{"id":21973,"title":"Sustainable Living saves YOU money.","description":"Frugality has always been a big part of my life. Growing up I was taught to never be wasteful, to be honest, we couldn't afford to be wasteful.","content":"

Let's be honest. Sustainable Living saves YOU money.<\/strong>

Frugality has always been a big part of my life. Growing up I was taught to never be wasteful, to be honest, we couldn't afford to be wasteful. Clothes were repaired and leftovers were never thrown away.

Many a Monday morning I have woken to a breakfast of Sunday Lunch Stew.
Cooked up at 6 am by my Grandfather, who will eat any food in any combination. This clearly set me in good stead for later life, as I will eat almost anything!

I love food, I really do. Fish & seafood is by far my favorite. Unfortunately, I live about as far from the Sea as you can in the UK, and let\u2019s be honest, supermarket Seafood is Sh*te.
So I don\u2019t eat it as much as I\u2019d like. I like my fish fresh. not 4 days, sat on ice in the back of a Ford Transit. So I rarely buy any. Now there is a big myth that frugal people are \u201ctight!\u201d We aren\u2019t. We just don\u2019t waste our money.

We could easily spend \u00a330 a week on a less-than-average takeaway every Friday night, but what we do is save that \u00a31500 and have a family holiday. Then I can indulge myself with all the seafood I can eat in a week.

Learning to think differently\u2026<\/strong>

Truth is for the last 40 years we have been conditioned to spend, Spend, SPEND!
I\u2019m not \u201cAnti-Capitalism\u201d I\u2019m trying to sell T-Shirts online for goodness sake, but commercialism has seeped into EVERY aspect of our lives now. It\u2019s so easy to get caught in the loop of Earn, Spend, Repeat.

Just look at how crazy supermarkets are on Christmas Eve. They are only shut for 24hrs and yet you\u2019d think another global pandemic was happening. It\u2019s the same for bank holidays. I know someone who goes to ASDA every day. They keep their TWO freezers chocker with food but still go every day! Even food Shopping has become an addiction now! But If you look at the way we consume food now its no surprise.

Growing up I remember the majority of the food I ate being simple. Cereal or Toast for breakfast. Lunch was a jam or cheese sandwich and dinner was often Egg & Chips or Beans on Toast or the occasional Lasagsana, Spag Bol, or Homemade Curry, every Sunday we had a Roast and
maybe 3 or 4 times a year we had a takeaway, normally on Birthdays or at Christmas and it was always from a local family-run Chinese or Indian Restaraunt. We never ate \u201cFranchise Food\u201d because there was none.

Now everyone expects every meal to be a grand occasion.
OK maybe not everyone, but a large proportion of the population now wants a \u201cpropper meal\u201d three times a day and that meal often includes ingredients that have been imported and flown halfway around the globe, just so Dave from Marketing can have smashed Avacardo 5 times a week. What happened to Beans on Toast?

Eat less Meat\u2026<\/strong>

The same can be said for meat consumption, for generations meat was expensive, in fact until the industrial farming of the 1950s very few people in the UK ate meat every day.
People certainly didn\u2019t have meat at every meal which is often the case today.

in 40 years meat has gone from a luxury mainly eaten once a week to a daily staple and that's not sustainable. In fact, we now know that the meat industry is responsible for<\/p>

14% of all man-made greenhouse gases, including methane and is a significant contributor to other global crises, from deforestation, plastic pollution, and even antibiotic resistance!

I\u2019m not anti-meat either. I believe in buying sustainable locally sourced meat from family-run farms and ideally from rare breed livestock. As with seafood, I\u2019d rather eat much less of a better quality than eat poor quality every day.

Keep your money in YOUR pocket! <\/strong>

We have become disjointed with our own money. I honestly believe that many people don\u2019t see the money they spend as their own. We rarely even hold physical \u201ccash money\u201d anymore. Everything we buy is done via the illusion of contactless, you don\u2019t ever need a bank card anymore with apps like Apple Pay. We aren\u2019t even aware of how much we are spending until days later when we see the bill\/statement.

But this is all part of the spend, spend, spend grift we live under. You are told you MUST have it NOW and to get it you better buy it QUICK. So Buy NOW. Pay Someday\u2026

The truth is do you really need it? Whatever it is?
Will the Kellogs Coco-Pops feed your kids better than the Lidi Alternative which is a quarter of the price? Is the weekly \u00a350 Pizza Hut really so much better than the Aldi alternative or would you prefer to have the \u00a32600 sitting in your bank account?

So next time you reach for the impulse buy, stop and just ask yourself.

Do I need it?
Is there an alternative?
Can I afford it?
Am I happy paying \u00a3X for it?

If the answer to any of those questions is NO, then keep that money in your own pocket.


If you are interested in my Sustainable living journey all of my Vlogs can be watched on my YouTube Channel - Grow Your Own Life.
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