When a whole year slips by…..

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IMG_3044

This photo does not do justice to the amazing sunsets from our front deck

Hi everyone!  I’m back.  Almost one year later. This time last year, I thought everything was going well.  We were well onto the path to financial independence, I was working part time.  The garden was looking great.

I was about to take a delegation of businesses overseas for work in late September, and I woke up one Saturday morning to go to the gym.  I also bought about $100 worth of groceries and felt tired.  Then I picked up the paper – a usual Saturday ritual with a cup of coffee made by my husband – and found I couldn’t read.  Bam.  Just like that. Burnout.

Of course, looking back – it was really a “bam” kind of moment.  I had noticed that I was having trouble reading work emails – just skimming for the critical points.  I was finding it harder and harder to remember the names of my staff, and the names of things – like chorizo.  I was looking at chorizo, chopping it up and putting it in that night’s dinner, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name of it!

So I advised my boss, took some leave and went to my doctor.  I wanted an MRI pronto, to find out immediately what was going on with my brain.  A tumour? Early onset dementia? My doctor calmly and quietly said that I would not be getting an MRI. She also looks after two of my daughters who have quite serious mental health issues, and she told me I’d experienced burnout.  Years of a stressful home life, combined with a stressful work life meant that I’d been living on cortisol and adrenalin and my brain had reduced in size over time.  What? Brain shrinkage? But, she assured me, it would grow back over time.

And she was right.  I lost about 65% of my cognitive ability. And within the space of a year, it’s mostly returned. I need to watch my fatigue levels, but I’m doing ok and getting back into projects.

Thank goodness for income protection insurance – apart from a couple of weeks, I was fully covered between leave, my employer and the income protection insurance agency. They also hooked me up with a great rehabilitation provider, and exercise physiologist and some cognitive brain training.

Financially, because of the income protection insurance we have remained on track. So I look forward to sharing with you the remainder of the year and next year as we count down to early retirement at the end of 2020.

I hope you are all going well on your paths to simplicity and financial freedom.  I’d love to hear how you are going.

The evolution of our grocery budget

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eggs on toastEggs from our free-range chickens. Yum!

There once was this woman, living in the Canberra suburbs who thought she was ok with money. Let’s call her – Kirsti. In 2009, she had a blended family of seven, and at any point during the fortnight, she would be feeding 2, 5 or 7 mouths, including her own.

On the basis there were so many mouths to feed, Kirsti thought she was doing well by keeping her grocery bill at $800 per fortnight. She worked full time but she meal planned and ordered her groceries online and felt like as far as grocery shopping as concerned – she had nailed it.

Now let’s fast forward nearly a decade, and Kirsti now feeds the same seven mouths with much bigger bodies on $550 per fortnight. Kirsti is now saving over $6,000 per year in groceries, is buying more expensive coffee beans and is feeding her family organic meat.

Doesn’t compute?

Let me tell you how I reduced the family grocery budget. And once I am Financially Independent, I intend to reduce it even further.

Firstly – meal planning is a great first step in putting some intellectual thought into shopping. Without a meal plan, there are likely to be more trips to the shops, more expense and more food wasted.

But the whole meal planning system needs to evolve to continue to bring your grocery bill down, even in light of slow but increasing inflation.

My first sophistication of my grocery system was to use online shopping, so I wasn’t tempted to buy anymore than I needed, and I could sit down and check in my house what I needed and what I ordered had stock of; which reduced waste. This was a great step one.

Then I learned despite avoiding delivery fees, online groceries had their own (usually more expensive) pricing that was different to the actual supermarket, so I started doing shopping at the physical store, finding marked down meats and veg which you can’t find online. This reduced our bill somewhat.

Then I started thinking about the amount of times our family ate meat each week  – a big expense in our budget – and I commenced reducing our meat intake – red meat particularly – and started planning some vegetarian meals and some tuna or salmon-based meals to reduce the cost. I had to be sneaky with the vegetarian meals and find options that everyone enjoyed – tuna and potato patties, tuna curry, vegetarian lasagne, gnocchi and baked potatoes with passata, cheese and sour cream were some meal options I employed. And no-one refused to eat, so to this day, I continue to have one “cheap” meat free meal a week with the kids, and one night David and I enjoy scrambled eggs from our gorgeous backyard chickens.

