Sorry old chap, the money has run out!

hp48910

Just dropping by to say well done for your continued progress.
H

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Hi Tony - just checking your SOA, the thing that really stands out to me is your still rather mountainous food bill! I really think you could halve that. My food bill a year ago was probably about £200 a month. Then I got serious and I'm now aiming for £70 which I've found to be ridiculously easy if I actually shop at the cheaper supermarkets and cook regulary, rather than having lots of 'can't be bothered I'll head down to the local shops' nights. Just think what a difference an extra £100 a month would make to your budget!

tony_ack

A quick update today as I am working away next week...

I feel like I've hit a bit of a setback as I've spent more than I intended to over the last few days, even though most of the stuff was justified.

First of all I've spent about £40 in travel, meals, station parking, etc. for visiting my work's London office last week. The thing with this is that I will claim the money back on expenses, but I have had nothing but trouble claiming back in the past, sometimes waiting several months for them to come through. I've taken most of it out of the emergency account (and the expenses will be paid back into there when I get them back), but I still feel guilty for spending for some reason! To compound matters, I have to work in Manchester for three days next week... I can stay over at my parents' but I still need to pay for the fuel to get there and back, plus daily commuting from my parents. Again I can claim this back, but it may take a while to get the money back.

Second, I needed to fix a problem with the car not starting sometimes - I got a new fuel filter and relay which I think was causing the problem, and fitted them myself, but the parts still cost me nearly £15.

Third, I spent £9 this weekend on alcohol and soft drinks for home as I invited my parent's round for dinner this evening... not a lot but still out of budget.

It may not seem like a lot of money, and all but the alcohol spend is accountable, but I still feel a bit bad about it.

Reasons to be cheerful:
1. I'm still within budget for this month as it stands.
2. I planned to pay £900 towards my debts this month, and I think I've ended up paying slightly more
3. My boss was talking about an 'uplift' (I think he meant pay rise...) when I met up with him last week - I'm not going to hold my breath but it would be nice!
4. I think I get a small (£80-£100) bonus in this month's or next month's pay
5. I made £13 this evening from selling DVDs to my parents! I also have a few more items on eBay, not going for much, but perhaps will get me a tenner in total.

I wouldn't quite call my food bill 'mountainous'! (at least when you consider what it was!!). We set aside £50 per week for online shopping and I have noticed that we tend to be slightly under budget each week. We also tend to have a surplus of food at the end of each week. This is usually because we plan for 7 evening meals, but me or my partner aren't always home every dinner time. I think we can save further, but I want to do this gradually, and keep the budget to £50 for now (so it's a bonus if we underspend..).

I have a couple of issues with the cheap supermarkets - firstly the biggest reason is that I don't trust myself to go in the supermarket and stick to a list, and the cheap supermarkets don't offer online shopping which help to combat this for me. Second, I have to travel a fair distance to get to the nearest one (Lidl is about 4 miles away and completely out of the way of our commute or anywhere else we go, so we'd need to make a special journey to go! Netto is no longer, and Aldi is about 8 miles away). I certainly wish we had an Aldi or Lidl closer by as I used both regularly when living in Germany, and I liked the Aldi stuff in particular.

saving4life

I have been trying to stick to a budget of £70 per week for 4 of us. I find I usually spend less when going to Sainsburys due to offers and choice of basics range etc. Last week, I tried Farmfoods, Aldi and Asda and whilst all were cheap I ended up spending more for some reason. Plus you get the loyalty points so, its not always cheaper to go to the budget ones I find.
You are doing very well to manage on £50 per week, I wish I could!

tony_ack

saving4life wrote: »

I have been trying to stick to a budget of £70 per week for 4 of us. I find I usually spend less when going to Sainsburys due to offers and choice of basics range etc. Last week, I tried Farmfoods, Aldi and Asda and whilst all were cheap I ended up spending more for some reason. Plus you get the loyalty points so, its not always cheaper to go to the budget ones I find.
You are doing very well to manage on £50 per week, I wish I could!

To be honest I don't usually get much on offer in my weekly shop. If there is something on offer that I'm buying anyway, then I weigh up the cost per gram/ml of the special offer against my usual purchase, and more often than not the offer item is still more. I do use offers on choccy/biscuits, as I'm not looking for something specific.

I found that special offers is a very easy trap to fall into unless you're savvy. I wonder how many of us get the items on our weekly shopping list, AND then spend some more money on items on special offers, just because they are on offer? Or buy multibuy items when we only need one? Three for the price of two still means you buy one more than you need!

tony_ack

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted, so I thought I'd better give an update.

It's mixed news really! As I posted before I was having real problems with my insurance renewal, as in it had gone up quite significatnly over a year with no discernable reason. My final best price was a shade over £900 which was ludicrous. So I decided to get something cheaper to run. I managed to find a car which would cost me the same to buy AND insure as it would to have insure my old car, so I'm driving around in that now. It's rough around the edges, and as much as I'd like to tidy it up, I have to resist spending money on it. As long as it drives, it's good! It has MOT until next Sept too, so that's good. It's also a diesel, so my monthly fuel bill has halved as well.

My old car is in the lockup for now. It is a fairly rare sports coupe, so I am loathed to sell it at the moment (especially since the market has bottomed out), and as the lockup is costing me next to nothing, it can stay in there for now. I'm hoping one day when I am closer to my debt free goal to get it back on the road as a weekend car but that's a long way off at the moment.

Aside from the saving on fuel, we're doing better than expected on groceries. The last shop was just over £40 (and that was only because I bought 24 toilet rolls to qualify for Asda's £5 off offer), and the one the previous week was £35. It's actually hard work to get the shop anywhere near £50 now, and we're eating really well too. The one big thing is a lack of waste - I can't remember the last time we threw food away (except for the odd slice of bread when it has gone mouldy - it's hard to get through a full loaf in a week).

