Edinburgher gets cracking!

abouttimetoo

Hi Edinburgher

Just stopping by to say I've read the whole of your diary in the last couple of weeks and very well done on all your progress

Belated congratulations on passing your driving test too and I an see a happy new car is also in order

I've never driven in Glasgow, it's a place I love and I'm there a lot but crossing the roads in the city centre can be bad enough never mind driving, you certainly need eyes in the back of your head just to walk across some roads

Regards
ATT

newgirly

Congratulations on passing and the new car , great news .

edinburgher

And so it begins...

Checked the tyres tonight and they're all illegal (tread depth of 5-9mm) :eek:

£253 for a new set of 4, getting them fitted on Sunday. Also need to get the rattling exhaust looked at.

Pants!

*Edit: False alarm - being a new driver is a heck of a learning experience!

edinburgher

£106.19 into Zopa (cashback credit card paid out for last year). Will update sig once it clears tomorrow.

Also discovered that my application to be a first aider at work has been accepted - a useful skill and a massive payrise of about £300/year :rotfl:

Otherwise just toddling along.

Alchemilla

God Bless you and keep you safe on the road.

Lois_E

edinburgher wrote: »

Reet - budgeted up the wazoo

In terms of the actual calculations, it was fairly straightforward. Because I know the annual expenses for everything, there were two values for each (annual expense / number of months until annual expense, followed by annual expense / 12 from that point).

There are a few things that will be a bit of a pain over the next 3-4 months, but there should be no need for panic after that.

£6.62 into Zopa today, time to round up to my next tenner

Hope it works well for you.

Have to admit I've never made "proper" budgeting work for me. Maybe I haven't got the self discipline, or maybe I haven't got the mental flexibility to deal with making a fixed budget despite not knowing things - how much prices of things will go up by, or what repairs the car will need etc. So I'm dead impressed with all you amazing people who can do it. :T

edinburgher

It's Friday! :beer:

The last week has been fairly productive, with lots of financial good behaviour.

• Amazon refunded a return, I saved the money
• I paid another £20 into Zopa
• I am now the registered keeper for our car, will pay the road tax in the next few days (paying for a year upfront, works out slightly cheaper)
• I updated my pension details and switched all of the monies into index tracking funds that loosely match the geographic distribution of the money we invest in our ISA (Vanguard Lifestrategy). This will save a small amount each year, but more importantly I have a consistent approach to investing. When I look at some of the smaller funds I 'picked' last year, I wonder what the heck I was thinking :rotfl: The online platform for L&G has been updated considerably, rebalancing and changing funds took all of 3 minutes to complete
• We are under budget for both groceries and petrol

Not on the MFW front, but Mrs E and I booked our cheapest ever summer holiday! We are staying in a lodge near Oban for a week over our wedding anniversary in September £300, and the petrol money should be covered by our regular monthly budget.

Looking forward to getting home for another lovely sunny weekend.

edinburgher

Phew - all the housework is done - including a 90l fishtank water change and gutting the filter. By the time I'd finished that particular chore, the water in my buckets was like gravy with muck *disgusting*! :rotfl:

We get paid on Wednesday, will need to be LSDs until then (I currently have the grand sum of £11.89).

I opened an account with RateSetter yesterday, as I noticed that my Zopa yield has started to fall. Luckily I get a weekly update from Zopa to show my yield for the MTD. I figure in future that I'll pay the cash into whichever is yielding better at the time. I am such a money nerd

We spent some time relaxing in Mrs E's parents' garden this afternoon, all the flowers were looking lovely (and the cats were pleased to see us). We also picked up some free ma-hoosive granite place mats/heat mats as Mrs E's mum is on a cleaning spree at the moment. As they're stone, they'll last forever and we didn't have any way of putting pots on the table before. They also gave us a second hand bread maker and an old pressure cooker last week, I think they're our second hand guardian angels

nattypants

What a fantastic M-I-L Edinburgher.

Are you still thinking of teaching in the future by the way?

edinburgher

nattypants wrote: »

What a fantastic M-I-L Edinburgher.

Are you still thinking of teaching in the future by the way?

Yeah, she's great, and us taking her old stuff off her gives her an excuse to replace it

Re. teaching, I vascillate depending on which day of the week it is, how I'm feeling and what socks I have on! I think I could turn my hand to it, but I earn more than Mrs E and there's no sign of that changing any time soon. I can't see how I could save the money to take a year off without both of us making big sacrifices and I'm not yet convinced enough that it's for me that we can make definite plans yet... It's a tough one.