Improving my life during Summer 2010

Mags30

I've just finished doing the garden and cutting the grass. It took me 2 hours and I ended up with a very unflattering bright red face and a slight heat rash (it's hot here today) but I've saved myself paying €30 for someone else to do it. Off to my mothers until tomorrow, it's almost an hours drive so Lady Gaga will keep me company! That's why I don't download music, I prefer the old-fashioned cd version for playing in the car.

Mags30

Spent the last 2 hours writing reviews on an Irish review site. I did 10 reviews to earn a €10 Just-Eat voucher. It's only €5 an hour for my time so hardly highly paid but I'm ok with that. Reviews can be written from home in my pyjamus, it costs me nothing to write them and in return I get to enjoy an almost free takaway next week.

Mystery shopping seems to be much more hassel. Unlike the "make it up as you go along" technique of review writing mystery shopping assignments come with around 8 pages of very detailed briefing notes and require you to spend money buying things.

The shop I almost did today involved:

• doing a price check on 5 different items
• buying: 1)a sandwich 2)a coffee 3)a hot item from the deli counter 4)a lynx shower gel or deodorant
• asking if the meat in the sausage rolls is Irish
• only buying part of a special offer to see if the staff pointed out the offer
• asking for a special offer leaflet if I couldn't find it myself
• asking another question at the checkout about plastic bags

The problems with this:

• It would have been ok in a supermarket but the shop in question is a tiny convenience store/deli where builders buy breakfast rolls, me joining the queue to check that the meat was Irish would have stood out a mile to the staff as the mystery shopper. I'd be really uncomfortable with that, although it would probably be a guarantee of excellent customer service!
• The entire fee for the shop was €17.50 but the items I had to buy (which I didn't want) would easily add up to €10, then another hour spent scanning and uploading the receipt and typing the report would make it lower paid for my time than the review writing.
• The shop was in the city centre, I'd be leaving the shop with coffee + deli food that needed to be eaten immediately but with no car, desk or park bench nearby I wouldn't have anywhere to eat it.
• As a single female living alone I don't want lynx products

I'm not ruling mystery shopping out though. A similar shop where I could park and eat the food in the car or just buy things that I might be buying anyway would definitely be worth doing. For June I'm working on signing up to as many of the companies as I can and working out which shops each of them work for.

I've started on survery sites as well. Again for June I'm just working on signing up and learning my way around them but I've done a few surveys already. It looks like the points take a long time to build up but if you are signed up to enough sites there should always be a few euro or an Amazon voucher coming from somewhere.

Signing up to all these sites and learning about them is extremely time consuming. I'm hoping that by next month I'll be able to do it much faster because all of the registering will be over + the invites will just be there in my inbox every day. I haven't had a chance to learn about clicking sites yet, I'll do that in July.

Mags30

Today's the longest day of the year, it's 10pm and still bright. I'm feeling so lonely tonight. The neighbours were out the back earlier having drinks with friends on their new decking and I'm home alone wishing I was out somehere with somebody doing something nice and summery. Didn't even receive replies to the text messages I sent today. It's just been one of those days, hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Mags30

Visited a friend in hospital tonight (explains why he didn't reply to my texts). He's ok now, wearing a heart monitor and will most likely be going home tomorrow, the heart condition has been an ongoing problem for him-he will most likely need a bypass eventually.

I had to bring him a few things which I paid for on my credit card because I have literally no money until payday tomorrow, of course I would never admit this to my real life friends, just like I don't mention that my expensive looking clothes are mostly old or were purchased on the 70% off rail. Every day the news and papers talk about the economy and it's all €80 million here, €3 billion there....but when we read one another's diaries on here it's £300 for the car insurance, £50 for the electricity.....miniscule amounts of money compared with what we hear about in the media yet household budgets often don't stretch that for.

I know it's budget day in the UK today and yesterday in Ireland the Financial Regulator announced that the lending laws are being tightened up even more. Sounds like it's going to become impossible to get any sort of credit here soon. Despite struggling financially I'm so thankful to have the house because I wouldn't be given the mortgage now.

This sounds bad but I was so happy to have somewhere to go tonight, to get out of the house for a while even if it was visiting someone in hospital. There's something about the long evenings and the beautiful weather that makes being indoors alone in a city house depressing (especially when the neighbours seem to be having a great time out on their new decking). I'm not jealous of the neighbours by the way, I'm lucky that they are nice people who like to do home improvements and not people who cause trouble. It's just that they're making me feel a bit lonely.

Another thing I'm really thankful for is that I've become much more confident about driving recently. Yesterday I drove into the city centre and tonight i drove to the hospital no problem, stopping off at Tesco on the way. A few months ago I would have done anything to avoid driving, now I seem to get in the car without even thinking about it. 2 years ago I genuienly believed I'd never get to that stage. I must start a gratitude journal soon.

Mags30

My friend is home from hospital:)

Tonight I used my €10 Just-Eat voucher from review writing to order a pizza. Delivery took an hour and the customer service was awful. Slow and bad service ruins a lot of the pleasure of something that's supposed to be a treat, even if the pizza was lovely when it finally arrived. Had it with a bottle of beer from Aldi--I don't really drink at all--I think I've been influenced by all the advertising of pizza and beer offers for the World Cup.

Off to bed now to flick through some self-help books for inspiration/motivation.

ConfusedAgain

Just dropping by to say that I'm glad to hear your friend in the hospital is ok and that your diary is really inspiring.

