More Bangs for my Bucks - MF by 50??

SmlSave

Thanks for the suggestion but out local cinema is Empire and they won't do an annual pass.

Sorry I just assumed it was cineworld as you has an annual pass last year

Thriftyknickers

Eek! I've done it again! :eek: Just lost another long update because MSE doesn't think I'm logged in - even though it tells me I'm logged in as Thriftyknickers!! Must remember to cut and paste, must remember to cut and paste...

Thriftyknickers

Well, we made a £500 overpayment in January (courtesy of DH) but as I've posted earlier, our main focus is to build up our savings to cover our holiday costs. My signature is now updated.

My additional income was unexpectedly high this month - there seems to be a lot more paying questionnaires around for some reason. My total was £107.23 made up as follows:-

Ebay £54.29
Quidco £1.85
Shop&scan £20
Ipoints £10
Rpoints £1.09
Valued Opinions £10
Ipsos £10

The Ebay figure was made up of a £36 compensation payment from a courier - long, frustrating story detailed in an earlier post. I was a bit miffed that they only paid the selling price in Ebay so I lost my various fees and even the 2 way courier charges. Appealing against this has been on my to do list for a while but it hasn't surfaced anywhere near the top yet - probably missed the boat on that one! I did really well on my only genuine Ebay sale though - I made a £18.99 profit on a Demalogica gift set that I received as a 'free gift' when taking out a magazine subscription for my Mum. She didn't want it so I put it on Ebay and it was close to covering the cost of the subscription - very impressed! :j Unlike my 2 brand new CD sets which didn't sell, which have now been donated to the hospice shop!

Our petrol costs are way down this month due to the snow and me riding my bike in to work at least one of my three working days/week. Must keep that up! (Not keen on any more snow though...!) This will go some way to offsetting our huge £200+ vet bill for getting 4 or our 5 cats 'boostered'! :eek:

We took the kids to Pizza Hut again to make use of their 50% promotion and I had a cheapy birthday meal - me, DH and 7 friends at Pizza Express, with 6 of us making use of their BOGOF. Good job I haven't got expensive tastes really!

As well as having a small win on the premium bonds, we also won our village nursery rhyme competition - £20 profit! My kids loved spending their share of the Tesco card - hoola hoops (no, I didn't just fob them off with a bag of crisps!) and a couple of dvds.

I seem to have spent a long time 'discussing' with my kids nursery a £12 charge that my DH incurred for dropping off the kids 1 minute early. Yep, this is what the invoice actually said. (The equivalent of £720/hour!!) I said, it was simple - a bit like a shop - if you're not open - don't open the door!!! Who in their right mind, not just MSE minds of course, would want to be charged £12 for the sake of waiting 60 seconds?? They came back with the reply that the kids could be desperate to get in to go to the loo! I pointed out that the kids would of course have an adult with them and that perhaps the adult could shout through the door the urgency if need be. Anyway, they've agreed to drop the charge 'this time'. Its actually a very good nursery which my kids love - I was just a bit taken aback.

I'm in the process of transferring some savings from my Tesco Internet Saver into my Egg Savings Account - difference of 1% gross but am being foiled by not being able to find the account number for the latter. I've got a number of online accounts now but Egg don't seem to like putting anything on paper - guess that's how they keep their costs down.

I did a long-overdue, hopefully MS task last weekend of defrosting our 2 fridge freezers. I was a bit aghast at the food that I did need to throw out (although it all got eaten up by the birds and a night time visitor (fox?)). To mend my ways, I've reinstated our freezer lists that I used to maintain, detailing what is in which drawer and I now have a 'Use Me Quick' drawer to put things in that are fast-approaching their expiry date. A couple of tips that I hadn't used before which made the job quicker and easier: - I wore snug-fitting leather gloves under my rubber ones so my hands stayed warm whilst scraping away. I also used a hairdryer to blast the hard, thick ice that had stuck to the roof (or does that only happen in our household because I don't defrost them often enough?!! :eek:)

I've now got an additional (unwanted) task for February. My MPPI (unemployment and disablement) renewal has come in - jumping from £69 to £92/month! :eek: According to my Nationwide branch all such insurances are going up because the insurers are being hit with increasing 'credit crunch' payments due to redundancies etc. I've had this MPPI in place since before I was diagnosed with breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. A new insurer is likely to want to treat them as pre-existing conditions and not cover them. I think I'm going to have to find a specialist broker or something to see if I can find something comparable cheaper and dig out my employment T&Cs to see what I would receive from them if either were to happen. Hmmm - another job I could do without.

Good luck everyone on your continued MFW quest!

