Journey to Future Freedom

Category: Blogs

  • NZ Made #1 Natural Care

    So one of the things I wanted to focus on this year was supporting NZ businesses. I strongly disliked my very expensive Shampoo and Conditioner which came from the other side of the world but I bought it because I thought it was great for my hair. Clearly someone was either great at marketing or I was a sucker.

    So one of the things I decided to try was Shampoo and Conditioner Bars. I had given them a go about 10 years ago as an attempt to reduce our plastic consumption and they were awful. My hair turned dry and stringy and really felt like Straw.

    So I decided to give then a go again this year knowing that technology had come a very long way in ten years. I went with this company based on the fact that they were NZ made.

    Well they turned up and my package loving 13 year old snapped it up and opened it…she was a tad disappointed by the contents. I however, loved the sustainable packaging and I can say after a month of use that I am a complete convert. I absolutely love the product. The Shampoo lathers beautifully and my hair feels stronger than it ever has. My hair used to look fluffy and frizzy by the end of the day and now it feels smooth and soft.

    A win all around. It is slightly cheaper- not sure it will last as long though. There is no plastic bottles and I love how my hair feels.

  • 20% Planning 80% Execution

    I have always been a planner. I can make the numbers work out beautifully on paper or I can come up with itinerary that has the best intentions. However, I really fail on the execution!

    I have come over the past year to realise that the planning means jack shit if you don’t put it in practise and consistently.

    Let’s use saving money on takeaways as an example. It’s easy to cook every night for a week but then kids sports go later than planned, and one of us ends up working late and you find yourself thinking, “We will just stop for something on the way home.” It is such an easy trap to fall into. Then you think oh I’ll do better next month, but next month comes and the same thing happens.

    Well I put a stop to this!

    First thing I did was load the freezer with easy meals. You know the ones that are ready in 20 minutes, require very little cooking and best of all no thought! Tacos, Nachos, Soups, burger patties. This meant that I no longer had time as the excuse.

    The second thing I did, was point out that if we purchased takeaways then effectively one of us had worked late for “NOTHING” Lets say we spent $80 on takeaways, easily done for a family of four in NZ. Then the 2 hours working late had been completely in vain. Nothing more degrading than hubby walking in the door and me saying, “Welcome home, here’s dinner that you just paid for with the past two hours of working . It isn’t worth it!

    Gone are our days of takeaways- I think it’s been a good three months since we had them. Or so the kids keep telling me. Although I have noticed they have pretty much stopped asking. I prefer now to eat out on a special occasion where we can have one on one time together with no devices .

  • Better Off!

    Wow what a read this was. It really challenged my thoughts around what I would be prepared to live and live without. I often think that Technology is both a curse and a blessing at various different times and so it was an enjoyable read. You could really feel the growth that happened as the couple worked their way through the 18 months that they lived without.

    The conveniences that we live with; running water, instant heat, light at the flick of the switch, refrigeration. The ability to boil the jug, use the oven within minutes of turning it on, dry my clothes in the drier on a rainy day, search google for a recipe or information. Pop to the supermarket when short on an ingredient.

    I am sure that I could live without some of them. I would just need to be more organised or perhaps have a lot more time on my hands. Which I guess is where the convenience of it all comes in.

    I think it would be fun to rent an off grid home for a weekend and take the family away to see how we all cope with it. Probably be a great way of torturing the teens and probably ourselves in the process.

    Is it something you could do?

  • What a bust!

    Turns out that NZ prices a way too expensive for my challenge. Yesterday we needed butter, bread, eggs, milk and coffee. I guess coffee would be a want but I needed it!

    Butter and a dozen eggs alone were over $20!

    So my $10 a day year has just changed into a very low spend year. I will still be tracking my spending so it will be fun to see how low we can keep it.

  • 2/365

    Well I forgot my entire handbag today. Good to know I don’t feel quite so tethered to it, I guess. So that meant no spend. I really didn’t factor in the school holidays though.

    I came home from work to an extra child for the night which meant changing up dinner to a meal that would fill the stomachs of teen boys that had been out biking all day so Mac and Cheese it was.

    Thought i’d throw a cake together for snack and morning tea for tomorrow and got half. way through it only to discover said teens had used all the eggs. So off I sent them to the supermarket with $10 and the don’t buy anything else spiel. Well they came back with the smallest pack of eggs ever and a bottle of soda water. Oh well. $7.50 spent.

    This is going to be so much harder than I thought. I spent some time today browsing the supermarket sites and man NZ food prices are horrendous. I know we are in desperate need of butter but $8.29 was the cheapest 500g block I could find. So we will be using it very sparingly from now on.

    Feel free to through suggestions on butter alternatives at me. For now I’m just using up the very large container of coconut oil I found in the pantry.

