Learning to Live on Less!

White_Iris

Sad to report I had a bit of a spendy weekend, too much month and not enough money. I ended up using some of this weeks grocery money and borrowing from myself by dipping in to my overdraft until today, when I get 'paid' by DH for the month.

Things are not going well financially at the moment, all the bills are paid but there is very little left over and we're starting to feel fairly deprived (by our own standards - I'm more than aware of how well off we are compared to many). Being frugal can become hard work if you've got no choice in the matter. DH is applying for another job this week - it's not ideal and many things may come back to bite us if he does end up getting it but it will mean a massive saving in petrol costs and a pay rise, meaning we would be at least £300 a month better off.

Better news from eBay - I've made about £75 this week. £50 in my PayPal account and £25 in cash. I do need to pay my fees out of this but it's a nice addition to the Christmas pot. I've added the £25 I got in cash to the grocery savings pot (since that's the only tangible saving pot I've got) and I also topped up last weeks £8 with £2 of my own money, so I've currently got £35 in there. I'll tally up the eBay pot once I've paid my fees and the last few things I'm selling have finished.

I'm feeling fairly organised with regards to Christmas presents this year. I've bought about half of the family presents and know what I'm getting for the rest. I'm also picking up a few bits (stocking fillers and the like) each week with the grocery shopping. I just need to decide what to get for DH - he has asked for money towards something but I'm not sure whether to get him what he wants (he has asked for something tech-y but he has a history of asking for things like this and then for a variety of reasons/excuses not using them) or get him something a bit more practical, which he can enjoy in the long term.

White_Iris

Good week with the grocery budget - a whole £6 left, so that's gone in the pot, taking me up to £41.

I still haven't managed to get DH is organise paying back what he owes to the credit card (he is going to a loan from his credit union but he needs to get them to send him the paperwork and trying to get him to do that is like getting blood from a stone :mad:). He has a job interview on Friday, so his brain is elsewhere at the moment but next week I'll be in full-on nagging mode!

I foresee a large dental bill in my future and the mere thought of the work I'll need is already making me anxious. I've been putting off having a tooth crowned for years but the tooth, and now the large filling in the middle of it, is crumbling away. I don't think I can put it off any longer but fortunately my new dentist is lovely so that does lessen my dental phobia slightly!

Christmas present shopping is well underway but I think we're going to need about another £100 to get everything bought. I need to change my phone soon and cash in my old one for some Amazon vouchers in order to buy DDs present. I should get about £30, which will cover about half the cost of the present. It's currently about £30 cheaper on Amazon that anywhere else but I'm sure that the closer we get to Christmas the more it's going to cost, so I need to get that organised asap.

Off to organise some more things to eBay now!

White_Iris

Winter has definitely arrived here but I'm determined to keep the heating off until the end of the month (ok, so I put it on for an hour last night to heat up DS's bedroom before bath time, as he's over the garage and it gets really chilly in there) but I'm not counting that as the automatic timer is still off. :cool:

The credit card is getting a bit messy at the moment as DH is using it for work expenses, which then need to claimed back and usually get paid as cash, which then needs to be paid off the card. Hopefully it'll be resolved by the end of the month (along with him paying back the money he's owes from the summer) and I can get a proper total for October.

Grocery shopping and menu planning is going well. Sometimes I'm a bit concerned I'm just repeating the same stuff every week but the children don't care and DH hasn't mentioned it, so it must be ok. I bought a lot of toiletries for DH last week, on offer in Boots, so I need to pay myself back on Monday once the child benefit (a.k.a. grocery shopping money) goes in, so that will leave me with £90 for the next two weeks. It's a good feeling, as I'm confident I can get everything we need with that, a couple of months ago I'd have spent nearly that much in a week. :eek:

Well, I've bitten the bullet and signed up for a contract mobile phone. It's going to cost £14 a month and I was paying £10 a month for pay-as-you go and at least now I can use the internet when I'm out and about. I always avoided that before, even though I have a smartphone, as it just cost too much. Frustratingly though, I've missed the delivery twice (both times during the 20 minutes I'm out of the house doing the school run), so I've got to drive to the depot to collect it tomorrow which is 45 minutes away. :mad: This new phone better be worth it!

It also means I can now recycle my old phone for some Amazon vouchers and finally buy DDs Christmas present - there is only one left in stock at the price I want to pay, so fingers crossed no one nabs it before I do!

