Sparkle is sorting out her finances

sparkleisshopping

I'm off down the gym shortly I have body pump then spin class so I hope I will be totally knackered when I'm done.

I made some lush banana and nut chewy bars last night out of a bunch of overripe bananas. They taste fantastic and I'm happy that I've found something else to do with overripe bananas as well as make banana bread.

Later on today I'm going to move my OH's cc balances onto my Lloyds card. I rang them up the other day to check I can pay his balance with my card which I can do. They offered me 4.9% for 6 months over the phone but when I checked online I was offered 0% for 9 months. Obviously I'd be happier with the 0% rate so I'll do the transfer online and see what happens. Either way it's going to be better than the rates he's paying on his cards (19% and 29% iirc). I'll help him set up a standing order to me for his card payments and make sure he closes these two cards as soon as the balance is back to zero. I'm not fussed if he keeps his barclaycard as the limit is only £350 on that and he occasionally uses it to buy online so I suppose it is more sensible than using his debit card for online purchases.

It's taken me a good couple of months to make the decision that I'm happy to move his balances onto my card. I got stung badly like this with an ex; the nationwide loan I paid off last month was the final bit of finance that I'd taken out for him and we split up 7 years ago. But we're getting married and we're going to be a team so it makes no sense for him to be making piddling inroads into his cc balances cos of the interest rates when I can help him pay them off more quickly by putting them onto 0% for him.

sparkleisshopping

Our wedding was fantastic! Loved every minute of it and I'm still really smiley about the whole thing. But ultimately I'm here to sort out the finances and here's where I am at the moment:

Virgin cc - £2320 (wedding spends)
Lloyds cc - £4060 (OH's card debt)
First Direct cc - £3280 (my cc debt)

I've sat down with an enormous pad of paper and did lots of sums (all very complicated cos of money still going in and out from the wedding) and the final figures are:
Bills are as per my SOA above
£200 each for both of us to spend on cigs, booze, presents, clothes and other fun stuff
£250 is going in a seperate purse for food shopping and I'll see how I get on with that this month. I hope I will be able to reduce this month on month by hanging out at the old style forums!
£70 each for car savings (mot, insurance, tax etc)
a petrol allowance (which is higher for my OH than for me as he works further away)

and after all that we have £510 per month to split between the 3 cards (which are all on 0% deals) which makes our DFD March 2012. I hope with ebaying and MS ing I can make an extra £100 a month which will bring us to a DFD of December 2011. It's my first weekend off since the wedding this weekend so I will go through all the wedding stuff in the spare room and sort that out. Hopefully I'll be able to sell some of it on wedding forums and avoid the ebay fees.

We're having a lovely curry for tea tonight! In true MSE style I took a load of takeaway trays to the wedding and asked the caterers to box up the leftovers and we still have twenty portions of curry left in the freezer so that'll keep us going for a while!

We're really lucky to have such lovely friends - we didn't have a gift list for the wedding and we asked for donations towards a new sofa if people wanted to give us something. Well, we've had enough money to get a sofa *and* a new carpet, paint for the walls and a new kitchen bin! So, we'll be redoing the front room at some point - how exciting!

Lemon_Tree

sounds like you had a wonderful time, i still smile about our wedding and it's fast approaching our 2nd wedding anniversary.
i'm sure you'll be able to cut your grocery money pretty quickly as that's a generous amount. But at least you know you can afford to live as your budget is planned at the moment, so when you do drop it you will be able to put it onto your debts.

sparkleisshopping

Hi Lemontree and thanks for stopping by! Wow - two year anniversary - bet that's come round quickly!.

All's going well for me, I am doing well so far with my grocery money in a seperate purse and I'm keeping up with going to the gym also. I went to spin class on sunday and I'm going to pilates tonight. I also got a new breadmaker (only a cheapo one that cost £25 from Argos) and I love it! I think it's going to be much cheaper than buying bread from the shops and my OH is impressed by the setting where you can get it to make the dough for you then take it out, make it into rolls and cook in the oven as he prefers rolls for work.

