Frugal Living - Living on a Budget

If you really want to give up the rat race to live the good life you have several options for how to pay for the roof over your head, assuming you have absolutely no other debts to service:

  • Own your own home outright / mortgage free and
  • Have enough cash in the bank that the interest payments cover your cost of living and all bills
  • Have investments providing you with sufficient regular return to cover the cost of living and all bills
  • Earn sufficient income from home to cover the cost of living and all bills
  • If you aren't fortunate enough to own your own home outright then you need to earn the extra to cover that cost

Before you do anything, know your personal budget inside out, upside down and back to front, know everything there is to know about it. When you're self employed with a bit of cash in the bank and no debts, there's no such thing as the benefits system to fall back on in times of hardship, so it's a case of making ends meet however you can, falling back on savings when needs must and replenishing those savings whenever you can. Everything must pay its own way. If it costs £10,000 a year to run your frugal homestead then that's the bottom line you NEED to survive until such times as you can shave a bit more off the budget. After several years of 'practice', I have the household budget down to the following:

FRUGALDOM BUDGET

Groceries £900.00
Toiletries £35.00
Electricity £1,040.00
Internet £164.00
Mobiles £30.00
Telephone £150.00
TV Licence £142.50
Clothing & footwear £40.00
Travel £240.00
Household Insurance £42.50
Council Tax £935.00 (guesstimate for tax year 2010/11
Everything else - £281.00

TOTAL - £4,000

For anything else, we now have a strict, 'must pay its keep' policy running alongside the 'don't buy it, make it' policy, so gifts are mostly handmade or else traded for via groups such as LETS, hens & ducks pay their keep by way of sales of eggs & surplus chicks and the garden needs to pay its way by providing enough to both feed us and sell or trade surplus to requirement seedlings and produce. I now have basic qualifications in both Health & Safety and Food Hygiene, enabling me to trade my surplus home produce.

We need to earn the above plus enough to cover rent. This is generated by a combination of eBid online auctions, sale of surplus stock & eggs, interest from savings & investments and other web generated sales such as artwork and photography. Free money always comes in handy, too, as does all the bartering & LETS trading. Every penny over and above what NEEDS to be spent is banked to shore up savings which, in turn, increases the earnings from interest payments, pads out the retirement fund and increases our chances to make some carefully chosen longterm investments. It's hoped that these will, in turn, help replenish any spent savings.

We do not live a precarious, poverty stricken lifestyle, we live a frugal lifestyle through personal choice.

Here are some of my favourite moneysaving items that we have bought, made, received as gifts, traded for freecycled:

  • Computer & Internet connection - my primary source of communication & earning
  • Digital camera - no more spools and development costs, photos for card, gift & calendar making
  • Rechargeable batteries & battery charger
  • Breadmaker - Fresh homebaked bread every other day
  • Slow cookers - I have 2 sizes, I can cook soup in one, a whole chicken in the other and both on during E7 electricity
  • Shredder - gifted several years ago, used for recycling paper into animal bedding
  • Steamer - cooks 3 lots of food in one go.
  • Pasta maker - having hens means loads of eggs, eggs make pasta, pasta makes lasagna
  • Camping kettle & pans - can cook a meal on an open fire or BBQ without needing electricity
  • Paper log maker - great at making the bricks for fire fodder but they need a lot of drying
  • Jelly pan - for cooking all these delicious free berries we forage in summer & autumn into preserves
  • Jelly bag - a few pence so well spent! I love hedgerow jelly.
  • Sewing machine - for making & mending things
  • My hens & ducks - for eggs, for keeping the garden slug free, for digging after the veggies have been lifted
  • Incubator - for hatching out new chicks when needed
  • Log store - without it, where would we keep the logs?
  • Compost bins - can't be buying this stuff every year when it's free to make
  • BBQ - great fun in summer when working in the garden, or during power cuts. Winter BBQs can be fun!

Whatever gets earned online from the WWW of cyberworld is what I call my Cyberdosh!

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