Attempting to live frugally

For those of you who know me - being frugal has never been a particular strength of mine however - here we are in France with no income - living off our savings and figuring out ways to ensure we make each euro stretch as far as it will go without feeling as though we’re really going without.

It’s been challenging but fun - and in the process I’ve come across some other very interesting blogs of people who have become disciplined either out of choice or necessity and are living incredibly fulfilling lives whilst ensuring that every dollar or pound or euro spent is spent wisely.

One of the suggestions I came across on another blog I’m following (got lots to read if I’m to catch up!) which is http://livingthefrugallife.blogspot.com/ is that it’s very worthwhile comparing prices - I mean actually taking pen and paper to your favourite supermarkets and comparing all the prices of the products you would usually purchase.  For those of you with children of a reading and writing age, you can actually make this into a game of sorts in order to collect your data more quickly - once you have the data, you know where you should buy certain products and you’d actually be quite surprised how much you can save in any given month by shopping wisely (I’ve been seriously astounded by the discrepency in the prices of the same product in a different store).

Many of you may already practice this and perhaps I’m behind - however, wherever Tony and I end up in the foreseeable future, I will always do my best to shop wisely - this is not just something to practice out of necessity but out of choice and where possible I’m going to choose wisely from here on in.

Words of wisdom above aside - we just met some lovely friends from Cayman in Bordeaux  this week, and tomorrow we have our friends from the UK coming over with 5 cases of wine from our “bin”.  Our “bin” is managed and stored by “Lay and Wheeler” (http://www.laywheeler.com/finewineplan.aspx), a UK company that will buy wine on your behalf or upon your instructions in order that you may build a “bin” for enjoyment or investment or a mix of the two.  It’s been a particularly good decision for us and sadly, once we settle in France we shall have to end our subscription as it really is only appropriate to pay the fees whilst in full time employment.  That said, we’ve thoroughly enjoyed not only learning about the wines but investing in a few and enjoying more than a few along the way.  The principle we’ve employed is to buy today what we might enjoy a few years down the line but probably won’t be able to afford at the time it’s ready to drink.  So far we’ve enjoyed some astounding wines that we’ve paid a fraction of the price for at the time of purchase.

Although the “bin club” is not necessarily part of one’s frugal living plan - we’ve tried to crowbar it in to our frugal living by the above justification!  In the meantime - we’ll continue to pretend to farm as we learn what we can along the way!!