abbey national's online banking?

First, we cannot log on for 9 days - the page just states that "ebanking is offline at the minute, please try again later"
(There is nowhere to email or contact Abbey, only a phone line which the customer will be charged 4p per minute from a landline)
We rang the Abbey, three times, they couldn't tell us what was happening, after an hour on the phone, the third advisor said he would investigate and ring us back - this comes after he asked for our security pin number off the back of the debit card or refused to look into the account!
The Abbey advisor did not ring back.

I tried to log on, the evening of the tenth day without being able to even view our account.
I was greeted with a "one time passcode" - whereby Abbey have to have our mobile number, and send out an 8 digit code whenever we attempt to use a transaction, via online banking.
I use it to pay seperate bills every month, this would mean that I must use 8 new codes just to pay them.
Clearly not happy with this, I ring the helpline number again and speak to a lady who informs me that she has no idea what is going on with online banking, but states that everyone with Abbey must now use a "one time passcode" - but has no idea what it is or when it will be implemented!
We are given an email address for customer services, to write to and get urgent information.
I received an automatic email stating they had received my complaint and enquiry and would be back in touch within 24 hours.
TWO DAYS LATER - still no contact!

Tonight, I finally concede that there is no way around this farce, so log in and register a mobile number on screen. I click next and it now allows me access to our account.... or does it?

Now I am faced with a screen that shows an old instant saver account that we have had for twenty years, containing £3.50 (I had forgotten we even had it!)
Our current account that we use every week, has suddenly vanished, there is no trace of it, no doubt another hour on the phone tomorrow, speaking to advisors that haven't got a clue what is going on and no inclination to find someone who they work with, that has the mental capacity of a wasp, to find out!

Someone please tell me: Exactly how does this kind of practice towards its customers, permit the Abbey (santander) to keep its consumer credit license and continue trading as a bank?

Looking out of the window in October, it is dull, cloudy and windy. Not much opportunity to be frugal and thrifty there then?
Oh yes there is...

Bang in a one or two loads of washing and get it out on the line to dry.
If it rains then it rains and you will have to use the dryer or your radiators, as you would have anyway, but if it stays dry or only drys your clothes till they are damp, then it is indeed a frugal saving!

Each dryer load, (even if you have an AAA rated energy saving top of the range dryer) costs you around 80p per load, if you put a load in straight from the washing machine.
Our house isn't especially big on washing loads, so I took a count one week.
I discovered that we do 8-9 loads of washing per week, sometimes more.

If I dry just 6 loads on the line in a dull, windy October, then I have saved my household £2.40 - this adds up to £9.60 saving per month and a whopping saving of £124.80 over the course of a year!
I am only counting for drying 6 out of 8-9 washing loads on the line outside. In summer I should be able to dry all 9 loads outside, increasing the saving even more.

Sounds obvious? Of course it does, yet on our part of the street of 20 houses, only three houses, put their washing out to dry!
On our street alone, if the other 17 houses, all had 8 loads of washing per week, those using a dryer to dry their washing would be paying the electricity companies an extra £2,121.60 - WOW!
Imagine that on a town scale... it is a staggering amount of money the electricity businesses are making off the back of householders. Electricity companies are businesses that exist in our homes to take our money off us.

By being organised and taking five minutes of effort per load of washing, I have beaten our electricity company!
With just this one single saving made, I have got a free TV license for the year and still left me with change in my pocket!