Frugal refresher -day two: the easy stuff!

Thanks everyone for the comments yesterday. I know looking at your pee most of the day and carrying buckets of rain water around might seem a bit extreme but it's not always about money. We have to look after this world too, all of us have to do our bit. My blogs this week are for the benefit of people who may have recently started reading or haven't been following me for long. Between December 2009 and today, we have paid back almost £36K of personal unsecured debt and we took drastic steps to do it. Now, it all seems so easy but some of you who have to go on that journey may still be daunted by it. You will get there. If you're reading, it's would be lovely to know who you are and would be fantastic if you left a comment or became a follower.

Today is all about the easy stuff. Let me think about a once upon a time day for me in the distant past. I would go downstairs, open the door and get the milk in, pick up the paper off the door mat and go and eat cereal, with shop bought jam or marmalade and drink premium coffee. I would get to work and get a coffee out of the vending machine, may be buy a pastry or sandwich at lunch time. On the way home, I would pop into a central Sainsbury's or city centre Tesco metro and pick up something for supper. Sometimes I would already have something at home, but I'd 'fancy a change'. In the evenings, I might go to weight watchers or the gym and come home and use the Internet without caring what it cost me.

My first start is about the really easy frugal steps we can all take. There are so many but here are just a few that I used and still stick to.

1. Cancel all newspaper and magazine subscriptions. A paper a day and two magazines a week will cost you £624 a year. Now, we only read freegan mags and newspapers. Dearly Beloved commutes by train and will walk up and down the train when he gets on looking for mags and papers. We usually get one or the other every day.

2. If you buy lunch and a coffee a day at work, then you could be spending £840 a year on lunches and £600 a year on just one coffee a day. Take a packed lunch and a flask and save £1240 a year.

3. A cut and colour every other month used to cost me £70 and now I get Foster Mummy to cut it for me and I colour it. The colour I buy is £5 and I colour my hair once a month so I spend £60 a year on my hair. By 'doing it myself' I've saved £390 a year.

4. Make your own bread. Bread now costs £1.50 a loaf for 'cheapy harry' sliced white in some places and as cheap as 80p in others. I make bread for DB's lunches. I make bread for 17p a loaf and as DB gets through two loaves a week, I've saved £138.32 a year.

5. Stop eating out and don't buy take aways. We used to have a take away every Friday, either fish and chips or a 'Chinese'. We could easily spend £15 to £20 a week, especially if we had a bottle of wine every Friday. As we don't do this any more, we saved £1040.

I don't miss any of the above, I don't need them either and I now don't know how people fall for the 'you're worth it' marketing, which is actually saying 'just give us your money for stuff you don't need'. If you've added all of that up, in a year I managed to save, or should I say, stop spending!!! the sum of £3432.32 a year and if you know your tax codes, you will have worked out that it would have taken £5000 before tax just to spend that amount of money.

We still eat well, I still 'have my hair done, I still have 'artisan hand made bread' on my table, we still read newspapers and magazines, we still eat every day but now we do it at a fraction of the price.

Mid-Year Reading Stats, and other stuff

First, Happy 4th of July! Hope everyone has a fun and safe holiday today :-)

In other news... I decided to post my reading stats for the first half of the year. Honestly, they're not where I wanna be. So I'm hoping to get super-amounts of reading done during the rest of the year. Honestly, I'm only about 5 to 10 books behind where I'd like to be... Ideally, I want to read 130 books this year.

So here's how the first six months of this year have gone...

January: 13 books read, 5502 pages
February: 10 books read, 4407 pages
March: 8 books read, 4195 pages
April: 13 books read, 4631 pages
May: 8 books read, 3349 pages
June: 6 books read, 2825 pages

Total books read: 58
Pages read: 24,909

Broken down my genre...
Classics: 2
Comic: 1
Fantasy: 7
Historical Fiction: 4
Non-fiction: 3
Poetry: 2
Romance: 6
Sci-fi: 1
YA: 13
General fiction: 19

And here's my thoughts...

• Stupid June. I was pretty busy in June... my little brother graduated, and we threw a baby shower for my little sister Amanda who is supposed to have her baby at the end of July.



• OK, so it wasn't just that I was busy in June... I've been relying on DVD's at work to keep me awake, because I don't get enough sleep beforehand. But work is a huge chunk of my reading time, so I gotta cut that mess out and start sleeping right so I can read more. Plus I did more crocheting/sewing this month than usual. Which is awesome, but means less reading.



