The Spikes' debt diary

chocaholic110

OneSpike wrote:

Right time to stop rambling and carry on with the letters. Boring as hell this diary I know (I'll never be a Mrs Sparkle!) but it helps me keep track of how things are going. Oh oh oh, the best thing of all!!! NATHANIEL FOUND HIS WEDDING RING, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!! It was in the overnight bag he'd taken to London, must have come off when he was scrabbling around. I'm so thrilled, awwww! :T

I don't think it's boring at all but that's because I love debt diaries as

1. Sometimes they contain ideas to save / make money that i hadn't thought of
2. They are generally very inspiring and help other people realise that they're not alone on the debt journey
3. I'm really nosy and like to know what other people are up to!

Congrats on the wedding ring find! My OH lost his shortly after our wedding 8 years ago and was never seen again. He thinks he knows where it went (or rather who took it as he started wearing an exceedingly similar one soon afterwards despite not being married, hmmmm!) but that's a whole other story!

Edited to say, I just noticed your signature as I posted my message and it almost made tea come out of my nose when I laughed! How disgusting!

OneSpike

Money at last, hurrah! Our salaries arrived in the new account today, so we toddled off to town and filled up one car and did a supermarket shop, grand total of £101 all together :eek: We then went to the wholefood warehouse and bought spices and oats and lentils, and bumped into one of the art teachers whose classes I model for. That was a rather profitable little encounter as we lined up some work for January, yippee dippee Then we went into Oxfam and I found a collectible little tin for 50p (50p!!!!!) that I'm about to bung up on eBay. It was half of a pair for 99p but they aren't a real pair (ie just two tins bunged together for 99p) so I'm going to make a candle in the other one and give that as a present. It was 99p unbudgetted for but I should turn a profit of anything up to a fiver

I should be emptying the dishwasher and starting the soup, but I'm about to list on eBay - does that make me a keen DFW or a lazy moo?!

Urgh , Nathaniel had a stroppy call from MBNA this morning, gits. It was 'Destiny' calling from a million miles away (by the sound of the line) to apply a bit of pressure, but Nat stuck to his guns and said he would only communicate in writing. Horrible way to start the day (8.45am) but hey, we can handle it.

Oooh handed in my job application yesterday, but it was a bit weird. The offices must be temporary or not set up yet as all post for the organisation gets handed into the bakery next door - !! So I handed my precious job app to a woman in a mob cap and apron who appeared not to have heard of the company, help! Her colleague seemed to know what to do but I'm going to call the people tomorrow to make sure it got to its destination. So much for a cheery smile so they could put a face to my name, hey ho.

Hmm, getting a conscience now, gonna make the soup then do eBay... Veg soup with dumples tonight. Can't think of dumplings without Nursey coming to mind, ah, those were the days. Blackadder, Blackadder, tra la laaaa

ifonlyiknewthen

I`m reading your diary daily and you`re making great progress so far.
Keep it up!:T

OneSpike

More steady stuff today. Spent £47 filling up the merc, which DH now tells me needs new tyres - now why do Merc tyres cost less than half what Renault tyres cost??? Will be glad to be shot of the beautiful but bloody expensive to run Renault. So on Friday we'll be spending a hideous chunk of money getting both cars seen to, but the merc work is all budgetted for and my father's paying for the Renault work as part of his payment for buying the car, so not as bad as it feels. Making the most of the trip into town (half hour drive) by getting some essentials in LIDL, but only about £5's worth as the food budget is almost wrung out for this week.

Got another job application ready to go off tomorrow, but they want full time which just won't work round the children. Rang today to check the handed-in-at-the-bakery application had landed on the right desk but the answerphone msg makes it clear they're only in the office Monday and Tuesday, so what kind of organisation am I applying to work for?! Am forking out £6 tomorrow night on a ticket for my friend's choir's Christmas concert, but I'm hoping they'll accept me into the choir which will be a darn sight cheaper than singing lessons, so it's an investment! DD's Christmas fair at school on Friday, which is really very unfair as I've made a plate of lebkuchen for the cake stand and will be expected to buy some of her artwork, but she's so excited about it that we've budgetted £2.50 from Household for it. Hoping for a free weekend!

