Learning to Live on Less!

White_Iris

Just spent a productive half hour upstairs sorting through old toys and baby blankets and now have quite a pile to sell. I've also got a few pairs of childrens shoes which usually fetch a nice amount and some bits from my wardrobe which I've ear-marked for selling later.

I've also got a big pile (20ish) of terry cloths which we used as dribble catchers (not nappies - wouldn't dream of selling them if they had been near bottoms :eek:) but almost all of them have slightly discoloured areas. I've tried soaking them in bleachy-water but that doesn't seem to have worked. They're in the machine now on a boil wash but if that doesn't help I'll need to decide whether the effort of hand treating each spot with neat bleach is worth the effort if I only make a few pounds for them :think:

I've been adding up all the money I have pending and I think by the end of the month I should be able to get the emergency savings up to £450 and my savings up to my target of £175. Maybe even add a bit more to the moving pot too! I'm also close (-ish) to a payout from OnePoll (£32.90) so if I get three or four surveys a day I should reach payout by the end of the month or early next month :T

LianneH

White_Iris wrote: »

I've been adding up all the money I have pending and I think by the end of the month I should be able to get the emergency savings up to £450 and my savings up to my target of £175. Maybe even add a bit more to the moving pot too! I'm also close (-ish) to a payout from OnePoll (£32.90) so if I get three or four surveys a day I should reach payout by the end of the month or early next month :T

thats great- excellent work :T!

how on earth did you manage to get your Onepoll up to £32.90?! I have been stuck on £19 forever!! each time I get a survey i get screened out - so annoying! :mad:

White_Iris

LianneH wrote: »

thats great- excellent work :T!

how on earth did you manage to get your Onepoll up to £32.90?! I have been stuck on £19 forever!! each time I get a survey i get screened out - so annoying! :mad:

OnePoll has slowed down massively since Christmas, there just don't seem to be as many surveys on the site. Towards the end of last year I was making about £1 a day (which is how I managed to get my balance up) but since then I'm lucky if I get 10p - I'm either screened out or get halfway through and then told that the survey is full :mad:

White_Iris

Where have all the 5ps gone?!! I only need 7 more to have a bag-full to take to the bank but we never seem to get any in our change anymore! I used to have the same problem when I tried saving £2 coins - the harder you look and the more you want them, the less appear!

White_Iris

Just spent a tedious but fruitful half hour getting home insurance quotes - looks like I should be able to save about £10 a month and get £60 cashback! I need to dig out the paperwork for a claim we made a few years ago before I complete the proper application, I'll maybe wait until the children are in bed this evening to tackle that.

White_Iris

Woo hoo, up to £33.40 on OnePoll (mind you I am checking manically every few minutes!). Also put one of my two remaining textbooks on Amazon Marketplace, all the others were so out of date that I sent them to charity (left uni in '98). I did hope to list both but the ISBN code for the second was linked to the hardback version and mine is paperback, plus its quite a big heavy thing and the price for paperbacks wasn't great so I probably wouldn't get much profit from it even with the postage credit - off to the charity bag it will go I think.

The terry cloths I mentioned yesterday look exactly the same even after a boil wash and bleaching - I think it'll be too much effort to tackle each stain individually so I'll hold on to them for a while and try to think of things to do with them. If I haven't used them (or earmarked them for a project) in a few months I'll put them on Freecycle or send them to charity.

lucielle

Can you dye them?
L

White_Iris

lucielle wrote: »

Can you dye them?
L

Hi Lucielle, They are cotton so I probably could dye them and then maybe they'd be suitable for selling on if I chose a baby friendly shade. I'll look in to that, thanks!

White_Iris

I'm a bit irratated with DH at the moment. We were meant to be better off this month because of the money that would have been his pension contribution but we've run out of money already (which means no nice meal on Mothers Day but that's a whole other rant ). He didn't withdraw the petrol money as cash like normal, so that's been spent as well and it's still 2 weeks until payday. I know that part of the money has been spent on me and the children but he just doesn't keep track of his spending. If he said we couldn't do this or that because we didn't have the money that would be fine but he never even considers his bank balance, he just spends :mad:. I've told him that next month I'm taking control of all the money - I'll leave him a bit in his account for pocket money but otherwise it's all getting transferred in to my account straight away.

White_Iris

Yay! Finally overcame my meal-planning mental block and have planned our evening meals until the end of the month. This has meant that I've managed to stick to my £60 online grocery shopping budget, leaving me with £20 for top-ups until the end of the month.