At this stage, I was still shopping at Coles. The duopoly in Australia started to get to me – along with their packaging, so I started switching it up a little. My husband convinced me to shop at Aldi which has significantly reduced our grocery bill. During the year of austerity, I actually shopped at Aldi for most things except fresh fruit and veg, which I purchased from the markets. This reduced our bill enormously – down to $350 a fortnight – a huge saving for a short period of one year.

But the packaging started to get to me –there is no deli at Aldi, and even though we were buying their organic meat range, I would have a dozen plastic containers to recycle each fortnight.

So after a while, I built the budget back up to $550 a fortnight in order to shop at the markets where I could buy organic meat and BYO my own container, and continued to shop for staples at Aldi.

This approach was hit and miss (but the meat was beautiful!!) and I would be over and under budget depending on the price of the meat at the time. As the meat was purchased at the market, there was no way of checking the price of meat online while meal planning, prior to the shop, so I would just turn up to the organic butchers with my containers and pay whatever it cost to make whatever was on the meal plan.

This is where a bit of ingenuity finally kicked in. Recently my husband I had a week of being away for work and we didn’t eat at home much. When I came I had surplus funds in the grocery budget. To avoid paying whatever price for meat on the day, I decided to buy what I needed for that fortnight AND stock up on any meat on special at my favourite butchers for the following fortnight. I would look for a chicken and red meat options; but I would look for the cut of meat on special, note what I had purchased in my meal planner, freeze it and then plan my next fortnight’s menu on what I had picked up at a reduced price.

And pairing the beautiful meat with seasonal vegetables only has added variety to our plate and reduced expense.

Genius right there. Buying meat on special a fortnight ahead saves me money and takes away the budget anxiety each shopping day about whether we will come in on or under our budget. Right now in the freezer for next fortnight, I have two lots of organic chicken marylands, a large pork roast and ten chicken breasts, and I can base my next fortnight meal plan around this. Buying beautiful, seasonal vegetables and fruit with low food miles makes us happy.

What hacks do you employ to keep your grocery bill low?

How will you answer “What do you do?” in your post-FIRE life?

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I have a tonne of things lined up for our post retirement lifestyle. I started two Google Keep lists months ago on my phone to jot down ideas when I am out and about – all to avoid the fear of being bored in our retirement.

 

I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately, as we get closer to our FIRE date of December 2020. Some of the FIRE folk can get very focused on the goal of FIRE and forget about the living between now and FIRE; as well as the living after FIRE.

I’ve noticed it in myself. When people ask me “what do you do?” I respond with my current job and it gives me a certain level of pride. I work in the public service. I work in the PM’s department, no less. I also noticed this tendency to define myself by my job when I was a lawyer. It came with a certain amount of unspoken kudos. In a way, I didn’t have to prove my intellect – my job title did it for me. To date, my role in the workplace has been doing some pretty heavy lifting, in terms of describing who I am. I’ve let my job title describe me for years.

Even in the two years leading up to our FIRE date, I am going to have to start redefining who I am, as I move to lower levels of responsibility in our transition out of the workforce phase. I won’t be leading a body of work – I will contributing to a body of work, of which someone else is leading. This will be a struggle for me – I’m an out-in-front-energising-the-people kind of a person.

Don’t get me wrong – the work stress combined with raising teenagers has been a bit of an overload, and I will be looking forward to less responsibility in the work place. But it leaves me struggling for words when people in future ask me “what do you do?”

Are we retirees? Feels like it will age us before our time. I will be 48 when we hit our FIRE date. Retirement in Australia is usually 65. When I have used this term lately people say I am too young to retire. Retirement conjures up images of endless afternoon teas, afternoon naps on the couch and the golf course lifestyle of the 65 and over. Are we travellers? We will only travel for a month or two in winter each year because my husband likes the routine of home. Vegetable growers? I guess but we will grow mainly in spring and summer. I guess I could resort to this shopping list style of describing what we do.

