More Bangs for my Bucks - MF by 50??

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6% isn't to be sniffed at at the moment

That's a wonderful rate! I'm dreading when my Reg Saver at 7% finishes in June.

I always knew you weren't mad Thrifty, shame about the price but at least the car will be fixed

Thriftyknickers

Here's another beginning of the month signature update. My 'extra' income is at £97.75 - should have worked harder to break the £100 barrier! This was made up as follows:-

• Quidco £5.78
• Valued Opinions £10
• Lightspeed £2
• Rpoints £4.20

with the rest coming from Ebay - baby sleeping bags, travel seats, twin reins and a neoprene knee support!

My money off savings were at £79.34 for the month. This was made up of MOCs at Tesco, £20 off a meal at Strada courtesy of Tesco Deals, 10% discounts at Clarks shoes thanks to TAMBA and the rest as 15% savings off of meals at Eurodisney as we're shareholders. (Definitely recommend this if you're visiting Eurodisney!)

We ended up having some additional spare cash this month so made a £1,000 overpayment on the mortgage - wish we could do that every month! However, we're having a bit of a change of plan. I opened up a Barclays Golden ISA at the end of May (when the 1% bonus for a year was still being offered - thank you MSE!) and I think this is still paying 3.55%. As our mortgage is 2.5%, I'm going to fill this up before making any further overpayments - unless interest rates move again of course! So, I don't expect the mortgage overpayment figure to go up over the next few months, but our net worth figure should still decrease nicely.

Bad news on my Boden clothes fix! (Or good from an MSE viewpoint!) I decided to stagger my purchases, just buying when I could afford them and now they're out of stock! I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere - not buy when you can't really afford them of course, but have a little money put by so I can buy things when I see them! Oh well - it obviously isn't meant to be!

One for the ladies - I signed up with chiconomise.com - 'the art of living stylishly for less' , the latest venture from former Apprentice winner, Michelle Dewberry. I don't watch a lot of TV but The Apprentice is definitely one of my faves - and a mega week for it this week! I had my first newsletter - you never know, it might show up some (not very expensive!) gems!

And we were suprisingly MSE in Disneyland Resort Paris - our only non food purchase being a Stitch fridge magnet! We stayed in the Disneyland Resort Hotel - very expensive but worth it for us - so convenient with 3 year old twins, lots of character interaction ('course you could just visit the hotel for that...) so didn't really need to pay extra for character meals, didn't need to buy Disneyland Express or luggage storage and it was just soooooo nice! ... Yes, I am trying to convince myself that we should stay there again next time! I took all sorts of snacky food with us (nuts, crisps, cereal bars, fruit) in my klik-y containers which we had start of the day (to make the most of the Extra Magic Hours) and in lieu of lunch. I had to make one trip to the little supermarket in the railway station to restock! We then had a late, blow-out breakfast plus a visit to the Mickey Lounge (open to shareholders) to pick up drinks including bottles of water plus a cake or cookie and then just ate at dinner time. It just seems such a long time ago now!

We also had what I thought was a bargain overnight stay on the way back. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in Ashford (4 of us, including breakfast for £49 thanks to details on MSE) which I thought was very good value. Plus £3.20 back from Quidco too!

I'm going to be paid a bonus in June (which seems so strange when my company is making redundancies) which looks like it will pay between £1,000 - £1,500. We've booked a short stay in a very-kiddy-friendly hotel in Cornwall for £500 as a family treat (during the only week in the rest of the summer when I won't be looking after young foreign students) and we'll be sensible with the rest. Fill up the ISA I guess.

Hope you're all making good MFW progress!

setmefree2

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

We ended up having some additional spare cash this month so made a £1,000 overpayment on the mortgage - wish we could do that every month!

well done on that :T

Thriftyknickers

Oops didn't do too well on posting a mid-month update did I? Will try to do better!

