DFSD's five year plan... and all it brings along the way

Chocforever

It does feel good to use up the loyalty and survey vouchers, doesn't it. Sounds like you got a very good deal with your T vouchers :T.

I can understand why buying presents throughout the year is a good idea, but can't imagine I would be so organised. I prefer to go for the crazy spontaneous gift nearer the time; not sure if my friends and family think this is better or not! I did see a nice gift for my Mum when I happened to be in a town I don't usually visit so I bought it and put it away for her birthday. I noticed it last weekend in a cupboard. Shame her birthday was 6 weeks ago and it didn't cross my mind then!

I know you said you wanted to take the pressure off shopping in December and can see that being heavily pregnant and weekend Xmas shopping are not a good mix. However, I find people who full-on Xmas shop/have all the cards written in September every year a bit odd. There is being task driven and there is taking all the joy out of a celebration :rotfl:. I was shocked to see someone in town yesterday in full Xmas shopping mode, even with gift wrap :eek:. It's summer!!!

Time to get off the laptop and on to the housework...

debtfreesomeday

Thankfully I'm not quite mad enough to write the Christmas cards in September - yet! (Actually, I'm usually the opposite and end up writing them too late to deliver!). I know what you mean, it does take a little of the Christmas spirit away in buying things so early, but, between us, we have a huge family and we'd never afford to eat again if we left it 'til last minute to buy all their gifts! I do love the Christmas Eve shopping scenes you see in films though, it looks so magical, which, in reality, is probably far from the truth amongst the stress of the crowds!

Where on earth did the person you saw buy Christmas gift wrap from in the middle of August?! How bizarre!!!

debtfreesomeday

Tonight hubby and I have sat down and gone through the list of 'one-off expenses' coming up from now until December. We have 3 weddings, a graduation and several birthdays to budget for, so needs must. Hubby is able to cover the bill for the hotel which we'll need for one wedding which is around £100 :eek:, thankfully we won't need hotels for the other two. We have one wedding gift sorted, so we need to buy two more from gift lists, which should be easy enough to cover. We have outifts sorted (which can double up for the graduation ) and a hotel booked for that one, which includes breakfast and an evening meal too for £90 for the two of us. We'll have to put that on the credit card for now and pay it off over the next two months.

Which leaves me with the birthdays to buy for. We have seven birthdays coming up from now until the end of the year (or nine including the two aunt I've already bought for). I'm a few points from gaining another Amazon voucher soon which will help towards one as I intended to purchase something specific from there for one of them. I don't have much in the present box suitable for any of the others, so will have to do some shopping when we next get paid.

Hubby is also going to try a little experiment with the car to see if we cut down on petrol useage. He ony travels about 6 or 7 miles to work, dropping me off on the way two miles down the road from where we live. There is a free 'commuter' bus which travels to the City Centre from close to our house which, in October, he is going to try taking to and from work as much as he can to see if it reduces our petrol comsumption and costs. Sometimes he does need the car for journeys during office hours to attend meetings and such, but there are a limited number of pool cars he can book for such ocassions. He is going to try and rework his schedules so it makes booking these cars easier as they seem to be in very high demand, as you'd expect. We just have to see if it makes a large enough difference in our budget to make up for the inconvenience of him having to take the bus. The main reason for this, is that he currently gets free parking at work, but it is 99% certain he will soon be charged £12 a month to park. I know that's very reasonable, but it's annoying when he has been contracted in with free parking from day one.

Back to this month's budget and we have about £75 left still once everything's paid for. I'm guessing £50 of this will be taken up by petrol costs, so £25 spare before we hit the overdraft which I'm REALLY trying to avoid from now on. Hopefully we can do it, I'll be so pleased if we are able to.

Chocforever

I can understand gradually buying presents throughout the year to spread the cost, its the ones that do all their Xmas shopping on one day and that day is before November that I don't get. Not sure where the gift wrap came from. I know Selfridges have their Xmas stuff in :eek:; maybe some other places do too.

I keep walking past shop windows with the new autumn season clothes - there are some nice things, but going to hold off a few weeks before I buy any more clothes and work out what I need.

How are you feeling? Do your work colleagues know you are pregnant?

debtfreesomeday

Selfridges have Christmas stock in?? Oh my goodness, that's just terrible! I love Christmas, especially the run up to it, but it now seems to spread across 6 months of the year in the shops - it's crazy!

I'm feeling fine thanks Chocs, I get really tired some evenings but that hasn't been as bad this past week. Only two colleagues know I'm pregnant and they don't work directly with me. They're two older ladies whom I get on well with. One of them has been arranging my paid time off for appointments, so she's been really helpful. I have another midwife appointment next week where she will hopefully listen to the heartbeat. Once she's done that and everything's fine, I shall tell the managers. I'm not expecting a particularly good response from the main boss as he's a male chauvinist and a horrible, sneaky type of person who likes to make people's lives difficult - hence why I'm holding back on saying anything. He made a crack not longer ago about how it's pointless employing women as all they do is get pregnant. I can't stand the man, he makes me skin crawl!