I could say I am financially independent – but I don’t think it provides enough detail about what being financially independent means. It could mean I am filthy rich or living on social welfare…

In some ways I would like to be a little bit provocative and challenge the status quo. When people ask me “what do you do?” I could say “well…… I don’t work”. But in a way I don’t want to leave the questioner feeling uncomfortable or inadequate. That kind of statement could shut down any conversation. Equally, it could open up a number of questions about why I don’t work. But as a community, even though FIRE awareness is growing, I think it’s still early days for the individuals and families to think about a post-work life, or even a life that doesn’t focus on getting up and working every day. People who know me know the plan; but for those that don’t, I imagine shutting down the “what do you do?” conversation will find people stumped for a follow up question.

I’m having a hard time settling on what the answer will look like. For now, I think I will say I am pursuing a number of projects like sustainability, travel and veggie gardening; as well as spending quality time with my family.

I think this will be a work in progress. How will you answer this question in your post FIRE life?

Creating your own death spreadsheet part 2 – net worth tracking

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zoo photo

So… once you have the total cost of your expenses nutted out and indexed for the rest of your life, you come to the part where you need to calculate the income required to meet those expenses. I’ve written about the income my family will need in retirement here but another important part of the equation is to keep track of your net worth – particularly for future planning – and not just the income producing assets. For example, our home is worth nearly $1m, makes up about one third of our net worth and while it doesn’t produce any income right now, it is important for us to keep track of the value in case our circumstances change and we are required to think about how to better deploy that capital for our financial needs.

What is net worth? In my head, net worth is your family assets minus liabilities. Prior to getting serious on our financial future, our net worth would have been barely in the black territory – closer to zero, more like it- as we had a mortgage of $350k. But after some serious knuckling down, some employment payouts and some granularity on the value of my husband’s superannuation pension, our net worth is tracking quite well for our early retirement.

Some net worth trackers out there include the family home; others exclude it. I like to think of the family home as part of the potential income earning asset pool, because you can create ways to use it, like Air BNB, hosting a student; or downsizing later for less and using a smaller capital pool to generate income.

As I share these numbers and the calculation methods, it is not lost on me that my family and I are in an incredibly privileged position. We are both educated. My parents started off in financial dire straits but slowly built some wealth over time (they showed me how to do it, really). My husband’s parents were educated and had successful careers. Both of us were fortunate enough to go to university and have had reasonably successful careers, living in the highest income per capita city in Australia. Jobs are plentiful here. Even though we have both been through redundancies at various times, we have enjoyed a short break and found work within a few months, without any financial losses.

But once again, I find the financial independence numbers for an Australian context hard to find out there in web-land, so I put ours out there to start filling the void. I hope others are prepared to do so too, so we can build a context rich picture for other aspiring financially independent people out there.

We paid down our mortgage following the year of austerity and have no other forms of debt, so I’ll be reporting on our assets only. I use an app called Wealth+ and manually enter the numbers each little while. The numbers fluctuate because we invest the share market; our house increased in value by $50k during the year and we got a closer idea of the value of my husband’s superannuation which boosted our assets significantly. He has a defined benefits scheme and we previously valued it based on his annual statements. Now we have moved the fund to cash and have received a pension estimate from the fund, we have valued his super at 25 x the annual net pension, assuming he lives until he is 80 and draws down from age 55.

So here are the screen shots of the app. We started tracking our net worth on the app in February with a commencing value of $3.423m. As at 28 July, our net worth is valued at approximately $3.545m.

net worth 2

net worth 1

The categories I track are below:

net worth categories

I love watching our progress. Investing and saving can be hard if you can’t see the gains. Knowing our net worth has increased by nearly $120k since I started tracking this February is so motivating and really exciting to show my far-less-interested husband (giggle!) about the progress we have made this year.

Do you calculate your net worth? What method do you use? How do you find it compares to the US versions of FIRE?

How to start you own death spreadsheet in Excel – part 1

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death spreadsheet overview

Grimly titled but the death spreadsheet is the most useful spreadsheet I have ever created.

I created the first version of this document back in 2014 when I felt like I was trapped in an awful job, earning quite well but job stress was out of control and I wondered if I had to tolerate this level of angst and frustration for the rest of my life.

