More Bangs for my Bucks - MF by 50??

Thriftyknickers

And another late update - this time for March!

So, first of all, good news on the 'additional income' front - a massive £218.45 for March made up of £154.74 cashback from Amex; Lightspeed £8; Quidco £14.41; Valued Opinions £10; Shop&scan £10; Rpoints £4.89 and the rest from Ebay sales. :T

But, as per my last update, March turned out to be an horrendous month - both in terms of finances (but for some good, planned things!) and stress levels!

First of all my job is definitely 'at risk' of either redundancy or possible down-grading. I get to hear on the 29th of April. It looks like around 1/3 of us will be directly impacted - so fingers crossed. Fortunately if the worst (redundancy) were to happen it looks like I would get around £50K plus I have £1K/month MPPI in place for 2 years. Which sounds fab - I just have big doubts whether I would pick up a similar job (particularly local and part-time) ever again. A change of career might be in order! Ho hum! We're all being desk-top assessed so its now out of my hands. And I figure you have to be positive. I feel I'm very lucky to have got to the ripe old age of 44 without ever being out of a job or in this situation before. Plus so far I've always been relatively well paid. If it all ends now, at least it was good whilst it lasted!

So, then we had the saga of DH's car. It looks like Skoda are going to refund around £600 out of the £3,600 but it hasn't arrived yet. Still I guess its something.

Then DH managed to upset my childrens' nursery whilst I was on a course (seriously trivial stuff IMHO about his attitude - ironically no problem with the girls!) but they wrote and gave us 4 weeks notice to remove the children. I had a very tense weekend before I could speak to them. Fortunately, after a very long phone call with the owner, she agreed the children could stay. I had been sooooo upset - as my children love the place. Its seriously new-agey, veggie etc but they love it and its all they've ever known for 2 days/week since they were 14 months old. DH is now under strict instructions to smile more, say hello etc etc. My girls both start school in September so its not for long now.

And now in April, we've had an oil leak in our central heating system - the fire valve needs replacing. So we didn't have any heating or hot water for 6 days - glad the weather wasn't tooo cold.

And finally, 2 punctures on my bike, cycling back from work! Still, we're all healthy and happy - despite it all, so that's the main thing!

The month was particularly expensive because we had 2 holidays to pay for, our house insurance, fees for the various classes my kids go to plus 2 lots of car insurance. We both ended up getting our car insurance through Aviva (pity they didn't come out too well in the Which survey...) but they were a recognised 'name' which undercut our previous insurers and we should get £75 each back through Quidco.

On the good news front, I've acheived a couple of my long term objectives. We're now sponsoring a girl in Kenya, the same age as my children, through Give As You Earn and I've changed my electricity supplier. If you haven't done the latter, I definitely recommend it. It probably took me an hour to investigate and do the switch. I did the compare through the Energy helpline and then took up the supplier through Quidco which should pay an additional £20 cashback. I've swapped from Southern Electric where my DD is currently £45 (although they did recently tell me they could beat this - see last post) to Edf where my DD will be £27.39. I could have gone lower but decided to stick with a 5* supplier. And we're now tied in with them until June 2011. I think this will just become like our insurances - when this deal ends, we'll have a look around again to see if there is anything better out there.

You'll see from my signature that overpaying the mortgage isn't going very well, but increasing our savings is. My plan is to use up the increased ISA limits for both of us before overpaying our mortgage again. Even my Egg savings account is paying higher net interest (2.6%) than my mortgage (2.5%) at the moment. However, I think once we have enough savings in place to cover the planned work on our house I'll start overpaying again and sacrifice the 0.1% interest in order to receive those nice letters from Nationwide telling me my mortgage payments are coming down. Who knows, by then and post-election, the financial world (and my interest rates) might look a whole lot different by then anyway!

Finally, a little money-saving tip I stumbled across by accident. I have trouble with my wisdom teeth getting infected from time to time so I buy a little tooth brush with a long handle from the dentist (but I'm sure you can get them elsewhere too) to clean them. My kids like the old ones to play in the bath with. Whenever I finish a pump-action beauty product (in this case the Boots No 7 Protect & Perfect Serum) I take the pump out and turn it upside down to get the dregs out. Anyway, this stuff is quite thick and gravity alone didn't do the trick on all of it. When I was cleaning the bottle out for recycling with the aforementioned brush it dawned on me to keep an old brush spare (after having a good clean in the dishwasher!) to reach those last tricky bits. I think I would have eeked out another week's supply. How far is 'too far' with money saving?!! :rotfl:

So, hope all is well with you and wish me luck for the 29th!

gallygirl

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

How far is 'too far' with money saving?!! :rotfl:

Sorry Thriftyknickers, you need to do better than that - there is a thread somewhere (can't find it, sorry) that has extreme stuff on it, a lot related to em....... bodily functions & waiting to get to work etc :rotfl:.

