Hypno's "just for today" diary of rediscovery.

InaPickle

Sounding good, Hypno!

Getcher colour charts out for the next round of home improvements. :beer:

Karmacat

Yep, sounds good to me too. The decluttering is *so* important - just these few weeks of having it nice while I prepared to sell have shown me how pleasant the environment can be when its tidy. But I'm definitely going to have packers in, in any case - I'm tempted to pack some bits up anyway, the really grotty things I'm embarrassed about :eek::o:o

Verbatim

Hi everyone. Glad your plans for the house are progressing well Hypno.

hypno06

Morning.....I am so so tired It is unbelievable! Why can I not be one of those people who wakes up refreshed every day!

Oh well, c'est la vie! Windows hopefully finished today....that will be good.

Off to bank, scratch and get through another day. Hope you have a good one x

hypno06

Right.....in doing that "early morning thinking of money thing" that I am sure we all do....ie, money/debt/balancing taking up every waking moment, and some of those sleeping moments too......and in tripping over a big box of white envelopes in my office this morning, I have decided to give the "envelope budgeting" method a try.

IE, when I get to work, I will work out what money comes in on what date, allocate certain amounts to certain things, and on the day that the money comes in, whether it is salary, maintenance, or child benefit, I will divvy it up in the appropriate envelopes, write on them what it is for and the date, and then SEAL THEM.

They can then go in a safe place to be brought out on the day they are needed. eg the garden guys come every other Tuesday and it costs me £20 a time - needless to say, there will usually be Tuesdays when I have either forgotten to get money from the bank or, more likely, that there is not £20 in the bank.....so by putting it in the envelope as soon as it is received, hopefully I will eliminate that bit of stress in trying to find it at the last minute.

I need to make it workable, so that I am not tempted to borrow from another envelope, so some sort of system has to be devised....hopefully by the end of the day I will have come up with something that I can implement with effect from Payday.

got to be worth a try......

Karmacat

Wow, Hypno, that sounds really complicated. And you'd have to be very sure that you've remembered every single bill, to avoid borrowing between the envelopes. I can hear how worried you are, tho, so I can understand you wanting it plotted out like that. I hope you can get something up and running in the next week, so you can hear the budget on the 22nd without too much pain....

hypno06

Its not as complicated as it could be - Basically, I have 4 income streams:

Salary
Maintenance
Child Benefit
Odds and Ends/MSE

My salary goes into one account, and out of that account I have all my monthly "household" bills set up as a direct debit/Standing order. The two amounts, coming in and going out, are very similar. So therefore, I let that account do its own thing. I don't use the accompanying debit card for spends etc, because I need to know that whatever happens, the basic bills are paid and the roof is secure over our heads. Minimum debt payments are included here.

It is "everything else" that I am having the worries about....basically I get £260 maintenance and £132 child benefit and that has to cover absolutely everything else - food, bus fares, petrol, skiing, holidays, birthdays etc etc etc. For three of us, that is not very much at all, and if CHB is cut, then it really is going to be tough.

So, it doesn't take much of an overspend early in the month on groceries, or an extra couple of trips in the car, to then be short middle of the month onwards, and then to face the need to borrow money, robbing peter to pay paul, etc and all the stress that then brings along with it. That could be the slippery slope back to big debt problems and I simply cannot go there after everything we have done to get to this position now.

So, it is more a case of taking that £260 + £132 and working out what it has to cover, and when. Money will be put aside for grocery shopping, ski races that are coming up and that need entering, bus fares (I will prob start buying a monthly pass rather than weekly tickets) etc.

But yes it is bothering me. So I need to get a workable system ready, not just for the budget on 22nd but because payday is on 23rd and I really want to know where I am "at" by then.

hypno06

So.....first decision I have made is to stop buying weekly bus tickets, (bought one this morning which will take me up to payday) and instead to buy monthly/3 monthly/or annual tickets.

The cost of a weekly ticket is £12. A monthly ticket is £49. there is therefore no difference in cost, but what it does mean is that when I need a new £12 ticket, I currently go to the bank and take out £20......spend £12 on the bus fare, and the other £8 vanishes into thin air......every week.

So, by having a monthly ticket, I eliminate the need for 3 trips to the cashpoint (or the temptation of "borrowing" from 3 envelopes!).

When funds allow, I will buy longer tickets as even allowing for annual leave, they work out cheaper.

Also, I think I need to move this "cost" into the household bills as it is pretty much an essential that has to be found month in month out without fail. So I will work on tweaking the "bills" figures somehow to include the additional £49.

Souk08

Morning Hypno, reading about your envelopes with interest. What works for me(ish) is having a seperate purse for groceries and only buying food from that. I then divide up what's left of my salary after EVERYTHING is off and divide it by 4/5 and then I draw this out of the machine weekly. I am no saint and often have to borrow from the last week of the month to do something exciting in the first, but at least I know I have borrowed it and how much i have left.

My mates find my 'butchers purse' as they call it very granny like and amusing....but now that their overtime has been cut and it's me suggesting lunches etc out to them instead of the other way round then this may change. I can only do this by a bit of cooking ahead and meal planning and it's taken a while but I'm getting there. Hope this helps and have a good day. I'm off work and off to see my mum in a bit. XXX

Karmacat

Does work do interest free loans for public transport tickets, Hypno? That might help ... and just a thought about buying the monthly instead of the weekly - if its not cheaper, does it still work out better to do that when you take account of holidays? I think I remember you saying you don't have much holiday entitlement left over the summer, so maybe it doesn't matter right now - but it might well do come the autumn. Mind you, by then hopefully you'll be up to at least the quarterly ticket. Good luck with it all. My budgetting is a bit in the air at the moment, compared to where I'd like it to be, because of lots of one-off expenditures with the house purchase, and also I'm running down my storecupboard further than I would do if I were just carrying on as normal. I *am* keeping an eye on the supposed budget, tho, which is better than it has been.