PigginSkint's DFW Diary

chocaholic110

I think I got my third star on 550 posts.

PigginSkint

Thanks! I have been wondering what I needed to do to get a 3rd star - looks like I have got a little way to go yet!

PigginSkint

Well it’s the first of the month so it is time to do the figures again. It’s not as good as I would have liked it to have been, for reasons I shall go into in a moment, but I think there is still a lot to celebrate here:

• I have now achieved my current small target which was to reduce my total credit card debt to below £24,000 again :j
• The balance on my LTSB loan has now dropped to below £8000
• My total non-mortgage debt has now dropped to below £37,000
• The balance on my Littlewoods catalogue is about to drop below £200 – apart from briefly one month, that hasn’t happened in a very long time!

Every time I update my signature lately it seems to allow me less! So I have had to remove my current target from signature!

I have done a lot of thinking about what my next small target and I have decided to go for a simple one, which is reduce my total credit card debt to below £23,000 again. I had hoped to get it down to below £22,000 before the end of the year, but realistically I don’t think that’s going to happen now, so I think I will just forget about that for now and just focus on getting down to below £23,000 as quickly as possible.

Reasons for the total credit card debt being higher than I was hoping this month:

• We are still waiting for OH’s internet banking to be set up so he has not actually paid anything off the Egg card yet. As soon as he is set up, he should be able to pay off quite a lot quite quickly and I shall be sending him lists of what he needs to pay!
• I have just done another major balance transfer so I have incurred a balance transfer fee which I need to pay off – I will do that this month.

That’s it really. The changes that should happen this month to make things look a little better are:

• I will pay back my balance transfer fee to my credit card.
• OH’s internet banking will be set up so he will be able to pay off a big chunk off the Egg card
• OH has been told (hee hee!:D ) that he is taking charge of paying the Halifax bill. Actually, he has been responsible for paying this for a long time but the minimum payments will now be larger because of the 2 big balance transfers that have recently been done (the Windows finance and the balance from the LTSB card). This means that he will be responsible for paying back some of my debt as well as his own! This is a positive step in my opinion!

Onto other money-saving matters, I have a number of jobs that I still need to do. Now that I have sorted out my home insurance I can concentrate on more of these now. In no particular order, they are:

• Investigate changing my gas and electricity supplier
• Investigate getting a better deal on my MPPI
• Arrange to have a mortgage review – could they do me a better deal? (Moving my mortgage is not an option at the moment)
• List more things on Amazon
• Take the plunge and start selling on ebay
• Sell some bigger stuff through the local paper
• Investigate whether I could reclaim some PPI – don’t know whether I can but it is certainly worth looking into!

So there is still plenty I could be doing! In addition I suppose I could add that I need to keep nagging OH about finding other sources of income! I still have my emergency fund – partly in my ISA and partly in my savings account – which keeps us afloat at the moment. Now that I have finished (I hope!) doing balance transfers I shouldn’t have any more balance transfer fees to re-pay once I have done the last lot so this should ease the strain on that account a bit. But on the other hand, Christmas is coming and although we won’t be spending a major amount on it, there will still be spending that needs doing! OH is well aware that once my emergency fund has gone, then unless he has considerably increased his income we will up a certain creek without a paddle! I have threatened him with the bar job/shelf stacking/call centre scenario if nothing better comes along so hopefully I am managing to frighten him sufficiently to do something about it. Luckily, this is not exactly imminent…yet! But it will come before too long and we need to be prepared.

Talking of which, he has heard back from one of his auditions the other day and he was actually offered a part. But, and it is a big but, it is not the part he went for but a much smaller non-speaking part and the pay they were offering was an insult – it wouldn’t even have covered an off-peak fare to get down there! So he has turned it down. He did ask me last night whether I minded that he had turned it down (so he is learning! i.e. feeling guilty about refusing work) but I told him that he had done the right thing – it would have cost a lot for very little in return so it was really not worth doing.

Anyway, I think I have rambled on long enough now! Have a good day everyone!

PigginSkint

Update!

I have just checked on Quidco and I have got the grand total of £9.86 winging its way to my bank account as I speak. In addition £60 I earned for buying my home insurance has validated. How excited am I!

PigginSkint

Hi All

I can’t believe that I didn’t get around to posting on Friday – just goes to show what a busy day it was! It didn’t help that I left early (hooray!) and I was trying to get stuff done before I left.

OH had a bit of nightmarish weekend. Not only is he going down with ‘man-flu’ but when he came back from London on Friday he managed to leave his wallet on the train. :doh: He realised as soon as he got off that it wasn’t in his pocket but the doors were already closing and then the train pulled away. He spoke to the station staff straight away (lucky there were some on duty) who phoned the train. Luckily they found it before some less scrupulous person did, but it ended up in lost property in Preston. OH was given the details of the train and the phone number of the lost property office and told to phone them on Saturday and they would arrange to post it back to him. OH phoned them on Saturday morning as instructed but they wouldn’t post it, they told him he could either fetch it himself or arrange a courier. I tried a couple of courier companies, including DHL, but nobody was answering the phone, can you believe? By that time we had thought about it some more and decided that unless it was a reputable big-name firm then perhaps a courier wasn’t the best idea, given that it was OH’s wallet we were talking about. So OH had to make quite a lengthy train journey and spend over £30 to go and fetch his wallet – Preston is about 2.5 hours drive from where we live but on the train there were about 2 or 3 changes each way so although he got a train at about 12.45 from here, it was nearly 9pm by the time he got home! The other thing was that I went with OH to buy his ticket (because in the absence of his wallet, how was he meant to pay for it?) but the ticket office was closed. Luckily I had had the foresight to get some money out of the cashpoint machine for him, just in case. What a palaver! But I suppose we have to be grateful for small mercies! He got his wallet back, nobody stole it and we didn’t have to go through the hassle of cancelling cards or anything!