Queen-Bee_2

My goodness - I can't believe the audacity of the nursery :eek:

Good luck sorting out the MPPI!!
QB

THRIFTY_GIRL

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

Well, we made a £500 overpayment in January
I seem to have spent a long time 'discussing' with my kids nursery a £12 charge that my DH incurred for dropping off the kids 1 minute early. Yep, this is what the invoice actually said. (The equivalent of £720/hour!!) I said, it was simple - a bit like a shop - if you're not open - don't open the door!!! Who in their right mind, not just MSE minds of course, would want to be charged £12 for the sake of waiting 60 seconds?? They came back with the reply that the kids could be desperate to get in to go to the loo! I pointed out that the kids would of course have an adult with them and that perhaps the adult could shout through the door the urgency if need be. Anyway, they've agreed to drop the charge 'this time'. Its actually a very good nursery which my kids love - I was just a bit taken aback. !

Absurd!!!at least they've backed down now:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Good luck with the MPPI....if you are in stable employment/have rainy day savings might you be better off just saving the £92/month?

uzubairu

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

Eek! I've done it again! :eek: Just lost another long update because MSE doesn't think I'm logged in - even though it tells me I'm logged in as Thriftyknickers!! Must remember to cut and paste, must remember to cut and paste...

That's happened to me too. :mad:

Good update for January.

gallygirl

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

I seem to have spent a long time 'discussing' with my kids nursery a £12 charge that my DH incurred for dropping off the kids 1 minute early. Yep, this is what the invoice actually said. (The equivalent of £720/hour!!) I said, it was simple - a bit like a shop - if you're not open - don't open the door!!! Who in their right mind, not just MSE minds of course, would want to be charged £12 for the sake of waiting 60 seconds?? They came back with the reply that the kids could be desperate to get in to go to the loo! I pointed out that the kids would of course have an adult with them and that perhaps the adult could shout through the door the urgency if need be. Anyway, they've agreed to drop the charge 'this time'. Its actually a very good nursery which my kids love - I was just a bit taken aback.

:eek:£12 doesn't seem a lot to gain when the flip side is losing your good will. Muppets!

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

I'm in the process of transferring some savings from my Tesco Internet Saver into my Egg Savings Account - difference of 1% gross but am being foiled by not being able to find the account number for the latter. I've got a number of online accounts now but Egg don't seem to like putting anything on paper - guess that's how they keep their costs down.

If you log on to your Egg account can you not see it then? I use Egg Money and when I log on & click on the account it opens up with the transactions - the account details are at the top of the page.

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

I did a long-overdue, hopefully MS task last weekend of defrosting our 2 fridge freezers. I was a bit aghast at the food that I did need to throw out (although it all got eaten up by the birds and a night time visitor (fox?)). To mend my ways, I've reinstated our freezer lists that I used to maintain, detailing what is in which drawer and I now have a 'Use Me Quick' drawer to put things in that are fast-approaching their expiry date.

Hmmm, freezers & expiry dates. This is not a concept I have grasped yet. I keep stuff for years. I defrost mine with basins of boiling water. I put the stuff from the fridge in cool bags & pile up freezer contents in the fridge. Apart from the loose peas. I give them their freedom :cool:

Great progress this month & belated happy birthday

setmefree2

Thriftyknickers wrote: »

Eek! I've done it again! :eek: Just lost another long update because MSE doesn't think I'm logged in - even though it tells me I'm logged in as Thriftyknickers!! Must remember to cut and paste, must remember to cut and paste...

TK - do't forget to cut and paste;):D and well done on the OP:D

Thriftyknickers

Crikey! An incredibly late February update caused by chicken pox x 2 (DDs) and a horrendous £3,600 car bill. :eek: But more about that later!

So, first of all we haven't made any more overpayments and aren't likely to for some time as we're going to feed an ISA for DH which is paying 1% more than our mortgage rate (Alliance & Leicester paying 3.5%), plus have new and improved ISA allowances coming up. More about where the money for that is coming from later too.... I do miss those monthly update letters from Nationwide though!

My additional income was a fairly modest £58.07 (£3 Lightspeed; £12.44 Quidco; £20 My surveys; £21.05 Rewarded Opinions; £1.58 Rpoints).

Spring seems to be a pretty expensive time of year for us. February brought DH's car tax & 2 new tyres plus our quarterly oil bill. On the plus side we did get a refund from Southern Electric for £105.80 and they agreed we could reduce our Direct Debit by £5. They've also identified a plan which would be more cost efficient for us - saving £100 p/a but I don't want to take it up without looking at the alternatives out there - one of my New Year resolutions! According to Martin's update this week now is the perfect time to do this so I think this will be a job for this weekend. Its a bit frustrating though. If they can identify this sort of thing with just me prompting whether I can reduce my Direct Debit, why don't they just give it to you automatically? The only difference seems to be that I would lose my airmiles sweetener and they would tie me in for a year.

