When Budget Met Crisis: Part Two

Hello friends

I am sad to report that this challenge is not going well!

The first two weeks I managed to keep in budget perfectly, despite the loss of all of my Tupperware.
Week three, however, has not been so successful.

It started well. I went out for a brunch meal with my cast and managed to only spend three pounds. My top tip for eating out on a budget, eat something before you go and then you won't be tempted by the big stuff, something small and cheap will do you fine and you get to spend some time with your friends.

Then the weekend rolled along and I made the executive decision to break the terms of my challenge, spending 15 pounds on a train ticket so that I could visit my Grandma. It was something my family had arranged, and there was no way I was going to let this challenge stop me from going. I don't see her very much, and it's important to take as many opportunities to do so that I can.

So I did that, leaving me with two pounds for the rest of the week, which obviously wasn't going to work out very well, seeing as I hadn't even done my food shop yet.

Then Crisis Number Two hit me.

And this is much bigger than Lost Tupperware.

Lost Phone and Lost Bus Pass.

I'd like to make it known here that I have never lost anything as important or significant as my thermos, phone, and bus pass. So this has been a very bad month for me.

It's felt a bit like this

So I had to get a new phone, and replace my bus pass of course. Now there was no way I was going to do this and stick to the terms of my challenge, so I took the opportunity to buy a phone I actually wanted (and was going to purchase with this months savings anyway) So I am now the proud owner of a windows smartphone - which, with the credit and charger, cost me £85. I also had to spend £5 on bus tickets (which I am sneakily reusing everyday until they notice and make me buy a new one) and £25 on a new pass, which should hopefully arrive in the next week.

Overall this crisis cost me: £115

Which I should have managed to save this month anyway - so that actually works out quite well (seeing as I probably would have lost these things whether I was budgeting or not!)

So technically, I have failed the challenge, by a long way, but I decided to just wipe the 'crisis money' off the slate and carry on as if nothing had happened.

And it's still not going very well.

For two weeks, turning down invitations out was not a problem, I was busy anyway, and committed to the challenge. But the more time goes by, the more depressing it becomes. I like being social and doing social things! So I had an invitation to go clubbing last night, which I haven't done in a long time, and I couldn't resist.

Club fee: £5. Taxi £3.

I've also done an £11 pound food shop this week, and had to put £3 on my printing account at uni so that is a grand total of...

£40 this week. When I should have spent just £20

So I've reached the end of the budget really, with nine days to go.

So Ashamed

So what now?

I suppose the challenge was kind of bound to fail the moment I spent £15 on a train ticket, when I only had £17 that week and hadn't yet bought any food. But I don't regret the decision. In my head, I had already saved a hundred pounds and I wanted to put that money to use right away in visiting my grandma.

So if that's the line of thinking I'm going with, that the fifteen pounds came out of my savings, then I suppose I can subtract that as well. Meaning I have spent £25 this week. This is still over budget, but next weeks budget was £21. If I take five away from that that leaves £16 from now until the 27th of February.

£16 in nine days.

Let's do it.

Super Cheap and Tasty Spaghetti Bolognese

Hello!

Due to this challenge I have had to figure out a really cheap meal that I could cook in bulk and eat hot or cold. And that meal was... SpagBol

I know, not the most original of cheap meals, but hey, it's a classic for a reason.

No, I did not take a fancy picture of mine, but I swear it tastes as good as this one looks!

Now I had never actually made a SpagBol before, so I was just kind of making it up as I went along, and what I ended up with was delicious, nutritious, and less than a pound a portion.

So here is my recipe :)

Ingredients:

Bought from Aldi:

500g Spaghetti - £0.20
3 tins Chopped Tomatoes - £0.93
2 tins Kidney Beans - £0.46
Family Pack Peppers (6) - £1.17
Pack of 3 Courgettes - £0.89
Onions - £0.59
Beef Mince - £2.59 (unfortunately it doesn't say how many grams on the receipt and I have thrown away the pack now! It was a fairly big pack, if that helps)

Total spend - £6.83

Items that I already had

Mushrooms
Garlic cloves
Balsamic vinegar
Oil
Mixed herbs

I'm not sure exactly what this costs but I'm pretty sure if you shop at the right places that all in all it would come under ten pounds.

This recipe makes Ten Potions :)

• Fry two onions and four finely chopped cloves of garlic until they are nice and soft and a light brown colour.
• Add in three chopped peppers (I used two red and one green) and fry until slightly softened.
• Chop up one and a half courgettes and add them to the pan. Fry until they start to brown.
• Slice as many mushrooms as your heart desires and add them too. Fry until they are brown and slightly reduced in size.
• In a separate pan, fry your mince until it is brown all over.
• Next, combine your browned mince with your veg.
• Add the two tins of kidney beans and three tins of chopped tomatoes. 
• Pour in a good few glugs of balsamic vinegar, and season with the herbs. 
• Leave to simmer.
• While your sauce is simmering, cook all of the spaghetti.
• When your sauce has reached the consistency you would like (I boiled most of the liquid off and kept it nice and thick) add in your spaghetti.