Good luck for 29th, if the worst comes to pass you will be well cushioned and have more time to save money, knitting your own yogurt etc

setmefree2

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

First of all my job is definitely 'at risk' of either redundancy or possible down-grading. I get to hear on the 29th of April. It looks like around 1/3 of us will be directly impacted - so fingers crossed.

Thriftyknickers

And another late update - this time for April! I have a really good excuse those, as I've put on 52 items on Ebay so far in May. :beer: Its mainly been my kids last year summer clothes etc so not huge money-spinners but it all helps and helps get rid of the clutter too.

And the other good news is that I've kept my job and my grade (read same salary!) which is amazing. :j There's been a lot of redundancies and down-gradings so its a very strange atmosphere at work and I do sympathise but at the same time I consider myself really lucky, at least for the time being.

So, what happened in April? It was a quiet month for 'additional income' - just £42.21 - £10 Shop&scan; £5 Ipsos, £2.16 Quidco, £6.43 Rpoints and the rest from Ebay.

The switch over for our electricity has gone through and from the 1st of June our DDs should go down from £45 to £27. (Writing this has just prompted me to email Southern Electric to see when we should receive the final bill and hopefully a small refund).

We had a oil (heating) leak (outside) this month which turned out to be a faulty firevalve. I seem to have so much trouble with my 'tradesmen' though. This one turned up and seemed to do a good job, plus did a service. And now the new firevalve has a small drip (inside)! Its only small and kitchen roll is soaking it up. He says he'll pop in and fix it when he's passing! So a few weeks so far and still no word. Does no one take any pride in their jobs anymore or is it just those tradesmen that come my way?

We had a £541.67 refund from Skoda because of the palaver with DH's car (see previous). Of course it helps and they needn't have paid anything I guess, but there's no way on earth we'll ever be buying a Skoda again!

I thought I'd share a bit of good customer feedback with you though - instead of moaning all the time. DH managed to rip one of our 2 top sheets on our kingsize bed. When we looked at it and the other it had gone very thin so decided to replace them from The White Company where I got them from originally. 2 Kingsize top sheets = £72 after the discount (plus Quidco on top). It was only then I realised that my original sheets that I've now replaced were 18 years old and were washed every week! I was very impressed! (And the new ones are lovely!) So expensive, but hopefully worth it and fits in with my theory that sometimes you get what you pay for quality-wise!

You'll see from my signature that overpaying my mortgage is going disasterously as we're diverting all 'spare' funds into ISAs paying higher interest rates than my mortgage. I also feel such a dork! I didn't realise, until reading one of Martin's weekly updates, that you can actually transfer previous years' ISAs. Up until then the plan had been to use last year's ISA to OP the mortgage when the rate went down after the initial first year bonus but now I'm going to transfer it to the Nationwide and get 2.75% instead of the 2.5% on the mortgage. Thwarted (in a nice way) at every turn! Its mucking up my various MFW challenges I signed up for though - will have to think of a way of recording an 'offset' figure or something.

Anyway, until next time! Hope all is going well on your MFW journey!

Thriftyknickers

Apologies for the delay in my monthly update - I haven't been twiddling my thumbs I promise you! Anyway, here's the very late update for May and June.

I'm a bit baffled as to why when I look back at my previous posts, all of my signatures show my current position, rather than at the time of writing?

Anyway, both May and June were very good in terms of 'additional income' - £239.25 for May and £229.72 for June.

May was made up as follows:- £3 Lightspeed; £8.78 Quidco; £32.57 Global Market; £2.14 Rpoints; £10 Valued Opinions; £10 Shop&scan and the rest was profit from Ebay sales.

June was made up of £162.67 Quidco; £3 Lightspeed; and £64.05 profit from having a foreign language student stay. We now have a student staying with us until at least the end of July so that will help keep the July figure high too.