White_Iris

We had a shockingly bad weekend in terms of spending, all on the credit card, and although the weekend was lovely in all other ways, the fact that we've now increased the credit card debt by at least £100 (:eek:) has taken the shine off it.

The good news is that I managed to get this weeks grocery shopping for £39 out of a budget of £45, so that's another £6 in the pot. I also added a few pound coins that were floating around so we're nearly up to £50. :T

I finally managed to get my new phone on Saturday and it's great, DH likes it so much he's also upgraded his to a similar (although naturally more complicated and expensive :cool:) model which means I can also recycle his for some vouchers. I should get about £60 in vouchers now, so even if I have to pay full price for DDs Christmas present, it should only cost about £20/£30.

DH decided not to accept the job he interviewed for last week. He said they wanted someone to do a very different role to the one they had described in the advert, so I can understand why he turned it down but I still have mixed feelings about it. We would have been about £300 a month better off and he'd have only been working 5 minutes down the road but he needs to be happy in his work I suppose. He's applying for another job this week and he's really keen on it - it's still local but doesn't pay as well. I wonder if this one hadn't come up, would he still have turned the other one down?

Off to check the banking, cringe at the new credit card balance and then cheer myself up by counting my grocery money pot. Have a nice day anyone reading this.

debtfreewannabe321

Hello *waves* i've been a bit slack coming on here recently been so busy with everything! Well done for starting the xmas shopping, I had a sudden realisation yesterday that I hadn't started mine yet :eek: this time last year I was nearly finished ...so I put that straight and bought my first presents I've been saving all year with park so I have lots of lovely vouchers to spend on amaz0n and in the high street now

What a shame your DH didn't go for the job sounds like my hubby they really do like to be awkward eh ...p.s so happy you're enjoying the new house....I sooooooo want to move as well but not yet (not enough funds lol) xx

White_Iris

debtfreewannabe321 wrote: »

Hello *waves* i've been a bit slack coming on here recently been so busy with everything! Well done for starting the xmas shopping, I had a sudden realisation yesterday that I hadn't started mine yet :eek: this time last year I was nearly finished ...so I put that straight and bought my first presents I've been saving all year with park so I have lots of lovely vouchers to spend on amaz0n and in the high street now

What a shame your DH didn't go for the job sounds like my hubby they really do like to be awkward eh ...p.s so happy you're enjoying the new house....I sooooooo want to move as well but not yet (not enough funds lol) xx

Hi DFW321, lovely to hear from you again and good work starting the Christmas shopping!

Well, it's all change again on the job front for DH - he didn't get an interview for the second job he applied for so he phoned up the first people, went back to talk to them and he's accepted it after all! It starts in january, so we've got a few more months of commuting and the expense of fuel but after that we think we'll be about £300 a month better off. :j

DH and I both upgraded our phones a few weeks ago and sent our old smart phones off for recycling in exchange for Amazon vouchers. Between the two of us we got about £70 (our phones were sooo old!), which was more than enough to get DDs Christmas present. There was also just enough left over to get the children some gifts from an Aunt, who had given me some cash to buy them something. That meant I had the cash available to go towards gifts for other people, instead of trying to find something suitable for them on Amazon.

As far as Christmas is concerned I still need to buy for my mum and MIL (no idea what I'm getting them), get my dads and sisters presents (know what to buy them, just don't have the money for it yet) and get presents for our god-children. I've got a credit voucher for M&S and two cards for a free greetings card, so I think I'll head there for our Christmas cards this year. I usually make them but this year I just c.b.a. I'll help the children make some for relatives but everyone else is getting a shop bought one (I'm also going to cut down our card list, as postage costs are horrendous and I really don't want to be spending a tenner or more on stamps to send cards to people we never hear from!). I think I'll need about £180 to cover it all but I'm hoping to be able to use some of my club card vouchers to get toys for the god-children, so that should bring the total down a bit. I need to get DH to give me some money towards this as soon as he gets paid next week, otherwise I'll end up buying it all.:(

The credit card is currently at about £1500 :eek: but £100 of that is the hotel we're staying at over Christmas, when we go and visit my family, and I intend to get that paid off before we go. DH still hasn't organised the credit union loan to pay back the money he spent on the card in August, so I'm going to have to up the nagging I think, especially now the job issue is resolved and he's got nothing else to worry about. I'm still optimistically hoping to get it down to £1000 by the end of the year and then once DH starts his new job we can get it paid off and start concentrating on saving.