So this is definitely not a diet food. Lots of pasta, oil, and mince. But it is a good meal packed with loads of nutrition that will get you through the day, and it's so cheap! You could use whatever veg you wanted. I think the kidney beans are a good addition, as if you're making the mince stretch over ten portions it's good to add something else in for more protein, and they are only 23p a can!

Also, I did have most of a pack of onions, three peppers, some mushrooms, and one and a half courgettes left over to use in other meals (mostly omelettes - yum!) so that's a plus.

Best of all, it's really easy to cook. You may need to stretch it out over a few pans, as it's pretty hefty, but it's basically a one pot dish. Then you can split it into ten little tubs (always keep your takeaway containers!) and freeze it. It reheats no problem.

So if anyone else in the world wants to eat cheap and still fill their bellys with good food that's easy to cook - I would recommend this wholeheartedly. 

Enjoy.

Handling a Crisis on a Budget

Well

What a week I have had.

Before I go into it, I might as well say now that this crisis of mine is really a very minor one in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless has really bothered me this week! Here's the story...

So for Christmas 2013 I got a brilliant thermos flask, which I have used almost daily ever since. I like a hot meal and so I use it to take hot food to uni. It's more expensive than your standard flask, about twenty pounds, but it really is excellent.

This week, I lost it.

Now normally, this would just be a bit annoying. I would tell myself off for being so careless, and then fork out for a new one. But it just HAD TO HAPPEN NOW, didn't it? Now, in week one of my budget challenge, just as show week is coming up - a week in which I need a lot of good hot food in me.

I wrestled with the dilemma of whether to buy a new one and break the rules, or to just go forth without one. My decision was made slightly easier by the fact that I would have to order it online, as they don't seem to sell my one in the shops. I didn't see the point in buying a cheap crap one, and all the ones I found were more for tea and coffee than for food. So it wouldn't be here in time for show week anyway, so I decided to just move on.

So I started making cold lunches again. On Thursday I packed both a lunch and a dinner because I was going to a poetry event in the evening. Of course, being on a budget I couldn't buy dinner so I made one. I had a lot of stuff in my rucksack that day, and so I had to put the lunches in a plastic bag.

WHICH I LOST.

So now my thermos and my two only lunch boxes were gone. I had lost all my food holding apparatus' in one cruel week.

Needless to say I had a day of absolute rage on myself (which I eventually meditated away)

Of course, I can't buy lunch or dinner because of this challenge. But with no boxes, I can't really bring meals in.

So I had to suck it up and buy a new lunch box.

As I say I start my financial week on a Friday, so this Saturday I went out with nineteen pounds to my name and bought a new box for a fiver. Leaving me with fourteen pounds. All of that I have since spent on food.

So I have managed to sort out the crisis AND stick to my budget, which I am very very happy about. However, I had actually hoped to come under budget, because next week the cast of the show I'm in are planning on going out for a meal, and I thought if I can save a fiver this week I could buy something better than a bowl of chips.

Alas, it can not be.

So thus far the challenge has felt like one big cloud of doom over my head - but as always there is a silver lining:

The fact is - I would have lost my thermos and lunch boxes either way. That was always going to happen. So even though it happened during this challenge initially seemed really annoying, it's actually a good thing. Because at the end of it I will be able to buy a new one with my savings, and I will still have loads left over. If I had done it any other month I would have probably paid for the thermos on top of the seventy I would have spent that week, and I would have forked out for some hot lunches in the meantime. But my challenge has made me more sensible than that.

And in a way it's already made the challenge quite interesting. My initial eighteen pounds actually stretched out quite well, and after a really successful first week I thought the month was going to be a breeze. But then this happened, and it made me think about how no matter how well you budget, sometimes life will just deal you a bit of a shit hand, and you just have to find a way around that the best you can.

So some food for thought there. Speaking of food - I am happy to announce that I managed to make ELEVEN portions of spaghetti bolognese for under a tenner. That is less than a pound a portion. And it's delicious. I'll save the details of that for another blog, but for now I shall just say that I am very very happy with myself.

Till then, let's hope this week is slightly less disastrous.

The Budget Challenge

Time for a new challenge.

