Ideas To Boost Your Income.

We all need more cash, theres a recession you know !
Heres a few ways to get out of the red.

Ebay, de-clutter and earn some cash.

Successful Blogging, generates advertising space and if you review you might get sent freebees.

Selling books on amazon, start with the ones on your self you don’t need but add to your sales by looking for books in charity shops, TKMax, bookstores and car boot sales, rare books make money, no one wants your dog eared copy of Pride and Prejudice ( or mine for that matter) but we once sold a copy of a Zelda guide for a nice lot of cash.

Gumtree, sell all kinds of things and services here.

Face painting, its a demanded skill, buy some and get practising on yourself and the kids !

Henna body art, as before get practising! especially popular in Muslim areas the night before Eid, I have a friend who set up a table in East London on Eid night a few years ago and made over £250 in a few hours of manic hennaring (is that a word?). Weddings, fetes and pregnant mama belly art, lots of ideas.

Learn to code on Tree House and make templates, logos and banners to earn extra pounds. Invest in yourself.

Use whatever you are good at, life gives you lemons, make lemonade (or however the saying goes) you’re a great gardener/make up artist/cleaner/tutor/ artist. Get busy and make yourself a few quid using your expertise.

Train as a Doula, a doula is a professional birth partner, there are courses available across the world and even online, read as much as you can on the subject and get to as many births as possible. A London doula can make up on average £700 a birth. It takes dedication and patience but its the most amazing job.

Book Keeping and Accounts, the tax deadline is creeping up on us, I’ve been helping my husband do his accounts for years and believe me I’d LOVE to be able to pay someone to do it for us !

Write, everyone is at it these days and the new technology means we can self publish on Kindle and Nook and other platforms for free.

Right I’m off to write a book whilst covering a birth, practising henna on myself and face painting my kids 😛

Change How You Shop and be Happier !!

Shopping on a tight budget can be depressing and repetitive, unless you make changes.We’ve had many weeks when we’ve had to feed ourselves for £10 each, there are 6 of us, 4 adults and 2 children. We try and see this as a challenge rather than something negative.

1, Stop shopping at the BIG supermarket that you’ve shopped in for years. We were regular customers in Tesco for over a decade. We stopped and started shopping in a discount German store Lidl and the local butchers and grocery stores for fresh fruit and vegetables. Lidl stocks a wide range of organic fresh foods and has a different theme every week, this is good fun, we’ve took advantage of this and had complete Italian weeks when every main meal has been Italian as thats what week it was in Lidl !!

2, Make a meal plan every week and STICK TO IT !!Unless theres something cool on offer when you get to the store !

3, Look out for the discounted items, my husband confessed yesterday that when he shops he scans every aisle for the yellow reduced stickers rather than browsing ! Visit the reduced sections of the store before getting whats on your list, be prepared to alter your meal plan depending on whats available.

4, Eat whats in season, not only is this good for your body its cheaper and helps the environment so that you are not eating fresh green beans grown in Zambia for dinner in November when you could have bought frozen ones grown a few miles away. I confess we had stir fry the other night and when I checked where the sugar snap peas had come from I was disappointed to find they’d been flown in from Chile! They were delicious but we usually try and eat local grown, seasonal food. This sounds very middle class but really its not, we buy greens and potatoes from a local store that are grown on a farm which is walking distance away. We get fresh produce from our family with gardens and allotments. We try and buy British Milk and butter and cheeses.

5, Eat Organic, yes its possible on a low income. We swopped and buy only organic milk, 4 litres cost £3 for two bottles, which will last us for a few days, its worth the extra 50%, the milk taste amazing.

6, Eat 2 vegetarian main meals a week and 1 with oily fish, this helps a lot. try new recipes. The best vegetarian recipes are intended to be meat free rather than the ones that replace meat in a traditional recipe, e.g no one I know who is in their right mind likes a lentil Bolognese, use those lentils to make a tasty daal or soup.

7, The “ooo” factor, we look for new products that when we get home we’ll pack it away and say “oo thats going to be nice” The thing we bought this week was a hot chocolate from Lidl that is made from chocolate chips, it only cost £1.99 and man it was amazing !!

8, Cook from scratch, if you cant cook basic foods then you’ll never be able to survive on a low income and be healthy, if you cant cook then learn, start by learning to make a basic tomato sauce which you can use to make soup or pasta, lasagne, tuna pasta bake and lots more. Check youtube for simple recipes.

9, Go to the market,not the farmers market, I’m talking old school weekly parish market or the modern equivalent! I know we are all short of time but if you take time to shop around rather than doing all of it in one big store you’ll find your money goes further.

10, Buy in bulk online, we rarely do online shopping anymore. I got fed up of late or absent deliveries, green bananas and battered boxes. However if theres a very good deal I’ll order a bulk load to last a few months, e.g a 10kg sack of rice on special at Asda or 10l of apple cider vinegar from Amazon.

Getting By

The recession has hit our family hard, very hard. We ve been struggling to make ends meet since Mr was made redundant 3 years ago. Even while he was in an office full time we were still on a tight budget, living costs in London are huge, travel, rent and utilities left little for fun, holidays or a car.

We are both self employed and over the past 12 months have earned almost nothing, this makes for depressing reading for me, we both work hard at what we do, I’m a birth worker and he’s in web and user experience design.

This post is about how we’ve managed to get by and make changes so that our children are almost unaware of how tight things have got.

