Fiona Lippey,
Miser Extraordinaire and
founder of Simple Savings

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National $21 Challenge - Day One    

Jun 2, 2008

Woohoo! National $21 Challenge month is here and today is the first day of our family's Challenge. Now don't laugh but I felt a bit different as I merrily cooked poached eggs for everyone this morning. I felt like Supermum - I am in control and feeding my family wonderful things! It's true! Today it rained for much of the day, which gave me the perfect excuse to achieve as much as I could in the kitchen. My main objective is NOT to allow my family to whinge about having no food this week; they need to have food readily available when they are hungry. I had to get baking!

So I trawled the recipe books and found a recipe for wheat-free Anzac biscuits, which mercifully used up half the oatmeal I bought last August and have never used. They were good! Better still, I have enough of everything to make another batch if we run out, which looks likely as the kids have been eyeing them ravenously. The kids, as expected, grumbled about doing a $21 Challenge week. For them it signified a week of no treats - but I soon changed that! As I went to put the coconut back in the pantry, I thought of a recipe I had seen many a time in the Vault but never tried, for 'Coconut and condensed milk snacks'. All I needed was three cups of coconut and a tin of condensed milk. I had one of those sitting in the fridge with only two tablespoons taken out of it - that would do! I whipped them up in a couple of minutes flat and the verdict was unanimous - 'THEY'RE AWESOME!' The way the kids are hanging around the kitchen I can see I'm going to have to put a padlock on the baking tin! I also made an Oaty Apple Loaf for Noel, which is very moist and yummy and uses up some of the two bags of rolled oats in the pantry, along with two sad looking apples which would otherwise have gone to the chooks. Very productive!

I wrote out my menu plan on Sunday and will copy it here but you can find mine and many more in the National $21 Challenge Month Official Thread":

Monday -

Breakfast - Poached eggs on toast. Thanks to our lovely chooks!

Lunch - Home made pumpkin soup. Tomorrow is a public holiday in NZ so we're all home for lunch.

Dinner - Honey Mustard Fish Fillets. Well, I hope we do! Noel has been out fishing all day so I hope he's caught something, that would be very helpful! Accompanied by rice, salad and broccoli.

Tuesday -

Breakfast - Banana berry smoothies, using up some of the overripe bananas. Yum!

Lunch - Sandwiches, crackers, fruit and Butter Cake for Noel's work lunch. Tuna and brown rice for me. Lunchboxes for the boys, containing ham and cheese sandwiches (on rice bread), mini potato chips, fruit and wheat-free baking (will either be chocolate muffins, chocolate cake or orange/almond cake, haven't decided yet).

Dinner - Pork chops, self crusting quiche (using silverbeet from the garden), peas and beans.

Wednesday -

Breakfast - Dovedale toast probably. We don't eat cereal any more as between us we can't eat any grains! I still have half a dozen Dovedale loaves in the freezer.

Lunch - Only the boys' lunchboxes to do today, same as Tuesday.

Dinner - Corned silverside. One of many from the freezer! Along with Scalloped Potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and cheese sauce.

Thursday -

Breakfast - Toast no doubt!

Lunch - Friary Lentil Soup (from Enjoy! cookbook) for Noel and I, lunch boxes for the boys.

Dinner - Sophie Gray's Wine Braised Beef with Herby Dumplings. Another crockpot meal as we have rugby training three afternoons a week. Whether the dumplings will turn out with GF flour remains to be seen! Accompanied by mashed potato and the mandatory broccoli for the kids.

Friday -

Breakfast - Er - toast? No idea!

Lunch - Only the boys and me today. Soup for me and usual lunchboxes for the boys.

Dinner - Smoked fish cakes. Again courtesy of my hunter-gatherer husband! Accompanied by salad, carrots and green beans.

Saturday -

Breakfast - Rugby for the boys, which means bacon and eggs all round!

Lunch - No need for lunch today, as provided at rugby.

Dinner - French Shepherds Pie a la Poppet. Liam's favourite meal in the whole world!

Sunday -

Breakfast - Omelette

Lunch - Toasted sandwiches

Dinner - Roast pork, kumara, potatoes, pumpkin, broccoli and carrots.