Anyway, I don’t really have anything else to report. My weekend was fairly uneventful, pity OH’s wasn’t! Oh, one thing I forgot, OH has had his sign-in details for his internet banking come through – he is off today so I suggested that this might be a good opportunity for him to sort this out.

Can't think of anything else to report on now. Bye all!

PigginSkint

Hi All

Well the news for today is that OH’s ‘man flu’ is actually an ear infection. Oops!

I got a letter from the Halifax yesterday confirming the cancellation of my house insurance. Now that I have bought my insurance independently I have got to name them as having an interest in my house and they gave me a list of things I have got to make sure my insurance covers. Groan! I don’t suppose it will make much, if any, difference to the cost of my new policy but it is just additional hassle that I could have done without!

I sat down with my Avon orders (the ones that I have had so far – I have got to collect some more books in tonight so there might be more yet), checked them all, listed them in my notebook and worked out the total – about £260 so far. Not bad, not bad at all! The last few have got to come in tonight and then I shall have to place my order online.

OH’s Dad phoned up last night and OH has invited him round this evening. I don’t want to be grumpy about it but tonight is not exactly the best evening for me for visitors. This is because I have got to do the following: (1) take DS’s stuff to him at his Dad’s (2) go out to collect the rest of my Avon books (3) place my Avon order online (4) have a bath! Not to mention cooking the dinner including making something for me to have for dinner tomorrow (because of my course) as well as lunch for tomorrow. On the other hand, OH will probably pull his finger out and do some tidying up as he has a visitor coming! So perhaps not such a bad thing after all!

I think that’s all for now. Bye all!

peb

Hiya: so far as the house insurance is concerned the list is standard; all Lenders require the same coverage for fire, flood etc and thus all main policies cover them - google CML Handbook and look at the insurance requirements. Annoying thing is that they will charge you to check the new policy!

PigginSkint

peb wrote: »

Hiya: so far as the house insurance is concerned the list is standard; all Lenders require the same coverage for fire, flood etc and thus all main policies cover them - google CML Handbook and look at the insurance requirements. Annoying thing is that they will charge you to check the new policy!

that's really helpful - thank you!

PigginSkint

Hi All

I am feeling a little bit off colour today. My sinuses have been playing me up for a few days and today I feel a bit queasy – hope I’m not coming down with some dreaded lurgey!

OH’s Dad came round last night, late as usual. I’m sure he does it deliberately to try to avoid being fed! Just before he was leaving he thanked me for the dinner but said that that wasn’t what he had come round for. I told him straight, that he should know by now that if he comes to our house, I am going to feed him! It’s called hospitality, it’s called family. I don’t know whether this will have had any effect – we will just have to see.

I did my Avon order online last night. I haven’t totted up the final total but it must be nearly £300 of sales. Woohoo!!

2 years ago (pre-lightbulb moment) I bought OH for Christmas one of those Phillips Coolskin Shavers (not cheap!) and apparently the heads need changing every 2 years. OH has had a DFW moment and asked for these for Christmas – they cost about £30. Now I have been giving this some thought and I decided that this would be a particularly uninspiring Christmas present, so I have come up with a better idea…

I have been saving £2 coins for quite a while now (the first batch paid for my digital camera), with the intention of buying the new Doctor Who box set when it comes out. So I suggested to OH that he use the current batch to buy his new shaver heads instead and the next batch can be used to buy the box set. This means I can buy him something a bit nicer for Christmas. So I counted up the coins and we currently have £40 which should be plenty, so I think he is going out to buy them today.

I have also told OH that perhaps he ought to contribute to the £2 coin saving pot from now on, seeing is it as much for his benefit as mine – he agreed!

I got really p****d off with my airer this morning (it is OH’s old one and it is not the best design) because I was rearranging some clothes on it and it collapsed and the clothes dropped on the floor. As I result I have been searching online this morning for a new one – I did a Kelkoo search via Quidco. I found some decent ones for decent prices on Amazon but then found the same one as the one I wanted on Littlewoods for virtually the same price so I have ordered it – means 0% credit and I will earn commission on it so it will be even cheaper in the long run. Hoorah! That other bl***y thing can then be chucked!! (Or, alternatively, given away or sold!)

Over the past couple of days I have been trying to reset my non-functioning accounts on Egg Money Manager because I have realised that the best way to get rid of the error message is just to re-enter the log-in details. I have managed to get my Halifax accounts working again by doing this – although the Halifax site itself is a bit hit and miss so I can’t always view my statements. Yesterday I managed to get the Tesco one working so I had some great fun with my spreadsheets yesterday afternoon working out what the estimated interest and minimum payments for the next few months (which can be updated as I get the actual figures.). Today I did my American Express cards (I have 2) which worked O.K. but I am bit disappointed with the actual website – you have a choice of paper statements or online statements, you can’t have both! Hmmpph!!! I like having both! So all I can see at the moment is my current account status (i.e. balance, next payment due, date next payment due). I tried to do my Amazon one but that one didn’t want to play ball for some reason.

Today I have also signed up for a new free trial for DVD rental – Amazon this time. I have selected a few DVDs for my rental list so now I will wait with baited breath for the first one to arrive.

I think that’s all the news for now. Bye all!

PigginSkint

One thing I forgot from earlier. PC1 (!!!!! Cat 1) went to the vets last week for tests and we have just heard the results. His kidneys are beginning to fail and the balance of his medication is not quite right (he is on lots of different medications for different things). So we have got to reduce the dose for one of his medicines – down to 1 tablet a day instead of 2 – and he has got to have another different one which OH has got to go into town today to pick up. He is one expensive !!!!! cat!!