Talking of frustration, I phoned Tesco to close my internet savings account with them as it had been paying a 1 year bonus that had made it attractive and this had ended. I'd opened up an Egg savings account instead, paying 2.5% gross. When I explained why I wanted to close the account, the lady said I could simply open another one with Tesco if I'd wanted, with another year bonus paying 2.75%! Obviously this is how the banks and building societies make their money - attract you with an initial high or bonus interest rate and then rely on your inertia not to move the money. I didn't realise you could simply open another account with them though - I'd assumed it was a one-time only offer. So might be worth looking into if you have bonus accounts about to end - close one and open another with the same company! Anyway, I decided to open an AA savings account paying 3% instead!

Conversely, one of the things I was impressed with back in February was the Marks & Spencer's Dine In offer. We were due to go out as a family on Valentine's Eve but our preferred restaurant didn't have any tables free. As I fancied something 'special' and was fed up with cooking we took advantage of the M&S offer and if you compare how much we would have spent out, probably saved loads! I know - female logic! And I was very impressed with the food and sparkling wine plus I got a rose as a pressie (I was devastated that all the choccies had gone but this was the only way I was ever going to get a Valentine's present from DH!) We've made use of this offer another time since and am going to keep looking out for it as an alternative to eating out. We really enjoyed having our meal on our laps in front of a film when the kids have gone to bed!

I've invested in a very cute chrome piggy bank - a mortgage pig - for all my spare change below £1 coins (the kids get anything below 10ps and my piggy gets the rest.) Considering I very rarely use cash these days, preferring to use credit cards etc, he's building up suprisingly quickly.

I also contacted an IFA about my MPPI and they didn't reply! Must follow this up with another advisor. However, the pressure is off (it was renewed at the beginning of March) because I decided to stick with it at least for a month or so. First of all, I had a (men look away now!) smear test which the nurse and GP thought was worrying. There I was lying back, trying to relax (yeah, right!) thinking of George Clooney and she did her 'I think I'll just go and get the doctor...' speech! She was supposed to take my blood pressure afterwards but I told her I didn't think there was much point! Anyway, the results came back OK and they think its just polyps which they can monitor. And then secondly, like so many people on this forum, my company have announced that 1 in 20 of us will be made redundant. We'll hear by the 1st of April (great choice of date!) So, I figured I'd stick with the MPPI until we know what's happening there. Even if I'm lucky this time, I suspect this will become an annual exercise as sadly my company seems to be trying to offshore as much as possible.

And now the horrendous car bill news. Technically it belongs in my March update but here goes anyway. DH and I went away for a belated birthday (mine!) couple of days away without the kids to Babington House (another March update). DH has a Skoda Octavia diesel model. I commented that it seemed really sluggish in low gears and DH said his normal carp about it being good at crusing speed etc etc. Anyway, when we were driving back there were some strange noises coming from somewhere behind the dashboard which DH attributed to the air-conditioning.... Did I mention the pair of us know s*d all about cars??

Anyway, the next day it broke down. Turns out the fly wheel(?) had broken causing the gear box to need to be replaced. A £3,600 repair bill - I estimated about £1K less than the car was worth! (The dealer has contacted Skoda to see if they will make a good-will gesture to the cost. This totally threw me as to why they would do this until we did a few searches on the internet and found that certain Octavia models were recalled due to problems with the fly wheel. Anyway, no news on this bit yet.)

I spent all night trying to figure out how we could pay for this without hitting our ISAs, regular saver etc and figuring out exactly how much I could Ebay. And then my DH admitted that he had an account he hadn't ever told me about that had £8K in it!!!:mad: I was sooooo angry! I just don't think couples should have secrets from each other -if you can't trust each other, what sort of relationship have you really got?? And, it shows how MSE I really am now - he was getting a carp rate of interest on it!!! Anyway, once I'd calmed down we had a heart-to-heart and I can't say I'll ever agree with what he did, but I do sort of understand why he did it. He had a policy that matured when I was on mat leave and I was a little preoccupied about how we were going to make our money stretch. Hmmm....

So, perversely, we're now financially better off than I thought we were despite an horrendous car bill. And that's how my DH has got his ISA!!! But our marriage has taken a dent. I think I would rather have struggled to pay the money....

Ho hum, March's update to follow all too quickly! Hope you're being good!

SmlSave

big (hug) hun