For dessert if the kids want it we have plenty of vanilla ice cream. We love making different sauces to go on it and have enough condensed milk in the pantry to make caramel sauce all week if we need to! We have feijoas, raspberries and grapefruit in the orchard at the moment, plus 2kg of Easiyo yoghurt for snacks and all the ingredients we need for baking to keep everyone happy snack-wise. At the moment, all I need to buy are apples, mandarins, potatoes, sour cream, carrots, broccoli and *gulp* cheese but only a small block. I have all the ingredients to make bread for the week and a whole bag of milk powder if we run out. Bring it on!

Noel ended up catching enough fresh snapper for two nights so that's very helpful, the pork chops stayed in the freezer! So far I have spent $13.94 on apples, mandarins, lettuce, rice and margarine. I felt extremely proud and smug buying so little. I wanted to announce very loudly to Mr Patel that I was spending no more than $21 in his store this week as I plonked my meagre purchases on the counter but figured he would just think I had gone bonkers again. I'm putting off buying the sour cream at the moment for the French Shepherds Pie - depending how I go it might end up being an English one!

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National $21 Challenge - Day Three    

Jun 4, 2008

Well if there's one thing I've learned from the $21 Challenge, it's how to diversify. Today was supposed to be 'Corned Silverside Day' and I got the meat out and defrosted it ready to put in the crock pot, feeling very proud of myself for being so organised. The only problem I find working from home is, you think you've got all day to do things like putting the washing out, emptying the dishwasher and taking out the rubbish, so you keep putting it off, thinking you've got plenty of time and then find to your horror that you haven't got around to doing it at all. Such was today's scenario with putting the corned beef in the crock pot. I didn't actually get around to doing it. By the time I had picked the kids up from school, spent an hour and a half at rugby training and popped in to see my brother in law and nieces who were visiting the in-laws, we arrived home at 6.30pm with the corned beef still in the fridge and absolutely no idea what was for dinner.

However, I refused to panic! Thanks to my pantry and freezer inventory I knew we had heaps of food, I just had to throw some of it together. My mum had made a huge batch of delicious minestrone soup a few days before and I had been craving some ever since. I found a recipe and reckoned I could do it! Potato, onion and carrot - check. Zucchini – no, but not essential I suppose. Celery from the freezer - check. Bacon also from the freezer – check. Wheat-free pasta – check. Tinned tomatoes – er, no. Oh well, I was just going to have to use the tomatoes in the fridge, although that would mean I couldn't get any more for the rest of the week. I went to the freezer to get the celery and bacon out and a container full of home made pasta sauce – complete with zucchini – jumped out at me! Perfect, just what I needed!

The only other thing I needed was cannellini beans, which I didn't have any of but I did have a can of mixed bean salad which had been sitting unused for months. The soup was ready in no time and we all sat down to steaming bowlfuls, topped with a little grated cheese. Healthy, filling and delicious. I had to chuckle to myself at the thought of all the people who harp on about how the $21 Challenge must be lacking in nutrition or not containing enough fruit and vegetables. I reckon we eat even better during Challenge weeks than at other times because we are forced to eat and buy more 'Nude Food'. Just as Fiona says, it's the cheapest, the tastiest and the best for you. So stick that in your ear Alison Mau!

Talking of the interviewer from hell, I must say an enormous thank you to everyone who has sent or posted messages of support, you have all made me feel so much better. I also received the most wonderful apology from the person who emailed me about looking like I had been dragged through a hedge backwards. We have had a good old laugh about the whole thing! Tomorrow I am being interviewed live on More FM radio. At least I won't have to worry about my hair and make-up this time as nobody will be able to see me. I just hope they are nicer to me than Alison was!

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You either 'get it' or you don't    

Jun 13, 2008

Thank goodness for last week's $21 Challenge! It's certainly proved helpful for a couple of unexpected expenses this week and most of them have been caused by Minnie the cocker spaniel. She started off the week by eating the Sky TV remote. I don't know what was so appealing about it that particular day as it's been in the same place every day since we've had her but she decided that Monday was the day to chew it into a zillion pieces. While I wasn't exactly impressed, I refused in the first instance to buy a new one. I figured it would be good exercise for our family to have to physically get up and down and walk across the room to change channels. Until later that day when I had been watching the news on Channel 1 and the kids asked if I could please change the channel to Animal Planet on Channel 75. Standing in front of the TV like a plonker pressing the button one channel at a time, I decided I didn't have the time or the inclination to keep this up day after day and called Sky in defeat. Once the woman on the other end of the phone had stopped laughing she told me it was going to cost $25 for a new remote.

