Budgeting and Insourcing...play to your strengths...

$32 Strawberries...keep reading and you'll see why!   I often have friends visit, who cannot believe that we live so well on so little.   We eat well, we entertain well, we dress well, our daughter, and our youngest son (we actually have four sons, but the older three are all grown and married) want for little, and we travel overseas every two years or so.   There are many, many blogs out there these days on saving money, living frugally and reducing your carbon footprint.   But most of the families I know personally don't subscribe to them, and wouldn't dream of planting a vege patch or repurposing a pair of jeans into a tote bag. It's all too much trouble. Even if it's for the reward of an overseas trip funded by the bank account, rather than the credit card.   The problem is that upon first viewing, all of these things are 'too much trouble'. It's all a bit of hard yakka, as we say here in Australia.

So you need to start small, like I did. That said, you also need to choose your battles wisely. Can I tell you about some of mine? You might learn a thing or two.   When I commenced my money savings journey in earnest after many years of frittering my hard earned cash away on stuff that only made the retailers wealthy, I had a few false starts.   One of those was soap making.   I am a sucker for scented bath and body products. I never could go past a Body Shop or Bath and Body or Lush, without buying just a couple of things. These coupla things would undoubtedly run into double or triple digits in dollar terms, but what-the-hey....   So one of my early efforts focused on making my own luxuriously scented soaps.   Well after spending about $100 on ingredients and equipment, I was ready. Or so I thought. Measure this, weigh that...oops need something else. Dash out, get missing thing, go back to start. High anxiety, due to many, many warnings on the dangers of inhaling this or spilling that. Get soap made, leave to cure behind lounge, to great grumbling from The Musician Husband. Test at 3 weeks, notice great chunks of caustic soda...toss, start over. Eventually get something useable and nicely rustic, but family refuses to use it as it 'looks funny'. Dole it out as gifts to unsuspecting friends. Experiment over. That said, I did eventually have soapmaking success which you can read about here.

I had greater success with hand and body creams, which was a little more foolproof, but ultimately went back to the pharmaceutical stuff for the face as the face really, really needed it. All good on the body cream though, as well as pillow/linen spray, bubble bath, solid perfume, home made talcum powder, bed powder, and lavender bath bombs.

But it was the overwhelming success of my home made Limoncello which actually caused me to wonder if I'd missed my calling as a Grand Brewer. Maybe my family and friends are all just hopeless imbibers of exotic liqueurs, and they would have loved it not matter what!   I had similar epiphanies with my vege patch. Plant strawberries, get one strawberry, give up. Try again. Get 4 strawberries this time...calculate how much I spent on wicker planters, potting mix, wet granule thingoes, strawberry runners and fertiliser. Decide $32 per strawberry is false economy, and give up.   Tomatoes...same. I do have some tomatoes on a tomato plant in my front yard right now. But for the life of me, I can't make the tomato plant stand up with the blessed tomatoes on the thing. I've planted them in a posh tomato planter with it's own add-a-ring tower to guide the tomato. The tomato plant ignored it and grew off on it's own tangent, falling over and breaking at regular intervals. I've staked them, they fall over, I've tied them to a palm tree, they broke off. I don't know. Maybe fruit-ish things are not for me. The Musician Husband just kept asking me why I don't buy the tomatoes for $2.99 a kilo. A fair question. 'They taste better' simply garnered a raised eyebrow.   I've had better success with leafy things. I've got a lovely nasturtium happening and we do eat it in place of Rocket which we love. I also have a Wild Rocket, some asparagus, a finger eggplant and some chilli. All A-Ok. But I am the only one who eats those things and it's not like I'm saving a bomb by not having to buy them.   I've decided that people who make a success of this kind of lifestyle deserve a medal, really. Honestly they must do nothing else. I admire them and all, but it's just not for me. I can't for the life of me, understand how they grow enough strawberries, or use the oversupply of tomatoes and zucchinis.     And I'm not being derisive, I am just asking myself the question.

Cutting my own hair was another strategy. Armed with detailed instructions from a reputable money saving website and a sharp pair of scissors, I hacked my way to a visit to my hairdresser. I had to. It looked awful. I think my hairdresser is still chuckling to herself over that one.

Have I mentioned the breadmaker and the slow cooker? Both wonderful inventions. Did I also mention that the average temperature where I live is around 27 Celsius almost year round, except when it rises into the high 30's right around Christmas? Yes we have our chilly moments...they last about six weeks. Have you ever tried to have a slow cooker and a breadmaker on the go when the ambient temperature is in the 30's? That's a minimum of around 86 Fahrenheit. No way. We eat cold food when it's hot and hot food when it's cold. It just makes sense. So overall...useability factor...about 3 out of 10. We'll stick with yummy Poached Chicken Breast, thanks very much. These days, I've accepted my limitations and my money saving strategies are more about cooking from scratch, shopping from my own wardrobe and online before even crossing the threshold of a retailer of any kind, making gorgeous gifts and preserves, and ensuring that my pantry is well stocked for quiet times in our business. I don't spend on gym memberships when I can walk for free, I don't join weight loss programmes when I can Google how to eat sensibly complete with menu plans and recipes, I don't sit in stinky nail salons to get my nails looking nice when I can have a quiet moment in my own back yard painting my nails over a cuppa, I don't buy books or magazines when I can join the library or search the net, and I don't buy my children experiential gifts...I give them the gift of my own experience. I reduce my carbon footprint by walking for exercise rather than driving to the aforementioned gym and buying local where I can. I recycle, repurpose and buy pre-loved wherever possible. So if you want to, as my blog title suggests, live a life of which your Nanna would be proud, look at where your hard earned cash goes. Make savings in those areas where you are humanly able, where your own strengths lie, and don't worry about what the rest of the world is doing. The important thing is to make small changes where you can. There is a Chinese proverb that says 'The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' Amen to that. Unless you're prepared to practice till perfect, don't make soap when you can make soup. Don't grow finger eggplant when you don't eat them, no matter how prolifically they grow. And don't plant strawberries in a $30 wicker basket. The birds and wildlife will still get to them before you do, no matter what they're planted in.

Take it from one who knows ;-) ...Mimi...