It pays to whinge.... politley... part 3....

Gawd will this whinge fest ever end ???

I'm on virgin media and they are starting to take the Preverbial one... Because the bank returned their [ virgin] direct debit unpaid even though there was enough money in the bank account virgin have now cancelled the DD [even before I had chance to] so on the new bill which arrived today they have charged me £10 for missing the DD payment, another £10 for a late payment fee and because they have cancelled the DD there is a new fee of £5 for a "manual payment handleing fee"

I called them and they wouldn't refund / cancel the charges and said as it was the banks fault I should go there which I will tomorrow but Virgin are taking the P now with their poor broadband service so it's time to change.

I wouldn't care but i'm a loyal customer who pays on time and who has an XL package so it's nearly £80 a month at present but I bet i get it reduced by a good bit after a few days of net research. I'll be getting the lowest price packages and then asking my wife to check the details, she's the brains, I'm the brawn,lol so then I willmaking a pot of tea, sitting on the floor and calling dear old virgin and "having a chat" about their costs and pricing structures. If they want market share then they will have to give me a better deal or i'm off.......

I'll update acordingly.

It pays to whinge.... politley... part 2

Having been bolstered with the whinging below I decided to play the insurance game and got several quotes then went through greasy palms . co.uk

Speaking of Greasy palms, If you join GP using this link you too can save money off just about everything. Also if you use the link to join I get £7 but only after you have enjoyed £15 in commision and then you get to use your own link to make a few bob.

Anyway I done the quotes, then re done them using GP and then i phoned my normal broker who does my car insurance. My best quote through GP was with More than and it was £245 with a £40 cashback brining the total down to £205. My car broker quoted me £206 so I said Oh I can get £40 cashback off GP to which he replied, we can;t match that price but we can knock £20 off for you as you are a customer already.

£20 off was down to £186 and it was a better policy to boot. He never asked what the original price was before the cashback and i never told him.......

If you are looking for anything to buy on the web then I can heartily recomend GP on the premis that you may as well make some money out of the purchase.

also if buying online first look for cash codes for delivery charges and these get free delivery. There are loads floating around so you should never need to pay for delivery from any of the major shops ( even for food etc) if you use the computer properly.......

It pays to whinge.... politley.

I run a car and have always been a main dealer customer for repairs and servicing etc. One reason is I can't do the jobs myself and secondly I want to use dealer parts and not some copy items.

Anyway the car went in for the M.O.T test yesterday and failed on the indicator stalk flashing the headlights occasionally so it needed a new indicator stalk fitting. Got the price of £84 fitted so I said yes.

An hour later I got the call to say the car was ready so I paid the bill and went home. Looking at the bill they charge £35 to fit the stalk now all it needed was to unscrew 2 screws in the cover / cowl round the searing wheel and unplug the stalk and plug in the new one re screwing the cowl back in place. No more than a 10 minute job even for a spacka like me.

I whinged at the service desk by phone and got the fitting charge reduced by £24.00 + vat. I'll have to go back to the garage to get the refund on my card but I need to go to a shop near there anyway.

Also I had a whinge at the Lloyds TSB yesterday about a charge for a "returned D/D" the thing was there was plenty of money in the account to cover the DD but they still returned it and were going to charge me £20 for their mistake....

It will be a cold day in hell when they get to do this to me I'll tell you so on the phone I went, 0870 number, 15 p a minute ...right, got to speak to a human and told then to ring me back. They did and then after about 40 minutes [ just imagine if I'd been paying the bill ] they agreed that it was "an unforeseen banking error on their part" I know it was, stop the charges... They did but they wouldn't refund a charge for a mistake I made but I bet i get it back before the months out or at least get it suspended until the court case about charges finishes.....

Hey up the lads are here to finish the deep beds for me... must dash...

Feed the hungry 2 on £75 for a month.

As an update this will not happen this month,lol.

Towards the end of February I was gearing up for this challenge but then my back gave out again. Well I say again, it just got a lot worse than normal pain so being in agony and bearly being able to lift my arms let alone do anything else my loving wife went shopping for me but being spaced out on pain killers or as I refer to them pain relievers as they never totally kill the pain but being spaced out I never conveyed to my eife in legible tones anyway what i was planning. She "got a few bits to tied us over " and spent £90 quid !!!

I take full blame for this but i'll try the £75 challenge later in the year as April sees holidays and from May our son decends on us from Uni and he is like a plague of locusts all in one go....

... but we love him to bits.....

Feed the hungry 2 on £75 for a month.

