Thank you for the days

So a few people have asked me to blog about money saving.  By this, they mean “Oh god Hari, how can I spend less on essential outgoings in my life, like food?.  Rather than “Do you know the best offshore interest rate I can get on my spare spondoolicks?”
Anyone in need of the former, this is for you.  Anyone in need of the latter, email me a photo and a list of your hobbies and favourite interests – would it be a surprise if we had, like, loads of stuff in common and we just hit it off right away?

I’m going to do a different money saving subject each week time I get round to blogging. For the first one, I’m concentrating on ways we can save money on our food bills.   One of my favourite quotes on this subject was by a very chic French woman in a Sunday magazine.  I’ve no idea who she was – one of those arty farty someones they make out is really important in the scheme of life.  Her wisdom for the world was…… wait for it;

“ I stay thin by not eating.”

Lets call that tip no 1 shall we as it’s also a really cheap way to save money on your food bill.

2.  Eating your cupboards down.   So this means that we all go shopping all the time and buy loads of the same stuff each week mostly out of habit.  Our food cupboards (and freezers) get rammed with stuff we can’t remember, let alone eat.  So you have to stop shopping in that unconscious state of mind and start cooking what you already have.  You have to actually run out of stuff.  You will find that you have a lot more food than you expected and you can really massively reduce your shopping bill for a few days,/a fortnight/couple of years while you consume your very own food mountain.

Just imagine if everyone’s granny decided to eat through their chest freezers, or better still turn them off.  Have scientists never thought of this simple plan to counteract global warming?  I bet I could win an environmental competition with this suggestion – “Reduce carbon emissions by 20 million emission-thingys and win a free eco holiday in South America (sponsered by Virgin Atlantic).”

Anyway, if I don’t win it’s probably because

finding new fuels to run jet engines, genetically engineering a methane free cow or developing complex carbon capture technology is all a darn site easier than getting a pensioner’s chest freezer out of their garage.

I seem to have veered off into global warming solutions.  Lets get back to where we were.  So you have journeyed to the back of your food cupboards and through the whiteness of the freezer and found all sorts of stuff frozen in time.  Now just how old is it – what if there is no sell by date?  Tricky this one.  My personal opinion on sell by dates is, if it’s got sugar and cocoa in the ingredients it will last long enough to be eaten.  With anything else my policy is do get some advice from your most environmentally friendly friends.  Ask them something like, “Will it help the planet more, to check through my out of date food and eat anything consumable, or throw it away and buy more?”   Listen carefully to what they say and then pass them your bag of unrecognizable out of date food.  This should be done with an attitude of great magnanimity, as  you were giving a bottle of vintage champagne for a special birthday.  Tell them that you would have eaten it yourself but you so admire how committed they are to their ethics.  And leave in a rush saying you’ll have to go because Tesco online are due to deliver at your place any minute.

Next, write down your meals for the week and ONLY buy that stuff.  Put your meal list on the fridge where you can see it and remember it.  This will save you the agony of going “Urgh, what shall we have tonight?” and financially it will save you about £20 a week for a family and about £90 a week if you live alone.

Read the deals in the stores and work out which one is the cheapest.  So either use the calculator on your phone or do it in your head.  I do this a lot.  Didn’t know I was that tight clever did you?  It amazes me how often the stuff on sale is not the cheapest stuff at all.  The supermarkets do silly little tricks to stop you working out what they’re up to.  So they’ll price all the carrots in 500g, apart from the ones which are priced in 125g.  This is really simple maths and makes the supermarket experience a bit more interesting.  Try it.  You can also apply this to reductions in sales, I’ve found loads of wrongly marked down stuff so it’s worth checking.  Doing this each time you shop will save you £120 because you won’t need a Nintendo DS and the Brain Trainer game.

