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Saving money to buy preps
3 March 2015, 14:36,
#1
Saving money to buy preps
Not sure about anybody else on here, but I'm pretty much always skint & having money at the end of the pay month is a luxury. That said, we live a fairly comfortable life, spend money on kids, hobbies & buy a lot of material crap for the kids, so I won't say I'm poor. I've been poor (for the 1st 18 years of my life) & it's awful so I know I'm definitely not now. However like I say, there's never much left by the time next payday comes around 28 days later. Maybe between £5 & £10. Feel free to put it down to bad money management or whatever, I just put it down to that's life.

As some older (been here a while, not age) members might remember me saying, my mrs previously thought prepping was stupid & was a waste of time. She's slowly coming around. She has a winter "just in case" bag in her car boot, we have a berkefeld filter with spare candles for all our drinking water, a few extra bits & bobs for food & she even shocked me by suggesting we cut back on our hobbies a bit to save up for a wood burner installed to save the gas bill & also incase there was any cut to the gas supply.

I'm sorry this is a bit long winded, I promise I'll get to my point eventually. Hopefully it'll be worth the extra reading.

Anyway, I want to increase the amount of foodstuff, add waterbutts at the allotment & most of all, get myself a frontier stove. Trouble is, money is tight as I've said & my wife said we can't afford the extra as we're cutting back already to save for the wood burner. We came to an agreement that any money I can save without cutting back further, I can have for preps. I'm assuming she thought I'd just give up & leave it at that - she still mustn't know me very well after 12 years.

1st stop, Martin Lewis website. Switched my energy prepayment supplier & going to save £10 a month. And this is cash in hand since we have to top up at the shop (we could go to bill meters to save more, but I don't like not knowing what I'm using or more importantly, how much it's costing me).

During my switching, we found out we are very high electricity users (4 tv's - 2 are either switched on or are on standby 24/7, 4 set top boxes switched on 24/7, iPads, iPods, phones, games consoles etc..). Infact we use almost double the uk national average. There was a lot to do to save cash there. 1st thing I done was bought some plugs with a remote controlled kill switch built into them. 5 plugs & remote was £20 from amazon. Savings (my own calculations) are going to be about £130 a year. So now I'm upto £250 savings.

Next I done a very geeky thing & done a lightbulb audit. Counting all my lightbulbs, the total wattage came to 830w. Because I'm now an energy nerd, I worked out this costs me £182 a year. I've looked at led lightbulbs & from a uk supplier I can get all bulbs for £121 (going to borrow the money from the wood burner fund), 98w consumption & cut my lighting bill to £31 a year. It'll save me £40 or so this year & then £150 a year for the following 4 years as they have a 5 year warranty. So my £250 from before + £40 this year means I'm going to save £290 this year & then upto £400 a year afterwards. Incase anyone is thinking of getting led bulbs, look at the lumen output rather than the wattage to find out which bulbs are brightest. The higher the lumen output, the brighter the light. Also cold white = a blue kind of light, while warm white gives off a more traditional bulb type light.

I'm estimating I will cut the amount I top up my electric meter by £30 a month (currently topping up £65-£70 per calendar month). It'll take 4 months to repay the wood burner fund & then after that, I've freed up an extra £30 a month I can use for preps.

£30 x 12 months = £360. More than enough for everything I'd planned & then the extra food items aswell. I'm also hoping by having the extra food, it might also cut the amount of times we go to tesco & in turn cut the amount of impulse buys we get, that'll easily save us another couple of hundred quid over a year. Once I've got everything I wanted, plus extra food preps, I'm going to save up for a new gas cooker rather than the current electric. For those not in the know (I didn't know until the other week), gas cookers use about the same energy units (kwh's) as electric cookers. It's just a gas unit is roughly 1/3 of the price of an electricity unit. The payback period for a new gas cooker is about 6-7 years mind so don't rush out & buy one to try & save cash quickly.

Just thought I'd post it incase anybody else is looking to cut back without actually cutting back, and in turn, freeing up cash that you can use elsewhere like preps. Apologies again if it's a bit long winded, I'm not a natural born writer.
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Messages In This Thread
Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 3 March 2015, 14:36
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Midnitemo - 3 March 2015, 15:32
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by SecretPrepper - 3 March 2015, 16:13
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 3 March 2015, 18:00
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Mortblanc - 3 March 2015, 21:43
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 4 March 2015, 00:34
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Midnitemo - 4 March 2015, 01:58
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Stewart - 4 March 2015, 13:16
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 4 March 2015, 13:58
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Devonian - 4 March 2015, 14:16
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Skean Dhude - 4 March 2015, 21:30
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Skean Dhude - 4 March 2015, 21:32
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by MaryN - 4 March 2015, 21:39
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 4 March 2015, 22:31
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Mortblanc - 5 March 2015, 17:57
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Devonian - 5 March 2015, 19:56
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by harrypalmer - 15 June 2016, 18:22
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Scythe13 - 5 March 2015, 21:15
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Geordie_Rob - 6 March 2015, 11:08
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by CharlesHarris - 14 June 2016, 19:50
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by CharlesHarris - 14 June 2016, 23:56
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by harrypalmer - 15 June 2016, 17:28
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Jonas - 21 June 2016, 15:05
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Lightspeed - 16 June 2016, 06:11
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by Steve - 16 June 2016, 10:07
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by harrypalmer - 21 June 2016, 15:43
RE: Saving money to buy preps - by harrypalmer - 22 June 2016, 00:28

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