We didn't make an O/Ps this month to the mortgage but with my bonus (a bit more than expected :j,) we filled up my ISA and blew about a third on a 3 night break in Cornwall. Still that means now, apart from topping up my monthly Barclays Regular Saver (£250) all spare monies should be going to the mortgage - unless some more savings accounts come along paying stonking interest rates of course! So, hopefully we'll get back on track!

I had quite a good month for 'extra income' - £161.13 in total. This was made up of £92.18 from Quidco; £4 from Lightspeed; £10 from Shop&scan; £2.94 from Rpoints and the rest from Ebay - mainly my DDs summer clothes and shoes.

The 'money saving' side was £29.66 this month. A £13.20 voucher saving at Costco; a £8.75 saving at ASK using a voucher from the Daily Mail plus MOCs at Tesco and Sainsburys. I also found a 5% code on MSE for Kiddikingdom.co.uk. I shopped around for Crocs for my DDs and found these were a good deal, plus free delivery. (2 pairs plus 4 jibbitz came to £38) and are ideal for holidays plus running around in the hot weather. I was pleased anyway!

Things didn't go quite as planned though! When do they ever?!!

First of all, I hold a small amount of EuroDisney shares so that we can benefit from the shareholder perks. As they're foreign shares you can't hold them yourself and the broker, Selftrade, has decided to introduce a pretty hefty (compared to the value of my holding) annual fee from 1/7. Anyway, its taken a great deal of time to investigate and (hopefully) transfer the holding of them over to the Halifax Share Service. Plus (temporarily) I needed to move £100 into the Halifax account to open it.

Then I was due to have my first foreign student of the year, a 14 year old from Italy. The day she was due to arrive, her mother phoned to say she wouldn't be fit to travel as she was ill. So I phoned the organisation to let them know. I'm a bit miffed that they (still - 3 weeks later!) haven't phoned or written to me to advise what is/was going on at all! Fortunately, the mum stayed in touch via email and I'm still chasing my cancellation payment, which according to the booklet the organisation provide should be £42 as it was cancelled with no notice. We'll see.... Still I can find out easily enough how much the organisation charged the girl's parents to rearrange to a different date. I'm sure they won't have waived that! Our 'next' student is due to arrive this weekend - hopefully she is well!

And that's it. Got to pay the balance (over £1,500) on our main holiday this month. Its all tucked away in my Tesco Internet Saver but it will see a drop in our savings this month.

Hope all is money-saving with you! :money:

Thriftyknickers

A couple of little tips that I've come across in the last few days that may be of money-saving use. I'm sure they'll be elsewhere on MSE but I've missed them up to now.

First of all, there's a lovely little site Supermarket Special Offers and one part shows Tesco Clubcard deals. http://supermarketspecialoffers.com/TescoPointOffers.aspx I took a look and as a result have picked up a few 'free' basic items like cheese, milk and bacon - 'free' that is if you use your CC points for deals worth 4 times the face value. Seeing as I needed the items anyway, I was very pleased. Some are definitely more expensive than the items I would have bought instead - but I see it as an 'investment' in the CC points!

Secondly, our 10 year old microwave has packed up. DH is a member of Which and we found the models we were interested in via them. I then cruised for discount codes and cashback. On the HotUKdeals site, I found that you could get their 'Best Buys' at an even cheaper than published rate using http://www.hughesdirect.co.uk/which . So the pretty basic Panasonic model I was interested was published on Hughesdirect at £107.99, but via this Which link was £98.99 - easily beating the next cheapest! (Amazon at £106.41). I think they may do a check to make sure you are actually a member - something about passing details to Which, but I guess some MSE-ers are Which members anyway? DH and I read it from cover to cover but hadn't noticed this before - hope its of use! :T

Floxxie

Hi Thrifty,

I was directed to the supermarket site the other day and immediately sent OH off to buy items from tescos that had additional points with them. Saved me hours of trawlign through various threads!

