Emma's mainly debt-related witterings (with probable tangents!)

Auntyem

Hi Edinburgher, thanks for posting I welcome all suggestions with open arms, its great to get the benefit of other peoples experiences. Great point about the budgets, I think its a work in progress still as I have had to take it slowly to keep dh onboard with the micro managing bit;). With my own personal accounts I do record to the penny exactly where everything goes and I find it useful to see where things "crop up" that we should really be budgeting for.

I do agree the true cost of some items is more than the SOA allows. Car maintenance being a great example. The problem is we can't really cope with any increase of "non-essential" outgoings right now firstly because I always feel it would be better chucked off a debt (after all in a dire emergency I could borrow back at 0% rather than the 21% of current highest debt). Secondly everything added to the joint SOA obviously increases the contribution we both have to make to it, and I know there is a limit to how much dh is happy to put in before he feels he basically has nothing left to show for his hard work:o. As I said this is a work in progress and I think the more we see the benefits of having funds available to deal with things as they crop up, the easier it will be to expand that to cover other things.

Sorry I did warn you that I waffle!!:rotfl:

Well I have been good this morning and done all my surveys. I managed to reach a £10 payout limit on one so chuffed with that, have ordered a paypal credit. Also received my £5 payout from Virgin and some mystery shopping money into my account. These are going into my little savings pot that I would have normally used to overpay my evil loan. But as its december I knew I might need a bit extra so this will be going towards a few little christmas pressie bills.:o

I will just say in my defence that last christmas I didn't put anything on credit cards because I had saved an amount every month and it was all nicely covered. This year it has just not been possible due to many expensive unplanned things happening, but I am determined to be back to plastic - free form for Christmas 2010!

I also think I managed to sort the moneybookers withdrawal issue as they have let me start verifying my other card so hopefully should be able to withdraw soon.

I found one match for tonight so just need to find one more qualifier this avo and try and finish [STRIKE]next months budget[/STRIKE] some important work projects.

Thanks for reading to anyone who gets through my waffling!

beanielou

Happy shiney new diary

Buffythedebtslayer

Hello AuntyEm

Good name! and sound like you have things under control, I never could get the hang of MBing

Good luck with the debt freeness It will come!

xxx

Auntyem

Thankyou Beanielou and Buffy :hello:

Hope everyone has had a lovely mse christmas.

I have been trying to organise the finances ready for month end / new year and its not going brilliantly :mad:. Have my budget ready for next month but not much more than the minimum payment is ready to go at debts. I have decided I need more targets and focus, so will be looking more into playing with the snowball later. Maybe I should work on a signature but I am scared! The total at the moment is £15,560 which is depressingly very similar to last month.

So thinking I needed to crack on and increase the pot to pay more than the minimums, I tried to finish the bookie I am working on at the moment. I found a great match for the remaining £150 I have to wager to get the freebie, placed it, placed the lay, and only then got a message from the bookie to say my bet had not been accepted. Following a bit of ping-ponging with livechat and a call to their (thankfully free) helpline it seems the match has been postponed :rolleyes:. I'm a bit annoyed as this is exactly why I have tried to be careful since the snow started, not betting on anything starting more than a few hours in advance and no random remote foreign locations where I'm not sure of the weather. So now I need to wait and check what Betfair will do, I think their rule is three days so I need to find out when the match is rescheduled for and if it is within 3 days I need to re-bet at the bookies, but no idea what the odds will be by then :rolleyes:.

No other moneymaking efforts to report so really need to kick myself up the bum and get moving on getting some ££££ off the total.

I need to make sure I am making use of any potential moneymaking possibilities. I have an old phone I have been meaning to recycle for ages and some bits I'm sure could go on ebay so need to make the effort to dig those out and turn them into cash.

I am off for a motivational soak in the bath to give myself a good talking to!

Auntyem

Good afternoon diary, hope everyone is fine and dandy

Been out and about the last few days enjoying abit of rare time off with t'other half, so its going good on the wellbeing front but very slow on the moneymaking front .

Managed to check betfair though and they have voided my bet and re-credited me so that's good news. Nothing lost there and just need to look for a replacement match to finish that bookies.

Not even done scratchards or looked at emails today so must find some time to check on the basics later. Right now the state of the house is doing my head in so I am psyching myself up to wizz round and get rid of as much visible clutter as possible. Brilliantly DH made a spur of the moment decision today to invite his parents for dinner tomorrow :eek::eek:. So have done the last minute dash-to-supermarket-for-extra-veg and now need to do the make-sure-house-is-basically-presentable.