We had a fabulous holiday and Turkey but my car developed a knocking sound driving back from Stansted. The resulting trip to the garage cost £444.70 :eek: but fingers-crossed, this will help it get through next month's MOT. I've been umming and aahing about getting a much smaller (and therefore cheaper to run) car - possibly going from my much loved Renault Scenic to something like a Citroen C1 now that I don't have to cart a double buggy round. However, seeing as I've now 'invested' in new tyres etc, we'll probably wait a while. I wish there was a magic formula which said when the best time is to ditch an old car and switch to a newer model!

Apart from that, the savings are going up nicely. :T

SmlSave

I'm a bit baffled as to why when I look back at my previous posts, all of my signatures show my current position, rather than at the time of writing?

Mine do too, think its just the way they're programmed. Would be nice to see how they've changed though.

Glad to hear you had a good holiday and ouch to the car costs!

Thriftyknickers

Aah, back on track with my updates at least! Here's how July looked.

My 'additional income' was great - a wapping £381.94! :T This was made up of £10.74 from Quidco, £10 each from Valued Opinions, Rewarded Opinions and Ipsos, £26.25 from Pure Profile (my current favourite questionnaire company) and the rest from OISE - the 'profit' from looking after our foreign students. August will be much lower - I'm only having one student for 1 week this month and then that will be it for the year - but it is good not having a teenager to accomodate!

I had a work bonus paid in June and some of that got spent on a mega trampoline - 10' x 15' for the kids - and me and DH! :rotfl:I'm very keen to get my girls out in the fresh air and exercising. I also had to pay for their next lot of swimming lessons - £186 in total :eek: but again its hopefully encouraging good habits and it is something they really enjoy.

We paid out over £1,800 on work on the house but this had been put aside and we've been waiting to have it done for ages, so I'm glad that's out of the way.

Sadly one of my cats died :sad: but she was getting old and it looked like it was very quick. Me and my DDs found her in the car port when we came back from our trampolining class - sat upright, with her head slumped over, just like she was washing her front. My kids went through the whole range of emotions in the space of about an hour. We took her off to the vets to be cremated and now her ashes are sitting in a box while we figure out which bit of the garden to put her in. I know the cremation thing isn't very MSE but I wanted her back with us, if you know what I mean and didn't want anyone or anything digging her up.

I was very restrained at (or disappointed with) the Next sale for my DDs. I normally try and buy a year ahead, but didn't really get that much for them this time. I think they're at a difficult age clothes-wise. I was looking for 'age 6' and still think they should be in cute, little girlie clothes whereas Next etc seem to think they should be dressed as mini adults (or little t*rts if I'm blunt!). Why do they all want kids to grow up so quickly these days? :mad:

Summer holiday outings are making a bit of a dent in the budget. During term-time we had various classes to go to. We met up with a friend and my god-daughter and ended up 'eating out' at the wildlife park as otherwise I'd have been carrying around a picnic all day - it was easier when I had the kids' double buggy for stashing away a picnic! Fortunately my husband does the carrying when he is with us too! The food was really disappointing and over-priced though, so I think I'll have to re-think this one. I don't mind paying out when you enjoy it, but this was nothing special.

I've booked a trip to Giffords Circus for the 4 of us for the Bank Holiday weekend which came to over £60. Again, crazy prices, but we've been before and we all loved it. I read somewhere this weekend that once you earn over a certain amount of money and have the 'basics' covered, its experiences that bring you happiness, not material things and that's definitely my philosophy. I'm just grateful that we have enough money to be able to do these sorts of things - we do have a good income but we do have to cut back on the things I don't consider so important.

I've booked a night in a hotel (Holiday Inn) in Ashford either side of our Disneyland Resort Paris break later this month. I booked via Quidco and researching on MSE and was very pleased. I got one night B&B, plus parking whilst we're away and transfers to and from the Eurostar for the 4 of us for £105 and then a further night B&B for £45, plus Quidco cashback. At least it makes the journey a bit more relaxing and we break up our journey to Ashford with a break in Legoland and use our annual passes (bought with our Nectar points).

