One frugal year = freedom and choices

JoeyGrey

Hi LL, just stumbled onto your thread and enjoyed reading through it. I can feel your energy and positivity and have subscribed - keep up the good work. You'll be on the mortgage free wannabe board before you know it.

Selling on eBay gives me a real kick too, especially those last few seconds. I end up refreshing every second in the hope there'll be a bidding war. Doesn't happen often for me but I get a proper high from it and immediately start looking round for something else to sell. The cats make themselves pretty scarce I can tell you

Look forward to following your journey :T

lobbyludd

thank you

today the good:

*toluna survey done (how dull are surveys?).
*swag bucks done
*ex paid CM ( late and £7 short, can't wait for the reason he's "fined" me £7) but it's paid and straight off of the credit card (I budget all outgoings for the kids to not include this as I'm never sure if/when it will arrive).
*all ebayers have paid, and after a brief time where I couldn't track half the payments in my paypal account I managed to discover I have set up 2 paypal accounts - and had linked my sales half and half to each of them, - what a fool! cash is withdrawing from both of them though now
*I did not take a half day today, although I really wanted to. The actual work is usually fine, the people are lovely, but I just want some TIME. still that's what this is all about.
£4 refunded from ds's school from inadvertent overpayment for the DVDs,
*6 of 7 ebay items packaged.

The less good:

*no daily clicks (computor very slow today).
*curtains very much not made yet.
*House is a tip.
*still need to order worming drops

and now the decidedly ugly: I have smoked for the last three days. determined not to tomorrow.

lobbyludd

JoeyGrey wrote: »

immediately start looking round for something else to sell. The cats make themselves pretty scarce I can tell you

ha ha! after the cat-poo disposal at the weekend I'd blow all my ebay earnings on paying someone to take mine away! That's probably why they are trying hard to be extra lovable at the moment :rotfl:

lobbyludd

get a wriggle on credit expert.

usually credit expert updates my records on the 18th, relating to the position as at the 11th of the month.

in december they did it on the 10th relating to the position as at the 4th of the month, which was annoying because I paid over £1.5K off my cc which cleared on the 5th and therefore didn't show in the update.

It is now the 19th, and there is still no update from halifax showing my decreased balance on the CC or from Virgin showing the cc as closed. I dearly want to try and get a 0% (or at least better rate than I have) balance transfer as at present the halifax card is at 29.4%. Every day I don't do this is costing me £4 in interest on that cc. It's just really iritating that for the sake of 3 bank holidays (on which I'm charged interest anyway) I have to wait now for over a week extra for the credit reference agency to update their stupid records.

lobbyludd

anyhoo, on a quest now to find more things to sell!

have 15 cloth nappies + wraps and bag and liners etc, I'll need to dig them out and see how many are fit for selling. Mumsnet charge £10 annual subscription to advertise on their boads though so don't really want to use that route in case they don't sell (I'd ratehr give them away), will see if my friend still does NCT sales, and see if I can ask her to sell for me at a cut.

lobbyludd

LOL - signed up for a toothpaste testing survey on one of the websites (must try and find out which one!) they arrived tody and it is supposed to involve your child, I figured DS who is in a sciency frame of mind at the moment might enjoy the blind taste-test challenge.

opened the first one and he flat out refused to put it in his mouth, he is still using children's toothpaste (8yo) and this smells like super-strength minty listerine, even my nicotine-bombarded taste-buds found the mint strength a bit overpowering. so I guess that's not going to be favourably reviewed! still - 2 free tootpastes for me

have done my daily clicks, lotto searches, swag bucks, 1 valued opinion survey. attempted 2 toluna ones and got screened out after 50% of the survey done in each BAH. have decided instead just to do gazzillions of polls which only guarantee a less than 1p per vote but at least don't waste 2 x 15 mins of my time for nowt. and when I get to the payout level (sometime in 2045 probably) abandon them.

all ebay packages picked up by courier yesterday which was a relief as I was a bit worried about getting them to people. slight downside was I had them picked up from work and my boss asked me in a jolly but "I've noticed what's going on" way if I was running a postal business. hmmmm. MUST NOT get sacked from good-paying job in order to earn extra bits and bobs on the side.

but PAY DAY tomorrow - hurrah!!! and after paying budgetted amount off cc, in total I will have paid nearly £1K into my debt accounts in January. which Is BLOOMING FANTASTIC. nearly 200 of that will be eaten up in interest but still.....

from budget (all of 2012 done now ) april, august and october will be way below this level as I have big one-off spends in these months.