To wrestle back some form of control, I decided to create a spreadsheet to work out exactly how much we needed to earn to live a reasonable life – for the rest of our lives. To build this spreadsheet, David and I had many conversations, over a period of time, to think about and design the type of financially independent lifestyle we would be happy with. An extravagant, luxurious one? No – not really our thing. A really nice lifestyle that includes international travel once a year, travelling within Australia, going to other capital cities, money for our hobbies/passions, time for volunteering and one home renovation project a year? Yes, definitely. I’ll take that version of financial independence any day of the week.

In 2014 we were close to paying out our mortgage, so our expenses were about to change considerably. I also knew both had good superannuation or retirement savings, so I wanted to understand, excel spreadsheet cell by cell how much we needed to earn in order to be financially independent.

And so the death spreadsheet was born. On the top line, I created a table out to David’s average life expectancy and mine (there is a little age difference 😊). Then I plotted out our expected income and expenses until we died. Fun, huh!?!

Key assumptions for the spreadsheet:

  1. Indexation of 2% for wages and our superannuation pensions (except for mine – I’ll take a flat rate)
  2. Inflation over our lifetimes (around 2%)
  3. Conservative estimated earnings on our investments at 5% over the next thirty or so years.

I created detailed expenses tabs that adjusts for this year and next when our expenditure circumstances will remain the same. In 2020 we expect to be paying for only one child in total – the other children may be living here and eating with us, but they will be largely responsible for their own expenses.

I have highlighted the current year we are in, and the year my husband’s superannuation commences ( I LOVE to see those two drawing closer together – means we are closer to financial independence).

You can see our net result bounces around a little but that’s ok – over the 12 year period, it works out about even. In my next post, I will detail how I have calculated our expenses over this period, and how I have calculated how our investments will support us in our two stage financial independence plan, paying down like an annuity.

Excel has saved my sanity! Never thought I would say that out loud to the world…..

 

92 days of winter survival plan

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autumnThe last surviving autumn leaves in our garden

Here in the southern hemisphere, winter has hit. I live in Australia’s capital city, Canberra and it really turns winter on. So the 92 days of a Canberra winter have begun and I’m frantically thinking of how I can enjoy winter, rather than endure it this year.

The summers in Canberra are perfect – it rarely gets beyond 40 degrees, and the overnights are very bearable with a sheet on the bed and the quiet whispers of a cooling ceiling fan. We love our house in summer because we have a pool and various outdoor eating areas to enjoy alfresco dining. It’s on those long summer nights with a glass of wine and the sun setting I thank my lucky stars and can’t believe the life I am leading.

But that lifestyle is still 910 days away and I need to live for now, rather than focusing on when my life will be better once we are financially independent. So I have started a survival list of things to inspire me during the 92 days of winter.

  • Knit my cosy bed blanket. I have purchased some chunky Peruvian wool (like 10 skeins) and have started knitting a large blanket to really keep us toasty during the -6 degree over nights here in Canberra. Just knitting that thing keeps me warm as it continues to grow beyond my lap to my knees as I am knitting.

 

  • I have discovered chai lattes. A little late to the piece, but I made this yesterday, along with some cashew milk and OH MY – it’s like a hug in a cup. Beautiful winter spices in a warm mug in my hands. Yesterday’s recipe was a little ad lib, but worked beautifully:

Chai Latte

  • In a small pot, fill up half way with water and put on the stove top
  • Add to the pot a couple of cinnamon quills, some fresh ginger chopped, grated fresh nutmeg, some allspice, some vanilla pods or paste and some cardamom. I haven’t given quantities here because it really is an individual preference about how spicy you like it.
  • Simmer for five minutes to enable the spices to infuse, and then add two earl grey tea bags for another five minutes.
  • Cool and transfer to a container for the fridge you can use when you need a little warm pick me up. You could either drink this tea heated, or whip up some milk/cashew milk or other nut milk and add half and half with a teaspoon of honey, warm it through and enjoy.

 

chai tea

My chai tea mixture next to my favourite smokey wintery smelling candle

  • If you are home, follow the sun around your home. I have written about this before but I watch how the sun heats up particularly areas of my home naturally and I design my day around where I can catch the most sun.