Mags30

ConfusedAgain wrote: »

Just dropping by to say that I'm glad to hear your friend in the hospital is ok and that your diary is really inspiring.

Oh my God!! Thank you, I'm really flattered that somebody finds my diary inspiring

From the money chapter in "The Secret" last night:

"To attract money you must focus on wealth. It is impossible to bring more money into your life when you are noticing you do not have enough, because that means you are thinking thoughts that you do not have enough. Focus on not enough money, and you will create untold more circumstances of not having enough money. You must focus on the abundance of money to bring that to you"

The lights went out fairly quickly after reading that :wall:

In other (less stressful) reading: I never used to read chick-lit but recently I'm enjoying it. I've finished "Personally I blame my Fairy Godmother" by Claudia Carroll. (It's about a glamorous TV presenter who becomes unemployed + poor) and I've started "Rules for a Perfect Life" by Niamh Greene. Both are Irish authors and very entertaining.

I'm still not entirely convinced about mystery shopping. I have no real enthusiasm for it but I think there's potential there to maybe earn €100 a month which would in a few months pay for a holiday or a gym membership or numerous other things that I can't afford just now. (Yes I know I should be thinking towards paying off my debt).

So today I did my first 2 mystery shops. One involved enquiring about broadband at a phone shop, no purchase was required and the pay is €16. It was easy but really boring having to pretend to be interested in something I have no intention of buying. Then I spent ages writing the report because the reports are graded and I don't want to ruin my chances of being offered more work!

The other one was for a different branch of the convenience store I declined last week. The fee is €17.50 but I spent €9.40 on test purchases of overpriced food that I didn't really want. I did drink the coffee and eat the sandwich and the 2 litre bottle of Club orange is now in my fridge but that €10 would have been better spent on a nice lunch somewhere else or on petrol. The report was easy enough to complete, uploading the receipt was awkward because I'm not very experienced at scanning but I'll improve at that with practice if I keep this up.

When I get paid for today's 2 assignments it's €33.50 so 6 assignments a month should provide approx €100. That's why I'm so tempted to explore this further.

I think it would take 4-6 months to become efficient at mystery shopping. It's not a quick-fix for money, it requires work and dedication but I think it would become easier and faster with experience.

Learning the way around the different sites and working out which ones email job offers to you and which ones require you to log on and apply for the jobs is more complicated than the actual shops but very necessary because being active on loads of sites is essential to generate income from this. And yes I have found the mystery shopping threads on here! (Suscribed)

Unfortunately my inbox is not inudated with offers to do surveys. I did 2 for Lightspeed Panel today, probably earned less than 50 cents but it's fast and will hopefully add up to some vouchers for Christmas.

That's all for now, goodnight MSE:)

Mags30

Driving: My confidence has just been dented rather badly (not the car thankfully). I'm not good at parking or at any manouvers in tight spaces in general. I park in white boxes in carparks or big open spaces out the country, definitely no parallel parking for me for now. Returning from my mothers I drove into the car park where I live. It was packed, nowhere to park so I had to turn the car in limited space to get back out. It takes much longer for me to do this than it would take a good driver and I tend to go very slowly for fear of hitting another car. No problem there, it's a private estate, I wasn't in anybodys way and I did manage to park the car somewhere else.

Now anybody watching me would probably just think "bad driver" or in the case of men "women drivers" and not particularly care but this guy with a foreign accent who had clearly been watching me came over and knocked on my window and asked me if I've been driving for long and told me that I should have someone with me so that I don't have an accident:mad:

I responded by saying "I'm fine thanks, I'm just not the best at parking" and then ignoring him and he went away but I was furious. It's not as if I hit his car or anybody elses so it's none of his business if I'm having trouble with parking. Doesn't he have problems of his own to be sorting out.

It's not news to me that I'm bad at parking, improving my driving is one of the things I wrote at the start of my diary. The anxiety I suffer from does make me more sensitive to criticism but I really think he had no right to comment. Out on the roads everyone encounters bad driving or learner drivers having trouble but they don't go over and comment.

It's not as if I crashed the car so there's no reason at all to be upset but I am, even if I know I'll get over it in a bit. I had my first driving lesson almost 2 years ago and it didn't come naturally at all. I spent a fortune on driving lessons and I'm proud of the progress I've made and his interference really doesn't help my confidence.

Rant over, at least it's therapeutic writing it all down

whatatwit

Couldn't you just slap some people.
If watching you turn your car around bothered him so much, he would have been much more helpful to have watched your bumpers and signalled when you were getting close. Interfering !!!!!!.

Sorry about that, but I had been reading through your diary and this made me really cross

Mags30

@whatatwit Thanks for the support. I saw him again during the week getting into a car that's around the half the size of mine. Wanted to explain to him that small cars are easier to park :mad: but obviously I just pretended not to see him.

I'm not bad at driving. I lack confidence about driving to places I haven't been before and I'm not great at parking but that doesn't make me a dangerous driver. There are loads of other people who can't park, especially in Ireland where parking isn't even part of the driving test. I'm working on improving and I do aspire to being a brilliant driver but for now I'm doing just fine regardless of what some rude stranger thought.

I've been really busy all week, still catching up with jobs from June but busy seems to suit me at the moment. I'm still mystery shopping, had a lovely easy job today that just required me to ring up and make an appointment. Would love more jobs like that. Still doing the surveys as well but not qualifying for loads of them which is disappointing.

There was a report on the news during the week saying that Ireland has the second highest food prices in Europe with food costing 30% more than the EU average. (Denmark being the most expensive) It's no wonder I'm poor!