Lois_E begins a long MFW journey

GeorgieFTB

Lois

You are my inspiration, I have kept my spending diary since payday, so 6 days... but its a start...

So far I've itemised everything so I can chart everything, I think the scariest chart will be essential vs non-essential, if it's worse than 50/50 I might cry!!! Well I might decide that I need to freeze my debit card!

Gx

Lois_E

Update for month 7/6/11-6/7/11
Spending diary up to date
(Everything I owe the world)-(balances of all my accounts) increased by £50.82 since 6/6/11 (but I did have that £480 bill for a whole term's after school club)
(Everything I owe the world)-(balances of all my accounts) decreased by 878.98 since 6/5/11
Average since 6/5/11 is decrease of £439.49 per month
Building work minimal progress since 6/6/11 and no further payments made towards it

Thanks for your lovely comment, Georgie. How's your diary going?

Lois_E

Only spend today has been a Mr T delivery. I usually get it during the week when the delivery charge is cheaper, but I've got out of sync with myself. So had to pay £5 delivery instead of £3. But chose stuff as carefully as I could and ended up with £10.24 of savings.

Nasty headache this afternoon. Tried to sleep it off and did get a brief nap, but DD was lonely and started winding DS up, which got noisy, so I ended up inviting DD into my bedroom to watch stuff on iplayer with me. It made her feel she was getting attention, and meant I could carry on lying down while I waited for the ibuprofen to work. Headache finally gone now, although I'm still very tired. Time to cook something quick and easy and send kids to bed, I think. Am going to be firm and make them tidy the mess they have made in the dining area while I'm cooking, though.

CTC due to arrive in bank account on Monday, so have set up an online transfer to move it to the slush fund (aka instant access savings account).

ETA Have decided to have an avatar. I took this picture from my bedroom window in my last house but two.

gratefulforhelp_2

Very cool pic.

Lois_E

Thanks grateful.

Been a bit busy the last couple of weeks - lots of end of term stuff to fit in (and pay for, I'm afraid). However, we have all broken up now, so looking forward to not having to get up for a deadline in the mornings. This will be the first time I've covered the school holidays with my spending diary, so it will be interesting to see what effect it has on my spending patterns.

One thing I've planned for the holiday is to try where possible to go places on foot or on bikes instead of driving, but I expect overall petrol spend will go up because we'll go to places that are a lot further away than the kids' school and mine.

twinklie

I can't believe I've only just noticed that you have your own diary. Bad twinklie. I'm all signed up to stalk you now though!

Lois_E

Welcome to my diary twinklie. :wave:

It's only an hour or so since I put the link to my diary in my sig - looks like it's working.

Moneysaving task for today: make chocolate buns with DD and/or DS.
ETA Have made 2 dozen chocolate buns. DD helped, then DS came in an there was an argument about whose turn it was to help - each child wanting to help without the other one being involved. We settled it that DD would continue helping with the buns but DS could make icing, and later in the week we will make some more but DS can help bake and DD make the icing. They are now out of the oven - 8 each for the three of us. I have eaten 4 of mine already. But they are only small!

twinklie

Ok I don't feel so bad then. I followed your link!

pammyj74

Your kids sound just like mine, they can honestly argue over the air that they breathe!! It got to one point the other week where I made them both go to their rooms every day after school for three days until they could be in the same room without arguing over the silliest thing.
Luckily they got on well on holiday but I think that was because they were either occupied with something or too shattered!

Well done on keeping the spending diary up, I keep forgetting to do it so have given up and just update my SS bills sheet and Grocery budget instead.

Lois_E

I've just ordered my latest thing for improving my house. It's a ceiling airing rack like one of these (only I got it for less than that on ebay ). It's going to go in the utility room - I'll get the builder to put it up for me when he's here doing other stuff. It's a big utility room, so I've got the maximum length, which is 2.4m. I've got some normal A shaped white plastic covered floor-standing airing racks already. I think I might take one of those apart and attach the two halves of it horizontally onto the ceiling rack - it would give me more length of bars to hang things from, and would be narrow enough to peg things onto instead of draping - I always find stuff dries more quickly when pegged.