I’m planning further posts about each item on this list but heres a few of the things I’d like to talk about.

• Be Grateful.
• Value yourself and your skills, don’t work for peanuts just because you are skint, you ll end up out of pocket in the end !
• Do make time for yourself, have a day off, go on holiday.
• How to take a family of 6 on holiday for under £500 !
• Budget, meal plans and lists.
• Where to food shop for a better quality of life.
• Home education on a shoe string.

We do all of these things and make the most of each day, I must confess to going through a period of my life when I thought, “things will be better when xyz happens or I’ll be happy when I have xyz” Stopping this circle of wishful thinking, the “when I win the lottery” mentality, its a con, a whole life time can pass by and we’ve forgotten to live whilst we are planing for the utopia that will never happen.

My 5 Favourite Family Weekday Meals on a Budget

So budgeting is rather chic now days, when I was growing up in London in the booming 1980’s no one spoke about making money go further, then the recession of the 1990’s hit just as I was setting up home with my husband and we quickly learnt that money doesn’t go far unless you plan your meals. We still have off days when theres not much in the house and at 4pm we’re wondering what to make for our evening meal, this usually ends with a rushed trip to the local shops, spending far too much and not eating until after 8pm.

So we try to plan, as we are mostly in the house all day we plan for breakfasts, lunches and dinners, in this post I’m going to share our favourite recipes from around the internet.

Number 1, Chilli.

One of our stables is Chilli con carne, we eat it on average twice a month, its so versatile, in a jacket potato, with rice, in a wrap as a burrito, we cook it with lean minced beef or with Quorn and loads of peppers and kidney beans heres our recipe. One batch will go over two days for a family of 4, for my greedy lot its amazing if any makes it to the fridge !!

• 500g lean minced beef or Quorn mince.
• 1 chopped large onion.
• 3-4 cloves of garlic.
• 2 tins of kidney beans in water.
• 1 carton of passata or chopped tomatoes
• 2 bell peppers chopped.
• 1 tbsp ground cumin.
• 1 tsp paprika
• a handful of chopped coriander.
• 1 chopped scotch bonnet pepper or a couple of chopped green chilli’s or if you like it mild you can throw in the peppers whole and take them out at the end.

Its a really easy meal to cook, gently fry (in spray oil or a table spoon of good olive oil) the onions, garlic and peppers, add the mince and brown, pour in the drained beans and passata, add the spices and chillis, add salt if you want to and cover and leave to simmer for an hour on a low heat. I usually do this in the slow cooker. Left overs taste amazing.

Number 2, Macaroni Cheese.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/macaronicheese_83521

Good ‘ole Mac n Cheese.

Number 3,Tomato Soup.

http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/tomato-soup

Add a tin of butter beans or a handful of small pasta to the soup to make it more filling. This is the first vegetable soup I got my children to eat. It freezes well too.

Number 4, Daal.

http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/10/03/lentil-and-spinach-daal-66p/

My favourite comfort food lentil daal, with boiled rice and a dollop of yoghurt, yummy.

Number 5, Tagine.

Moroccan Tagine is something I grew up eating its kind of like a curry but with a different set of spices, its very easy to make as its basically a stew, I love one pot cooking, here my chicken tagine recipe.

• chicken pieces it doesn’t matter which pieces you use, I like boneless thighs they are juicy, always chose skinless ones but bone in or our it makes little difference.
• 1kg of chicken, breast pieces, thigh or a mixture of drumsticks and thighs with the bone in.
• an onion chopped
• a clove of garlic
• tea spoon each of ground cumin, paprika, black pepper and turmeric
• half a tea spoon of cinnamon.
• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
• 1 can cooked chickpeas
• 1 litre of chicken or vegetable stock or less, if your serving it with couscous you might want more gravy.

Plus add a selection of vegetables, cubed potatoes, chunky carrot, turnip, parsnip, sweet potato, courgette, aubergines, okra, green beans, all work well, but be aware the softer vegetables don’t need as long to cook as the root vegetables. Avoid bell peppers they give it a bitter flavour.

Soften your onion and garlic in olive oil, add your chicken and brown it a bit, add your tomatoes and spices and the root veg, cook for 20 mins and then add the chickpeas and soft veg and cook on a low heat until done, this smells wonderful while cooking. You can adapt it and make a more elaborate looking meal by leaving out the vegetables, chickpeas and tomatoes and adding a jar of olives and a chopped preserved lemon serve with cous cous, rice or bread.

Making My Own Laundry Powder.

 

We go through laundry powder very quickly, last year we decided to start buying eco friendly washing liquid which costs us a little more but is ethical. Recently I felt brave enough to have a go at making my own big batch of powder. It was a great sucess the clothes come our fresh and soft.

Ingrediants

Soda Crystals Powder 1 bag 500g

Baking Soda 1/2 a small box @ 225g

Oxy Clean Stain Remover Powder 1kg

Bar of Soap- grated.

Some people like to add Natural Borax and use less soda, I mixed the lot in a very large pot and I use a couple of scoops in each wash, its useful for cleaning the cooker top and leaves sauce pans sparkling clean.

This batch cost me about £4.50 and last about a month, we are a large family doing about 15 washes a week so I got about 60 washes out of this 7.5pence per wash.

 

I got all the ingredients from my local Savers branch incase you were wondering where to buy these things.