Grocery shopping is going well - I have £15 left out of this weeks money, meals planned until Friday and we're going out for a meal with family on Saturday, so as long as I can cobble something together from the freezer on Sunday, I should be able to top up the grocery pot on Monday, when I withdraw next weeks £50.

White_Iris

Arghh! Credit card is worse than I thought - £1575! Even if I can pay off the £100 for the hotel and get DH to pay off the £250 he owes, that still leaves £225 to clear by the end of the year if I want to get to £1k by Jan '14.

White_Iris

White_Iris wrote: »

Arghh! Credit card is worse than I thought - £1575! Even if I can pay off the £100 for the hotel and get DH to pay off the £250 he owes, that still leaves £225 to clear by the end of the year if I want to get to £1k by Jan '14.

And it gets worse…Dh bought a new suit for work (needed but still expensive) and a few other bits and pieces for work and we're now closer to £1900. :eek: We also need some repairs to the brakes on his car which is about £150 - think we're going to break £2k soon. Time to hide the credit card I think.

I have finally managed to get DH to sort out his credit union loan to pay off what he owes on the credit card from the summer - just need to print out and post off the form, so that will reduce the balance a little bit I suppose. Lets see if we can get to the end of the month with a balance of £1500?

Better news is that the Christmas shopping is almost done, except a gift for MIL (which I'm leaving DH to buy) and the godchildren (which should be about £30 for both). I managed to get my mums present using my club card vouchers (which I boosted!), so that only cost me £9 instead of nearly £30 and I also got DH to give me some money as soon as he got paid, towards some other presents, so it's cost me less than I expected to get everything. :j I do need to get something for DH though - I keep forgetting about that! We've agreed to just do stockings for each other with little gifts, so it should be fairly cheap but I do need to put some money aside for it.

I did have £70 in the grocery pot but I dipped in to that to buy my sisters present with cash in-store, rather than online, to save delivery costs, so that's at £40 now but I've got two items ending on eBay tomorrow - both collection only/cash on collection - so if they both sell for the minimums (and they've both got quite a few watchers), then that'll be another £35 in the pot. Not sure whether to use it to pay for the hotel at Christmas, or save it for petrol money for the journey.

We're going to have to dip in to emergency savings to pay for some repairs on our rental property (got to keep the tenants happy!), so that's going to go down to about £160 - hopefully I can get that back up to around £250 by the end of the year.

I need to double check our bills budget, as we've had a few changes recently and I need to balance the books - better go do that now and print off DHs loan form while I'm at it.

White_Iris

Credit card duly hidden and currently hatching a plan to get it paid off (ok, so I've no idea how we'll pay it off but I'm thinking!). Although I printed off and organised DHs credit union forms, he still hasn't completed them so I guess I'll have to fill everything out and just get him to sign it.

Having everyone at home for the past week has resulted in some sort of residential malfunction - I've run out of everything except sausages, I have a huge pile of laundry but no washing powder, the house is a tip and the children don't start back at pre-school until Wednesday, so no child-free time to get things organised until then! Today will be mostly spent trying to clean while simultaneously trying to stop two toddlers making another mess. :cool:

I do need to do a freezer inventory and check the cupboards to see what meals I can come up with this week. I'm going to have to run out and grab some washing powder later but I'm hoping to put off a big shop until the end of the week.

Only one of my eBay items sold and that's being collected today. Annoyingly it was the cheaper of the two but it's another £10 in the pot. Listed a few new things last night and photographed a lot more, ready to be listed when I have the chance. I also need to realist the item that didn't sell - it's big and bulky and I need it out of the way soon. Hidden away under the children's single beds are their old cot beds and mattresses, which I keep forgetting about. They need to be re-assesmbled to take some photos and check we've got all the right screws for them, which is a pain in the backside, but hopefully we'll make at least £25 each for them, which would be nice before Christmas. I've also sorted out some old toys to sell but when I went to photograph one of them last night, I've discovered a piece is missing, so I need to scour the house for that today as I'm certain it's here somewhere!

Better stop procrastinating and make a start on the cleaning (or at least go make another cup of coffee!).

White_Iris

Phew, upstairs now clean and tidy, kitchen and dining room fairly tidy, living room utter carnage as the children have decided to have a "party" with all their toys while I was upstairs. Time to chill out for a while until my eBay buyer arrives (hopefully on time) and then tackle downstairs cleaning.