As an update I

Electric tarrifs

As we all know it's often cheaper to switch suppliers now and then for our gas and electric.

I used to do this religeously every 4 months but have become a bit slack over the last year only changing twice but since Ebico put their prices up they are not the cheapest now and if you need to save money then it is necessary to look around and change as the needs arise.

I've said before I don't trust the comparison sites which stems from the time i was a door knocker salesman for British gas and Eon. I always look at the companies own website to find the details of the lowest tarrif and often you may find that the power companies offer a two rate tarrif which can be hard to work out for your home.

My tip is to always take daily meter readings and then you will know what you are using. It's no good blaming the power companies for taking to small a D/D when you are using the power.

A person on another computing board i visit wrote out this formular for me to work out the cost of two tarrif electric bills.

=IF(SUM(A2:L2)<901,SUM(A2:L2)*0.1826,(900*0.1826)+((SUM(A2:L2)-900)*0.0796))

It can be cut and pasted into the top line of an excell spreadsheet in column M2. The first row is labeled jan, feb, march, april etc, one month in each cell A1 through to L1.
In ROW " column A you write your monthly electric useage figures. For me it was 230kwh. so I'd put 230 in cell A2 240 in Cell B2 260 in cell C2 all the way along for each month.

In the formula above you will see the numbers 901 and 900. These represent the first tarrif. For many companies it is a higher price for the first 900 units of a year then cheaper for all the rest. British Gas has 500 units at a high price then the rest at a lower price. Some use 182 units which IS FOR A QUARTER so should be multilpied by 4 idf usig the above calc. If your power company uses a figure then this 901 / 900 will need to be altered to suit your tarrif. The last bit you need to alter is the 0.1826 and 0.0796 in the above formula. These figures represent the actual cost in pence of your tarrif. The 0.1826 is the higher tarrif ( for the first 900 / 728/ 500 units etc) and the 0.0796 is the lower figure for the remaining units you use in a year.

If any of you good followers have any problems then leave a comment or better still email me and I'll do a spreadsheet for you if you give me your company and figures etc.

I'll be experimenting with this formula over the next few weeks to see if it works for gas. It should as the gas is also in KWH but there needs to be a conversion process first to get it to KWH if you have an old meter like me,lol.

Feed the hungry 2 for a month on £75

Well, my month of reducing plastic in the shopping went well in January and continues to this day but with the deppression, (sorry worldwide resecion that had nothing to do with Gordon brown,) we are now in I thought it might be worthwhile doing another month long experiment. For the month of March I will attempt to feed my wife and I plus the occasional visit from our son from uni on £75 in total.

I've done it before on £120 but it was a skimp to do it and that was before the resent price rises in food etc.

I'll be utilising a full stock cupboard of which i'll list the contents here when I decide what will be in it.

Will this depression be all bad

I call this downturn a depression rather than a recession because I think the present incumbent at Number 10 doesn't want to own up to the truth. I'm not a political supporter of any of the parties believing that all of them will fill their own pockets then let the rest of us fight over what's left. Cynical yes, sad, even more so but who wants to be remembered as the prime minister who took us into a depression?

The current track is that "it's a worldwide recession that was started by the Americans so it had nowt to do with me guvnor... honest"

The sad part is that many people will suffer in this depression, mainly those who have lost their jobs and cannot keep up the repayments on the new beemer or jaguar, the credit card payments, the various loans and the purchases of T%&*0 Finest shopping basket.

But ask yourselves this question. Will it really be that bad ? I was one of the consumer is king brigade until my financial crisis in 2005 - 2008 when I eventually ended up escaping bankruptcy by the skin of my teeth but that focused my mind to ensure i never again had any credit cards, loans, debts i "might not" be able to repay etc.

I spent the first 3 months of 2005 in denial, then the next 3 months blaming everyone else then finally I owned up to it being my fault and my responsibility regardless of the fact banks and building societies kept offering me more money. Of course i took it and spent it but hell life's too short to worry isn't it? well isn't it ?

After a lot of Internet searching and reading, often in the early hours as I couldn't sleep with worry I eventually got to grips with the problems and started to sort them out. Only one of the 14 creditors ha ranged me but I got the better of them in the end and stuffed them well and truly which makes me smile even now.

I had to live on less than £75 a month on food for 3 of us... which we did, I had to be housebound as being disabled I couldn't afford petrol so couldn't use the car and it got so bad I resorted to scrounging the allotments for veg to make soup.