 

  • Of course days like today are no good for sun catching – it’s overcast and super cold. So basic one I know, but for now I put on more clothes to stay warm, rather than using the indoor heating. I was listening to a financial podcast where one FIRE interviewee just wears a onesie all day and doesn’t put the heating on at all. I’m not at that extreme yet, but I will spend the time to design my stay at home days around the weather.

 

  • Right now the house is 18 degrees but the temperature will fall throughout the day without any sun to warm up through the double glazed windows. So I am doing my indoor work this morning; will grab a bite of lunch here and then head out in the afternoon to complete my tasks – taking an old chest of drawers and office chair to the second hand place; visit my daughter; read up on my favourite magazines in the library and find other cosy, free spots to relax until David comes home and I can justify putting the heating on. One of the greatest pleasures for us is the gas fire we installed during our renovations. It has a mesmerising flame and pushes out heat.

 

  • Make slow cooked soups and stews that are homecooked, without anything artificial and fill up your belly with yummy warm, flavourful, rich food. Last night I made bone broth too, which is a great base for soups, with bones from the butcher, left over vegetable scraps I collect in the freezer, bay leaves and apple cider vinegar.

bone broth

So there’s my top six for now. What do you do to enjoy winter?

So why financial independence and how does it relate to simple living?

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living area

This is a quiet nook in the corner of our newly renovated living area.  I’ll do a house tour later this year.

So why financial independence and how does that relate to simple living?

I love the fact as humans, we are constantly evolving and changing.  I have always had a really big thirst for knowledge, and when I am really interested in a topic, I emerge myself in all available material to learn and grow and connect with like-minded people.

I have found this is absolutely the case on my simple living journey.

First came the feeling over being overwhelmed. With five kids more than half time, a busy job, two kids with mental health issues and interests outside of work, I felt I was never on top of things and always running behind.  My to do list was always longer and greater than 24 hours in any day and I never truly felt like I could sit down and relax.

My health started giving way and I realised things needed to change.  So we created the year of austerity to pay down debt and not be a slave to full time employment.  We achieved this goal in 2015 after some hard work and a small inheritance.

During this time, I was also organising the whole house like crazy.  I thought if I made some sense of the physical chaos in my life, simplicity would descend upon our household like some kind of magic.  A place for everything, everything in its place.

But of course, I organised every drawer within an inch of its life, felt only marginally less overwhelmed and realised I just needed to downsize and declutter.  For a while I donated, sold and gave away stuff in my house like a possessed woman.  Gumtree, eBay, Vinnes and Buy Nothing New became my best friends.  We also renovated which provided a great opportunity to reassess a lot of clutter in our house. The downsizing was enormous – I stopped counting at 25000 items, and I forced myself to reassess all purchases, use up all cosmetics, audit the fridge, pantry and freezer……..

I found the two upsides of decluttering were:

  1. The house felt refreshed, sorted and clear of things that previously made my brain ache. I confirmed in the maximalist/minimalist debate, I’m definitely in the latter camp, although far from living out of my back pack with less then 100 items to my name.  Funnily enough, the first year of our retirement David and I have decided we will go through the house and declutter again as a first priority because we can still identify many items that need to go.
  2. We spent so much less money following a consciously commitment to this form of living and this has enabled greater savings for our FIRE plan.

Once I discovered the FIRE community and worked out we could work less I immediately amped up our savings plans and began consuming everything I could on saving, investing and planning for an early retirement. I realised the FIRE path was really one that could really support my goals of living simply and with less stress.  FIRE became the wind beneath my simplicity wings and the two goals merged into one. I reduced my working days to three a week and began living a simpler life – with a longer term financial plan.

So – in short – from overwhelm to organisation to minimalism to FIRE.  I’m sure it’s such a well-worn path. With December 2020 looming, it can sometimes be a source of overwhelm all on its own, but I am looking forward to writing about our plans for our post FIRE life and all of the hope for a peaceful life it holds. For me, financial independence and simple living are inextricably linked.  To live a simpler life I need to have a source of passive income to pursue the things I want to pursue – be fast when I want to be fast and slow when I want to be slow.