I know I said that money has been really hectic with all the wedding stuff, but I've actually made a mistake and forgotten to subtract a repayment of £100 I made to my first direct card, taking it down to £3180. I never normally make mistakes in that fashion and forget a payment I've made! I also sold some shares and made £1.13 more profit than I expected so that takes the virgin card down to £2318.87 - every little helps!

This weekend we are going down south (almost all the way to brighton!) for my OH's sister's 40th birthday. TBH I'd rather stay at home as it's going to take forever to get there and back, we are staying in our tent in the garden (out of choice as initially we were meant to be staying in her kids playroom) and I'm not a big one for family occasions and I'd prefer to relax by myself as I haven't had a weekend off in ages! Oh, and we're in the doghouse for not chipping in with everyone else towards a very expensive present for her (which we weren't told about until after we'd bought her present from elsewhere). Families eh?!?

I'm much more looking forward to next weekend when it's my lovely friend's 30th birthday and we are all going camping

Tonight I must get my thank you cards ordered from Vistaprint to send to everyone that gave us wedding gifts.

sparkleisshopping

Words I have learnt since I started on this DFW journey:

quidco
mystery shopping
poundland (it's my favourite land)
lidl
onepoll
£2 coin!
a whole host of ebay terminology

I've also learnt that I value my expensive toiletries more if I alternate between them and cheap own brands. For example, I've just run out of my fancy Brilliant Sparkle toothpaste (yes, only bought because of the name lol!) so I'm on Morrisons own brand. And I absolutely love my bar of Lush soap after working my way through all those cheapo wafer thin soaps I have stolen from hotels over the years! I'm really precious about my hair and always *have* to have the branded fancy conditioner at £5 or more per bottle but for my next conditioner I'm trying a LOreal one which was £2.75 for twice the amount.

Finally ordered the Thank You cards from vistaprint (obv getting £5 quidco cashback!) yesterday - they look lovely and I can't wait for them to arrive.

I'm really tired today - DH is going through a migraine phase at the mo. He won't have them for months and months then he'll have a fortnight where he'll have them every night and as he was up and down for painkillers all last night I didn't sleep very well My head has been achy all week - maybe it's the weather? I hope I don't have a headache tonight as I want to go to the gym and I can't exercise with a headache. Is it bad of me that I'm secretly hoping he has a migraine so we can't go to his sis's birthday party?

sparkleisshopping

Woot! No headache yesterday so got down the gym after work With any luck I'll feel ok after work tonight then I'll be able to go to Bodypump at the gym.

I have £150 left from my personal spending money which is to last me until I get paid on the 20th. I would like some new shoes (am coveting some black ballerina pumps with butterflies on from Next that cost £36) and I have my friend's birthday party... we've paid for her present, my OH is paying for the camping fee, so all I'll need is some money for some drinks and food at the pub and a contribution towards the BBQ food, but I'd also like to have £100 left from my personal spends to pay towards a credit card. Hopefully I can make do with £40 for my friend's birthday so that would be £80 left to pay off a credit card.

Bookwormlou

Hi sparkle congratulations on getting married ! I hope you are enjoying being a newly wed and I'm so pleased you had a lovely day. Sounds like you are budgeting really well , its all consuming isn't it , thinking all the time about what money you are spending or rather hoping not to spend. Your post about your OH not being in touch with food prices really made me laugh , sometimes my OH is oblivious too but since he has been coming shopping with me , he is getting more in touch with reality! Good for you going to the gym , I just walk the dog (the shame). I loved your notebook lottery ticket present for your OH too , very thoughtful. I'll think of some tips I've learnt along my debt travels to share with you x

sparkleisshopping

Hi Lou Glad to have helped with my diary! I'm glad I'm not the only one whose OH is very endearing but a bit financially useless lol!

