£1 A Day - Plan Ahead!

The £1 a day challenge ended last night! I celebrated with a cup of tea and a Cadbury's creme egg at the stroke of midnight! :) It's the simple things.

I survived pretty well on the food I bought for £7 at the start of the challenge. I only have some porridge oats, two carrots and some of the baking fat left. I didn't even have to resort to foraging for stinging nettles in urban Bristol, luckily.

I have to admit to a fail though; I forgot my lunch on Friday and had to buy a sandwich! I hang my head in shame, but I really don't cope well not eating for 10+ hours.

My food for the week:

Sunday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil soup
Dinner: stew

Monday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil soup
Dinner: stew

Tuesday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil soup
Dinner: vegetable ragout


Wednesday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil soup
Dinner: vegetable ragout

Thursday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil soup
Dinner: lentil burgers

Friday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: DISASTER - I forgot my lunch, so bought a sandwich.
Dinner: stew

Saturday
Breakfast: porridge
Lunch: lentil burgers
Dinner: rice, lentils and vegetables


As you can see, my meals were seriously repetitive (although were somewhat saved by that awesome lentil burger recipe!). Still, I knew I had enough food to last the week. I think that's the biggest thing I've learned from this: if you can plan your meals in advance, you can buy exactly what you NEED and avoid impulse buys or wasting food.

My Mum was doing the challenge in a slightly different way. She worked out the cost per serving of everything she ate during the week. She managed to have a much better variety of food than me (including fruit, biscuits, tea and more veg) for £1 a day by spreading the cost over more than a week. This shows that it is possible to eat well on a very small budget!

It is VERY strange to be able to pick whatever I wanted to eat today. I had boiled egg and soldiers for breakfast and fajitas for dinner! I could also have a nice cup of coffee or tea whenever I fancied, which was ace!

Cheap meals: Lentil burgers

I'm currently doing a challenge to eat for £1 a day. Using my stash of value ingredients, I've been living on a few basic meals over and over again!

Luckily for me, Frugal in Derbyshire sent me a recipe for lentil burgers, which turned out to be the tastiest thing I've had all week!

Ingredients:

50g split red lentils (I used 50g as I'm running low, but they would hold together better with 75g!)
300 ml stock
a carrot
a small onion (mine are super small!)
25g oats
10g baking fat (to fry)

Total cost =  26p (or 31p if you use 75g lentils).

SO TASTY!

How to (all credit to Frugal in Derbyshire):

• Boil the lentils in the stock until they're mushy, then remove from the heat and drain.
• Grate the carrot and finely chop the onion.
• Mix the lentils, carrot, onion and oats in a bowl
• Form the mixture into burger shapes (mine were about 1.5cm thick) and fry for around 3-4 minutes on each side.

These were some seriously nice burgers and made a great change from all the food-in-a-bowl I've been eating lately! Thanks for the recipe!

£1 a day - Cheap Meals

Hi guys! Thanks for all your comments on the £1 a day (£7 for the week) challenge. 

I just want to make it 100% clear that I am only doing this challenge for 1 week. I've had a lot of awesome suggestions about gathering food or using £28 for the whole month to get a better selection of foods, but this is strictly a single week challenge! 

Having said that, there have been a lot of tasty suggestions for cheap recipes and ways to eat for less. Frugal in Derbyshire commented yesterday with a recipe for lentil burgers made with red lentils, carrots, onion and oats and gillibob linked me to a website where you can feed a family of four for £100 a month,  which looks like a really handy resource for anyone looking to keep their food costs down!
 

 
I have been eating some seriously cheap meals so far this week from my £6.98 shopping trip.

Breakfasts have been porridge made with UHT milk and water.  Total cost = 13p.

Lunches have been lentil soup (21p a portion because I used a small and more expensive pack of lentils) with two slices of bread "buttered" with baking fat. Total cost = 26p.

I made two portions of stew out of potatoes, carrots, onion and a parsnip. Cost per portion = 24p. Eaten with a slice of bread, making the total meal cost 26p.

I've also made a sort of vegetable ragout out of red kidney beans, chopped tomatoes, carrots, onion and stock, which cost 37p a portion. I had it with rice, bringing the total cost to 40p.


Tomorrow for dinner I'm pretty excited to try making those lentil burgers!

All the meals listed above are very filling. It's amazing how cheaply you can make something that will keep you going all day!

Here are a few more cheap meals I've made in the past:
Quiche
Lentil Salad
Pumpkin soup

Cheap snacks:
Rhubarb crumble (vegan)
Chocolate cake (vegan) 
Caramel shortbread
  
Just out of interest, how much do you spend on food each week? 

£1 a Day Challenge - Previous Attempts

Hello all!

Thank you for all your comments so far. I really like Angelsey Allsorts' idea of making oat cake/chappaties to go with meals. I'll give them a go tomorrow!

