Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

Right, do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news is that I banked £330 from bead sales today (which may be it for the week, as I currently have one order for £2.99 to go tomorrow!) and am now effectively working as a PA for Mr RPC, who is getting me to do all sorts of interesting stuff for him.

The bad news is that Nissan called Mr Minx and said that although they'd do a full inspection tomorrow, their initial feeling was that the truck will be a write-off Mr Minx is trying to convince me that we NEED a brand new VW Amorak, I am trying to convince Mr Minx that we NEED to spend half the insurance money on an older 4x4 to pull the trailer with, he can use my car to commute in and use the rest to pay off his credit cards. Let's see whether his head wins out over his heart....

cazmanian_minx

Nissan rang Mr Minx to say that they were still waiting on prices for a couple of parts, but they were already up to an £8,000 repair bill and they thought it very unlikely the insurers would pay up. Since he's in Inverness early Friday morning for a hospital appointment, he's decided to nick my car, go down tomorrow afternoon and have a nosey around all the car dealerships.

I have told him NOT to let them start pushing finance on him - I ran him through the MSE loan eligibility checker and he has a 90% chance of getting 3.6% APR on £15k over 3 years, which no car dealership would be able to match.

Four files to proofread, no work through from Mr RPC (though I had one thing outstanding for him, which I did), not many bead orders to send - not quite sure where the day's gone really. I did go for a run this afternoon, but had to cut it short at 2.5 miles when my stomach told me to go home ASAP! Must be more productive tomorrow.

Mara_uk7

That looks really sore ! Thank goodness Mr Minx wasnt hurt. Must have given you a heck of a fright tho !

cazmanian_minx

"Don't worry," said Mr Minx cheerfully, as he pulled away in my Toyota. "I'm only going to look."

Ha!

I know him better than that and sure enough there was a phone call about 4pm.

"Er, can I buy a car?"

"Oh God, what is it?"

"Well, it used to belong to the boss of Audi UK's friend and it's top-spec, it's got a Bang & Olufsen stereo and everything. I'm about to take it for a test drive."

He sounded like a man very much in love and after the saleswoman let him put his foot down in a serious way on the A9, he's paid his £500 deposit and in a couple of weeks' time will be handing over a sum equal to just under a fifth of our outstanding mortgage to pay the remainder :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

I think I'd just better resign myself to the fact that he's never going to be out of debt and try to earn enough to make sure that we're always okay :wall: :wall: :wall: He has so many wonderful good points that I can overlook him spending money like water as long as it doesn't mean we're ever at risk of losing the house

DebtFree2012

Life is for living and if you are within your means, live it

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Life is for living and if you are within your means, live it

I suppose you're right, I'm just feeling a bit irrelevant - he's spent over a year and a half of my gross earnings on a car, which really puts it into perspective how little I earn.

Anyway, scores on the doors

Business
Overdraft: -£-5,270.00 / -£5,180.00 +£90.00

Business total: -£-5,270.00 / -£5,180.00 +£90.00

Personal
Halifax card: -£5,190.00 / -£5,190.00 no change

Personal total: -£5,190.00 / -£5,190.00 no change

Grand total: -£10,460.00 / -£10,370.00 +£90.00

A slight improvement to £90 paid off this week, but the YNAB pots are filling nicely - I need to pay myself another £500 this month really, then I need to put aside roughly £850 for next month's business-related bills and the rest can be split between overdraft, tax, me and VAT.

I think I probably need to de-register for VAT, as I'm well under the threshold again now. Some of the stuff I'd like to do in the future may come under VATMOSS, but as I'm not doing it at the moment, there's no point in paying 20% to HMRC when I've not got any purchase VAT to offset against it. Will investigate later.

DebtFree2012

Yes but think how long the car will last post the 1.5 years earnings.

cazmanian_minx

Depends whether he writes it off on Strathy brae again!!

WeeMidgie

Hi Caz, you do very well for someone working from home in a remote area! It seems to me that you manage to pursue paying off debts whilst achieving a great work/life balance.

I know when I worked from home that I really appreciated the flexibilty of, e.g. being able to hang the washing out, or take it in if it started raining! And have lunch at home.

Now I work part-time for health reasons, and have a 28-mile round trip to and from an office three days a week. I value the days off, and whilst I occasionally miss the extra 40% of my salary that went with full-time hours, I'm much happier leading a simpler and more frugal life!

cazmanian_minx

Thanks WeeMidgie - I take it from your username you're in a similar part of the country to me??

Today's been a bit spendy. Pete the Roofer turned up today, together with a young assistant, and put the roof back together, so that was £430, and then I had to pay the oil bill, which was another £228.

Mr Minx has now had official confirmation that the truck has been written off, but the insurers haven't yet made him a settlement offer. It does mean that he can now have a hire car, he got a phone call around 3pm from the company arranging it to take his details. 'We'll have a car to you within the hour, sir,' said the lady on the other end, very chirpily. "Er, do you know where I live??' asked Mr Minx. Needless to say, they are still trying to arrange it and will give us a ring in the morning with an update He can only keep it for three days after he receives the settlement payment, so it hardly seems worth it.

What he's pleased about though (and, to be fair, I am too) is that he applied for a £20,000 loan from Santander to pay for it and was accepted immediately at the headline rate of 4.2%, which means his credit record must now be looking pretty sparkly. He's come a very, very long way in the 10 years since we got together - no lender would touch him with somebody else's bargepole back then! The loan and £2,000 of the settlement money buys the Audi, whatever 4x4 we get comes out of the rest of the settlement money and whatever's left of that gets paid off his credit cards. If I end up selling my Toyota and using the 4x4 as my car (because I'm not sure we can really justify running three), then I'll give him the money from that for his cards I guess.