Unfortunately, DH's job is at risk. He works for a local authority and they've been told that they're to lose 25% of their senior managers - and that was before the government started talking about 40% cuts! We'll just have to wait and see about that one. I know so many people are in the same boat. DH thinks they won't hear until around Christmas. Fortunately, my DDs start school in September, so this should improve our expenses as our childcare costs will reduce. I also hope to increase my hours to 24 hours/week (from 21). I also have a lot of work on at the moment and have been doing extra hours up until now out of 'love' - I did an extra 7 hours the week before last, but my boss has now said they will pay me 'overtime' - standard hourly rate, but at least I will get paid for all I do which will help. So an extra 9 hours to be paid this week. I know that as long as one of us can keep our current job that we can 'get by' which is a relief but it would be a big change for us.

Unfortunately the brakes on my car have started 'hissing'. I know very little about cars but I know this can't be good. Unfortunately the MOT, service and tax are all due this month so we had a test drive of a Citroen C1 this weekend. It looks like this might be the time to ditch the car and replace it so I'm back to the garage tomorrow to find out what 'nearly new' ones that fit my spec they can get their hands on, how much they will give me for my Scenic and their best price for a new one. Then its decision time! So one way of the other it will all have been decided by my next update. Ironically, considering this thread, if we do go with a new/another car, I'll probably finance it by drawing down on our mortgage overpayment as this would be 2.5% and our savings (mostly ISAs) are all paying upwards of 2.75%.

Finally, a little tip. I've been researching clothes labels and personalised PE bags for my DDs starting schools. It looks like you can get some good deals from Ebay - one of the Mums on Mumsnet recommended it and the prices look much better than the other sites I'd looked at and the ratings on the product and supplier are excellent. I will be ordering mine tomorrow when my kids have decided on the designs etc.

Until next month...! Keep the MSE faith!

Thriftyknickers

Well, you'll see from my updated signature, that we're officially going backwards on the MF front! Yes, I bought a new car - and put an additional £8,000 on the mortgage as this rate is cheaper than what we're getting on this and last year's ISAs. I never know how to record this sort of thing in the various challenges I should be taking part in. I've only made one £500 overpayment so far this year but instead, we've been increasing the amounts in our ISA savings. So at least our Net Worth figure is getting better. Still, I expect to fill our ISA pots in September or October and then I should be able to make 'real' overpayments on the mortgage - and look forward to getting my letters from the Nationwide again. That's assuming a more tempting regular saver or such-like doesn't pop up in the meantime paying more than 2.5% net.... And in the long-term, my new car should be cheaper to run.

I had a bit of bad luck with the car though. First of all the order didn't go through properly to get it transferred from the docks to the garage, and then it got damaged in the docks. I had to wait an extra 12 days for my new car to arrive but at least the garage kept me on the road in the meantime.

So, additional income for August is £97.57 made up of Shop&Scan £10; Quidco £12.81 and the rest profit from Ebay sales.

We had a very expensive month. First of all we went away (without our DDs!) to belatedly celebrate my DH's birthday. Just the one night (but two days) in the hotel plus food and drink came to £324. But we had a fabulous time and felt like money well spent. Then at the end of the month we were in Disneyland Resort Paris so had our evening meals etc to pay for. Still again, great fun.

We've also had various bills kitting our DDs out for school and I finally bought a new bike tyre (the inner tube having popped 3 times in recent months) but I have cycled twice already to work, to 'recoup' the money.

Probably famous last words, but I think September should be a fairly cheap month. I should also get round to putting some more things on Ebay and, if I've filled in my overtime claim properly, I should have 40 hours overtime paid, which I think will come out around £800, which will help us get on track. A sizeable chunk of this is going to be spent on a little break at Half Term though. I figure if I put in the extra hours at work (not really something I want to do) then we should get a treat out of it! It looks like my overtime will be on-going for a while - or at least the requirement will be; they might decide they don't want to pay for it....

Until next time!

ILoveSaving

Hi Thriftyknickers

Long time no speak! I see you are doing well in keeping at it. Does it feel that you take two steps forward and one step back? That is how I feel at times.

We needed to replace my 10 year old car this year, but luckily my Dad gave me an interest free loan, (good old Dad). He was making no interest on his savings so thought he would help us out.

My original goal was to be MF by the time I was 50. We are still overpaying while interst rates are low, (daft not to), but not as much as we would like to. With so many cut backs everywhere, even with the extra hours I got at work we dont feel any better off. At the moment we have reduced our mortgage term by 4 years, but I will be nearly 55 when we are due to finish the mortgage. So I will keep my fingers X that things pick up before long, to reduce that again and finish it when I am 50, (that is now only 5 years away) as I am 45 this week.

Seem to always take stock of my finances when its my birthday, strange?