A few people have suggested extending the challenge to £28 for four weeks, to enable the purchase of eggs, flour, fruit and other items to make a more balanced diet. Interestingly, this is sort of what my Mum's doing this week. She's made a spreadsheet of the cost-per-serving of all the food in the house so that she can calculate the total cost of what she eats during the week. This means that she can take advantage of buying in bulk at a cheaper price. It will be interesting to compare menus at the end of the week!

I've been doing the challenge for two days now. Here's how it's going so far:

Breakfast: porridge made with half a cup (~45g) of porridge oats, half a cup (125ml) of UHT milk and half a cup of water. No sugar :(

Lunch: lentil soup (made with two carrots to bulk it up a bit!), two slices of bread "buttered" with baking fat.

Dinner: stew (one can of new potatoes, two carrots, a parsnip, onion and some leftover stock from lunch made two portions), with one slice of bread.

Snack: one sixth of the chocolate swiss roll. (Glad this made you chuckle, Tania. It wasn't very exciting though!)

You might notice there's only one day's worth of food up there. That's because I've eaten the EXACT SAME MEALS twice in a row! Don't worry, dinner will be different tomorrow!

So far, I haven't really been hungry because I've been eating such bulky foods, although my energy levels have taken a hit. I'm not sure if that's due to lack of calories or caffeine!


Since that food wasn't too exciting, I thought I'd tell you a bit about similar challenges that have been done in the past!

The first challenge I found was by Stuart Jefferies of the Guardian. He was challenged to live on £10 for a week, but somewhat underwhelmingly he just ate food he already had in his cupboards and spent the entire week moaning about not having enough to buy wine. He blew the majority of his budget on a meal deal in Marks and Spencer.

Dannielle is a student who "read his (Stuart Jefferies') account with slight disgust". She took the same £10 challenge and was much more successful, scouring Tesco, Asda and Lidl for the best deals. Whilst she did eat rice, pasta etc. from her cupboards, it was a much more admirable attempt at eating on a shoestring budget.

The best attempt by far was by Kath, from Bristol, who lived on £1 a day for an entire year! This covered everything apart from rent and utilities (as far as I can tell), and even stretched to a trip to France (hitch-hiking and staying with family)! She recommends finding toiletries as freebies from magazines, attending free events for food/entertainment and hosting a clothes swap with friends. It's amazing that you can live on £365 for a year in the UK!

Do you think you could survive on £365 a year? How would you do it?

£1 A Day Challenge - The Food

Before I started the £1 a day challenge, I actually expected it to be relatively easy. We tend to spend about £25 - £30 per week on food for the two of us, so £7 a week is about half of my share.

When you think about it though, we don't replenish our entire food stores for the week on £30. A big bag of oats lasts more than a week, you can get a lot of meals out of 1kg of lentils, and we only have to buy a massive bag of tea once a month!

Unfortunately, the rules of this challenge state that EVERYTHING you consume must be bought with the £7 (except tap water, toiletries and toilet paper). I can't rely on the canned goods in the cupboard or even the half bottle of oil next to the cooker. Don't worry, the food we already have won't be wasted because The Boyfriend has refused the invitation to join in the challenge. I think he despairs of me at times! :)

My food for the week!

So what can £7 get you?

• Value skimmed UHT milk (1 litre) – 53p
• 2 x Value tinned new potatoes (15p each) – 30p
• 10 Value stock cubes – 10p
• Value chopped tomatoes – 31p
• 2 x Value red kidney beans (18p each) – 36p
• Tesco Scottish porridge oats (500g) – 65p
• 500g red lentils - £1.09
• Value carrots (1.5kg) – 89p
• Value onions (1kg) – 63p
• A parsnip – 42p
• Value bread – 50p
• Baking fat (250g) – 55p
• Value rice (1kg) – 40p
• Value chocolate and vanilla swiss roll – 25p

Total cost: £6.98

Notes:

• In some cases, the unit cost of the food would have been cheaper in a bigger pack (for example, you can get a whole bag of parsnips for twice what I paid for a single one), however I bought the least amount that I needed for the week to fit within the tight budget.
• The most expensive thing I bought was the pack of red lentils, however I will be getting a lot of my protein and vitamins from these!
• I got a swiss roll as a cheap motivational tool! Keep on track and earn a tiny chunk of swiss roll! I might regret this.
• Value carrots are just as good as any other carrots, except that they are snapped, small or misshapen. I am proud to buy them regularly to stop supermarkets from rejecting foods they think that customers will be too fussy to buy!

So now you've seen what I'll be eating this week, what do you think? I am planning on eating porridge made with 50% milk, 50% water, with lentil soup and bread (buttered with baking fat if possible) for lunches and dinners will be stews, beans and vegetables with rice, and lentil and vegetable pilaf (but unfortunately without the coconut milk and curry spices!). Any suggestions are welcome though!

Please note: I will only be getting ~3 instead of 5-a-day and will not eat enough dairy products or calories. This is NOT recommended as nutritious or healthy and I normally eat a much more varied and balanced diet.