Value or Basic products:  These are not always good value for money.  I buy them but not all of them.  They are great for things like hummus and cashews, but if you buy fruit check it well.  Often Value fruit is just crap.  I’ve found that Value pears rot before they ripen.  To me this means they are irradiated and so there is probably little if any vitamin content in them anyway.  Value strawberries are often about ten minutes from being unusable.  So by the time you get them home it may be too late.  I suggest you eat them in the supermarket.  Spit any over-ripe ones back into the box and put them back on the shelf when you’re done.  No one will know.

Stay out of large supermarkets.  Go for mid sized ones where you can get everything you need but not all the additional extras the big stores sell.  This will save you a fortune by reducing the amount of crap you pick up but don’t need.  My top supermarket is currently  Lidl.  It is the Skoda of supermarkets – don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.  Check out the

British fruit and veg which costs about 1/3 or that in Sainsburys or about 10% of the price of anything in a farm shop.  I really do think you are buying better quality in Lidl than the  basics range in Sainsburys or Tescos.  One of my friends did a basket comparison between her Lidl shop and Sainsburys basics range.  She had saved £18 on her week’s shopping by going to Lidl and got much better quality stuff, quite a lot of organic.  That’s after saving the £20 by writing down what she actually needed.

Look in different places in the supermarket for the same products at different prices.  They really do this.  A great example of this is cashew nuts.  You can buy them bagged up as “health food” – really expensive.  Or, you can buy them in the cookery section bagged up as “ingredients”, expensive.  Then you can also find them in the crisp section – as fatty junk food, getting cheaper and then you can even find Value cashews, yes cheapest of all, but still a cashew nut in the end.  I’ve noticed it with rice milk too, get it in the health food section and you’ll pay more than if you pick it up in the longlife milk area.

Don’t over buy just because it’s on buy 2 get 1 free.  Buying three when you only need one is not a saving – that’s how we all end up with overstocked cupboards.  I often ignore those type of offers.  They are a bit more insidious than they look   They work by increasing our responsiveness to scarcity.  If we respond to these offers then we change from shopping with our meal list, to shopping opportunistically fearing that the offer will end and we will be paying more than we need to.  So we then start searching for bargains and guess what?  We end up buying a load of stuff we don’t need.  Less is more?  No, less is actually less.  Buy one if you need one, not three.   If I see expensive essentials on sale like washing powder at half price then I will get a couple, because it’s a big saving.  But saving 28p by buying 3 tins of marrow fat peas when one tin a year is more than enough – just don’t go there ok.

Buy at the market but check your veg yourself.  The market is really much cheaper than the supermarkets.  But you do need to check your veg.  I once got so ripped off.  The guy took all the stuff I wanted from behind his stall and it was all lousy quality.  They often trim the cauliflowers so they look fresher, so just pick it up yourself and look at it.  The best time to get to the market it about an hour or an hour and a half before it closes.  They want to get rid of all of it so they begin the big reductions in the veg.  If you leave it too late they’ll have sold out though.

My last tip comes from my friend Pete who was the master of the supermarket.  Pete would come out of Sainsburys and have four full carrier bags of yummy pre-made salads, organic meals, dips, gourmet puddings – really amazing stuff.  Then we’d play, guess how much he paid.  How much for four carrier bags of the best Sainsburys can offer. Well including some booze in those bags, he’d generally pay about £4 for the lot.  How did he do it?  He didn’t do anything illegal (well not there anyway).

Lets have a competition called “WOW!! How did he do it?”  to find out if you’ve got any interesting ideas on how you could do this.  The winner will receive a tin of marrow fat peas.  Only joking, you’ll get some daffodil bulbs.  Closing date will be in a couple of weeks time – when I get round to it.

PS: If you have any good shopping tips, please post them.

Bye for now xx

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UPDATE ON ARTICLE

Due to a complaint of  exclusion from a reader without a garden, the competition winner will now be able to choose their prize.   In addition to the daffodil bulbs, I will now also be offering the tin of marrow fat peas.  The winner has 28 days to claim one of these fantastic prizes after the closing date (to be decided).   Prizes will be sent out by 2nd class post,  sometime in the future.  The judge’s decision is final.