War Diary from Frugal in Norfolk

This entire series is really interesting.

My husband had taken early retirement from the RAF on a pension of £500 per month. We had sacrificed a large part of his pension in order to clear our mortgage. Doing so meant that this amount of money would be fixed for the next 5 years until he reached 60 when he would get a pension increase (a huge 2%). I was training to be a nurse so we assumed I would and could help out hugely on the financial side of things. How wrong can you be.

Within two months, I came close to having a nervous breakdown and had to give up my training. I was unable to drive past the hospital for the next 3 years without feeling physically sick! We had always been careful with our money but now had to learn to live on this fixed sum.

We cut down everything we could think off and when that wasn't enough had to look at food - our last desperate attempt to keep within our budget and steer clear of debt.

This is our story, very relevant to today and we hope you will find it useful. The first part will be condensed so I can keep it current month by month, posting at the end of October the entries for October 1994. I will run it under the label Wartime Diary (WD) As I don't yet know how long these static pages are, I may need to add new parts as I progress.

We all have to eat but people during the war ate surprisingly well and their only real complaint was lack of variety combined with difficulty in obtaining their normal food when required. The more I read about rationing, the more I realised it was the answer to our dilemma. I discussed it with my family and we jointly decided, out of curiosity, to see if we could reduce our weekly food bill and to see how we fared - excuse the pun. I am really looking forward to it. My husband DB is willing to have a go, our young son DS isn't sure but luckily for us, he is still at that tender age of 'compliance' - most of the time!