Onion carbonara and other stories

the_mollusk

so i'm back in france with my gorgeous animals, and definitely in need of a well-earned rest after my hectic "holiday"! ...shame i'm going back to work tomorrow!

after two very successful car boot sales, a generous graduation pressie of money from my mum (strictly for clothes as i never buy any and look like a tramp!), lots of generosity from my friends as well, and a boyfriend who's remarkably good at staying under most budgets i give him (it's my money as he doesn't work at the moment - i'm sure the staying-within-budget will change when he has his own money!), i've come back with plenty of spare cash. £35 of that is going on a book on the subject of a possible career change for me, which i've been waiting to get for a couple of months now and finally have the money to spend on it, and the rest is going into my debts (apart from my mum's pressie of course, which will be duly spent on the high street )

i seem to be obsessed with making money at the moment (reached my £300 september target already, thanks entirely to the £10-a-day thread for the motivation i needed, and i'm still looking for ways to make more). i've realised the cashback sites only work if i'm in the uk nothing tracks here in france. so i have a grand total of 6p that tracked while i was at home but i won't be going back for another few months so i'll have to find another extra source of income! as far as i can tell there aren't really any equivalents in france (at least i can't find any that have free cashback, which is what i want - although there are a couple that give cashback on purchases so i might check them out before buying anything else online).

i've also found that i spend an awful amount of time just... staring at my various financial spreadsheets and online banking... i feel like i've done the hard work of budgeting/saving/switching/etc, done all my calculations, got it all figured out and sticking to it successfully... and now i just need the months to pass with every payday so that i can see my balances go down! i feel like i'm wishing my life away! so i've decided that maybe (at least i'll try...) when i have no extra work coming in and there's nothing i can do except wait for payday, i should make a conscious effort to turn off my computer and knit that shawl i've been making for my mum for years. "free" present, thus saving money, and much more productive than this bizarre sitting-and-staring-at-balances behaviour that i've developed of late.

right... after 5 hours sleep since saturday, i think i'm going for a nap. zzzz.

Itsadogslife_2

:rotfl: I posted the exact same thing a month or two back, I find as I have set all the wheels in motion, it is just a case of sitting back now and watching month by month as the totals come down - and this for me will take a long long time so wishing that time away is very very bad. I think I will probably be nearing retirement when the whole lot is gone

What kind of things have you been doing for the £10 per day challenge?

the_mollusk

oh really, i didn't notice that, it's funny isn't it! i feel like there's not much else i can do! although the £10 a day is really motivational. it was mainly two car boot sales that got me to my total, and (i know i sound like a real mummy's girl on here as i'm always talking about her, but she's so supportive!) if my mum hadn't helped so much i wouldn't have got a fraction of the profits i made - she was relentless in looting the house for as much of my stuff as possible (and some of hers too) and stuffing more than should have been possible into the car - i would have given up shoving stuff in long before she did - people at both sales were gawping and commenting on how much stuff we'd managed to bring! (we brought most of it back too even after selling loads, that's how much we had!)

other stuff i've been doing is finally sorting out things i've been meaning to do for years (if not decades!) - i closed an ancient savings account i had as a child and got £50 from that, changed my mobile contract to something more appropriate to my use, and sold three toiletry samples on ebay for a few pounds each. i think that's all really. i imagined that it would be quite easy initially because you can make all those big changes, which is why i went in for the £10, but next month i think i'll try £5 (if that!)

you're not on it? (i'm only on a few threads but i'm so confused between them, i'm sure i'm repeating everything i say three times over on each thread!) if not then you should definitely try it, go in for a fiver a day if you're worried about not making the £10, you can always increase it

i think you should take the "maybe" out of your signature by the way

the_mollusk

so i did as much as i could while i was at my mum's to gain extra money, but now any extra income has ground to a halt as i have nothing to sell over here (and even if i did, i doubt my broken french would make a very good advert!)... but i do keep forgetting that there are still things i can do, so i thought i'd write them down.

things i've done:
1) started designing a website for a second job i can do from home in my spare time
2) emailed the administrator woman at work to see if i'm allowed a second job (if so then i can advertise at my work, but if not i'll have to keep it secret but might well still do it!)
3) politely chased up a non-payment of a job i did a few weeks ago. final polite reminder. next time i'm pulling out the big guns.

things still to do:
1) sort out social security stuff and finally get reimbursed for all my doctor's visits and prescription costs
2) finish and publish website for second job and plaster adverts all over the university
3) pull out big guns for non-payment of job (see 3 above)
4) find p60 form and apply for a tax rebate

this should give me a fair bit of dosh and will certainly be more productive than staring at spreadsheets.

yes. i will get to work on it tonight

the_mollusk

sigh. little setback today. our car was towed it was parked perfectly, within the lines, sitting happily right outside our flat. but apparently you're not allowed to park it in the same place for more than seven days...! (god knows what you're supposed to do when you go on holiday for more than a week) got it back after a 4 hour mission and €170 release fee frustrating with all the stuff we're doing to save money. even said no to lunch with all our friends yesterday as it would have been too expensive for us! ...oh well. nothing we can do about it now.

in other (better) news, oh got a job at last!!!!!!! it's only for two weeks but at least it's something. unfortunately we won't get to see much of the money as it'll go straight into his credit card bill payments, but at least he won't have borrow any more from his parents for a couple of months

right, back to work on my website...

Hovel_lady

Boo and a :mad: to car being towed.

