Learning to Live on Less!

jwil

wishies_x wrote: »

Just stumbled across your diary I am in a similar situation, I have one little boy and baby girl due in July, I currently work part time (if I went back anymore it wouldn't be worth it in childcare ) and we have pretty much the same spending money left, it sounds doable but I'm finding it really undoable there's always a birthday or something that comes up. I too have been buying second hand clothes for baby and it feel so guilty, I am finding the fact I can't buy them shiny new fabby things the hardest we would have soooo much more money if we didn't have any of these debts, but every time I sell something on ebay it gets used on something we need, never the debts! It's driving me insane - anyway! I will be following your diary and fab news about your house, I really hope it works out xx

Hi wishies

Congrats on your imminent arrival :T

Don't feel bad about not buying new for your children - I've got a 1 year old, and we hardly bought anything new for him - we get most of his clothes and toys second hand.

They don't know any different and the second hand stuff has been used so little, no one else knows either!

It is frustrating when you think of how much money you'd have if it wasn't for the debts (I do this ALL the time!) but we are getting ourselves in a better financial position, and will be able to teach our children good financial habits hopefully

dawnybabes

Just read all the way through, you've done so well xx

White_Iris

lucielle wrote: »

Wow just heard your news. Hope everything goes smoothly.
L

jwil wrote: »

That's fantastic news about the house!

Hope you are enjoying the new car

dawnybabes wrote: »

Just read all the way through, you've done so well xx

Thank you everyone!

White_Iris

wishies_x wrote: »

Just stumbled across your diary I am in a similar situation, I have one little boy and baby girl due in July, I currently work part time (if I went back anymore it wouldn't be worth it in childcare ) and we have pretty much the same spending money left, it sounds doable but I'm finding it really undoable there's always a birthday or something that comes up. I too have been buying second hand clothes for baby and it feel so guilty, I am finding the fact I can't buy them shiny new fabby things the hardest we would have soooo much more money if we didn't have any of these debts, but every time I sell something on ebay it gets used on something we need, never the debts! It's driving me insane - anyway! I will be following your diary and fab news about your house, I really hope it works out xx

Hi wishies, it's lovely to have a new face on the diary, feel free to come here any time you want a virtual shoulder to lean on. If you're just starting out down the debt-free wanabee route, the whole lifestyle and budget changes can seem tough but if you persevere your whole mindset changes and spending less becomes easier.

Please don't feel bad about buying second-hand. I totally agree with everything that jwil has already said, no-one need know it's not new unless you tell them and actually you'll probably find most people do the same. Occasionally I think that it would be nice to buy something brand new for the children but when I look at the prices (especially clothes) and weigh it against how hard my children are on clothes, it rarely makes sense when you can find pretty much anything you want on eBay.

I tend to use eBay as a way of making money to buy the things we need, rather than to make money to pay off debts. I try to be money-neutral when it comes to clothes - selling things to make the money to buy new things. Although it doesn't seem like it'd making any difference to your finances, imagine if you didn't make that bit of extra money but you still had to buy all the things you needed.

As far as things like birthdays are concerned, the trick is to plan as far in advance as you can. From February to June, I have two birthdays a month, every month (three in May and June), so I try to buy a month in advance, starting in the January sales. I also keep a tin in a kitchen drawer and any leftover cash from the grocery budget (I withdraw £50 a week in cash to buy groceries, if I shop smart and menu plan I can get away with only spending about £40) goes in there and is used towards things like birthday resents.

Please don't think that I always find things easy though. Sometimes it is tough and we get fed up with having no money and that's when we spend money we don't have (i.e. the evil credit card) but I come back on here, read a few diaries and get back on the debt-free wagon. I've rambled a bit but what I'm trying to say is that you're not alone and whenever you want some advice or just a rant about how !!!!py it is having no money, then there will always be a friendly face here.

White_Iris

I've been thinking about our debts recently, especially the dreaded credit card. I'm ashamed to admit that we've let it creep back up to around £2000. This needs to be dealt with and we could just take the easy route and pay it off with the money from the sale of our house but we need to retain as much of that as possible if we want to buy another house any time soon.

I need to get my money saving head on and get back to basics. So, the credit card will be locked away and I will start paying it off with any spare cash we have. I've got some things listed on eBay and another three or four large things to get listed in the next few days. Hopefully I should make close to £100 if everything sells, so that can all get paid off the card.

Things I need to budget for in the next two months...
- presents for three childrens birthday parties next week :eek: (£15) coming out of this weeks grocery money
- lawn mower service/repairs (£100) not sure - maybe savings maybe credit card
- market value survey on house (£300) in emergency savings
- sisters birthday present (£20) saved from grocery money next week and week after
- childrens birthday presents (£70) ???
- family day out for childrens birthday (£50) ??? maybe Tesco vouchers

Quite a lot of spending and some of it I don't know where the money is going to come from, need to get my thrifty thinking cap on.

