My No Spend Challenge 2022 - Adding Up the Cash Stash

This morning I finally got around to adding up the Cash Stash.  

I had built up my little pots of money from various sources, the enamel teapot held the cash unused from the previous years Sealed Pot Challenge as well as the money I have been making recently from selling on Facebook Marketplace.  Then there was the little wooden box that has been collecting all the little bits of change to keep my bag lighter and the tile-fronted drawer that sits in the kitchen was used to save some £2 coins and had money added to it over the course of the year whenever I drew some cash out of my bank account, it was just there for emergencies and was never intended to become part of a Challenge.

It all adds up, and I consider myself to be very fortunate that I am able to do this.  Back in the day when my boys were growing up, any pots of money around the house were but a pipe-dream.  Our only savings were a large whisky bottle that we dropped pennies and two pence coins into ... and even this was raided as emergency food money some weeks.  It's this background that has honed my frugal mindset and which inspires me every so often to buckle my belt tighter and challenge myself to do better with my budgeting.

Do we all really need everything that we have?

So lets go through the cash I had around the house and get it all together to see the final budget for 2022.

In my handbag there was £25 in notes and no small change*.  I don't use a separate purse as this handbag has slots for cards and space for me to keep bank notes nice and flat, these plastic notes are murder to store folded!!

The little vintage money box didn't seem to have that much in ...

... but it all adds up.

Yes, there was £12.44 ... and a Kune!  I had to Google that one, seemingly it is a Croatian coin worth at todays exchange rates 11p, so although it's un-spendable someone palmed me off with more than the 10p it pretended to be.  😁

I'll keep it as a souvenir.

Peering inside the teapot for the first time in months, it looked pretty promising.

And indeed it was.  

The notes, and one and two pound coins were from Facebook Marketplace sales and the money in the polybag left over from last years savings.  A grand total of £117.88.  The odd 6p that you can see on the edge of the front £5 note was found on the ground on a dog walk and had been added to the pot on our return.

The little drawer I knew would be holding the bulk of this years budget.

Oh, that looked so much better ... and there were coupons that I had forgotten about.

A lovely round total of £400, plus the two coupons which are worth a total of £12.50.  

It's lucky that I did dig them out now as the Booths coupon expires in a couple of weeks, and I have no intention of losing £10.  I think I will wait as long as I can and then use this for a fresh fruit and vegetable top-up shop just before it expires.  This should mean that I can get through January with a very low spend.

Seeing the two coupons in the little drawer jogged my mind about my Nectar points, which are given out on any Sainsbury's shop, and which I have built up quite quickly over the course of the past year by buying some of the items that they give me extra points for.  The good thing is they usually issue the extra bonus points on your regular purchases and as mine have been mostly fruit and veg this means that I could continue to accrue many more over the next few months just by buying a few things that I need when they are on offer and then use the even higher points balance to pay for my shopping one or more weeks to have a bit of a top up as the cupboards start to run low.

(It works by for example them offering you 20 points which you would normally only get for spending £20 on something like bananas.  So buying one banana for 12p means you get points as though you have spent £20.  I hope this makes sense for those of you not used to Sainsbury's system.)

* The reason I had no change in my bag became obvious when Alan came in yesterday afternoon just after I had finished all my workings out and said he had found £5.20 in his coat pocket that I had given him along with other coins when we went to the hospital for my consultation.  He had paid for the parking ticket with money from my bag ... and kept the change.  So my workings out were quickly revised to include this unexpected windfall, luckily at this stage my scribbles were still on a scrap of paper 

I have decided to use my free gift Country Living diary as my Challenge notebook for the year, so all the workings out were written down at the front of it.   As you can see I have an average of just over £50 a month, which if I can keep the first few months spend really low will rise, and looking at the amount of food I have in the Lodge this should be quite easy to do.

The rules are still whizzing around in my head a bit and not really finalised, so I will come back tomorrow with a new blog post containing them ... and if you would like the photos I have taken of the Food Stash.  

I have food in the strangest of places, as I discovered when I went to bed last night!!

Sue xx