At the very least I need to :

1. Fold all the items of washing that were drying in little bathroom which have now gone stiff and hide them somewhere mil won't see them.
2. Get rid of all the odds and ends of carp cluttering my kitchen as I don't even have enough space to make a cup of tea let alone a roast dinner.
3. Sweep / hoover the floor in the living room dining room and possibly mop.
4. Quick wizz over little bathroom with some bathroom cleaner incase mil goes in there so that it looks / smells like it has been cleaned

Oh dear now I have written it in a list I officially have to do it :rotfl:

Auntyem

1. [STRIKE]Fold all the items of washing that were drying in little bathroom which have now gone stiff and hide them somewhere mil won't see them.[/STRIKE] Done
2. [STRIKE]Get rid of all the odds and ends of carp cluttering my kitchen as I don't even have enough space to make a cup of tea let alone a roast dinner.[/STRIKE] Done
3. [STRIKE]Sweep / hoover the floor in the living room dining room and possibly mop. [/STRIKE] Done by DH
4. Quick wizz over little bathroom with some bathroom cleaner incase mil goes in there so that it looks / smells like it has been cleaned Not done yet

Hmmm well I kind of got distracted by number 2. There were so many assorted objects cluttering up my worksurfaces I ended up trying to re-arrange the room to fit things in cupboards, moving stuff around, and before I knew it I was on a full scale kitchen re-vamp mission . So now it looks great, loads more space and am very pleased with it. But keep going to the wrong place for the kettle :rotfl:

Right, tea done (slowcooker ), kids occupied so am now sitting down with cuppa to have a look at the banking situation.

Lemon_Tree

good luck with your visitation by your MIL. mine has vowed that she won't set foot in our county again as it was much to far for her to travel for our wedding.

Auntyem

Thanks Lemon Tree, you lucky thing :rotfl:

Managed to survive and now enjoying a quiet half hour with the laptop while everyone is still asleep. 10ps on the scratchcards but quite concerned to read about the changes to Virgin bingo. Apparently they will now only let you withdraw winnings from the free scratchies if you deposit £5 per month. Now most of the time these scratchies only give you 10p per day so on the face of it it would not be worth putting in a fiver. However I have done really well out of their recent free bingo promotions and have come away with average £24 per month since september. So I'm really not sure what to do about this one . Putting in the fiver would essentially be gambling as you would only be getting minimum £3.10 return and relying on luck for the rest. But going by previous form I am estimating I would be quite likely to recover the extra £1.90 from winnings. Before christmas they were also doing a money back day where if you bought a ticket for any amount, even if it was only 5p, you got 50p back in your account the next day. So that would take care of another 45p of it.

Hmmmm might have to have a bit more of a think about this one and read other people's opinions on this but I may be half way to convincing myself to try it for a month or two .

Off to look at bank accounts and have another cup of tea, hope everyone is having a good day.

Auntyem

Looked at main bank account, nothing too exciting but lots of dds have come out today so I have entered the amounts into my budget spreadsheet and turned those cells a pretty colour

Sent a few bits of money off to different pots eg petrol, food, coloured those cells in too.

Also while I was on online banking it also shows you related credit cards and I remembered I don't think I have opened the last statement for this one yet... its not a part of "my" 15k but its one we have in my name on 0% but OH pays it. This has made me slightly concerned about what else may be lurking in the big pile of un-opened mail upstairs so I am going to make this my first job of the day... so list so far:

• Open all post and file / shred / handle
• Get through enourmous pile of ironing which I hid from mil.
• look for matches to finish off that bookie I seem to have been doing for AGES

May add more as I think of them. Apart from that going to try and stay inside in the warm and dry, and not spend anything

Auntyem

Half way through the ironing mountain and surviving so far. Have managed to get the last bet on at that bookies again, on a match for tomorrow night so hoping for no freak snow in spain and I should be ok
Also got the first of a batch of qualifiers on at another bookies for the FA cup. I would have liked to do more but thats all my betfair balance will allow at the moment.

Decided to leave the post until later as its sharing a room with the games consoles so bit difficult to get in there at the moment

Forgot to mention I did a proper clean of the little bathroom yesterday rather than a pretend one for mil, so thats another bit of the house I can forget about for now.