  • 1/365

    Day One of 365 saw me spend $4 on a loaf of bread. I managed to throw together a bento bowl using what we already had at home. In my rush I had grabbed chicken thigh fillets with the bone in for the meal so I got to work deboning the chicken so we could use it, thank goodness there was only one bone in each.

    The dogs sure were happy to munch away on the raw chicken bones. I looked at the price of these only and was shocked to see that buying the thigh this was is $10 cheaper per kilogram so for the extra few minutes we will definitely be doing this again.

    Crunchy coating was made using a Skinny Mixers recipe- I had no idea I actually had tapioca flour in the cupboard. I can’t recall the recipe it was purchased for either. It will be good to use up some of the stored items that we have. Not sure what will happen after that?

    One child was away for the night so there was plenty of chicken left over for todays sandwiches.

  • Low Spend Year!

    Today marks the first official day of our low spend year. I have been inspired by a couple of books that I have read lately to see if we can spend less. This is actually something that I am quite excited about and I am looking forward to seeing just how far I can stretch the budget.

    I am only focusing on household expenses. So food, cleaning products, animal food, etc. The goal for the next 365 days is to spend less than $10 a day. So $3650 over the year.

    The only rule I have set for myself is that I can’t use the $10 from days in advance but I can save leftover money for days that come in under $10 to use in the future.

    To give an idea on what we would normally spend I roughly worked out it would be around $18,000 if we were to include coffees and alcohol in the budget. Though lately we have been using the coffee machine at home and not purchasing coffees. We have both cut down the alcohol consumption too and we are kicking the year off with dry July .

    How do I feel about this? Excited, daunted, looking forward to seeing where our creativity takes us.

    Feel free to share your cheap meal ideas….

  • Slowing Down

    I have found myself slowly slowing down lately. Rushing syndrome! I don’t know if it’s a thing but, I have suffered in a big way for a long time. I will be driving home from say Hockey and my mind is literally going 15 mins to get home 5 to light the fire, 5 to get the washing in. Dinner needs to be done by 6.45. Every morning I tell my kids they will make me late for work. I work for myself FFS I set my own start time. Why don’t I just make it 15 minutes later. Will we all fall over if dinner is 20 minutes later that my again self imposed time? I doubt it. Do I need to jump when someone says they can’t find something as though I need to set a world record .

    So I have been pushing myself to slow down, take more time, not feel as though I am rushing.

    It felt ugly and hard and like I was forcing myself to walk around naked to start with but I am slowly getting more into it and actually enjoying the time that things take without a time frame to stick to. This morning I got up and made cheese and bacon scones for breakfast, something that in the past I would have declared there no time for on a weekday. We had plenty of time and it was nice having everyone eat together rather than all at seperate times.

    I’m finding it crazy how tasks seem to take less time when I don’t rush than when I do…a strange parallel universe of time perhaps. Weird but I’ll take it!

  • The Moneyless Man

    Last weeks read in my journey to figuring out what future freedom looks like was The Moneyless Man.

    What a thought provoking read! I can confidently say that following the reading of the book I have no desire to live without money. However, it did prompt me to think about the conveniences that we spend money on.

    We overhauled our spending at the beginning of this year knowing that we would have two children in private school and would probably need some extra pennies. So I considered myself to be a fairly frugal spender already.

    However at the beginning of last week I decided to keep a diary of our household spending. Every single thing that we purchased, lunch when we forgot ours, the kids saying they had a shared lunch, a bottle of water here, sports drink while at Moto, coffee while at Moto, beers & wine. I was blown away by all the little extras that added up and mostly because I was disorganised. An extra 5 minutes in the morning to fill a water bottle or get lunch out of the fridge, fill the thermos would have saved us about $60. I justify this as a small amount but when you add it up over a year it is no longer a small amount.

    So I have decided to continue the habit of tracking the small expenses and see if we can find some patterns and change some habits.

  • Parenting through a crazy lens.

    I remember being pregnant with my first and being so excited. I had all these dreams about the type of parent I was going to be, the opportunities I would ensure my children got, the calm educational activities I would do with them. I even dreamed of durasealing school books and duraseal and I hate each other.

    Then life happened! My Dad got cancer, I worked more than I would have liked, my husband worked more than he would have liked. Day care costs, school costs, sports practices and birthday parties here there and everywhere.

    The thousands of toddler questions turned into negotiating with children and then teen tantrums , things broken by boys and girls and their catty comments.

    Somewhere amongst it all my threads of patience grew thin and I found myself raising my voice more than I would like and forgetting things that shouldn’t be forgotten. Things broken by boys and girls and their catty comments.

    You spend the majority of your parenting life questioning whether you are doing it right, could I have handled it differently, will my teens every like me again and then right when you least expect it you get a text, “I love you, Mum”.

    Maybe just maybe i’m doing something right… but it is certainly the hardest job I have ever had. Sometimes it’s hard to see what is beyond the tunnel you are currently in.

    Photo credit to my son(6) The entrance of a hut made many years ago