The following morning I got up and saw in delight that we had successfully captured Supermouse, our evil pantry thief from last week. As suspected he was indeed one heck of a mouse - and there was no way I was going to dispose of him. I ran upstairs excitedly to tell Noel and returned to find both Supermouse and the trap had disappeared. I didn't see who took it but judging by the way Minnie came bounding in from outside and ran straight to the pantry to see if there was anything else worth looting, I had a pretty good idea. I eventually found the brand new trap plonked in the middle of the front garden and chewed to pieces but Supermouse was nowhere to be seen. I am hoping to goodness that the trap did its job and that Minnie deposited him outside having already gone to mouse heaven, NOT inadvertently released inside alive and kicking to darken my pantry once again. Eek!

Wednesday arrived and everyone was on the lookout. Minnie was due to go to the vet to get speyed and under no circumstances was she to eat ANYTHING before her operation. The kids and I had been super vigilant, making sure all food sources were out of the way, not letting her outside unaccompanied or off a lead and so on. With just 10 minutes to go until we were due to get in the car we were all feeling very proud of ourselves for not letting her consume anything - until Ali found her sitting in the middle of my bed eating a cardboard toilet roll tube. She had also helped herself out of the bin to one of the cotton wool pads I had used to cleanse my face the night before and as Ali tried desperately to wrench it out of her jaws she steadfastly refused to open her mouth and swallowed it instead. You can imagine how daft I felt having to ring the vet and asking them to postpone. Fortunately they weren't in the least surprised, being a spaniel and all. We booked her in for the next day instead but decided this time that the only way we could keep her safe and be 100% sure that she hadn't eaten anything was to keep her in at the vets overnight before her operation. Unfortunately this was going to cost an extra $15, bringing Minnie's bill for the week to $47 - not to mention the $180 it was going to cost for her operation!

Even though she is such a ratbag, we all love her dearly and missed her terribly while she was away. We even slept in yesterday morning and missed the school bus because she didn't wake us all up as usual. I'm happy to report she is now back home but deeply traumatised and absolutely scared stiff of me, the horrible lady who she trusted and took her to that dreadful place where they did nasty things to her. Every time she sees me she shrieks and I've lost count of the number of times I've had to go and look for her only to find her whimpering and shaking uncontrollably under a bush! Poor Minnie - I don't think she'll be getting into any more trouble for a little while at least.

Apart from those odd little quirks though, it's been a pretty good week. I realised as I walked into Mr Patel's on Wednesday that it was the first time I'd spent anything all week! To date, I have spent $80 this week and quite a lot of that was because I used my trip to the supermarket to pick up several items in bulk on special to put in the freezer. Yesterday I was asked to go and give a talk to a group of women on a low income, who wanted to learn how to manage their money better. They were all really motivated and I was chuffed to find one of them was already a Simple Savings member. Others were solo mums, trying to feed as many as six kids. They all had my admiration, particularly one young mum who had a baby daughter. She told me that she put $10 away every week for her baby's education and she couldn't touch it until she was 21. The condition was - her daughter would only be entitled to the full sum if she didn't repeat her mum's mistake and get pregnant before she turned 21. If she did, she had to give her mum back half the money! We all had a giggle and I thought here was a young woman who obviously was doing her best with the little she had.

Until we started talking about food. As always, the subject of the $21 Challenge came up and I was explaining that to be able to do that, you needed to have a basic range of staples in your pantry. This girl told me that she never cooked and didn't know how - she lived on takeaways every night of the week. It transpired that she was spending a whopping $200 a week on takeaway food, just for her! The rest of us were gobsmacked, envisaging the trolley load of real food she could be buying with that money - not to mention the savings she could be making. It soon became obvious that it really wasn't the poor girl's fault - she had never been taught any different. The first job she ever had was at McDonalds and she had learned to survive on it. At first she was a little defensive about her eating habits but soon I could see her brain ticking over as she started writing notes. I wrote down all the names of Sophie Gray's books and told her to go to the library and see if she could find them. By the time she left, she vowed and declared that she wasn't going to buy a single takeaway between now and when the group met again the following week. I was so proud of her! I can't wait to see how she goes.

