Caz counts it down

catshark88

Going into an agric store is the nearest thing I do to shopping as a hobby. We have scatts down here and I spent the winter getting very excited looking at all the different fuels for my log burners. Perhaps I should get out more.... ;-)

cazmanian_minx

My memory is getting dodgy, the last beet purchase was 7th January, so a bag has lasted me two and a half months for two horses through some pretty horrible weather - not bad for £12 I may need to find some more hay though, I'm down to my last 16 bales and the good weather isn't due until the second week of April. My supplier is totally sold out now, so I might treat them to some Horsehage, but because of the freight costs the cheapest you can get it up here is £7.50 a bale :eek:

Anyway, it appears to be Friday, so it must be time for some scores on the doors:

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£-5809.59 / -£6589.98 -£780.39

Business total: -£-5809.59 / -£6589.98 -£780.39

Personal
Overdraft: -£3454.89 / -£3542.44 -£87.55
Egg card: -£3115.00 / -£3115.00 no change
Barclaycard: -£2734.89 / -£2695.00 +£39.89

Personal total: -£9304.78 / -£9352.44 -£47.66

Grand total: -£15,114.37 / -£15,942.42 -£828.05

Nasty as that number is, I did spend another £2,500 on stock so I'm actually quite cheerful about 'only' increasing the overdraft by £780.

I'm considering paying myself the extra £250 I didn't pay myself on 1st March. My personal budget is now maxed out for the month, I have £10.09 left until the overdraft gets worse than it was at the end of February. OK, if I hadn't had to renew the car insurance, it would be fine, but I've still got two Saturdays of food shopping to go and with Mr Minx at home for an extra 2 days because of Easter, they're not going to be small ones.... I think what I'm going to do is wait and see what the figures are for the business at the end of the month and if I've made more than £1500 profit in March then I can take the extra £250.

catshark88

DH's are lovely, but very expensive to run. Mine is always taking cash out of cash machines and wasting it on things like train fares and sandwiches.... ;-)

As he works long hours, commutes 4 hours a day and is the sole breadwinner, I try not to nag him about it quite as much as I would like....

cazmanian_minx

I was wrong about the Horsehage. I had to get it from Pets at Home because the tack shop needs 24 hours notice to get it to the shop - £8.29 :eek::eek::eek::eek: I'm sure the tack shop will be cheaper, but I was better off paying the extra yesterday than making a second 90 mile round trip to save about 70p. I had to get some because Merlin, after confining himself to just pulling faces at Finn for the past few months, attempted to take a chunk out of Finn's bottom on Saturday morning. Poor Finn has a little bald patch about the size of a 20p and a bigger crop circle of summer coat where M ripped out all the winter coat. Mixing a slice of Horsehage into Merlin's hay means he spends at least an hour happily picking through his own pile to make sure he's got every single last bit of Horsehage out before he goes and moves Finn off the pile he's on to see if there's anything better there.

Not a bad trip to Tesco yesterday, we got £13 off with coupons but it was still £74.

I have a very cold annexe today, I forgot to keep an eye on heating oil levels and have had to turn the boiler off - hopefully before it dragged any dregs from the tank into the system. Phoning Simpsons is the first item on the to-do list for tomorrow morning, I think Tuesday is their delivery day for out west, so hopefully it'll be 48 hours of working in the cold at the most.

cazmanian_minx

Drat, knew there was something else I meant to post about - I found a UK retirement calculation spreadsheet Someone put me on to the Mr Money Mustache blog, which is American, but happens to have a post about a UK retirement calculation spreadsheet with a handy link to download one. I haven't had a proper play with it yet, but it looks interesting:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/07/28/a-simple-retirement-calculator-uk-version/

cazmanian_minx

Simpsons say 'by the end of the week', so I may have a few days of being cold, but I'm crossing my fingers they'll deliver tomorrow.

It's been a good weekend for sales: 49 orders, £650 in PayPal and another £250 on its way from credit card sales. I guess all my customers were snowed in and got bored

Merlin and I had our first go at long reining this afternoon. I'd never done it before; he obviously had because he was going perfectly until he sussed that I didn't really know what I was doing - then he slammed on the brakes, propped a back hoof for added insolence and turned his ears backwards like a particularly sulky yellow donkey. Now I know he can do it, I'll take him out for a hack in long reins, he'll find that more interesting than walking around the field and should behave himself.

catshark88

He sounds such a character! He will probably be so interested in all the sights and sounds of a hack, that he'll keep going forward.

I think it was Jennie Loriston Clarke that made some amazing DVDs of just what schooling you could do long reining. It seems quite an art.

cazmanian_minx

He's a total character It's lovely to see actually, because he wasn't really very interested in humans when I first got him and now he'll usually come over to say hello the moment he hears the gate open. He's got a sense of humour though - I went down in my jods last week to ride Finn, Merlin took one look at my legs, stalked over to the wettest part of the field, dropped to the ground and PLASTERED himself in mud before getting up, having a shake and then giving me a very smug look as if to say 'Ha! Try tacking me up now!' :rotfl:

Not much progress on the debt busting front today. I only had a few orders to go and wasn't feeling great this afternoon, so Jura and I curled up on the sofa and caught up with some of the contents of the Sky+ box. It seems to have done us both good and I'm ready to march back into battle tomorrow No oil delivery today though, so I'm going to have another chilly day

cazmanian_minx

No oil delivery today either Other than that, it's been a pretty good day. My nickel-testing kit turned up so I was able to test my owl beads and they passed The balance transfer to the new Nationwide 0% card is being processed by Barclaycard. And Mr Minx told me this evening that he's upped the amount he pays me towards the household bills (I forgot to ask how much by!) in anticipation of the electricity DD going up. We had the meter reader on Monday, so Scottish Hydro is about to email me with a nice cheery message telling me to log into my account to see my latest bill. I know that the DD is going to go up - I was only £96 in credit after the last bill in September compared to £240-ish the same time the year before, they had a price rise in October and we've still got the heating on full whereas this time last year it had been turned off completely. We're paying £103 a month at the moment, I'm thinking it's going to be £140-150

cazmanian_minx

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

We had the meter reader on Monday, so Scottish Hydro is about to email me with a nice cheery message telling me to log into my account to see my latest bill. I know that the DD is going to go up - I was only £96 in credit after the last bill in September compared to £240-ish the same time the year before, they had a price rise in October and we've still got the heating on full whereas this time last year it had been turned off completely. We're paying £103 a month at the moment, I'm thinking it's going to be £140-150

I was wrong. Our new direct debit is £172 a month :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek: We owe them £363 from the 6 months just gone, so that does include paying that back over a year - as long as there are no more price rises in the next 12 months it should, in theory, go back down to around £142 this time next year.

Mr Minx, bless him, has said he'll take on the entire price rise as he's been paying the same into my account for bills for the past five years and things like Sky and home insurance have crept up over that time. So he's putting his monthly payment to me up from £570 a month to £650, which is going to be a big help.

I'm starting to wonder what to do about shifting my last expensive debt - my NatWest overdraft. The only company doing super balance transfers with any reasonable length at the moment is MBNA and I've heard that they'll automatically decline you if you've had a rejection from them in the last six months, which I have (I think - I'm pretty sure the card I got turned down for in December was MBNA-backed). I think I'm stuck for now, but once the Barclaycard-that-was-an-Egg is paid off I shall start putting the monthly spending on that and paying it off at the end of each month, as that'll be interest free and will mean that the money Mr Minx puts into the account each month stays there for longer, so I should pay a little less interest.