Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Well I didn't expect to read this today. So maybe the other day's thoughts we're just hormones? What's lessened the forever home feelings? I think you would be fabulous in anything you set your mind to. The problem, or hard part, is deciding to and following through I guess. Especially if it takes you outside your comfort zone. I suffer from #3 daily. # 1 and # 2 could be sorted somehow, something would come up and #4, well that just takes time. Having said that, it depends what you actually decide that you want to do.

The house thing is just practical really. Mr Minx is getting some heavy hints dropped that one of the parent companies of the place he works for would like him to take up a bigger, nationwide role in their organisation, which would mean him being based in the south-west and although we won't move while his mother is still alive (there's a chartered flight which brings all the execs from said company up here on a Monday and back down on a Friday, so they'd put him on the empty return legs), their head office is only about an hour away from my mother (who's 12 years younger than Mr Minx's mum, but still not a spring chicken) - so if the job did come off, it would be sensible for us to move so he's not away most of the week every week and I'm closer to Mum to help out as she gets older. The other thing in the back of our minds is that if the SNP sweeps the board at the Scottish elections next year, Nicola Sturgeon can declare independence with a Holyrood vote without having to hold another referendum, and neither of us particularly wants to stay in Scotland if that happens (even Mr Minx, despite being Scottish!), though we'd probably try and keep the house as a holiday home, because it's beautiful.

#2 can be sorted with head torches and a massive mucking out session at the weekend, or putting them on livery in winter, though that would really upset Finn's stomach. #1 - the only fair thing to do would be to hand her back to the rescue. She's used to having company 16 hours a day and although most people here just build dog runs and leave their dogs all day, she'd be completely miserable. I looked into dog sitting, as I thought there was a lady doing dog daycare in the next village, but turns out she'll only come to you, so that would be £27 a day for her to come here for four hours.

I'm also slightly confused as to what Mr Minx actually would like, because he went from 'you don't have to work any more' to 'wouldn't it be great if we had two fabulous incomes?' in consecutive sentences! One of the reasons I decided to stop doing the beads was that I want to be free to go at a moment's notice if Mum needs me (her other half is now 88 and he's not in the best of health these days), and no full time job is going to be happy with me disappearing to the other end of the country for weeks at a time when we do lose him.

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Anyway - tis Friday You know what that means x

Le scores? Le doors? Here they are

Business
Overdraft: -£-320.00 / -£0.00 +£320.00 :D:D
Barclaycard: £3,490.00 / -£3,490.00 no change

Business total: -£-3,810.00 / -£3,490.00 +£320.00

Personal
Halifax card: -£4,870.00 / -£4,870.00 no change

Personal total: -£4,870.00 / -£4,870.00 no change

Grand total: -£8,680.00 / -£8,360.00 +£320.00

This week not only says goodbye to the business overdraft, but also hello to £19,000 paid off :D:D

Some month-end ones as well.

Business
Overdraft: -£890.00 / -£0.00 +£890.00
Barclaycard: -£3,500.00 / -£3,490.00 +£10.00

Business total: -£4,390.00 / -£3,490.00 +£900.00

Personal
Halifax card: -£4,930.00 / -£4,870.00 +£60.00

Personal total: -£4,930.00 / -£4,870.00 +£60.00

Grand total: -£9,320.00 / £8,360.00 +£960.00

Next week will be stashing money for eBay fees, Royal Mail and something to pay me with, then I'll start bashing away at that Barclaycard

cazmanian_minx

Just had a little look in my finance notebook (once a month I scribble a couple of pages of 'Dear Diary' in a nice notebook - with my Parker 51, Alex, if you're reading - just the month's figures and my thoughts and feelings) and in April last year my credit cards were at £9,400 and the business overdraft at £9,933.18, a total of £19,333.18. In twelve months, I have paid off £10,973.18. Quite chuffed about that

Knit_Witch

Well done Caz! some great scores on the doors there :j:j:j

Hmm the transcription work seems your best bet, it can be done almost anywhere and fits in with the staying home/headed to family stuff as well

WeeMidgie

Great going, Caz! Your debt'll soon be in the £7,000's too!

At current rates, within a year you'll have paid everything back, and your disposable income will be all yours as a result.

My daughter has just resigned from a management post - it looked attractive and exciting at first. But she now thinks, and I agree, that it helps couples to have flexibility, and that two full-time and demanding jobs in one relationship leaves very little wiggle room for the eventualities of life - and the money just doesn't compensate. She, like you is going freelance, and she can take her skills anywhere.

She's putting family first, not I hasten to add, to look after me! But your reasons for needing flexibility and the possibility of moving, considering your oldies, and being around for the hound and the horses, are good reasons to want to stay flexible and happy on the income-earning front.

cazmanian_minx

Well, we've abandoned the Lidl shopping experiment, as we spent more on food last month than any other month since we moved up here, just about! The problem is that there are things Mr Minx won't compromise on (i.e. whisky - he did try the Lidl one but it's really not to his palate) and so we were doing a full trundle around both supermarkets and spending over £100 in total every weekend.