Funny enough our microwave has also packed up on us and I've been trying to get by without one but am stuggling to say the least so thankyou for the info.

And well done on your progress!
Floxxie

Thriftyknickers

A bit late reporting in this month!

Well we've started overpaying the mortgage again - £500 in July and £200 so far in August.

My 'additional income' was good in July too - a total of £269.87. The bulk of it was from the 'profit' of having a foreign student stay but there was also £10 each from IPSOS, iPoints and a Heart radio survey, plus smaller amounts from Ebay, Lightspeed and Rpoints.

My 'voucher savings' were £40.78, all but £0.53 in Tescos. I seem to be on a roll with till spits - £5 off a £50 spend, plus there's been a number of Daily Mail Tesco offers - today for example I managed to use a £5 till spit, £9 worth of Daily Mail vouchers and a £1 nappy voucher (my Tescos will let you use 1 voucher on an item that you don't buy. :T)

So, where did all the money go in July? Well, I bought all the kids' summer clothes fornext year in the Next sale :A, plus a half-price T shirt for me. I was lucky enough to get a VIP invite to the online sale (not sure how that works - I've only ever bought 2 Peppa Pig sunhats online before!) plus queued up for the 5am start in the stores. I also paid a visit to the Bicester Outlet Village and bought a £79 pair of Seven for all Mankind jeans for me (10 times what I paid for my last pair at the Gap outlet!) but girls, I'm sure you'd understand. You can't underestimate the value of a well-fitting pair of jeans! (Guys probably appreciate them too...!) Plus I bought a DVF kaftan to go over my bikini (need to do a rescue job on it - the under-wiring popped out in Cornwall!) or swimming cossie for when we go to Portugal in September. I decided I needed a bit of glam in my life(!) and some cover for the Mummy Tummy plus they were half price - the kaftan even less I seem to remember.

We had some good news in that SelfTrade (see previous post) refunded a £10 transfer charge and both cars passed their MOTs first time (this has never happened to me before! :T). I also paid the £1,500 balance on our Club Med holiday online and without thinking put it on my cashback Amex card. It was only later that I remembered that I thought there might be a charge for CC payments. Anyway, I dragged out the T&Cs and sure enough, there should be a 2% charge - although this hadn't been mentioned when I actually made the payment online. So the next morning I phoned Club Med and they said that the charge only applies for telephone payments - so I've had the interest on the balance for an extra month plus cashback on my credit card. I know a lot of holiday companies say this, so it might be worth investigating if you're about to pay a hefty invoice.

And now for the bad news. First of all, we inherited a 'ride-on' mower (which it must be said my DH loves - although that might be more to do with when he uses it, he gets 1.5 hours away from me and the kids! ) when we bought our house. It is positively ancient. Anyway, it was having a bit of a problem with its drive chain so we had it fixed and serviced - £325.39!! :eek:

And this one is ongoing. Our family like to have a bath ( a very long one in my case, with bubbles and a magazine!) rather than a shower but our foreign students seem to all prefer the latter. Anyway, everything was working fine with our ancient shower and then my student said that water was pouring out of the control box on the wall. One of my friends' brother's is a local plumber and he came and checked it and said we'd be best to replace the whole electric shower. So I bought a replacement of the newer model online from Showerstoyou.co.uk for £120 (very pleased with the price as they seemed to be £50 dearer in Plumbstore etc and the delivery etc has been excellent.) So, the plumber came back to install it and guess what, the water was pouring out of the control box for that one too. So, we've ordered a replacement part - a water pressure flow device or something but I've got this horrible feeling we've bought a new shower needlessly, plus its still not working (hopefully it will be when the new part is installed) plus we'll probably have a mega bill from the plumber. And I think he might have c*cked up in the first place! And to make matters worse, our shower doesn't have an isolation switch so the new shower's 'on/off' light is always on (the old model didn't have this - guess I'll need to get one installed or face horrendous leccy bills and the wiring into the shower is supposedly dodgy. I hate to think how much this one is going to cost us! :mad:

Oh well, until next time!

setmefree2

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

Well we've started overpaying the mortgage again - £500 in July and £200 so far in August.

well done on that :T

PS sorry to hear about your crummy plumbing experience. Hope things work out well, so annoying!