I've just had a fab email - I've been accepted for a new current account with the same company Nathaniel's just joined up to, and we should get cashback for that :T Having just switched all the dirdebs from our old joint account to this new one we'll have to do it all over again once I'm up and running. I'm getting good at this - I've never been so in the know about our finances as I am now! It did feel weird not having my own bank account for a couple of weeks there, well not one I could use anyway. I had to take Nathaniel's card to fill up the car earlier, and I'm plainly not 'Mr' anyone, but as you stick the card in the reader yourself they don't notice, and I knew the PIN. Still felt weird though! The garage was heaving too so it would have been horrendously embarrassing if they'd decided I was doing something dodgy!

Oh well, off to bed for my spikey sleep >wot no sleepy smiley?<

Brassic

Hi Spike,

Just found your diary - great rreading so far, will bookmark it. Gotta go as loadsa work to do - but keep up the good work!

Mrs_Sparkle

You're doing really well hun- good news about the current account and cashback. I love cashback these days!

Keep it up... it's all the little things that make a difference.

OneSpike

Hmm, things haven't gone quite so well spendingwise in the last 24 hours or so

Yesterday morning we took both cars to town to have work done on them. It takes 35 mins to get into town and park, so we tend to make the most of it when we do go in - no 'nipping home for half an hour', and the public transport is no use for getting us home. So, while my car was in Kwik Fit and Nathaniel's was in the garage we walked into town and decided to have our Christmas treat - you can hear the warning bells going off, can't you? Sad to say, we're such bumpkins that going to Starbucks is a treat for us, and I look forward to the gingerbread latte all year, so we went and had a coffee and a bun each, at a cost of about £7. I immediately opened my dairy the moment we sat down and deducted it from the household budget, what a good little DFW! We spent as long as we could there and I took a good handful of paper napkins and those funny wooden stick stirrer things, as I thought they might be useful for craft. Then Nathaniel suggested looking in The Works, this was his reason: I make candles and tend to filch DD's wax crayons to colour wax and create effects. I figure that she has ten million and will never notice - let's say she hasn't yet! Anyway Nat thinks this is a bit mean of me so he wanted to buy her some more for Christmas, even though the child has two overflowing boxes of crayons, felt-tips and coloured pencils, urghhh. Still, I agreed...

We walked out £51 less 'well off' - where's the hara kiri icon??? To be fair, that included some roaring deals on DVDs and books and more or less sorted Christmas for our parents plus their hangers-on. An added dimension this year is that Nat's aunt has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given 3-6 months to live. She and his mother are very close identical twins (they live together and share a job) so this news that is bad enough anyway has an extra twist. It didn't feel like the time to be quibbling over a few £££s, and I have to agree but at the same time the spending made me uncomfortable. The we went to Clare's to look for something halo-ish for DD's Angel Gabriel moment in the nativity play, and found one for £2 that we will wrap some 99p wiry tinsel around. We walked pass a crappy card shop that had fantastic things in the 99p bin outside so we spent £6 there. Nat suggested having lunch out and I put it to him that if he wanted to take me out to lunch that was lovely and I would graciously accept and have a lovely time, but that I wasn't hungry (true, for once!) and I couldn't help being bothered about the cost. I should say at this stage that neither of us envisaged being out all day - if I'd known we would be I'd have bitten his hand off LOL!

Eventually we got the call that my car was ready, so we went to get it and paid £400-odd for the tyres and alignment, but that money was sitting in the account as it was part of the money my father has paid us for the car, which he's buying from us and collecting in a couple of weeks. Once we had wheels again we went to LIDL and spend more than expected - Nat wanted a stollen and we bought a couple of off-list items, but also considered and decided against a few too. It wasn't vastly overbudget though, about £7 or so - pretty good for yesterday really! We then had to go to Morrisons for veggie mince for SS' cookery class on Monday, but we had a Morrisons Miles £5 voucher which paid for that, but not for the magazine we couldn't resist (it had something about The Archers in it ), the tinsel we bought for DD's halo, the tights I do actually genuinely really need and the other one or two bits we got.