I'm also still ebaying. I go to our spare 'junk' room and sigh, not really able to find much of value, but I always end up with about £30 of stuff in the end on eBay, which is a nice little income. I have made sure my postage costs are properly covered (including travel costs to the post office) so even if I sell 20 items for 99p, I'm still almost £18 better off at the end (ebay fees are a little pricey though!).

The missus' car is due an MOT this month, but barring any major repairs, we have money in the emergency/annual bills fund to cover that. We will have more than enough in there to cover Christmas too, and I have also have enough money in the fund to do a few small repairs to the house which we've needed to do for a while.

So where am I now in the journey? Well, as far as paying off debts go, I'm still right a the start. My debt is slightly less than it was when I started, although all my accounts are up to date. However the biggest changes have been to my whole approach to money. I haven't worried about lack of money now since the first dark month when I realised the shortfall. I look back at the days of living and spending blind, then panicking about a lack of money to pay bills, and wonder why we lived that way. I find myself thinking about things that would be nice to have, then quickly knocking myself back when it's clear I can't afford them. I'm starting to declutter a little - any money I want to spend on myself has to come from eBay sales, and even then I sometimes put the money towards the debts.

I don't think I'm quite there yet, but I'm still here, and still going which must count for something!

My next plans are to ring Orange in three days time and give 30 days notice for my phone contract... Giffgaff here I come!

Horace

Well done on your journey so far. Someone tipped me off about a website that sells short date food which is great for stocking up on things like beans & pulses and tinned stuff - it is called Approved Foods, it may help you save money.

Instead of pizza dough, how about using French sticks instead, chop up some tomatoes, spread this thinly on the french stick that you have cut in half, add grated cheese and other toppings of your choice..they are really yummy.

I invested in a slow cooker last month, it was the best purchase ever because I use it nearly every day.

boschiba

there is some really good advice on here, esp. Pollycat's post - I am in a similar situation, tho keener on ebay and amazon than you seem to be!! just convinced hubby to get into it to, after I made £55 on amazon in the last week. go for it!

tony_ack

Another weekly update... where does the time go??

I think I need to look into selling on Amazon - I have loads of DVDs that are worth up to £1 each, so I may have more luck shifting them on there.

I started 20 auctions a week last Friday. I set myself some targets:
£22 = good return (£20 in my pocket plus eBay fees)
£30 = very good return
£50 = excellent return

I got £55 in the end (minus £4 for what is looking like a non-paying bidder) so I'm quite pleased with that! Got to take fees away too yet. I posted the items today and I was slightly up on postage (about £3 across all 19 items) too.

I am really annoyed about e-Bay's postage policy on DVDs - the max you can charge for postage is £1.25, and it works out to £1.09 for the postage and 10p for the jiffy bag, so you're costs of getting to the post office aren't covered! I can live with that, but one of the DVDs was a box set which cost £3.50 to post, and I could only charge £1.25! Call me a cynic, but I think eBay are restricting the postage so people will bid more in the auctions, which means more seller fees for eBay!!

On other matters... the debt busting is definitely becoming a grind now. It's really easy when you start, but then a couple of months in and reality bites. I'm not really bothered about lack of spending at all - to be honest I feel a lot better NOT spending than the spend+guilt feelings before. I think the problem is that I feel I'm going nowhere fast. I'm still paying just above the minimum on the cards (though granted the Halifax loan and parent's loan are coming down fast). Any extra money from eBay and selling elsewhere seems to be getting sucked up - for example last Saturday we went to a fireworks display - we gave £5 as a donation to the scouts who were organising it, then took the little one to McDs for a treat afterwards. It was worth it for her, but I can't help feeling the little things add up! The budget is still balanced at the end of the month, but it is hard work. Work are being poor as usual with my expenses (they owe me £200 now). Also, the missus car failed its MOT this month, and will need about £150 in repairs - not bad by any means, but money out of the emergency fund that we weren't going to spend.

I'm also struggling to keep the missus on board. Earlier this month she refused to pay into the emergency/annual bills fund at first because it was 'her money' and 'my account' (I am looking to set it up as a joint account). She paid it in the end, but I still don't think she gets it - maybe it will become clearer when the MOT repairs for her car come out of it?

Then she has spent £40 on a new dress, and she also has a couple of other items of new clothing I've noticed. Which is fine if she has this left over, but I'm not sure she always does!

Earlier she said that a couple we know want to meet up for a curry, and that we will HAVE to go out as our house is too untidy. I told her she would have to pay for it then as I didn't have any money left... don't think she was too pleased with that!

She's better than she was though. And it works well for me I think - by seeing all the follies she is making, it makes me more determined to be frugal. As long as I get my share of the bills, and payment into the emergency fund, things are okay.

On a more positive note, I rang Orange last week to give notice of my contract (12 months is up on 3rd December). They offered me 300 minutes, free texts and free internet for £10.50 on a 12 month contract (funny how it was 'impossible' to give me free internet when I was 1 month into my contract when they had accidentally removed it when I upgraded). I told them that was great, but Giffgaff is non-contract so I'd rather go for a deal with no tie-in. So the Giff-Gaff simcard has arrived, I have my PAC code, and now all I need to do is get my phone unlocked and initiate the number port. Good times!

tony_ack

Oh and Horace - on the pizza, I have done this before with the french bread, and I've also made pizza flavoured toasties in the sandwish toaster! That said, I do like making my own dough, and I *almost* seem to have it sussed. I think I've got as far as I can without a proper pizza oven, which will have to wait for post-DFD!