Thriftyknickers

Well, another month has gone by - time just flies! We managed to overpay £700 off the mortgage this month so hopefully we're looking OK for the end of the year target.

I made a massive £363.74 in additional income this month - £10 each from Valued Opinions, Shop&Scan and IPSOS, £1.48 from Quidco, £2 from Lightspeed, £26.55 from Pure Profile (this is going much better now I realise they don't always email when a survey is available), £29.71 from Global Market and the rest from hosting my foreign students. Sadly this is the last payment but at least I finally got my 'cancellation' fee after 9 weeks!

I made £35.80 in voucher savings - £2.60 through Tamba (buying my DD's trainers in Clarks) and the rest were from Tesco - many courtesy of the Daily Mail.

So, what news this month? Well, we now have a working shower - after 3 visits! Haven't had the bill yet, but its probably going to be a shocker! And all apparently because Thames Water increased the water pressure! And now we have no-one to use it as we're all confirmed bath-wallowers! Still, my house/cat sitter friends will be here in a couple of weeks when we go on our hols so it will probably get used then as one is disabled. And I had to pay £190 for replacement shock-absorbers on my car - just after it had successfully passed its MOT, for the first time ever. I'm sure my car has a sense of humour!

I've had fraudulent activity on my credit card! :eek: I regularly check all of my statements and noticed a £15 charge for an O2 prepayment the day before. DH and myself aren't O2 customers so I thought I'd better phone up to check, thinking they'd just be some sort of mistake. Anyway, I tend to do my money stuff and MSE quite late at night and they'd already closed. I checked the next morning and found out they'd already stopped my account! Well done Nationwide!! :T Someone had tried to buy a £1,500 computer plus loads of other high value bits and pieces on my card! :mad: Anyway Nationwide realised this was suspicious (how do they do this??) and stopped it. So, the only thing that got through erroneously was the £15. They've since sent me a form to fill in to confirm this wasn't my payment and they then refunded the money on the same day. I'm very impressed - particularly as I don't have any sort of Credit Card protection. I then had a bit of a panic, as we're going on holiday in less than 2 weeks and although its all-inclusive, I was planning on using my Nationwide Credit Card for any extras (as its in Europe, the Nationwide card still doesn't have any charges or loading). Anyway, they're going to send the new replacement cards direct to our nearest branch as apparently this should be quicker than direct to our house. It should only take 3-5 working days, so fingers crossed!!

I've had a pay rise! Something like £200 for the entire year but seeing as I was expecting a pay freeze I can't complain. Seeing as I'm now at the top of my grade they've paid it as a lump sum this month. Unfortunately they're freezing the target salaries and reducing the upper level of the band to a lower percentage of target. I think this means I'm going to be severely limited in my ability to get a pay rise from now on - unless I go for promotion which would mean giving up being part-time. I'm sure there's going to be a lot like me. I guess they're hoping we're not all purely motivated by money as our pay rises are supposed to be performance related, but now they're going to be capped! Still I have a job (fingers-crossed!), I still consider it well-paid and I don't want to give up my time with the kids. There are more important things and I'm very, very lucky!

We've had a few MSE-y days out I'd like to share with you. First of all we went to the Bristol Balloon Fiesta which was superb. I advanced booked the car park (the day before as we were waiting on the weather!) for £7(instead of £8, the show itself is free) and we had a wonderful day! Plus we got £6.90 back in various MOCs and loads of sweeties and chocolate freebies! All in all we saw 40+ balloons take off which was a lovely sight. This included a turtle, a cockerel, a Jag and the world's tallest air balloon (I think) - a Scots man - don't go there with the kilt thing!