grocery shop on saturday. sainsburys as I have an £8 off a £40 shop voucher, £9 in nectar points, and a DVD from there to take back (duplicate christmas present) so I'm hoing to get most of the month's necessities for about £15 with a few fresh items topped up during feb. I still have lots of stores of fairly random food as I've only just started seriously doing this, so I can stretch the freezer and larder contents out for quite a while. Any left over from £100 budget will go into next months payments.

and think I will try netmums to sell the old cloth nappies. was thinking about them today and got a little teary-eyed, which is daft as washing nappies was the bain of my life when destructo-girl and the chaos kid were tiny and I am very glad not to be doing that any more. but when I think of the time in their lives this represents, and how soft and cuddly they were wrapped up in their cosy nappies; <snivel> well there you go.

party for a friend of dd on sat afternoon, am going to try and find something with boots points in the 75% sale for the birthday girl as I've not got round to making anything of any standard that other people's kids could have (mine have to put up with my "efforts" and are polite enough to at least feign delight.

all going well (touch wood)

lobbyludd

grocery £25 including a present for DS's party. forgot to use nectar points though so those are still available for topping up.

clicks swagbucks toluna and VO done.
not going to list on ebay this weekend, I think everything I've thought of could probably start off with a 99p listing anyway, or needs washing and ironing for photos and I have spent all day running kids around, so am going to spend tomorrow doing family things, stuff around the house, knitting and starting to sew curtains, painting plant pots and planting a few seeds.

got a letter through saying my deal with atlantic for gas and electric ends in March, unfortunately that means a price rise, I've checked on Uswitch, there are no deals currently that aren't more expensive than my current one. will check again mid-march, and at least it hits after winter. I'm on a bit of a quest to get the background level of electic usage down, my energy meter sas this is about 130 watts when we are not actively using anything, or lighting anything. As we are only in the house awake for 6 hours a day, the background level condtitutes quite a lot of my bill over the year. Obviously [URL="file://\\i"]i[/URL] can't get it to zero, but I want to see if I can get it down below 100.

lobbyludd

virgin media cut from 50.00 to 36.90 monthly, not cut in package, with a braodband upgrade and a wireless router. which is 1 min well spent on the phone! Annoying though that it took me researching alternatives and deciding to leave to get a better deal (moving to sky wouldn't have been a better deal as the broadband speed is shocking from them here, next door has it and it's appaulling, so I didn't want to move really, so that's a result.

rang halifax to see if they had could offer me a balance transfer rate and they won't.

but all good otherwise.

stymied

Hi, I stumbled across your thread when searching for something else & got reading. Just wanted to say I got on really well with "The Used Nappy Company" for selling my cloth nappies. No listing fees so risk free. It does sometimes take a few weeks of patience waiting for a buyer, but everything I've listed has sold. Hope this helps.

lobbyludd

ooh, thanks, that's really useful

less useful is that I went foraging in the loft and couldn't find them! I hope I haven't thrown them away in a fit of pique (it's very unlikely, I rarely throw anything) so this weekend - I WILL hunt them out and wash them and photo them and list on "the used nappy company"

a babysteps day today:

checked bank accounts and updated spreadsheet.
posted speeding fine cheque (:o)
600 sb - determined to reach payout this weekend and start afresh, mum's birthday in may and would like to get her some kindle vouchers.
Daughter's hotwater bottle cover finished except for sewing on the crochetted flowers and Miffy patches (cost = zero as I have so much craft stuff).
will look at whether any of my hundred's of books will sell to zapper or whatever it's called.

daily clicks done (including email-only clicks for imutual), I've no idea though if you have to reach a certain level before you can withdraw the money - I will post a q on up your income. none of it will be payable until the back end of the year, but anything I can get in the bank for oct/nov (car tax and MOT month) will be a massive bonus.

To do this evening

finish making chicken/celeriac soup. yum.

find something to feed the kids with

print off a couple of restaurant vouchers, am taking a friend out for dinner as a thank you next week, but it has to be cheap!

My kitchen patio door curtain is cut to size and pinned (material, lining plus interlining) and just need three straight rows of easy-peasy machine sewing. I WILL do that tonight. The curtain pole is hung, I have enough buckram left to do the pinch pleats and have the hooks so really I just need to blooming well do it.

I had wanted to apply some hand embroidery to it, but frankly I can get round to that (or more likely not:p) whenever, so for the moment it can go up plain and keep the heat in.

and I WILL NOT watch any more of the killing dvds that a colleague lent me, I have been late to bed and grumpy in the mornings every day this week, after "just watching the next episode"