Are you on any of the paths to financial freedom or simple living? Have you been down a similar path?

Financial independence update May 2018

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NGV

This is from the Triennial exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria – spectacular.

It’s been awhile on the post (apologies friends!) but sometimes life takes over (like teenagers and their needs) and priorities change. But I’m keen to let you know where we are up to on the financial independence journey and tell you we have 925 days to go until we are financially independent.

NINE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DAYS

Feels like an eternity and super close, all at once. I have a countdown app on my phone and I when I started it, the number was 1009 days. In a very short period of time, over one hundred days have passed, so this is going to fly by quickly.

countdiwn

So I am keen to write a bit more on this topic and share with you how and why our finances allow us to live a simpler life.

For this post, I want to share with you our financial independence plan. Not to brag, or to be compared to others. I’m just doing it to actually disclose my numbers and my plan, so anyone doing research on this topic can find some cold hard numbers. Lots of websites talk about “…x times my annual expenses” or $1m at a 4% withdrawal rate. But a lot of these sites are from the US and while they are interesting to read about, I am often left wanting after a google search to find something that represents middle class, urban Australia. And if you can’t find, it create it. Start a conversation. That’s my view.

So we have two scenarios we are working on. One is base level, worst case, where both of us feel compelled to leave our jobs immediately…..(usually a Sunday night sort of conversation at our house – let’s call this the Sunday night calculations) and the more realistic and comfortable version, where there is enough padding (let’s call this scenario Padded FI). Sunday night calcs involve finishing up our well-paying jobs with current savings and just earning enough to make our living expenses between now and December 2020; Padded FI (Financial Independence) see us working in our well-paying jobs until December 2020 and continuing our current savings rate (around $50k per year).

One more thing before I disclose the numbers – we have a two-stage strategy. I am 45; my husband is 52. We are close enough to superannuation to take this approach – Stage 1 Before Super and Stage 2 After Super. But I think anyone contemplating financial independence in Australia can think about it in two stages – pre-super and post-super.

For us, it looks like this:

Now:                   Work to save/pay living expenses until December 1, 2020

Stage 1:               Live on my husband’s superannuation, which he can access from 55 and supplement with investment earnings (2021-2032)

Stage 2:               Access my superannuation at the start of 2033 when I’m eligible to start  drawing a super pension (aged 60) and continue my husband’s (indexed)                          superannuation pension

US case studies rely on the 4% withdrawal rate for thirty-somethings, for the rest of their lives. We only really need to build sufficient passive income for a twelve year period to supplement my husband’s superannuation, before accessing mine.

In Australia, for those families with superannuation, the numbers might work a little differently. You may find you need to live off investment incomes for a period of time until you can access your superannuation. Or you may decide to supplement lower superannuation pensions with some investment income. Either way, it’s important to do your long term financial projections to understand your particular circumstances and discuss your strategy with your financial advisor. Ours got the tick of approval a couple of weeks ago at our annual appointment with our financial advisor.

Stage Income total Sunday night Padded FI
Stage 1 Husband pension $       73,621 $         73,621
Investment earnings $       27,433 $         29,819
Income total $     101,054 $     103,440
Savings remaining $               – $     120,000
Stage 2 Husband pension $       86,414 $         86,414
My pension $       40,000 $         40,000
Income total $     126,414 $     126,414
Savings remaining $               – $     120,000

 

As you can see, the difference in income is not that great, but the financial security of some money in the bank is worth the otherwise sleepless nights of not having a safety buffer. So we push through working more and continuing to adhere to the budget, in order to enjoy the fruits of our work later on in life.

Do you have a financial independence plan? Are you thinking about retiring early from a job and pursuing other business or creative interests? If you are game, share your numbers 😊

Upping my Zero Waste game

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market shopHello! Life is full of little obsessions.  Lately mine has absolutely been about reducing the amount of plastic coming into the house. I was inspired by the recent ABC Four Corners documentary on the failing recycling industry in Australia, particularly the recycled glass market, and the mass warehouse storage facilities filled with broken glass waiting to be recycled.  I also heard an alarming statistic the other day – in the first ten years of this century we have produced more plastic then we did in the ENTIRE LAST CENTURY. Finally the science is out on how long it takes for plastic to breakdown, but a known known is that it at least takes longer than our lifetime.  So every piece of plastic I buy/use, I am sending to landfill for my children’s lifetime and beyond. It really got me thinking about how complicit I am in all of this excessive plastic production.