Also, my kids took part in the local carnival as pirates. My cousin, her kids and mine all made the 'ship' which was great fun and we rustled together a couple of costumes. They came first (OK, there was only 2 in their class!), they won £10 and we all had free entry to the Village Show (saving over £10). My kids loved every minute of it, waving to everyone as they went by and it helps keep the community event going. I'm thinking we might re-use the costume and props in another carnival next week...!

I've been planning my holiday wear and thought I might need another swimming costume - one which will never get wet in a swimming pool of course! Last year we went to Club Med in the South of France and there were a lot of ladies who looked so fab. You might have seen in another thread where I asked for advice on mending my one and only bikini and that's still on my list of things to do. Anyway, (any men look away now!) I thought my 'proper' swimming cossies just wouldn't cut it. My Speedo etc is great for real swimming but tends to squash everything flat - fine for the old mummy tummy, not so good up top! So in my quest for a bit more glamour in my life, I've been looking around for something with a bit more oomph - or under-wiring at the very least! I was coming to the conclusion that I couldn't justify the cost when, on a trip to get the DDs shoes and trainers checked, I remembered a couple of local lingerie shops. I bribed DH to entertain the kids in a playground for half an hour and to my delight, found a sale box in one with a lovely Freya costume which fits perfectly, down from £45 to £10. Admittedly it was from 2006 but black swimming cossies (this one has a very bright belt too) don't really date do they and its beautifully cut - no bulgey bits on the thighs! Its a cup size too big and DH kindly pointed out that I don't fill it as well as the lady on the label but I think I get away with it and it looks the part. High maintenance moi??

You'll see from my signature that I've very close to my end of year target for my 'additional income'. I've just put a few things on Ebay - would be great if I could complete it this month. I've also applied for a Tesco Instant Access Savings Account for DH so we can load money into it for one day if poss on the 7th October, so we can top up the Clubcard points. (We tend to use these for meals out at CenterParcs plus I have a vision of doing Disney with Virgin one day....) So every little really will help!

Think I'm going to set up another savings account next month - ditch the Tesco Internet Saver and possibly switch to Egg.

Hope you're all doing well. Until next time!

Thriftyknickers

Just a quick update - I've acheived 2 of my original goals and am very excited! :j I've updated post #1 and my signature accordingly. My 'additional income' has gone over the £1,500 mark thanks to a bit of Ebaying of my kids' old stuff. This was particularly pleasing as they'd just been sitting around, taking up considerable space for a while - old swing seats, a Winnie the Pooh toilet trainer seat and a couple of pairs of old Clarks shoes and trainers. And they all raised more than I'd anticipated!

And I finally got down to investigating my life assurance and, with DH's agreement, am pleased to say my death in service plus dependents benefit is sufficient. I must admit, I find pensions etc very confusing and had to speak to our HR department to confirm what would be paid out etc. I'm sure there's probably an easier way of explaining these things! I didn't realise that my DH would get an annual pension if I died right now, even though he's only 42. Anyway, now I'm a part-time worker, he's the main wage-earner, but if I keel over, he would be able to pay off the mortgage plus have some left and get a dependent's pension of £21K p/a. This should cover any additional childcare he would need and maybe a cook and bottle-washer? Plus I have a previous employee pension which would pay out a lump sum too. So, its put my mind at rest and we won't need to dent our finances to give it a boost. Hopefully he won't need it for a while! Is scary that I'm worth considerably more dead than alive though! Next, the wills!

We're off on holiday at the end of the week - am sooooo excited! I've finished work after a bit of a late one tonight, (whilst listening to the football which I'm sure didn't help me get out of there any quicker) so just need to sort out all the holiday stuff. Its such a fab feeling, walking out from work for a while, knowing that everything you needed to do is done! Portugal here we come!

Be Money Saving good, all!