Dreaming of financial freedom!

Thanks MadVix, I'll take a look and see how I get on

ShangaiJimmy, I love the spreadsheet! I've input my figures for 2018 and will use it going forward. I also had a play with it and entered the figures from when we moved into this house 3 years ago and it shows that our daily interest has gone down from £19.47 to £10.57! I know it will go up a lot when we move into the new house, but it will really help to see the daily interest and watch it go down as we overpay. Thank you

We've had a relatively cheap few days. After picking up the in-laws from the airport, they wanted to eat quickly, rather than wait until we got home then order food so we went to McDonalds instead. We tried to treat them but they were having none of it so we ended up being treated instead!

On Saturday we went to my Dad's place to pick up my Mum (DH stayed in the car as he's still wary of being around Dad in case he passes on his cold). We then went to my Grandma's house to take down her Christmas decorations and we stopped to do some shopping for her on the way. DH and I hadn't eaten so we grabbed a meal deal while we were shopping, which we then ate at Grandma's. I'm not sure if I have actually been charged for it though as I used Apple pay on my phone, as I often do, and I got the notification on my phone from Apple pay to say that MBNA had registered a charge of £6, but the till was still asking for payment. I called over a member of staff and showed them the message on my mobile phone and the message on the screen of the till. It's never happened to me before and they'd never seen that either so in the end they just told me to take the shopping and they cancelled it off. I guess I'll find out in a couple of days if the payment registered. Grandma was happy that her decorations were taken down and stored back in the loft, and that we'd brought her some shopping. She gave me £30, which I tried to refuse because I really don't think she should be giving me money all the time, but she wasn't having any of it and actually got quite upset when I tried to hand it back so I said thank you very much, but I really don't like that she feels she has to pay me to help her

After we took Grandma's decorations down we headed over to the in-laws. They had kindly invited DH, me and my mum round for a meal on Saturday in lieu of Christmas dinner. It was lovely. DH, BIL, mum and I watched Catchphrase while the in-laws cooked the meal (they wouldn't let any of us lift a finger), then when it was ready we went through to the table and it was set beautifully with Christmas crackers... of course we all had to pull them and wear the silly hats for the rest of the meal! They even finished off with Christmas pudding and brandy sauce. The food was great and the company was even better! Afterwards the in-laws opened their Christmas presents from us and gave us the gifts they'd brought back from America. BIL had even bought each of us a scratch card, and a joint lottery ticket. Sadly, we're not millionaires, however the in-laws won £7 between them

Yesterday we used up the last of the fridge items and some bits from the freezer. We're now ready to go shopping today. I'm going to take an inventory at lunch time so I know what meals I can make to use up some of the items still lurking in the tin cupboard and freezer. I'm going to try and keep to basic rations now so we'll hopefully not have much, if any, food to take with us when we move.

We have the BIL over tonight and DH is cooking so I'll have a nice relaxing evening. We're currently watching Stranger Things season 2 (DH and I have already watched it but it is new to BIL). When there isn't Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead on we tend to rely on Netflix and Youtube to fill the weeks in between. The Walking Dead usually starts up again around my birthday but we may be in the new house then, so we'll have to see what we do then. We will either end up watching it separately or hold off watching until we see BIL, but it's hard with spoilers posted on Facebook or BIL's colleagues talking about it so we'll have to see how that plays out.

Nothing new to report on the house front, other than we have taken the packing boxes out from the loft and done nothing else! We really must make a start this week, even if we only do an hour after work each day, it will be a start and then when we start to see it making an impact I think it will spur us on to finish as much as we can. I think half of the issue is that we don't have a completion date yet. DH seems to have a nagging doubt and isn't sure the move will actually happen. I think this is due to the buyers' solicitor coming back with questions, not having a completion date yet and the electrician who is due to complete an electrical certificate cancelling on us on Saturday (still no new date for when he will come). I'm remaining optimistic, although I am aware that we need to get removal quotes and book them well in advance so I am starting to get a little nervous about it. Hopefully this week will bring some good news for us.

eBay listings have stalled so that is another aim for this week. I also told DH we need to look at things as we pack and decide if we really want to keep it. I'm going to try to cut down on what we end up taking, but we'll see. He is very sentimental about things (read as borderline hoarder) so I find it hard to convince him to part with things. Luckily he doesn't buy much so at least he's not accumulating more.

Jessy103 wrote: »

Let me know if you need to re-home that alcohol from your bar, I'm pretty sure i can give it a good one! Lol! Good luck with the packing and well done on the tin cupboard, it's so easy to forget what you have lurking and end up buying more!

Haha Jessy! I'm sure I could find a few people to help with that :beer:

We had the in-laws, including BiL, round for tea yesterday. We wanted to repay their kindness for having us over and also we're not sure how long we have left in this house so it was nice for us to have another get together here. I prepped the veg and chicken earlier in the day as DH was in meetings all day and we hadn't been able to get fajita sauce from Tesco the night before as they only had fajita seasoning so I new I would be on a hunt after work. I went to the big co-op by us as soon as I finished work but they only had Old El Paso sauce, which contains wheat which MiL is allergic to and I was running out of time. I didn't have time to go to ASDA so I popped into LIDL across the road and luckily their fajita sauce doesn't contain wheat :T - LIDL to the rescue! We used two jars and DH used both full sachets of fajita seasoning from the top of the jar (we normally just use half a pack per jar) so it was very spicy! Luckily I'd bought some sour cream and guacamole to help cool it down. Luckily as everything was prepped it didn't take long to cook so we weren't waiting long. We finished with cheese and biscuits (we'd got them for Christmas and not used them so it was good to use up more food). We also had a bottle of wine that we'd bought on holiday in Majorca that we all enjoyed and a desert wine that BiL hadn't tried as he didn't go with us on that day of the holiday... 2 bottles that we now don't have to take with us to Nottingham!

The in-laws were telling us that used a packing service when they moved MiL's mum and dad in with them and it was great. They said the packers are so experienced it didn't take them long at all to pack up and they are very careful and already have all the packing materials. It's convinced us so we're going to get some quotes for a full packing service. We received the pack from the house we're buying and there is a bit that states that delays after the completion date incur a severe financial penalty so it's probably best to leave it to the experts. Unfortunately, the last page of the seller's pack is the contract, and it was the wrong one - the solicitor (or more likely her admin) has put in someone else's contract so we're having to wait for a copy of ours to come through, although as we haven't heard anything about our buyer's signing, there isn't really any rush.

OP is now up to £35.05 - it's so close to payout, that's helping to keep me motivated to check every day. I've also received my payment from Pinecone and Prolific. I haven't had nay new surveys through from them though so progress slow on that front. I referred my mum to TopCashBack and she has now met the threshold so the money is showing as 'confirmed', just waiting for that to hit payable and I'll add that to my RS fund. I also paid in my £83 change float that we use for car boot sales, stalls etc. as I won't be doing anything before the move and would hate to accidentally lose that money in the move so I thought it's best sitting in my RS fund for now and I can always withdraw some change for a float later. So far I'm at £184 / £300 so just over half of my target for the month.

To Do: (listing for accountability)
1) List kitchen table and chairs for sale (failed to do so the other day)
2) Bring down the broken beds and mattresses and put them outside so I can arrange bulky household waste collection
3) Arrange bulky household waste collection
4) Ring movers to arrange quotes for packing & moving