Then we went to get Nat's car, but it wasn't ready so we'll have to go back on Monday. By this time it was 3pm and we had to head straight to DD's school for the Christmas fair and art show - ravenously hungry of course. Nat decided to buy a couple of plates of cakes as well as several cups of tea and a plate of biccies >sigh< Including £2 for DD's picture we spent £8 - it almost hurts.

There's more - it gets worse. Today we put up the Christmas tree. We have an artificial one that I've never quite come to terms with, but at least it meant we didn't have to pay for one today. We discovered a couple of sets of lights were dead. My immediate thought was 'ah well, we have some others, this isn't the year to replace them' but nope, Nat was pulling his boots and on and coralling us all into the car to go and get more. I know his mood atm and I didn't want to sour everything by insisting we couldn't afford it, so we spent about £35 in total on loads of lights and some tinsel as the girl in Focus had a funny with the till and our £30 lights were rung in as £15 - she explained it as a 25% discount, so obviously arithmetic isn't a requirement for working on the till at Focus LOL! Nat's put lights along our front fence and in the trees at the front and it looks lovely, but I feel we've really messed up spendingwise. He tells me (and I do trust him implicitly) that the picture we've put to the creditors is rather blacker than things really are, to enable us to increase payments to them over the next few months without squeezing ourselves hideously tight. Hmm. I know that's the case as I've seen the figures, but personally I feel any extra should go to creditors sooner or later rather than on Christmas lights and stuff, but that's so damn boring of me. Nat is naturally an excessive person and he just seemed to get into a 'sod it' mood yesterday. We also have the £1500 from the car sale (that's in addition to the money Dad's given us to cover the servicing) so the cashflow is there, but spending it on stuff was never the idea.

So, copybook a bit blotted but it is :xmastree: On the upside, Nat had one of those blindingly obvious thoughts yesterday that has got me very excited. He runs his own company which is a good going concern, but lacks a salesperson or non-technical customer looker-after sort of person. He casually said yesterday while we were driving to DD's thing after school 'why don't you do more work for the company dealing with customers?' - uh duh, yes, why not?! The obvious downside is that there won't be any more money for this (I get about £500 a month from his company for proof-reading, support and software testing), but through my ministrations I can sell servers or generate business then we'll benefit from the extra income and that's partly commission-based too. I immediately had loads of ideas which are still all in my head and need to go down on paper, but together with BIL and another business contact we could really start selling servers and making our customers feel well and truly loved. It means I carry on working from home so am here for DD every morning and evening and Nat and I can really grow the family business. I'm really excited about it :j

Well, guess I'd better go into the sitting room and enjoy these bloody lights! Merry Christmas everyone, bah humbug!

OneSpike

Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Nathaniel has just called after his meeting in Scotland, and the client wants to spend an extra SIX FIGURES a year with us, woooooooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! :dance: :T A fair chunk of that will be investment in the company, but my salary will likely double after a couple of months (ie when the money starts rolling in) and it's making me even more enthusiastic about my new customer service role. I'm about to draft a newsletter and a customer audit procedure for the new year. We're in such a great position as Nat's business partner recruited me to his internal audit department about 10 years ago (when Nat and I first met and he went on to marry someone else disastrously and on the rebound while I had a series of fun but empty flings, what WERE we thinking?!), so he has a bit of respect for what I have between the ears and we know we can all work together as we've done it before. I'm so thrilled, can't contain myself!

In terms of the debts, things won't change much in the short term as the extra money will initially go into upgrading hardware and providing infrastructure for the services Nat's company will be providing, but as my salary goes up and Nat's does a little, things will settle down and we can increase our payments. Nat wants so sit things out but he's anticipating a £50k bonus payment at the end of the coming year *if* things go to plan, which would enable us to polish off over half our debt or maybe even come to a one-off settlement arrangement. Suddenly owning our own house one day when all this is over seems much more likely. Oh my husband is a wonderful man!

Right, I'm off to get business planning, in the 45 mins before I have to do the school run :rolleyes:

Serialdieter

Hi

Just found your diary, love reading these.

Sounds like things are looking up for you. Ooh I'd so love a starbucks.... I'll admit I overspent at dd's christmas fayre too

Jx