White_Iris

White_Iris wrote: »

Things I need to budget for in the next two months...
- presents for three childrens birthday parties next week :eek: (£15) coming out of this weeks grocery money BOUGHT FROM GROCERY MONEY
- lawn mower service/repairs (£100) not sure - maybe savings maybe credit card LAWNMOWER UNFIXABLE SO NOTHING TO PAY BUT WE WILL NEED TO BUY A NEW ONE NOW
- market value survey on house (£300) in emergency savings
- sisters birthday present (£20) saved from grocery money next week and week after
- childrens birthday presents (£70) ???
- family day out for childrens birthday (£50) ??? maybe Tesco vouchers DEFINATELY WILL USE VOUCHERS, TO AT LEAST HALVE THE COST IF NOT COVER IT ALL

I've sold a few things over the weekend, one for cash on collection so when they come and get it tonight I can put the money towards sisters birthday. We do need to buy a new mower but we've borrowed MILs so the lawn is tidy for now (and we can probably use it again in a few weeks), giving us a short reprieve to decide what to get and how much to spend. So, it seems that all we need to worry about at the moment is buying the childrens birthday present (and a bit of spending money for our day out).

Having a good clean, tidy and sort out today. I'm going to be brave and swap the heavy winter coats for lighter ones and give the porch a good clean - what are the chances we get torrential rain and freezing temperatures now?

debtfreewannabe321

Morning WI
We have the same luck with lawnmowers, however we only have a small amount of grass to cut at the moment so we bought one of those old fashioned push mowers with no electric I've had many comments -all derogatory and not very nice tbh but I don't care- but it's into yr 2 for us and that is a new record usually they last about 8 weeks tops lol (teach us for buying cheap flymos perhaps???)

How's the new car? I'm desperate to get a new (to us at least) one but no spare money at the moment and i'm not keen to take any credit on

Hope the holidays are going well xx

White_Iris

debtfreewannabe321 wrote: »

Morning WI
We have the same luck with lawnmowers, however we only have a small amount of grass to cut at the moment so we bought one of those old fashioned push mowers with no electric I've had many comments -all derogatory and not very nice tbh but I don't care- but it's into yr 2 for us and that is a new record usually they last about 8 weeks tops lol (teach us for buying cheap flymos perhaps???)

How's the new car? I'm desperate to get a new (to us at least) one but no spare money at the moment and i'm not keen to take any credit on

Hope the holidays are going well xx

Still delaying the new mower purchase by borrowing MILs but I think she may start "commenting" on how often we borrow it soon. Would love a push-mower, so low maintenance and cheap to run but our garden is pretty big and uneven, so I don't think the suggestion would go down very well with DH. :rotfl:Going to try and convince him to get a mid-range hover mower, rather than a more expensive petrol one though.

The new car is great and still a novelty - I think it's been cleaned more in the last few weeks than the old one was cleaned in the last six months!

Holidays are going well so far - nice and cheap! The kids are missing pre-school though and starting to annoy each other, luckily the weather has been ok so I've been out in the garden with them as much as possible, trying to keep them busy.

We've been doing a few projects in the garden and we've just finished emptying and cleaning up a raised bed, so I've got the children to help plant some seeds. Carrots, beetroot and peas outside and some courgettes in an old fruit punnet indoors. I might pop out later and try to find some seed potatoes and I need to find the instructions for making origami newspaper pots, so I can get some sweetcorn started. MIL has promised some tomato plants and strawberrys - I'll be running out of room soon but I did see that Aldi have some cheap hanging baskets so I may get a couple of those for the strawbs. Getting a bit low on funds though, so I might have a look on eBay and Freecycle first.

White_Iris

I managed to get the origami pots made and have planted the last of a packet of sweetcorn kernels that I opened about 3 years ago! Fingers crossed they germinate. I looked everywhere for seed potatoes but could only find them in one place and they were huge bags of fairly standard varieties - maybe I've left it too late? Anyway, I only wanted 9 or 10 to go in my three potato growing bags so I've ordered 10 of a heritage variety from eBay. Hopefully they'll get delivered soon and I can get them growing.

I was tempted by some pretty woven rush hanging baskets while I was out but I remembered seeing some ordinary ones in MILs shed, so I've asked if I can borrow those instead. All I need to do now is buy or make some kind of liner for them and get some plants - I'm thinking of some cherry tomatoes, the ones designed for growing in baskets. I'm going to convert my last few nectar points in to eBay vouchers and get some plug plants from there. Should have a nice, productive plot soon!

White_Iris

I had a fairly good result from eBay over the weekend - £80, half cash on collection and half via PayPal. Unfortunately I've just paid my eBay fees for the month (not planning on listing anything else until next month) and now my PayPal balance is down to £26 . eBay fees are so expensive these days I'm finding it's rarely worth listing the things I used to sell. Still at least the £40 cash will come in handy - £10 towards my sisters birthday present and £30 towards the children's birthday day out.

I'm really looking forward to our house sale going through, not just because we'll make a little bit of money but because we'll be able to stop paying for things to do with the old house (we're going to have a bill for the boiler service soon, important but :mad:). We've emptied our savings pot paying for the fees and surveys our third party lender wants before they will agree to us selling and next months money will have to be used to pay the boiler bill. I don't think we're going to have any savings again until we sell-up.

It also means we can focus on improving our finances with a view to getting a new mortgage. Luckily SIL is a mortgage broker so she can do some trawling for us and see what we could afford now and, if that's not enough, what we need to do to improve things (aside from save, save, save!).