We cut back on everything, the creditors were king and got their money first before anything else bar the mortgage and council tax. I learnt to bounce Direct debits without incurring charges and running up debts on the electric and gas in order to buy food and stay warm as well.

We learnt to grow veg, make our own bread, butter, cheese, jams and pickles, sausages and burgers whilst also making do and mend with clothes and furniture etc. Many of the things we still have now would have been long gone had we had more credit cards or access to loans etc. We would sell anything we could but also demanding a fair price and thus not used eBay and the likes. We cancelled birthdays and Christmases, holidays and even chocolates from the corner shop.

We paid off a ver big debt in a little over 3 years through cutting back to the bare bones of an existence and making the best use of what we had. I say this as it has made me a much stronger person and also a stronger family. It's taught s to be a lot more cynical of society and government, to be helpful but not at our own expense and above all to be realistic and trade in cash. If we have the cash we can make a purchase.

So to the initial question, will this depression be a bad thing? I think not for the simple answer that it will make a lot of people sit up and look at what they buy, what they do and the way they do these things in a similar way our financial troubles made us. It will be most uncomfortable but it will make a lot of people come to terms with their predicament and never again will they buy into the consumerism that this "world " economy relies on to make the rich richer and the less well off feel good by buying products they don't need or worse still want!

We are now on the way to self sufficiency. We still shop at food stores as we are still meat eaters and don't keep our own livestock... yet but we have reduced our reliance on the power companies, we store water and still grow and make food as above. We are happier and healthier now, less stressed but still wary of what government can and often will do that may not be good and we will take that as it comes.

In my opinion becoming more self sufficient is going to be the way forward out of this economic crisis and the way forward to help combat global warming, food and power shortages that will come in the future as sure as day follows night. So if self sufficiency in whatever guise that presents itself is the answer where do we start? Everyone could install, or have installed micro generation for electric and hot water, even harvest rainwater and grey water but at what cost? £100,000, £200,000 ??

What we need to do is start of in the garden.

Simple as it seems but to grow a bit of your own food is a step that puts you in control, gives you a bit of time to be "at one with nature" and help you relax and unwind after a hard day at the work place but also it saves you money and the planet food miles. Obviously is you have a couple of acres as a back garden you can do an awful lot of growing your own food but you don't need much space, anything from a plant pot on the windowsill to grow a few herbs up to a full farm. If you have a back yard you can grow food in pots, if you have a bit of soil you can grow quite a few food plants in as little as a square meter of space. The native Americans used to grow three crops together. They grew sweetcorn and as it grew they under planted this with beans and used the sweetcorn as a climbing frame. After the beans were away they planted squashes or today we could plant courgettes as well. This became ground cover and so reduced the time spent weeding the ground. This method of planting is very hungry on the soil and attention needs to be given to the amount of water needed and also replenishing the soil with fertilizers.

Water harvesting

Which then neatly comes onto two other aspects of providing your own. Water harvesting and fertilizers. Water harvesting need not be grand sunken chambers the size of houses which cost £1000's of pounds but a few water butts in the garden. Having water butts is one thing you can't do on the windowsill but an average house roof is about 60 sq m and an average rainfall is about 1 metre of water per year so you could in theory harvest 60 tonnes of water per year or 60,000 Lt's. This water can be used to water your veg and fruit and also wash your clothes... and no they don't turn out grey and also you can flush the toilets and wash the car with the rainwater. If you go further you can filter the rainwater with a simple box of sand and there are many designs out there for this. Many offer purity of water in the 90% to 99% free of bacteria and germs but for even more safety you can use a set up of ultra violet scrubbers and then you can use this water to drink and bath in but please do your own research for the exact specifications of these methods.

Fertilisers As the cropping above is fertiliser intensive then you can use chicken pellets if you are going to grow organic but why not keep a few chickens in a small space in the garden and keep the guano or chicken much for a couple of years to mature then use this as a fertiliser.

The ideas keep coming from one leading to another and over time you can get a great deal of satisfaction out of being a bit savvy on where your food comes from and don't forget this all started with an idea to grow some herbs in a plant pot on the kitchen windowsill and costs nowhere near 100s of 1000's of pounds.....


Of course if the government really had their heads screwed on (proper like) instead of throwing billions at the banks they should offer free interest loans for environmentally friendly micro generation projects such as solar PV, solar Thermal and water harvesting but what do they know.........

A month without plastic.... conclusion.

February 2ND

The month of January has come to an end and as such the challenge of no plastic also ends.

It was quite clear from the first day of shopping that this would be a Plastic REDUCTION CHALLENGE because an enourmous amount of plastic is used in todays food industry.