Extreme Frugal Living - £1 A Day

In the UK, we throw away 4.4 million tonnes of food a year, including a third of all bread and a quarter of all vegetables. Up to 30% of vegetables are left in the fields to rot because supermarkets can't sell misshapen foods. This is an ethical problem in a world where almost a billion people go hungry every day.

There are 1.4 billion people living on less than £1 a day, which is the definition of extreme poverty. The Live Below The Line campaign challenges participants to live on £1 a day to engage people with the realities of poverty. I decided to take on the challenge to live on £7 for the whole week and let you all know how I get on.

The Rules
1. Spend no more than £7 for food for one week. This is approximately half of my normal share of the food shopping.
2. Gift cards must not be used. I got a Starbucks gift card for Christmas but I feel like it would be cheating to use it.
3. Only food bought during the challenge may be consumed. No raiding the cupboards for food, no using oil or spices unless included in the £7.


I will be starting this challenge tomorrow. Check back to see how I get on, offer advice and hear more about extreme frugal living.

How to Survive on a Student Budget

Are you the typical bean-eating student or are you living large on your student overdraft? (Or both? :D)

The cost of living away from home as a student is estimated at £9250 a year. This includes a rather expensive-sounding £346 a month on rent and £51 on utility bills, with around £120 on food. It is also £500 more than the maximum student loan and grant (£8750 when living away from home, outside of London), so it's no wonder people end up skint!

My flatmate in Halls spent his entire student loan payment within a month, looking cool at expensive bars in his brand new clothes. Unfortunately he spent the next two months scrounging bread and pasta from the rest of us! How can you avoid this mess??


Budget
First of all, you HAVE to make a budget! Work out how much you have left after rent, bills and travel that you could use for food and leisure (beer). Do this BEFORE you get that lump sum paid into your bank account! See if you can put a small amount aside each month for unexpected costs.


Housing
After living in Halls of Residence in the first year most students move into a shared house or flat. Top tip: the ones closest to the University are often the most expensive and the most grotty! If you're willing to walk a bit further you'll get a much better deal.

See if your Union can recommend a good landlord. When I lived in London the landlord's mate fixed a giant hole in the roof by taping a plastic bag over it...


In Case of Emergency
Many student bank accounts come with an interest free overdraft.This is both a blessing and a curse to most students! Often a student overdraft is abused as "free money", with the student loans bumping the balance back up to zero. On the other hand, if you need to make an emergency trip home you don't have to rely on expensive credit cards. Use it as a buffer against going overdrawn (not to pay for trips to Kenya...).


Don't buy textbooks!
Ooo-errr, controversial! No, I don't want you to fail, but new textbooks are really not necessary! Your University's library will have dozens of copies of the recommended textbooks that you can check out almost indefinitely. If you really must own it, other students will likely sell theirs at a discount at the start of the next semester. Make sure you look after them and you could sell them on again!


Be a Guinea Pig
Back at Cardiff University, if you felt yourself coming down with a cold you could go to the Common Cold Research Centre and get paid to try various over-the-counter medicines to see how effective they are. If you are brave/foolhardy you could also earn hundreds of pounds from pharmaceutical companies to test new drugs for side effects (but be warned, there really can be serious side effects!)

Alternatively, you can sign up to your University's psychology department mailing list. Researchers need to test their theories on willing volunteers. For example, this week I earned £15.65 by spending an hour sat at a computer looking at coloured squares and photographs!


Travel
Students spend an average of £483 a year on travel. If you travel long distances by train, a Young Person's Railcard will pay for itself in no time! Railcards cost £28 for a year or £65 for three years and will save you a third on most train journeys (and they are available for all full time students, not just under 25s!).

Secondly, do you REALLY need a car at Uni? Most Universities are restricting undergraduates from taking their cars to campus anyway. You might think that the fuel home costs less than a train ticket, but have you factored in all the other costs? Insurance, road tax, maintenance and breakdown recovery costs can eat up massive hunks of money over time, especially for younger drivers who typically have high insurance premiums and less reliable cars!


Jobs
 Most student financial advice tells you to buck up and get a job. I disagree. Students should be focussing on their education; you're spending A LOT of money to be there so make it count! You can get away with working during the first year, but make sure you focus all your attention on your studies during your final year because it makes up the majority of your final grade. 

Remember, you really do need a 2:1 or a first class degree to get a graduate-level job these days. It costs too much to go to Uni for you to not get a good job at the end of it!!


"Do you do student discount?"If your University is a member of the National Union of Students (NUS) then you can get discounts anywhere from a huge variety of companies; clothes shops, cinemas, restaurants, night clubs, mobile phones, travel companies and more! Get the full list here. Ask for discount wherever you go!



So you see, it's definitely possible to live within the bounds of your student funding without having to eat baked beans everyday. (Another top tip: Tesco own brand baked beans are infinitely better than their Value ones!). 

Students: how do you avoid the dreaded overdraft limit? Anyone have any top tips for living on a student budget?