• January was awesomesauce. Partly because I was re-reading the Harry Potter series in the beginning of the year, and I flew through those.



• Also, 8 of those YA books were Harry Potter books. So if you don't count those (because they're amazing and should have their own genre), my YA count is actually only like 5.



• Fiction is all of the books that don't really fit into my other categories...



• I need to read more classics, sci-fi, and non-fiction.



• I didn't list it, but 12 of those books were re-reads. But since my goal this year was to kind of focus on re-reads, that's okay.



• I'm sick of these bullets.
  

SO, that's my reading info for the first half of this year. OH also, I've accrued 108 books so far this year, and spent $532.86 on books. Crap, that's a lot when you really look at it. Kind of regretting starting that "book purchases" spreadsheet now...

ALSO, because this is one long-ass post and I'm too lazy to do a seperate post....

The Summer Mini-Readathon is only SIX days away! Yup, it's on this Sunday. I can't wait!
I'm a big one for preparing. I have most of the challenges figured out, so lately I've been planning out my snacks / drinks / books!

Food stuff:

Probably just waffles & coffee for breakfast.

Homestyle popcorn as some point. Because it's delicious and perfect snacking-while-reading food.

I'm thinking soup & bread for lunch. If I have the A/C on. I really, really like to read while I eat soup. I have no clue why.

Deviled eggs, if I'm not too lazy to make them. Because they're SO GOOD.

Not sure about dinner... maybe I can ask the honeyman to make a pizza. That way I don't have to worry about cooking :-)

Oh, and that coffee I mentioned earlier? There will be coffee all day. Because I love coffee.

And near the evening... probably wine, or some amaretto sours.

THE BOOKS:

Definitely, Maybe by Heather Webber (a short-story that I'll be reading on Kindle-for-PC)

Shambling With the Stars by Jesse Petersen (a short-story that I'll be reading on Kindle-for-PC)

Into the Dead by Jesse Petersen (a ARC of nine short stories that Jesse sent to me for review, also reading on the computer)

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (might re-read if I get outside at all that day)

Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand (one of the poll-winners for this month!)

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray (other poll-winner, I have it on hold at the library, hopefully it comes soon)

Voyager by Diana Gabaldon (might start re-reading this by the end of the readathon)

1776 by David McCullough (actually currently reading this, so I'm hoping to get a couple chapters in during the readathon. Trying to celebrate Independence Day and up my non-fiction numbers all at the same time)

Obviously that list is way too long. But I like to have options ready! I never know what I'll feel like reading next. And I fully expect to read those three short-story novellas right away, hopefully they'll only take a couple hours.

*Also, I linked to the books where I could in case you were interested in them. I linked to Amazon (mostly out of laziness), but I don't get anything from Amazon for doing so. It just seemed easiest.

So, are you getting ready for the readathon? Books picked out? Food all planned? Tell me about it!

'insert clever line here' . . .

I've run out of different ways to say "Design Wall" so never mind. Instead, perhaps this morning I'll just say . . .

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY!!

Now. On to the design wall (or table or ironing board or whatever).

Saturday I headed over to join our stitcher's group for a Stitch-In Saturday. My goal was to put together my two blocks of the month, which are due Friday. So here are the latest additions to my orange and purple quilt . . .

Block one.


And block two.

And here's how I've decided to set these two . . .

This one definitely looked best in the orange.


And this one is going in the purple.

I need to start thinking of a name for this quilt. It's orange and purple and has batiks mixed in and the purple leafy fabric is Moda's "October," which makes me very happy since I'm definitely an October kind of girl.

Here's my little stitch-in station . . .

Let me introduce you to Kari, our wonderful coordinator!

She was working on getting a quilt pin basted -- it's one she's entering into our fall quilt show!

There was lots of gabbing and sewing and eating. Lots of eating. ;)

Charmaine finished up the block she was working on for a different BOM.

Isn't that pretty?? I love the colors in there with the black and white!

And my friend Kathy is shipping this one off as a gift.

Lucky recipient!

And if you've hung out with me this long, be sure to head on over to Judy Laquidara's Patchwork Times to see what else is going on in design wall land!

Cheers!

:)