I have been wanting to do something budget related for a while. I wanted to combine saving some much needed money away with experiencing a more restricted way of living. My initial idea was 'spend thirty pounds in thirty days' but I've thought about it a lot, and with the physical demands of my course I didn't want to risk not having enough nutritious food! It seemed like that was be a challenge I was bound to fail, so I took to google to see if there were any other budget related challenges out there.

I came across this.

It's a year long challenge, in which you increase your savings each week by a dollar, obviously a pound in my case, and by the end of it you have saved a tidy £1378 stashed away.

The first thing I thought when I saw it was 'why would you do it that way round?' The challenge gets more demanding and difficult as it goes along! It seems to me it would be more sensible to do it backwards - saving £52 the first week, £51 the second and so on. That way, you save a lot straight away, and week by week you not only have a lot saved away, but your budget is getting higher too, and the challenge is getting easier.

So I flipped it :)

And I decided to make it this months challenge to do the first four weeks of this system. (Which actually makes it a twenty eight day challenge, but I shall forgive myself) I will be saving £52 in week one, £51 in week two, £50 in week three and £49 in week four.

My usual maximum weekly budget is a very comfortable £70, so that leaves me with £18 for week one, £19 for week two, £20 for week three and £21 for week four.

Overall - I will aim to be spending £78 in one month instead of £280

So I've cut my spending to about not much over a quarter of my usual budget - which I think is pretty challenging! So I am satisfied with that.

Financially, I usually start my week on a friday (because most of my spending is on a weekend so I like to do that with a full budget) So I actually started this challenge two days ago. I have managed to only spend £10 on my food shop, but am already lamenting spending £1.50 on some takeaway chips (how expensive that feels to me now!) That leaves me with only £6.50 for the rest of the week! Let's hope I can make it stretch.

Twenty five days to go.

Finding the Middle Ground between Discipline and Fun

Hello lovely readers of mine!

Well I am nearing the end of this challenge of practicing violin every day for thirty days. I haven't really blogged about it, because if I'm honest I didn't have very much to say. Basically: I practiced every day that I could (unfortunately there were days when I was only in at times that were not appropriate for violin playing!) I was getting slightly better, and I was enjoying it.

In fact, I've been really, really, really enjoying it.

Even though I'm still pretty terrible.

In my last blog post I talked about getting over the fear of being terrible. My advice to myself and anyone else trying to develop a skill was to 'chuck it in the fuck it bucket and move on' - and that's exactly what I did. I played terribly to my hearts content and, sure enough, as each day went by I began to care less and less about what others thought of my playing. And I got a little bit better. And, most importantly, I started to really have fun.

And here is something I've realized. Practice should be fun. One of the great things about getting better at a skill is the very fact that, as you get better, you begin to take a lot more pleasure in doing it. And for that reason, taking the time to do some of the more tedious parts of practicing (like scales, for example) is very much worth it. It feels boring at the time, but ensures more fun in the long run.

However.

I also think it's important to make practice more fun for yourself by doing things your own way. EVEN if this means you slow down your own improvement. For example - there have been times when the sensible thing for me to do would to play the piece really slowly, really concentrating on my weak points and focusing on my technique until I got it perfect. But instead, I played the piece at my pace (which is almost always too fast) messing up many notes along the way, sounding pretty bad for most of it but then always playing the last bar with a dramatic flourish. Then I'd do it again. Four or five times. At this point, it was most likely that I would have improved a little bit on the piece just by bashing it out, but it would be far from perfect. Still, I'd just move onto the next one and do pretty much the same thing. All the while enjoying myself immensely.

Is this the most efficient way to improve on a skill? Absolutely not. But ultimately, practice needs to be enjoyable, or one simply won't want to do it. So even though I know that I could have come a lot further with my violin by now if I had really disciplined myself - I don't really mind, because I've been having a lot of fun. And ultimately I am progressing, just a little slower than I could be.

I like to imagine that Einstein had it right when it came to balancing discipline with fun. And his quote here is a reminder to me that playing music should always be joyful.

So, the conclusion that I have drawn is that if you want to improve on a skill and also enjoy doing it, then you have to find that middle ground. You need to discipline yourself so that in the long run you will be able to get better and therefore enjoy yourself more. But you also need to make every practice fun so that you will want to do it again the next day. At the moment, I think I am indulging slightly more in the fun than the discipline, but I'm happy to work on that, and try and balance it out a bit more.

Most of all, I'm just really happy that I have yet another hobby in my life. Another challenge that has made the time I spend on this earth just that little more valuable.

Because I started late, I do have a few days left on this challenge before it is officially over. However I want to keep to my schedule, and so I will be announcing my new challenge, which I'm really excited about, tomorrow. So look out for that!

In the meantime - keep striving and keep smiling.

Getting Over the Fear of Being Terrible

Hello my lovelies!

