We're saved.......

For now that is.......
Yes, it's confirmed. You Swedes have to stand out with us even longer. Our life in Sweden is saved, at least for now. Thanks to my contact at the bank who put her all into helping us to get us a little breathing room to make it through the months ahead. In hope that at least one of us is going to find a (new) job.

She gave me a big compliment, she said "du kan koka soppa på en spik ". You Swedish people know very well what that means, but let me explain for those others what it means.
Literally it says I can make soup from a nail. It means more or less that I can make something out of nothing. In our case it means that we can make ends meet at the end of the month, with a family of 5, on an income of 14.354 swedish crowns = 1.575 euros
(and that includes child benefit [barnbidrag] and housing benefit [bostadsbidrag])
How do we do it ? Sometimes I really wonder, but there are some things you can do to save money that are actually very easy. I'll share some of these, maybe it helps someone else when they're in a bit of a tight spot someday.

First up:
Make a  menu for a whole week, (we write our menu on the fridge door with Whiteboard pens) and then make you grocery shopping list from that menu and what is missing in your pantry or freezer. It helps to make a menu using what's on sale in your favorite (or cheapest) supermarket.
Make sure, when you go out to do your grocery shopping, that your stomach is filled. A growling stomach is a killer for your wallet. It makes that you buy more than what's on your list because of the lovely smells and the way the alleys and products are placed in the supermarket. They have these very neat tricks they use to reap even more money out of your pockets then you intended or want to.

Second:
Buy second hand.
We buy almost everything that's not food related second hand, clothes, furniture, kitchen equipment. We love to go "på Loppis" A loppis is a second hand store or maybe even a flea market and there are lots of them around here. We have a few favorite ones where we know that we will succeed. Especially when it comes to clothes, it can be tricky when you go shopping with three kids, 2 of them in their teens.
But also other things like kitchen utensils are often very cheap. I like to use cast iron cookware, but buying a new kettle is incredibly expensive, yet I do have quite a number of those at home, thanks to the secondhand markets.
Nowadays you can even shop on Facebook. There are many selling pages and even pages where things are donated for free or maybe  to trade for something else. Benefit from it

Third:

price difference between normal and Eko

When you live on a very small budget and you do your groceries at the supermarket you'll certainly find out that cheap food is by definition not the healthy kind. The cheapest food mostly consists of fries, hamburgers, pizza and packages with lots of E-numbers on the ingredient list. Definitely not the kind of food you would want to stuff yourself with.Therefore if you have a garden, put it to good use and grow your own food. How you want to do this is your own choice, but we choose to do it Biologically/Ecologically. It pays to grow your own food. For one it just tastes a lot better then the stuff you buy in the supermarket, It is  rewarding and you know what you eat.
Of course you'll have to buy seeds, that may cost a little but when you see what it'll cost you to buy the fully grown vegetable in the supermarket, it is well worth the price.

 It may cost you a little more in a non-material way though.It'll take a lot of effort, persistence, patience and a very large dose of energy and hard work, but......... when you put a bit of homegrown broccoli in your mouth, you'll forget about all that.

Fourth:
Don't ever fall in the trap of buying things with money you don't really have.
It is so easy to buy something you wanted for so long on installment or creditcard. In they end you always pay much more then the thing is really worth. if you start on buying things on part-payment it will become a disease hard to get rid of.
It start with one item and a small amount per month, next month you see something else and another small amount is added, and so it will keep going on until all these small amounts have added up to become a huge amount which you no longer can pay up. We've fallen for that trap and payed dearly for it. If we really want something and it is over our budget, we simply save money until we have enough to buy it. And that is the only way.


And last but certainly not least:
Read this Book

First my husband read it and told me it would be a good idea if I would do the same. So I did, (I sometimes really do listen to what he has to say ;), not to often though )   and I can only conclude that he was absolutely right. It is a very inspiring book on how our monetary economy is consuming us, absorbing us humans.We are all chasing an ideal of wealth that is mostly material. People want to have more gadgets, more comfort, more money, a bigger house and once they obtained it......they're still not happy. They are a prisoner of their own mindless consumerism in which they have to work two jobs to be able to pay for the house they live in and to get all the stuff they want, having no time left to really enjoy or even use the things they obtained.
In this book the author Ben Hewitt himself goes through a transition  from this mindless consumerism to a thoughtful consumption through a friendship with another man who lives a happy life with almost no money. Instead of being a prisoner of the monetary economy, he is a man who sets a new standard for true happiness and wealth.
It is certainly not a book written in anger.  It is written with a good dose of humor in a very understandable language, even for those with absolute minor understanding of how economics work, like myself. As the writer is an American, the book looks mostly at the American society, but since the whole world is trying to be like America, it fits right in in our European society. I have certainly enjoyed reading this book and it sort of has given me the confirmation that our visions on money and economics are not so strange at all................