Things have been tough in the suburban homestead. My husband has been put on furlough and then told that his job will be made redundant. I work in a sector where I seem to have a job now but not quite so sure 18 months from now. We are trying to put as much of the furlough money into cash savings in case we need it later on and we are not alone. According to one AP article I read, a lot of UK consumers are paying off debt as quickly as they can and storing any leftover cash.
I’ve been suffering from a lot of anxiety about our future. I applied for a ridiculous number of jobs today (something like 5) in three different countries just to assuage my panic. I had a second interview for a side hustle last week and I am trying to prepare for a job interview next week but I am uncertain whether they will even go ahead with the position because I hear the place has cancelled all new hiring. We aren’t sleeping. I’m having some medical issues. Life is tough.
A couple of good things, however, is that I returned some (most) of my sad overspend that I wrote about previously (hello buyers remorse and thank you 30 day returns) so I don’t feel like I blew the budget as much as I thought I did. And here is our finally positive net worth (again, as I mentioned before, banking on the fact that our house value is the same as our last assessment and who knows about that). I feel like talking about your positive net worth right now is about as terrible as announcing your promotion on Twitter. A number of people in my sector have been announcing positive work related self-promotional things on Twitter. It falls flat. So do announcements about my personal net worth. Well, we def don’t have all our shit together so don’t despair but you can see how drastically we’ve been moving upwards since December, which was when we went to visit my folks in a land far far away. I think best of all is to just keep trying to make slow, incremental changes to help give you some breathing room.
The big spend: Food
Because my partner isn’t going into the city every day, we have actually cut back on a bunch of bills including our second largest expense which is the annual train ticket. This plus a break on our student loans and not going to see the trainer has increased our savings game. Once his furlough payment ends, however, we wont be able to do this as we will be back to one income. So I am putting away as much as I can right now.
Our remaining big expense then is mortgage and food, so I thought that I would talk about grocery shopping. I haven’t really been able to get a delivery spot for groceries and so we bought a lot of meat from a local farm and have been trying to shop smaller places. We’ve also been going to a local farm shop for fruit and veg but they have had to close and I hope that they are open again soon. I am very nervous about our food security. There are so many posts saying that we just wont have the labour to pick agriculture. The UK faces a shortage of fruit and vegetable pickers because of travel restrictions on overseas workers. I keep bringing out the one prep book I have and remind myself that I should really restock the Brexit closet while we have money and fresh food around and pull out the canner. Alas, I haven’t been very good at this either. It’s hard to figure out exactly how much disaster prep I should do.
So, instead, I decided that I would use this post to meal plan for the rest of the month. I have never meal planned for a whole month before so I might be very bad at it. I’m going to start with all the stuff that we bought from the farm shop and then, go from there. Here is my monthly meal plan:
MONTHLY MAY MEAL PLAN
- Slow cooker beef stew (500g)
- Leftovers
- 2 Chicken breasts
- Halloumi-stuffed peppers
- Soup and Salads
- Pizza
- Bibimbap (250g ground beef)
- Halloumi tacos
- Spicy chicken thighs with rice
- Leftovers
- Soup and Salads
- Burger night
- Onigiri and miso soup
- Bangers and mash
- Savory Pie
- Leftovers
- Soup and Salads
- Pizza
- Spanish tortilla
- Tacos, beans, ground beef, and rice (250g ground beef)
- Halloumi-stuffed peppers
- Risotto
- Soup and Salads
- Burger night
- Stir fry with leftover 1 chicken breast
- Lamb Patties with Pita and Yogurt (250g)
- Fish and chips
- Bangers and mash
- Chicken breasts
This comes to 56 pounds worth of local meat and then whatever else we spend around it, hopefully not too much. By the time June rolls around, I will be able to eat some of the food from the garden as well. I hope that you stay safe and in good spirits. Let me know how you have changed your spending and how you are doing.
