frugal | The Really Good Life

Keeping track of personal finances – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Monday 9 August 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

How do you keep track of your money from day to day?

Considering my love of both frugality and numbers, I don’t actually have a particularly good handle on my finances. I have a rough picture in my head of things – how much my standard incomings/outgoings are, how much I’ve spent in addition to those, how much I have in savings and how much I have on my paid-off-in-full-each-month credit card – and I check my bank balance reasonably regularly so nothing really passes me by — but I’ve been thinking lately that it would be better if that picture was in sharper focus. It’s hard to say how much growing our own food is saving on our food bill or how much an insulation measure saves us on heating unless we know what we’re spending in the first place.

All my accounts are paperless/internet-based and I use finance software as part of my job so it makes sense to manage things on my computer/online – but I’ve not been able to find an app (either online or offline) that does what I need. I’m not asking for the moon on a stick but I want to be able to import statements from my bank, manually create/delete transactions, define categories & assign stuff to them easily, produce useful reports and most importantly, not feel it’s a chore to do (because if it feels like a chore, it won’t get done). I’ve spent a good number of hours over the last couple of days looking into different options but all either had major show-stopping flaws or were that complicated/clunky to use that I would actively prefer to do actual chores than that.

(Offline, on Ubuntu/Linux, I tried GNUCash, Grisbi, KMyMoney and Homebank. Online, I tried Xero Personal & the very US-focused Mint.com. I also tried to try the multi-platform YNAB – You Need A Budget – but the free trial just wouldn’t download for me, no matter what I tried.)

A couple of friends suggested just using a spreadsheet, which I think are great for overall finance planning but would involve a lot of manual data entry work for keeping a track of every transaction — and I want that “every transaction” focus or I won’t have gained anything over my mental map.

Do you use dedicated software, or a spreadsheet, or some other computer-based method? Or do you still keep a track of things on paper? If so, how does that work out for you? Any advice, tips or software recommendations would be gratefully received!

Bread baking – making efficient use of the oven

Posted by louisa on Thursday 5 August 2010 in cooking, frugal, green | 0 comments

Following on from yesterday’s post about my love affair with slow rise/no knead bread, I’ve asked a question on Recycle This today about how to make better use of the oven while baking.

It uses a fair bit of energy (and therefore money) so I want to make sure the process is as efficient as possible.

If you’ve got any suggestions, go post a comment over there!

Charity shop finds: two fruitbowls and a vintage cookbook

Posted by louisa on Monday 26 July 2010 in charity shopping | 0 comments

Another Saturday afternoon charity shopping in Shipley – and another few select purchases.

It was, stangely, an afternoon for buying wooden fruit bowls. The first one – the bottom one – was £2.50 from Scope, the second (and to be honest, nicer) one was £2.40 from BHF. As soon as I got back to John, he said “but we have a fruit bowl. And we don’t eat fruit” – which is largely true but I’d imagined using them as general storage bowls not fruit bowls, per se.

I also got a vintage cookbook from the crazy randomness that is the JOY shop. The book is apparently a spin-off from a Yorkshire TV cooking show in the 1970s and when I flicked through it in the shop, the first two recipes I saw were for candied ginger marrow and marrow & tomato chutney. Since I’m looking for different marrow recipes at the moment, I thought “ace! many marrow recipes!” and happily handed over my 50p. Turns out those are the only two marrow recipes in it. Ah well. There are some other interesting preserve recipes in it – and a section on homebrewing/fruit wine making too.

Growing vegetables for chickens

Posted by louisa on Thursday 22 July 2010 in chickens, growing, wild food | 1 comment

As I mentioned in my post about the economics of getting started with chickens, we’re hoping to feed the chickens a combination of bought-in food (nutritionally balanced layers pellets) and “free” food – scraps, foraged stuff and things we’ve grown especially for them in the garden — and it’s the latter I want to think about now.

Before they moved in, I had started growing some stuff for them (specifically radishes because they’re such a quick crop) and I’d left some lettuces in the ground for longer than I would have done normally, because I thought they’d like them as a snack. They didn’t. The radishes were slightly more successful but only for the green tops, not the red roots – which would be great if we liked radishes because we could easily share but since we don’t, it seems inefficient to grow them.

So anyway, I’m trying to find crops that I can grow for them to supplement their pellets. They’re currently snacking on borage (which they’re eating in the somewhat blurry pics here) and bolting spinach. I’ve got some perpetual spinach & chard growing too – we’ll use some of it, but it’ll be mostly for them. I should be able to start picking those in a few weeks. Around the same time, we’ll be harvesting carrots so they’ll be able to have the tops from those. For late winter/next spring, I’ve sown kale & spring cabbages, and there should also be lots of brassica leaves/surplus — but there is a bit of a gap in the middle between the autumn and late winter/spring harvests.

Next year, I’ll be more on the ball and have early winter cabbages ready to feed them then but now I’m trying to plug the gap with quick-grow stuff. Any suggestions? I’m too late for planting comfrey for them but there still maybe a little time for clover?

I am going to keep foraging for them too, with the rule that unless I can identify something so definitely that I’d be confident to eat it myself, I won’t feed it to them. It’s a cautious route to take – probably missing out on a lot of good stuff for them – but I’d rather be cautious than have a poisoned chicken. They very much like nettles which is a good thing given how many we have around here! I’ve been wilting them to lessen the sting but I’m tempted to dry a lot now to have for over the winter.

Homemade dog treats: drying offal in a dehydrator

Posted by louisa on Thursday 15 July 2010 in frugal | 1 comment

In the supermarket a couple of months ago, John noticed that the dog treats we were buying our old springer spaniel Lily cost £11 a kilogram. The prepackaged lumps of cereals, additives and mechanically recovered meat were more expensive gram for gram than cheese, steak or a nice roast. That didn’t seem quite right to us.

We swapped to using cheese for a while – mostly because it kept longer than meat – but Lily wasn’t that keen so we decided to try making some homemade dog treats by dehydrating some meat instead: it would last longer than cheese and wouldn’t need refrigeration.