One thing which became apparent from talking to the group was that I never realised how many people have a 'thing' about eating leftovers. They can't bring themselves to do it, thinking it's yukky and worrying what other people might say - even when times are really tough. Is it any wonder we waste up to 100kg of food a year per person! So I told them to do what I do - have tiffin instead of leftovers! I explained how Sophie Gray wrote about 'tiffin' in a recent newsletter and how for me it suddenly made my warmed-up leftovers sound a whole lot more appealing. As I left, the ladies asked me what I was going to have for lunch and I proudly told them of the leftover beef casserole and veges I was looking forward to for my tiffin. I honestly don't think it had ever occurred to any of them to do that before but then I used to be like that too. I could see them thinking 'Well if she thinks it's OK to do it, it must be OK for the rest of us to do it!' That's the whole thing about Simple Savings isn't it? Sharing ideas and trying things you've never thought of before.

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Bill Ralston for Radio Live. Bill has been around for years and has a reputation as a real hard-hitting TV and radio interviewer. After the whole Alison Mau experience, I was terrified - this guy was going to eat me alive! However I couldn't have been more wrong. He was helpful, positive and completely got the whole $21 Challenge concept. Who would have thought I would be discussing the wonders of Lonely Sausage Risotto with one of the country's longest serving media personalities! Don't you just love it when people 'get' Simple Savings?

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Blood out of a stone    

Jun 30, 2008

Sorry it's been a while! What a wild week it's been in our neck of the woods - day after day of thunderstorms and lightning like you wouldn't believe. According to our regional newspaper, there were 20,000 lightning strikes in our area in one day alone! Hence I haven't been able to get online much as every time I tried the storms would start up again and I had to shut everything down! The unpredictable weather also made our $21 Challenge week pretty unpredictable as we didn't know whether we were going to have power from one meal to the next. This week's Challenge was a first as despite my best intentions I didn't get round to doing a menu plan! I don't really recommend it; it makes things a whole lot harder and takes away that feeling of control I usually enjoy when I know what I'm doing in a Challenge week. I think I scraped through more by good luck than anything! Still, scrape through I did, buying only a tin of tomatoes, half a dozen mushrooms and a six pack of yoghurt for the week. Buying the yoghurt was pretty poor really, when I already had a sachet of Easiyo in the pantry but it was one of those weeks!

So we ended up having the following:

Monday - Roast wild pork, roast potatoes, carrots, broccoli and peas. The wild pork was of course courtesy of the hunter-gatherers in the family. I balked at having to cook it but they insisted they wanted to sample the fruits of their labours. I tried, really I did, but I couldn't bring myself to eat it!

Tuesday - Curried sausages, rice, broccoli and peas. If there was one thing I could grow myself at the moment, it would be rice. After almost a year as a wheat-free family I'm really finding this global rice shortage one heck of an inconvenience. I mean, we live on the stuff these days, what rotten timing! Even rice flour is as scarce as hen's teeth, I haven't been able to find any for miles. We experienced the first of goodness knows how many power cuts on this day, fortunately it occurred right as I was serving up dinner!

Wednesday - Noel and my 14th wedding anniversary was one to remember with the biggest storm I have ever seen! He brought me flowers, I brought him Sophie Gray's chicken risotto. Not the romantic meal I had envisaged but we had to come up with something quick in between power cuts! Was a good way to use up the single chicken breast left in the freezer and the can of evaporated milk in the pantry. Note - that's evaporated milk Alison Mau, NOT condensed!

Thursday - Corned beef, home made wedges and salad. Thank goodness for the crockpot on rugby training nights!

Friday - Annette Sym's Potato Lasagne with broccoli and salad. A somewhat spontaneous decision but was a huge hit with the whole family!

Saturday - On a roll with Annette Sym, so made her Indian Curry, except using beef instead of lamb and rice while we've still got some.

Sunday - Roast duck, roast potatoes, pumpkin, broccoli and green beans. From the hunter-gatherers again and no, I couldn't eat the duck either!