It's going to be an expensive month horse-wise. I dropped into the tack shop today on the off-chance that there was a bag of Copra in stock (she does try to keep a bag on-hand for me) - there was, and micronised linseed was in stock as well, but because my friend, the owner, wasn't there and I hadn't paid her by direct bank transfer in advance like I normally do, I had to pay full retail, so that was £45 for the two sacks. Even more annoying, I pinged her on Facebook this evening to say thank you for having it in stock and if I was still the only person buying it, I'd be okay for at least three months now, and she said she'd been going to give it to me for free because I've been helping her out setting up a new payment gateway on her website! She's said the next bag will be free

On top of that, I need to buy some more forage balancer this month (£36), have the farrier out (officially £40 and he hasn't charged me a penny for the last two visits, so he's definitely getting money forced on him this time!) and pick up my last 30 bales of hay (£90) - ouch.

The house next door to Mr Minx's mother is coming up for sale, as the lady who lives there has bought a smaller house in the town centre (at least we assume she's going to sell it!). Mr Minx has suggested to one of his brothers (who already has two BTL properties in the town he lives in) that they buy it between them, as their mum is quite anxious at the thought of having new neighbours after so many years (she's 88) and this way they can make sure it gets let to some nice respectable contractor engineers from his workplace who won't have noisy small children or throw weekend-long parties. Just to show you how far the market up here lags behind the rest of the country - this is a four-bedroom semi-detached house with two good-sized reception rooms, a reasonably-sized garden and sea views (no houses in front of them, just fields and a road). Guess how much those houses sell for (there's a row of six of them). Anyone? Top price for sales of those six, which is the one that was newly decorated with a brand new kitchen and bathroom and has been extended with a conservatory, was £124,995 a couple of years ago.

cazmanian_minx

Hope everyone's having a nice bank holiday - Mr Minx and I are both working. Mr Minx because he has to, his workplace gets them to work this one and then gives them the Monday and the Tuesday off at the end of May to make it easier for people to get south to see their families (when it's 3 hours to Inverness and about 5 and a half to Edinburgh, visiting family in England becomes a major expedition!) and I'm pottering round the office attempting to catch up on all the left over bits on the daily to-do lists for the past couple of weeks.

Where were we in the sump saga last time I updated you? I think Mr Minx had just patched it. Well, 24 hours later he went back and checked it and it looked fine, so he filled it up with oil again and discovered that an L200 takes more than 5l of oil in its engine. A week later, when we'd managed to get to Autoparts again, he topped it up (there having been no drips at all in the intervening period) and took it for a test drive.

Yes. Turns out that it doesn't drip when the oil's cold, but once it's warmed up... :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: On inspection, the patched area turned out to be absolutely fine, but cleaning up the sump to apply the patch had worn some other rusted areas too thin and it was now more of a sieve than a sump! So now we had the problem of how to get it the 26 miles into Thurso without turning the A836 into a skid pan. I wondered if the AA would give us a tow under their Homestart service and emailed them to ask, but never got a reply other than the bog-standard 'Thank you for your message, you will receive a reply shortly' auto-responder. Mr Minx came up with a cunning plan involving a ratchet strap, a rubber seal and some gun-cleaning swabs (don't ask...), booked it into the garage for 9am today and at 8.15 this morning we set out in a rather cautious convey, me following behind him (the last time I did this when he was in a truck it didn't end well!) with strict instructions to stick my hazards on if I saw the strap fly off or a sudden river of oil on the road.

Well, blow me down, we made it! Despite five cattle grids, numerous potholes and getting stuck behind a bulldozer, the strap held and it was only dripping very, very slightly when we pulled up at the garage. :T:T:T It's a good thing Mr Minx gets his bonus this month (4.5%, which he's very chuffed about, and that's just the site-wide bonus, he hasn't heard about his personal bonus yet), as he had a rush of blood to the head on Saturday and ordered a new oven as well (he's been cooking with a knackered one for about three months now and finally got fed up of not being able to cook certain things because it just won't get hot enough any more and the fan's broken too). However, he's realised this morning that the site he ordered it from is backed by AO, who don't deliver to the Highlands, so he's fully expecting an email and a refund tomorrow!

In other news, I've spent the last two days reading this: http://www.whatsamsawtoday.com/ - currently up to mid-2013 and gutted that she's taking a sabbatical from it at the moment as I'm really enjoying it! Gallygirl - I don't suppose you have any property-related blog recommendations?

cazmanian_minx

Done so far:

14/15 accounts dumped onto a CD
Covering letter written to accountant
18 orders packed
Last week's accounts done
Last month's sales taken off stock sheet
Closing stock put into accounts
Paperwork filed
Formatting sorted on Mr RPC's report
Mr RPC's April invoice sent, along with a reminder that March's is now due for payment

Just need to change the bed sheets and do the ironing and then I can legitimately take the rest of the day off

gallygirl

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

In other news, I've spent the last two days reading this: http://www.whatsamsawtoday.com/ - currently up to mid-2013 and gutted that she's taking a sabbatical from it at the moment as I'm really enjoying it! Gallygirl - I don't suppose you have any property-related blog recommendations?

No I don't I'm afraid - and I'm not your friend any more for putting temptation in my way :rotfl:.

DebtFree2012

Difference in house prices is crazy. It also has got me thinking......!

cazmanian_minx

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Difference in house prices is crazy. It also has got me thinking......!

Would you like me to put up some links of north coast properties suitable for horse owners....? :D:D:D:D