Well, I am one week into my challenge of practicing the violin every day. I've done well so far, although I accidentally forgot yesterday, but did an hour today to make up for it! My wrists and fingers ache a little, and my shoulders ache a little more. I've been focusing a lot on getting my technique up to scratch (more than I ever did when I was actually learning!) and I think, slowly but surely, I'm beginning to improve.

So for a bit of background, I played violin on and off from year three to year eleven -  then threw in the towel. I've played the odd tune since then, but essentially I haven't really played in over seven years. So while I'm not completely starting from scratch, I do have to go right back to basics. Which, as you can imagine, is a little infuriating. I've essentially spent the whole week practicing scales and arpeggios, with a few exercises and tunes thrown in, all from this delightful book:

Going to practice from a book that is so clearly aimed at children can feel a little bit embarrassing, but it really shouldn't, should it? Unfortunately, I think this kind of thing can really put adults off learning a new instrument. And that's a real shame. Another thing that I think puts adults off learning a new instrument is the fear of being terrible.

I certainly have that fear.

This week I have pretty much been able to practice in an empty house, which has been nice for me to ease back into it. Next week this probably won't be the case, and I shall have to face my fear of people being able to hear my less than brilliant violin playing.

When I learned how to juggle it didn't feel like this, because it's a silent activity! I couldn't get embarrassed by it that way. I didn't feel like I was imposing something awful upon people's eardrums. But playing an instrument and knowing that you're doing it badly feels really bad because you know that other people will be thinking how bad it is.

But unfortunately, the only way to get better is practice!

So really, if I want to get better at violin (which I really do!) I have no choice. I have to get over it. So I've decided to do this:

I honestly don't think I could put it better than that.

It seems to me, that as you grow older you become a lot more critical and aware of yourself. And that self awareness makes people scared. It makes me scared at least. Scared to do things badly because everybody else will judge you for it. But I can't let that fear stop me from trying new things, or, in this case, getting back up to scratch with old things. I have to get over it. And I think the only way to get over it is to say 'fuck it' and steam on ahead.

And yeah, it's infuriating to play an instrument badly, even if no one can hear you! It makes you want to stop. But if I learned anything from my first challenge of learning how to juggle, it's that if you practice practice practice you can only improve, even if it's slowly. So that's what I'm going to do.

So to any one who will happen to be in my house in the next few weeks to hear my scratchy tones and flat notes: I really am truly sorry, but if I can get over it I'm sure you can too.

Twenty Four days left to become less terrible - let's do this.

New Year's Resolution and a New Challenge!

Happy New Year every body!

Of course, New Year is classically a time to be making resolutions, and of course I will be making one. Reflecting back over my challenges, two in particular have made a huge impression on me: Giving Up Sugar and Meditation. Meditation has been something I've managed to keep up fairly well. Especially with the help of Headspace, a meditation website I have found really helpful. Keeping off sugar, however, has been a lot harder. So I've decided to make it my new years resolution. This time I am going to attempt not one month, but a whole year of no added sugar!

The rules are going to be slightly different this time. In June I was really really strict. This time I'm going to be slightly looser on a couple of things. For the sake of saving money, I'm allowing myself stuff like cheaper peanut butter, which has a very small amount of sugar in, rather than forking out for the sugar free stuff. For these kind products I'm going to make sure it's only about a gram of sugar per serving, so it really is minimum. I'm also going to be more lenient when eating out. In June I only ate chips as they were the only thing I could guarantee to be sugar free! This time I am going to allow myself proper meals in restaurants, but I will still avoid things like pizza and burgers, as I know they almost always have added sugar.

The thing I am going to be more strict on is puddings. Last time I made allowances for a very delicious brownie. This time, no matter how special the occasion, (and no matter who has made the brownie!) I am going to resist proper sugary products. I think this is going to be pretty easy except for birthdays and Christmas, but I shall cross that bridge when I come to it!

So that's my New Years Resolution - on day four now and feeling better for it already! Especially after gorging this Christmas!

Now for this months challenge. I've been a bit naughty and not started yet as I was really enjoying my holiday, but I'm going to start it today and just run into February a bit! I haven't done a practicing a skill challenge since the summer, and I really enjoy those, so I've decided that this is the month for practicing my Violin!

I learned how to play the violin when I was younger, but gave it up (which I really regret!) Last year I got a Violin, but I haven't been practicing as much as I should. I think it's because I'm a bit frustrated that I've forgotten so much, so it's not such a pleasure to play at the moment. But the only way I'm going to improve is to practive! It's time to force myself.

So I am going to commit to half an hour of violin practice every day. Hopefully I will see some improvement that way and rediscover my love for the instrument!

Here it goes!