Which brings us to the end of another $21 Challenge! I'm going to try and carry it on as best I can however, as we are going to Australia NEXT WEEK! Not much point getting a load of food in for only nine days. I'm SO excited! The Vault has been brilliant in helping us save money for our trip - that's a whole blog in itself but for a while I was wondering if we were actually going to get there at all, thanks to our extremely unhelpful bank. How long have you got?

As you know, I have a mortal fear of overdrafts but what with all our necessary house renovations (and the fact that the painter finally showed up after two and a half years!) we made the decision at the start of the year to ask the bank for an overdraft, just to take the pressure off a little in case we uncovered any expensive surprises while doing the renovations. As it turned out, there weren't any expensive surprises, which is just as well because we were never given the overdraft. First, we received the paperwork from the bank and it was incorrect so we sent it back. Then the bank manager fell ill and our request somehow fell through the cracks and never made it to the person taking over from her. So we placed the request again and sent the paperwork back within 48 hours but we never heard anything back. We were finally granted our overdraft FIVE MONTHS after we applied for it - and now we don't need it any more! I'm pretty proud that we managed to get through this tight time without borrowing but that's not the point - the point is their service was absolutely crap!

Then there was the credit card debacle. I admit to having a credit card but it only has a $1000 limit on it and I only use it for online purchases where there is no alternative. With our Australian trip coming up, and accommodation, car hire and so on to book, we decided to ask for an increase on my card limit, so we could put all our expenses on the one card while we were away and then pay it off when we got back. I rang the bank and asked nicely and was told no problem, I'll receive a notification in the mail in the next few days. My notification duly arrived, but they had only given me half the amount I had asked for. 'That's not right, it's nowhere near enough!' I complained to Noel. So I rang the bank again the next day and was told the reason that the amount I had asked for had not been approved was because I had missed two payments at the beginning of the year. That was news to me - I've never missed a payment! I dug out my records and demanded the bank increase the limit to what I asked for but they wouldn't budge. Even when I asked them just to increase the limit for ONE MONTH ONLY, they still wouldn't give in. I couldn't believe it! There was I, Penny Wise of all people, grovelling for a tiny credit card increase and they wouldn't give it to me. How ironic. I was sorely tempted to throw a Naomi Campbell style tantrum and say 'Don't you know who I am?!' but I figured she obviously didn't, particularly as it sounded suspiciously as though I had phoned through to someone in India.

I was gutted. 'What are we going to do?' I pouted. We didn't have time to go shopping around for a different card, by the time everything was processed it would be too late for our trip. 'Hang on', said Noel. 'Your credit card is in your name only - I'll just apply for one in my name!' He insisted on sitting down on Saturday afternoon and emailing a request to the bank. 'If they still say no, we'll just tell them to get stuffed and take all our banking elsewhere', he said. I didn't like his chances after my experience, especially via email - I mean, the bank has always dealt with me, whether at the branch, online or over the phone. So imagine how gobsmacked I was to receive this email this morning:

'Congratulations Noel! We're delighted to let you know that we've approved your application for a Visa Classic, with a limit of $15,000. Your new card should reach you in 3 - 5 working days.'

WHAT?!? Fifteen thousand dollars?! They wouldn't even give me five! The cheek of it! We never even asked for that much in the first place! Noel thought it was hilarious, 'they must think I'm more trustworthy than you!' he laughed. I just didn't get their logic, we share the same bank account, the same mortgage and everything, yet they were happy to hand over $15,000 worth of credit to someone they didn't know from a bar of soap, when they weren't willing to lend $5,000 to me, who they had been dealing with for the last five years. Apart from being a bit miffed though, I think it's sad really. You can see how people end up in so much financial trouble if it's that easy for the average Joe to rack up $15,000 worth of debt thanks to a single email.

So things are finally moving! The Vault has helped us plan our trip and save money in so many ways already, but as I said, that's a whole other blog. I'm embarrassed to admit I had to postpone my meter reading experiment last week because the weather was so horrendous I was too much of a big girl's blouse to go outside and take the reading! Needless to say, it was a very good week for saving power because we were forced to light candles and use camping lanterns most days anyway!

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