Rant over!

Back to money-saving, and this morning I've transferred the odd 85p across accounts to the maternity fund which is now at £407. It will be good to put another £400 in there when we get paid.

We will go and pick up our baby monitor order from tesco tonight. I also need to buy some eggs whilst we're there as I'm baking cakes for a friend's wedding tonight. Also need a few bits and pieces for hubby to take to work tomorrow as he needs a convenient packed lunch 'on the go' for tomorrow - he'll be outdoors, so no access to a microwave - cold soup won't cut it!

Have a good day all

DFSD

Chocforever

Hi DFSD

You are doing so well. Have a fab weekend .

The naughty streak in me would enjoy winding up your boss. For a while, and then I would want rid. What an idiot. Is he near retirement?

debtfreesomeday

Unfortunately, no he's not nearing retirement age. Believe it or not, he's not an old man - in his early/mid 40s at a guess, with 3 kids - hard to believe the attitude of some people isn't it.

Filled the car up with £25 of petrol this morning, ready for our weekend away. I can't wait to escape for a little while!

Have a good weekend too xx

debtfreesomeday

A week since my last update already - it's been a busy one and seems to have flown.

We had a lovely weekend last weekend - a real relaxing break at home and attending a friend's wedding.

My wonderful parents surprised us with a huge box of 'baby essentials' which they'd been buying since they found out. All the little bits and bobs like toiletries, nappies, safety bits etc. which are vital but seem to make the money disappear quickly. My cousin has also given us lads of stuff she no longer uses - changer unit, carriers, gym/playmat and lots of clothes etc. so we're feeling very lucky at the moment. We bought the car seat last week, so al we really have to buy is a cot and my parents have kindly said they want to buy that (as we bought the car seat).
We have also been picking up little bits and pieces as we have seen them cheap so we're getting pretty well stocked!

16 week midwife appointment yesterday and all is fine so far. She let me listen to the heartbeat and had a prod around and said all is well. :j:D We have the down's testing blood results back next week.

Onto moneysaving, and last night I sat down and worked out a complete savings plan for the next year. I worked out (and was worrying overly) that we will actually have less money to play with once I go back to work after 9 months, as we have to pay nursery fees which I'm estimating at about £100 a week for 2.5 days a week.

As I will be earning around half pay, I realised we'd be pretty much just about scraping together the amount to pay the bills for 2 years until our loan is paid off. Well, I have now written down a detailed budget month by month which shows that we can save approx £6K+ over the next year, and may not need to draw on much at all during maternity leave. This leaves us with a reasonable pot to draw from for the following 24 months until loan number 1 is paid off after which time we'll be £216.73 (to be precise!) a month better off.

I feel so much better now it's all worked out and on paper, let's just hope we don't have any expensive mishaps along the way.

Currently, we are overdrawn by about £30. I had to put some more petrol in the car yesterday, so that really didn't help. The overdraft will go up a little before payday on Wednesday, but we'll be fine. Next month we really want to concentrate on not being overdrawn at all. Unfortunately it's an expensive month with two weddings and 4 birthdays so I'm not sure how successful we'll be!

Have a good weekend all

DFSD

debtfreesomeday

We had a lovely weekend, my folks came to visit. :j:D

A few more spends has sent the account further overdrawn - MORE petrol (£15), food Saturday night for us all (£10) and a couple of other shopping bits we'd run out of (£10). Also the phone/internet bill came out of the account (£25) so it's not looking great.

On a plus, we have managed to pick up a second hand car seat base (not the car seat, we've bought that new for safety reasons) for £35 when it's worth about £100. I have used some money my sister kindly gave us towards baby stuff to pay for it.

We have advertised an item of furniture for sale on the notice board at work, hopefully that will sell soon and provide us with some extra pennies and some space in the soon-to-be nursery. I also have one more thing to advertise which I need to list details of tonight. I might make a bit if I sold it on ebay, but it is quite heavy and bulky and would cost quite a bit to post I think. I'll try via work and see how it goes.

MIL has kindly paid for a cot bed and tallboy chest of drawers for us for the baby's room, bought from Mothercare with a 20% voucher code + extra 10% off promotion. I think we pretty much have everything we need already! We are very lucky to have such generous and supportive families.

It's payday on Wednesday, so I will work out the budget then when I know how much the overdraft is - I have a feeling it won't be pretty.
We have several gifts to buy this month, so it'll be a costly one.

DFSD
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debtfreesomeday

We have had an enormous crop of tomatoes from our garden this year and really needed to use some of them up, so last night we set to and made Chutney. It made enough to fill 5 jars which need to store for a month before use for best results, and then we'll use them as little gifts. Today I'm going to make some labels for them so we can make them look lovely.

Today the music magpie cheque is being paid into the bank (£12-odd), alongside £15 cash, so the bank account will be up by £27 and pennies. We also get paid tomorrow (thankfully) so I'll work out the budget in the morning.

Tonight I plan to make some bread in the bread machine - I'm thinking sultana bread for a change... off to find a recipe.

Have a good day all

DFSD
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