Well, we went to my OH's sister's birthday party at the weekend - we were both very tempted to ring in sick or something so we didn't have to go but we ended up being dutiful and we went anyway and it was a nice party, but I'm not sure if it was worth the 11 hour round trip to get there and back! We put the tent up in their back garden (instead of staying in the children's playroom) which was great to have our own little space to retreat to.

We got home about 5.30pm yesterday and just flopped on the sofa and ate a pizza for tea. I'm reading a great book at the moment - World War Z - which is all about zombies, so that kept me entertained last night while OH snoozed in front of the football.

Tonight I'm going to do all the housework I normally do at the weekend - the house needs hoovering (one of the cats is moulting all over the place) and I need to put on a load of laundry as I have no clean gym shorts and I'm not doing it in my pants like the teacher would make you do if you forgot your PE kit at school. I made a big batch of broccoli and stilton soup on Friday after the gym so I've taken two portions out of the freezer and we can have that for tea with a garlic bread so I don't have to cook and I'll have enough time to do all the chores. OH is out on site with work today so goodness knows what time he'll be back but at least soup is easy to reheat if I end up eating before him. Oh, I could also go with making a big pile of pasta salad for work lunches for the next couple of days as I've bought food from work for 3 days in a row (the shame) and it's cost me over £10 - eek!

I'll also need to go through my finances this evening as we took the housekeeping purse to the party rather than pay £2ish to withdraw cash from the service station so we've spent either £50 or £37 from that but I'll need to look at my internet banking to work it all out. OH gets paid on Wednesday so I'll be able to move money around and pay some bits off credit cards - hurrah!

Also, my work had a car boot sale on sunday and our department had a charity table. THere were quite a few books and dvds left over so they are out on the side for us to buy. I got Slumdog millionaire and Natural Born Killers for £1 each and I got a book about Jeff Buckley, a book called the Corner for my OH (it's from the people who wrote The Wire which is a TV series my OH loves) and a book called Disco 2000, all for £1 - not bad eh!

sparkleisshopping

OH liked his book but he's a bit daunted by it as it's nearly 700 pages! I'm still really enjoying my zombie book too

I managed to get the house tidy yesterday; didn't have time to make pasta salad but I forgot I had lots of frozen curry in the freezer left over from the wedding so lunch was Tarka Dall, vegetable pilau rice and a couple of chapattis. I've agreed with OH that we can do his banking tonight as he was shattered when he got home from work yesterday, having worked 3 hours overtime.

It's pilates at the gym tonight I love pilates but haven't been for a while so it should be quite a challenge.

sparkleisshopping

Am not too impressed with OH today

It was his turn to make tea last night and we have a fair bit of food in - stuff for stir fry, risotto, stew, and there's curry in the freezer. As the football was on he decided he didn't feel like cooking so I ended up going to the shop for frozen chips and veggie sausages (£3.38 spent) as I was absolutely starving as I'd got back from the gym expecting tea to be ready and instead found a quite drunk OH on the sofa cheering on the football and chatting on the phone

We did his internet banking last night and that upset me also. When we moved into our house, he was the one who was very keen on having a garden and I'm not fussed about it at all. I do try and help out a bit by picking up after him when he does the hedges or mows the lawn or whatever but because I'd been so busy with selling on ebay then sorting out all the wedding stuff I didn't have any time to help him in the garden so he basically stopped doing any gardening. We have massive hedges round three sides of the house which are hard work but as he'd left them for so long they were totally out of control. So, when some lads came round offering to cut the hedges he paid them £40 which he took from the groceries purse and promised to pay it back. When I asked him to transfer the £40 back to me he said that it was right that it should come from the groceries budget as it was something for the house. I can understand his reasoning, but I think he should have paid for it from his personal spends as it was him that was too lazy to cut the hedges and decided to pay someone to do it for him. So, who's right? Me or him?

I think this has upset me so much as I feel like I'm bearing all the burden of paying back our credit cards with our joint debt on them as quickly as possible, doing all the household budgets, and all he has to worry about is making his £200 pocket money last the month.