Why are you frugal? A quick poll

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 1 December 2010 in frugal, meta | 7 comments

I follow a lot of frugal, green, simple living and growing blogs – some of my favourites are listed in the sidebar but I read many, many more. Amongst all the great advice and ideas, I’ve noticed that just about everyone has their own reason for being frugal or growing their own – and that’s made me wonder what drives me/us too. What drives you?

I’ve listed what I think are a dozen reasonably common reasons for frugality here – but I’m sure there are many, many more reasons for it — and for many people, it won’t be just one thing, it’ll be a combination of a few – so feel free to tick as many as applicable.

For me, it’s a certainly a combination of more than a few! I’ve always looked after the pennies and I think I’d still look for offers/bargains even if I had a million pounds, I think it’s an unchangeable trait now.

Living cheaply allowed us the freedom to quit the shackles of our full time jobs and start working for ourselves – and it still allows us to do what interests us rather than needing earn a fortune to pay the bills.

I am a greeny and I abhor easily avoidable waste, and related to that, I also strongly dislike excessive consumerism – so I guess that’s part of my drive too. There are elements of frugality I find fun – cooking, growing, making etc – and I like having hobbies that help me save money and live well. I’m also definitely be ticking the “thrill of a good deal” box! Frugality isn’t all doom and gloom as far as I’m concerned.

So what about you? What drives you to be frugal? Is there something I’ve missed off the poll list?

Feeding the birds through the winter – how do you do it?

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 30 November 2010 in frugal, growing | 1 comment

I don’t mean feeding the girls, they get more than enough. No, I mean feeding wild birds. Last winter, we had bird feeder on the balcony stocked with wild bird seed and nuts from our local miscellanea store – I think the squirrels raided it more than the birds but we regularly saw feathered ones at it too. We went through quite a lot of feed during the six weeks of snow.

Back in September, Colette at the Permaculture Cottage wrote about how wasteful it is to spend money – and all the carbon cost – of importing peanuts & seeds to feed to wild birds, when there are other alternatives. I had a bit of a smack-my-forehead moment when I read that – I’m doing all I can to minimise our food miles but importing food for them.

Colette has noted a number of trees & plants that are good for providing winter food – those suggestions alone are a good starting point for me. I try to maximise the good growing ground in our garden for food for us but further down the garden, in the shade of the trees, there might be some space for bird-friendly bushes. Perhaps my living fence shouldn’t be all focused around our wants & needs…

Alternately, Kate from Living the Frugal Life grows sunflowers in the summer for their nectar and cheer – and for the free-bird-feed seeds to use over winter. I’m tempted to use some of our under-utilised front garden to grow sunflowers next year – although I suspect I’d be tempted to offer at least some of the seeds to our chickens…

Do you feed the wild birds in your garden over winter? Do you buy in feed or do you grow your own? If so, what do you grow? I’d love to hear your comments/suggestions.

(Photo by PsychoPxL – I tried to take my own version but every time I went outside all the birds disappeared, the little pesks!)

Winter preparations now it’s winter – things still to do

Posted by louisa on Thursday 25 November 2010 in frugal, green | 2 comments

We’ve had our first snow of the winter today – quite heavy flurries but not sustained. There are few snowy patches around the garden but the sun, which is shining brightly in between the showers, is quickly turning the snow to transparent ice or melting it all together.

Or at least that looks like what’s happening from up here. Even before I knew it was going to snow today, I’d decided to do the frugal thing and stay in bed for as long as possible. I’m still there now. I’ve got up for a few dashes around the house – feeding the animals & myself, a wee run, a delivery arriving – but other than that, I’ve stayed under the duvet and not had to use any form of heating for five hours and counting. (John’s out at his office today, I’ve got all the cats & dog as mobile heaters up here with me.) I will have to get up soon to take the dog for a walk and probably won’t return to bed again after that but until now, *warm*. My view has been of tree tops not trunks today:

This weekend is supposed to be a very cold one. Around here (Yorkshire), it’s not supposed to get above freezing at all on Saturday – and that’ll be positively tropical compared to other parts of the country. It’s the first time I remember it being this cold in November – the colder weather has usually waited until late December (as happened last year) or well into January or February (as is more typical). It’s made me realise how far behind I am on my “things to do for winter” list… I’ve done some of the stuff on it – some important stuff like curtains for our office, which makes a considerable difference down there – but not other bits.