All along this challenge i aimed to reduce, reuse THEN recycle but my first dissapointment was milk. We drink a lot of milk and as such I looked for a doorstep delivery but the this was a no no from the first phone call. The milk had to come from the next town at least 15 to 30 miles or so away as our local depot was no longer viable many years ago and closed down so there was an issue of food miles. Secondly the cost of milk in proper glass milk bottles was 62 pence per pint. I mean come on, no bloody wonder the poor milkman is no longer doing so many doorstep deliveries. In a previous post I said we drank 3 pints a day but on counting we actually drink on average 3.8 pints a day. If our son is home from uni that will go to 5. So an average of 4 pints a day is 28 pints a week or 10220 pints a year. For doorstep deliveries the cost would be £6336. For poly cartons from the shops it would be £3654 !! I know I wanted to reduce my purchase of plastic milk cartons but come on spending an extra £3000 to do it is madness.

Thus I aim to reuse as many of my poly milk cartons as I can. I've got a lot of sugesstion for this but some to help on the way are making butter in them, cutting up and using for plant labels, making funnels out of them, bird seed fillers etc, etc.

My second dissapointment was the use of plastic for my dogs minced steak. He has a dodgy stomach and so we need to be careful of the amount of fat in his food. We found minced steak in 500g bags for £1.98 then it went up to £2.00 a bag. This is less than 8% fat so to reduce my use of this plastic, A grade 6 I'd need to mince my own which would be no problem but I'd need to find a supply of meat for less than £4 a kilo.... If you know of anywhere that sells steak at less than £4 a kilo let me know please.

Other than that there were no major dissapointments and it doesn't take long to "train" butchers, grocers, fishmongers etc that you don't want plastic bags. I mean it took me a week to actually buck up the courage to ask my fishmonger but then it was cool for all the rest. Within the second week I'd trained them to expect me to hand them a box marked beef, fish or pork etc and often one lass on the butchers stall would actually ask for the box to tare it out on the scales so I didn't even have to have greaseproof paper which I thought was cool.

Over the 4 weeks I had a total of approximatly 823g of plastic that I couldn't find a re use for, mainly the dog food wrappers but also the odd plastic tray from bacon because we wanted a bacon sarnie when only the Asda type shops were open.

Which is another point. In days of yore we shopped on a daily basis if there was a non working(outside the house)housewife or weekly on a saturday if the women were working. How on earth did we manage with shops only opening until 5 pm or 10 pm if it was the local corner shop. I mean, you couldn't get a pound of bacon at 9 pm on most nights could you... And maybe this is a way forward in this depression we are in now. To plan a weeks meals and stick to it. Buy all the ingredients and no more then either prepare daily or weekly and freeze. Maybe this will help cut down on the waste thrown away each week and the amount that comes out of our purses and wallets each week.

One other point is that it takes more time, effort and money to shop locally as opposed to doing one big shop at the likes of ASDA. It takes planning and time management. These are skills of which I need to hone and hone a lot but I'll get there in the end al being well.
On the whole I'd implore everyone to try the reduction of plastic for a month experiment. It certainly changed my views and I am one who already does an enourmous amount of environmental friendly shopping anyway.

This reduce plastic ethos will be continued from now on and even stepped up to badgering local shops to stop supplying plastic bags for fruit and veg. After all paper bags have done us proud for many a year before plastic arrived.

Life goes on

Sadly my neighbour of 17 years died on the 18th of January after a short illness. She was one of the most kind and gentle people you could ever hope to meet. She could see the good in everyone even those who couldn't see it in themselves. She made the most wicked potato and leek soup you could ever eat and her recipe, one of many has been passed onto me so each time I make P&L soup I will remember my neighbour.

Her lovely daughter scattered her ashes yesterday and just as she did there was a massive rainbow in the sky, no rain, no sun just an overcast sky with my neighbour smiling down.

But this gets me thinking about life and things. We are so wrapped up in material goods like posh cars, fine foods, expensive holidays, all probably paid for on the never never that one day, in fact now there will be a depression not a recession. My family and I will be ok as we have nowt of value, no posh cars, no rich foods and certainly no holidays. So for us life will go on as normal until we come to the end and become another rainbow in the sky. For many others angst and depression, loss of houses and lifestyles will cost the NHS a lot more than anything else.

Hopefully this blog, and my main site http://www.bselfsufficient.co.uk/(when it's sorted) will become a bigger source of info for others to get through the crisis that is upon us and also looms in the next decade with the loss of oil / fossil fuels etc.