The primary plastic culprit in our house is groceries. And I am the grocery shopper, so it is really up to me to lift my zero waste game.  My theory is if I reduce our supermarket intake (processed foods) , and increase my market intake (unprocessed and likely to be unpackaged, food) then we will reduce our plastic consumption.

In our early, pre-zero waste days I would say the ratio would be 3:1 in the supermarket’s favour, in terms of quantity.

A couple of years down the track, and this week when I went shopping, our ratios completely reversed.  It did not take long.  Every month or so, I look for some new alternatives.  For example, with a bit of research, I located a deli that sold cheese cut from cheese rounds (like a beautiful triple cream brie) as well as tasty cheese – that was not pre-wrapped in gladwrap. The deli just wrapped it up in paper and I bought it home and put it in a cheese cloth. I bought some fresh pasta in a stainless steel tin – they just “tared” my tin (put it on the scales and pressed reset so I did not pay for the weight of the tin).

I then went to an organic butcher and purchased my meat in old Tupperware-types of containers. I know this is still plastic, but I also don’t believe in throwing everything away if it still has a useful life  – it’s going to end up in landfill in any event. Finally for mince, I reused some cereal bags that my husband eats – great for mince and they will be washed and recycled at the REDrecycle facility at Coles.

And they beautiful thing about it all – my early retirement plans were not compromised. The entire food shop came under budget, and I bought all organic meat, including two chooks, a leg of lamb, lamb and chicken mince and chicken breasts.

Strangely when I cooked with some of the meat last night, I treated it differently.  Call it psychological but I found myself not just dumping the meat to brown (or stew, when I try to do things too quickly!) but cooking it in batches, looking for the browning meat and making sure not to overcook it. I put way more love and care into my food last night.

That could also coincide with the fact that I now have more time, as I am working two days a week but hey, it felt great.  I enjoyed every mouthful.

Zero food waste fridge set up

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zucchini spiral dinner

The ABC’s War on Waste has got me supercharged about food waste.  According to the show, and NSW Government data, the average Australian household throws out 345 kilograms of food waste a year. If you think about that in dollar terms – assume an average of $5 per kilogram of food – that is $1725 a year! Let alone the cost to the environment of the food that ends up in landfill centres.

I have a natural aversion to food waste and like to get creative.  For example this week I was invited to my mother in law’s house for a beautiful roast leg of lamb.  She generously packed us off home with some leftovers “for sandwiches” (what a sweet).  Knowing that sandwiches were already made for the week, I made a middle eastern lamb “pizza” for dinner the next night, using the cooked lamb, peas, mint, fetta, hummus and a smidge of pomegranate molasses that I had in the cupboard, all on puff pastry. YUMMO.  Crunchy deliciousness and no food waste.

Despite my commitment, I felt like I was still finding food that was past its useful life up the back nether regions of my fridge and so I decided to take action. I needed a new system that would enable me to use my fridge like a well ordered machine that would tell me what foods I needed to consume  now or soon.  The obligatory before shots:

I reuse the plastic bags for vegs that I buy and wash in the mesh bags when I get home – this keeps the veg fresher for longer. Bit of a mish-mash of all sorts of things right there in the fridge as you can see.  There is food behind the front row too, because our fridge is quite deep.  And there is no recognisable system of organisation in the fridge door full of condiments etc.

So I planned the system.  Really I wanted my fridge to tell me what I needed to use today, this week or this month.  I wanted to know whether the condiments needed to be used in the next three months or would keep for longer. I wanted to be able to look into my fridge and decide what to shop around, for the next grocery shop.  What needed to be used up next?

A couple of containers from the dollar shop (Home Base in Australia), my labeller and voila. System complete (apologies for poor photo quality – fridge light interfered….):

 

For a little closer look at the labelling:

Have you got any other fridge food waste hacks that I could implement? Hope you are all well.