Thriftuary (Part 5)

This is it!  What you've all be waiting for: the grand finale of Thriftuary. Today, all your questions will be answered*.

It actually ended a couple of days ago, but I thought I would hold off 'til the weekend to get some lovely graphs and statistics ready for you.  Graphs and statistics are ace.

Lets start by getting the spending chart out of the way:

Ahh. Lovely.

As you can see, I spent considerably less than our Ben over the month. £38.09 less, in fact. That's almost a 30% difference.

So what went wrong?

Pizza.  That's what went wrong.  Pizza and then curry.

For anyone planning to subsist on a tiny budget, here's a hint: don't go to Pizza Hut! While you gobble up their lovely pizza, they'll be gobbling up your lovely money! In all fairness, Ben and his missus did go for a relatively cheap pizza - the whole meal only came to £13.  I expect it was the nasty pizza at the bottom of the menu that only students order because it's made with questionable cheese and pubic hair!  Yum.

You can tell by the shape of his cumulative line that he lost quite a lot of enthusiasm for Thriftuary around about Pizza Day.  Even with those two huge spikes though, he still came out at an average daily spend of £4.85, for two people which I think is pretty good!

Enough about Ben, anyway. This blog is my vanity project, not his. How did I get on in Thriftuary? Here are some bullet points:

• Total monthly spend for two people: £97.69
• Average daily spend for two people: £3.48
• Most expensive day: £6.69 (We had a joint of pork!)
• Cheapest day: 0.63 (Hooray for edible Christmas Presents!)
• Cheapest day what didn't involve edible gifts: £1.39 (Pancakes for the win!)

Yesterday, by sheer coincidence, I read that Labour MP Helen Goodman decided to spend a week living on a food budget of £18 in order to protest about how the bedroom tax wasn't going to leave her constituents with enough to live on.  You can read about it here and see her video diaries here.

At the end of the week, she had only a small swede and a can of kidney beans with which to construct a sumptuous meal! In an article here, she is quoted as saying "I had to eat the same food over and over and over again. [...] I made a stew at the beginning of the week, and I ate the same food four nights a week [...] It was completely impossible to have meat or fish; that was out of the question [...] I found myself waking up in the middle of the night absolutely ravenous, having to make cups of tea and eat biscuits. I had a headache for five days in that week, and I was completely lethargic and exhausted by 4 pm."

While her protest was an interesting and well meaning stunt that doesn't seem to be getting the media attention it deserves, I suspect her problems were due more to bad planning and too many midnight biscuits than her budget. After all, I was living on £12.21 a week for a month and had varied meals.  Yes, I was kinda hungry for a lot of it, but not even remotely ravenous, despite my intermittent complaining.

But we had plenty of vegetables and it was very possible to have meat, although I would not recommend they very cheapest frozen mince - I found myself hoping that the news would declare that it contained horse  as that would mean that there was, at least, some meat in it! I soon started cutting it with slightly meatier meat.  My final food list is at the bottom of this post.

Now for some additional bits and bobs.  Dr K very kindly did a few sums for me using a calorie counting app on her ipad.  This gave an approximate calorie count for each day:

• I ate an average of 1382 calories a day. This is a fair bit below the average recommended intake for a big, hairy man like me, but as I am fairly sedentary, it didn't cause any problems.  In fact it had a somewhat predictable and beneficial side effect, which I'll get to in a moment.
• Highest day's calories: 1909
• Lowest day's calories: 805

Of course, all those calories I wasn't eating caused a bit of of weight loss.  Now, instead of being very fat, I'm just quite fat.

• Weight at start: 113.1kg (17st 8lbs)
• Weight at end: 106.95kg (16st 8lbs)
• Total weight loss: 6.15kg (1st)

So that's nice.  Here's another chart with calories and weight and shit** on it:

I gave blood on the final day of Thriftuary. I was actually a little bit worried, because I'd been under-eating for  a month and wondered if this would have any effect on my iron count or my ability to stand up afterwards. It did not. I did, however get some free biscuits, with which I was very pleased. I'm not sure how much a pint of blood weighs, but I'm guessing it didn't make a significant difference to my final weigh in as I was pretty much the same weight this morning.

A final set of bullet points, because bullet points are cool, mostly because they have the word 'bullet' in their name:

• Best purchase: £3.80 for a piece of beef skirt that made two very tasty stews. I initially pooh poohed Dr K for coming home with this, but as always she was right and I looked like a fool.
• Second best purchase: Cooking bacon. 81p for shit loads of bacony goodness!
• Tastiest dinner: Liver, bacon and onions. So cheap and so tasty.
• Nastiest dinner: Chilli made with cheap frozen mince. Even making it bastard hot didn't mask the greasy, horrible taste of Soylent Green made from chavs.

So the conclusion to all of this nonsense is that it seems to be perfectly possible for two people to live on £25 a week. Although we were generally under-eating, I suspect better planning and a bit more experience would fix that.

To celebrate the end of Thriftuary, Dr K and I went to Nando's on March 1st. One meal Nando's cost an entire week's food in Thriftuary. It would have made me pause for though if I hadn't been shovelling hot chicken wings into my mouth as fast and as greedily as I could!

Here's my food list for the final few days of Thriftuary.

25/02/13	7x tea	0.21	2.06
	2 weetabix	0.08
	100 ml milk	0.06
	1 can of sardines	0.47
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 banana cookies	0.18
	Tin of beans	0.25
	Leftover lasagne	0
	slice of Victoria sponge (office cake)	0
	2 yoghurts	0.5
	1 apple	0.20
26/02/2013	2 slices bread	0.04	4.46
	27g cheese	0.13
	Ready salted hula hoops	0.11
	1 small apple	0.20
	2x weetabix	0.08
	100ml milk	0.06
	8xtea	0.24
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	150ml milk	0.09
	1/3 pack liver	0.71
	150g cooking bacon	0.23
	1/3 bag spring greens	0.33
	1/3 bag green beans	0.33
	100g sprouts	0.20
	379g spuds	0.31
	2 small onions	0.16
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	Knob of butter	0.05
	1x yoghurt	0.25
	2x banana cookies	0.18
27/02/13	2x weetabix	0.08	3.92
	100ml milk	0.06
	4x tea	0.12
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	246g beef skirt	1.72
	Leftover liver & bacon	0.00
	16g gravy granules	0.04
	100g sprouts	0.20
	2 small onions	0.16
	161 g carrots	0.16
	154g spud	0.36
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	1tsp chilli powder	0.02
	1 tsp oregano	0.04
	1 yoghurt	0.25
	4x free hotel biscuits	0.00
	Buffet food	0.00
28/2/2013	2 weetabix	0.08	2.04
	100ml milk	0.06
	2 slices bread	0.04
	1 apple	0.20
	1 bag hula hoops	0.11
	11g 'meat' paste	0.05
	Avocado	0.37
	10 almonds	0.11
	2 Finn crispbreads	0.12
	30g cream cheese	0.12
	6 teas	0.18
	100g sprouts	0.20
	1 tin tomatoes	0.31
	Yesterday's stew.	0.00
	Banana cookie	0.09
	2 lotus biscuits from blood van	0.00
	Handful of chocolate buttons from Hannah.	0.00
	2free lemon curd biscuits	0.00

* By 'all' I actually mean few. Or none.
** Not actual shit... just lines and stuff.