Five frugal ways I’ll be staying warm this winter

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 23 November 2010 in frugal | 6 comments

This winter looks like it’s set to be a cold one – and that means that heating bills can easily go through the roof. But there are plenty of frugal ways to keep warm without resorting to hugging a radiator – here are five things we’ll be doing this winter to stay warm on the cheap.

1. Staying in bed

Mmm, bed. I love it when it’s frugal to be lazy…

I was chatting to my mum & dad on instant messenger the other day and they commented that even though it was 11:30am or so, they’d only just got up and “saved on three hours of heating”. My dad is retired and my mum only works part time so they spend a lot of time at home – but instead of getting up & relocating to their needs-heating living room, they had breakfast & read in bed until they had to get up to do other things.

Here, we work from home and use laptops so it’s easy for us to start the day up there. Working at desks helps us concentrate later on but the start of the day stuff – checking email, websites, writing to-do lists – that can be done from bed with our animals around us for extra warmth.

We’ve put in hours of hard work building up a cocoon of warmth overnight – we should make the most of it!

2. Getting our blood flowing

How I cut our gas bill in half with one phone call

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 3 November 2010 in frugal | 3 comments

Recently, we got a letter from our utility company.

As a result of your latest annual review, it said, your monthly payments will increase to by £5 to £70 a month. I gasped – £70 a month!?

I realise an increase by a fiver isn’t much in this day and age – but the original £65 was higher than it should have been (we’d underpaid when we first moved in so overpaid over the summer to make up for it). I’d been hoping for it to drop when everything levelled out, not raise further.

John and I were in disbelief about it. We didn’t think we used that much gas. Sure, it powers our heating, our hot water and our cooker hob, but the oven is electric and so is the shower. We mostly shower rather than have baths so don’t use much gas-heated hot water at all. Even though we work from home and have a high-ceilinged draughty house, we hardly over-use the central heating – we prefer to use our woodburning stoves for heat when we’re in the living room or office, and only used the central heating last year when we were in other parts of the house – with the thermostat at 15C/60F and only programmed to come on at certain times of day (and certainly never at night). We wear layers and use animals as hot water bottles.

We weren’t sure how much we could cut back – maybe rely on the stoves more (although we’d obviously need more wood than we’d planned for to do that), wear more layers, get more animals… John accepted that his nasty habit of turning on the hot tap to rinse things (but turning it off again before the hot water started) needed to stop and I worried how much energy we’d used cooking jams and long-time-on-the-hob stews, curries and pasta sauces. Even with my recent drop in income, we weren’t particularly concerned about the extra fiver – we wouldn’t have to be selling any kidneys to cover it – but we were worried about how much it was costing compared to how little we were using. What if we did need to start using the heating more? How much would it cost us then? And what’s the going rate for a one-careful-owner kidney these days?

Then I decided to do some maths. I collected together all the year’s bills and counted up how many units of gas we’d actually used. I also made sure that our bills were being worked out on actual meter readings and not estimates – they were. Then I made the phone call I mention in the title.

I explained the situation to the woman on the end of the phone. I explained that I was happy to accept that I’d done something wrong in my calculations but according to my figures, we should be paying substantially less than the £70 they’d proposed. With a bit of rounding up, I thought it should be closer to £40 a month.

She put me on hold and did the maths herself. Then she put me on hold again and got her manager to do the maths. They both worked out it should have been £32 a month. We settled on £35 a month to give us a bit of leeway in case it’s a cold winter and the dog doesn’t perform her feet heating task as well as desired.

She said she couldn’t understand where the £70 a month had come from – it just didn’t make any sense when you looked at the figures.

I suspect the power company don’t actually do any counting during the automated “annual review” process and just put everyone’s bill up a little bit – an amount not many people will notice – because every extra pound that our accounts are in credit will be money in their bank account making interest for them. Sure, that money is still technically mine and I’d be able to use it against future power purchasing, but I’d much rather it was earning interest for me, not them!

The episode has made me more keen than ever to get our paperwork in better order and to keep taking monthly meter readings for my own interest – if we suddenly start using more of something, it will be nicer to be able to spot it earlier rather than waiting for the quarter-and-then-some bills. I’m also definitely going to be checking all future bills incredibly carefully.