Yay to OH getting a job :T

the_mollusk

hi HL! nice to see you here - i've been reading your blog every day even though i haven't been commenting much. so pleased to see the developments you've made in the last couple of days - it breaks my heart every time you have a setback but your positive moments seem to be getting stronger and stronger. keep going, you're an inspiration x

the_mollusk

quick update for my diary.

managed to get a free £20 offered to me from my bank who messed something up - i'm not very good at complaining or making a fuss but i didn't even need to, they offered me a bottle of wine(!) to say sorry for the confusion, i asked if i could have some money instead(!) and they agreed without any questions, saying it would have been a £20 bottle of wine(!!) and they'll send me a cheque for it instead! i won't get too excited till it's in my account though...

i've finished my website for my little extra job and have tentatively started publicising it around my university, although at the moment it's a free one through another website, but i'm thinking of buying my own domain so not going crazy with spreading the word just yet. just doing a bit of research first.

oh nearly quit his job but eventually he just took a day off and will go back on monday. the job is doing his back in so even though half of me was pretty furious and really worried about him quitting, the other half felt really mean for pressuring him to go back to a job that's really hurting his back well it's only for a few more days and once he gets paid i hope it'll be worth it...

the_mollusk

hello diary, looong overdue on an update. just saw the date of my last entry, can't believe quite how long it's been!

to say i've been busy is an understatement... the job-from-home i mentioned a coupla posts ago has been going really well, although still hugely underpaid, and this on top of my way-more-than-full-time job means i've been working pretty much every waking moment for about 6 weeks, stopping only to shower and eat... but at least i've earned quite a bit of extra money (most of which has been thrown straight at my debt and i'm really seeing results - and a bit was spent at ikea this weekend on some long-needed storage stuff, which i wouldn't have been able to afford had i not been working so much), but it all came to a bit of a dramatic ending on friday. OH flipped out a bit and ended up essentially demanding that i do everything and complain about nothing (well that's how i took it, anyway)...

my boss is a complete psychopath so OH has been on the receiving end of much moaning/crying/shouting about that, and i also complain at OH about him not doing the housework, not looking hard enough for a job (he's *still* unemployed, after the last job that i posted about finished) and playing far too many silly computer games while i'm working my bum off (he did go through a phase of doing loads of housework and food shopping and cooking which was amazing since i had no time at all (and he's a brilliant cook) but that phase came to an end).

so yes, i have been a whiney cow. but the frustrating thing is that if *he* changed his ways i'd have a lot less to complain about. but i guess men just don't see things that way.

so during his little flip-out i got the message that in addition to me having to work *insane* hours while he played on his computer, i also had to cook, clean, not nag, not complain, and be a perfect wifey. i tried this out for an evening, then went to work the next day feeling completely lost and distraught since not only was it obvious to me that it was completely impossible to do everything and complain about nothing, but also the feminist in me clearly wasn't gonna have any of it.

so in the end we had a big old chat and agreed to do something that is financially stupid but does take a huge strain off me (and us, in turn): i've been budgeting/planning/paying for absolutely everything, but from now on OH will pay for food and hope that his parents can keep paying his minimum cc payments till he finds a job. this means i have one less thing to worry about (our finances are separate and for the time being at least his parents can help), i won't have to work quite so much to earn more money, so i'll have more free time which we can spend together doing nice things, which in turn will make me more relaxed and generally a nicer person. and we agreed to redistribute the household responsibilities, although that requires list-making and i haven't got round to it yet cos i was distracted by rearranging our stuff into all our newly-acquired extra storage space.

so that's the last 2 months in a nutshell. 90% work, 5% relationship crisis, 5% ikea.

i'll try not to leave it 2 months before another update...

the_mollusk

hellooooo diary! remember me??!!

oh god stupid december!

so the bad news is... i decided to use my credit card a bit in december. then i ran out of money for payments-a-day, therefore stopped coming on here at all, therefore completely lost track of where i was financially, and therefore MASSIVELY overspent - i estimated i'd spent a coupla hundred on my credit card, which i could have paid back this month, and have just checked my balance and am shocked to find out that it was WAY more than that and i've bloody nearly maxed it out. :eek: ohh god oh god.

oh boy oh boy. _pale_

i'm trying not to beat myself up about it. i paid off well over £1000 between june and november so i'm still better off than when i started this diary, so i'll just... put it down to "a little setback" and take advantage of the renewed motivation it's given me to clear my debts. spending diary starts again, payment a day starts again (even if it's just a penny) and sticking to budgets starts again.

but there is some good news. OH has a JOB!!!!!!! :j:j:j it's only 20 hours a week on minimum wage but it'll be a massive help, and the best thing is it's a permanent contract!!! finally we have some stability in our lives even better (than the best thing?) is that he loves it he comes home more animated than i've ever seen him after work, he talks about his job which he never did before, and we're both much more relaxed and happy. sometimes i think things are much better between us than in my last post and other times i'm paranoid he'll leave me but that's just me. i'll try and focus on the fact that we're not !!!!ed off with each other any more

AND... the company i used to work for got in touch with me and asked me to come back - but as i'm in france (and still have a job here) and they're in the uk, i suggested working from here for a few hours a week as a second job, thinking they'd say no chance... and they accepted!! *AND*... it's UNBELIEVABLY good pay!!! finally there is a light at the end of this stupid debt tunnel. with OH's job and my second job i should be able to pay off much bigger chunks of my debt and OH can finally start paying off his too.

so. here's to a happy, productive and successful 2012, full of rewarding work, debt clearing, and enjoying the benefits that it brings

:A

:beer: