Ultimate Challenge. 457 days / £16600!!!

lou2003uk

My main spending is just using my card daily for crap so I thought small steps first and have set up a spreadsheet for January to detail every penny I spend every day .... Small steps I guess!

killerpeaty

Wow Loo, you've done so well! How did you manage it? (If you are happy to share of course)

lou2003uk

Hey of course,

I had a family member loan me 10k to get out of a shared equity property and I paid back £600 a month for 18 months .

I'm now hoping to use that £600 as I'm used to paying it anyway to pay of the further 4k I had on credit cards so for the last 4 months I paid off 2k on one card which is now clear and transferred the other £2300 onto an interest free card so I can clear that whilst saving :-) cars paid off in June so that should also help ... I'm hoping to have at least 10k by the end of the year ....

Fingers crossed , went a bit mad at Xmas which I'm now regretting but I'm hoping to take some tips of here and get right back on track!!

eco_farmer

wanted to ask you (but completely forgot) how farming has changed in your time working in it and how you got into it. So would you mind telling me, obviously only if you want to. Best of luck with the debt bashing!
Hi killerpeaty thanks for asking i'll answer as best i can and i'll start with easy bit on how i got into it! basically i was born a farmer son and unlike many children who are born into the family business but hate it or have no talent for it i LOVED it from day one! and i'm gernerally quite good at it! i'd be a liar if i said i skipped to work every day as some days this year have been a little bit hardcore to say the least! But generally i am up rareing to go before my alarm goes down.
As for hows its changed its a massive subject from GPS mapping of fields and fertiliser rates to robots milking cows the industry has changed hugely. In our own case we have sort of gone in the opposite direction! Much as tech as made things better it has also made farmers more relient on big business and as such costs have risen for example back in the day milking cows would eat grass in the summer hay in the winter and a nut from sugar beet to help them produce milk.now the cow would not have produced a huge amount of milk but the farmers biggest cost would have been labour.
now the farmer would either own or hire large tractors and machines(which break down!) to harvest maize or grass silage etc they would be importing soya form brazil to feed to there cows because they need this product to help them produce lots of milk to help pay for the feed machinary fertiliser etc required to make the system work.All of which are now supplied by firms like monsanto or CASE tractors for example.
We after many years of doing that well but not making much of a return decided to do it a bit differently we now calve all our cows in the spring and they eat mostly grass until november/dec we don't import any feed from abroad we produce our own electric(solar and wind) we use our own water(borehole and rainwater harvesting) we are just starting to compost our own slurry so we can reduce the amount of inorganic fertilser we buy. Our cows are on "holiday" so require less feed machinary etc during the winter months.All this means we are much less dependant on big business and are much less effected by the input inflation most have suffered lately. So while high tech is great and sexy etc it hasn't meant its easier to make a profit in our case low tech and basic has been the way forward!
I have no idea whether any of that made any sense to you or was in the least bit informative let alone interesting!

eco

killerpeaty

Wow Eco. So you switched between input price risk to output quantity uncertainty? Do I have that right? Does it change who you sell to? (no names wanted! Just nosey)

With the solar/wind power, was that a personal expenditure or a business expenditure? Do you know how much energy you have produced/how much money you have saved on it? I'm just curious as at some point I am interested in getting myself some cheap-ish energy.

It's also great to hear you love your job :T

Lou (I can't believe I called you loo before.. /muppet): That really is amazing! I wish I could save £10k a year! But I will content myself with cheering you on. (Have you seen that there's a Save 12k in 2013 in the savings and investment forum? You can make your own target. )

lou2003uk

It was incredibly hard but I'm still disappointed as I know I old of saved a lot more I still went on holiday , shopped well etc naughty me! Ooh I haven't seen that il have a look just now! This forum is so vast it's hard to get used to and keep track of everything!!

killerpeaty

I don't think extreme frugality is sustainable, I think that you have done a phenomenal job in clearing your debt so don't be too hard on yourself. Different approaches suit different people :money:

I pop onto MSE for 5 minutes on my phone during quiet times at work (I am very new so there's only so much I can do and that's all support so when there are no low level support cases, there is nothing I can do without hindering the busy people ha ha), so I jump on so many different threads now!

eco_farmer

killerpeaty wrote: »

Wow Eco. So you switched between input price risk to output quantity uncertainty? Do I have that right? Does it change who you sell to? (no names wanted! Just nosey)

With the solar/wind power, was that a personal expenditure or a business expenditure? Do you know how much energy you have produced/how much money you have saved on it? I'm just curious as at some point I am interested in getting myself some cheap-ish energy.

It's also great to hear you love your job :T

Lou (I can't believe I called you loo before.. /muppet): That really is amazing! I wish I could save £10k a year! But I will content myself with cheering you on. (Have you seen that there's a Save 12k in 2013 in the savings and investment forum? You can make your own target. )

your sort of right there is no doubt we produce less per cow(so they are productive for longer) but we do have a fair idea of what the production will be so no there is no uncertainty on output. Yes it does effect who we sell to our milk because there is less quantity there is more qaulity so our milk is better suited to a cheese/butter maker than to a bottled milk supplier.

Our solar is a business scheme but basically we expect to have scheme paid for in 7yrs 30% coming from electricity saved 60% from the feed in tarrif scheme and 10% from exporting the surplus back to the grid. The income from the scheme should more than cover our electricity bills going forward even though it only produces 50% of our electricity needs. i think this is still the case with personal schemes. the subsidy has been reduced but as the subsidy has fallen the price of the panels has also fallen so the potential pay back period has stayed roughly the same.

hope this helps
me thinks you are potentially wasted in your current employ! you have a mind of a business women! curious analytical and getting to the heart of the matter.:j

eco

killerpeaty

Eco: I'm just a nosey nosey person. It's probably my best and worst trait. But, it does mean I can talk to nearly anyone about their topic of choice, the other week I had a chat to a CERN scientist about the Higgs field (and its more famous boson). He was fun, his last name is Mee! Great name.

I didn't realise that different qualities of milk went into different products. But thinking about it, it definitely explains the difference in price. Does it mean that you had to break a contract (providing milk to milk seller) to make a new one (to the cheese men)? Or is it like a phone contract and it starts to "roll"? I know nothing really about contracts between companies, so I'm sorry if this is a dumb question.

Wow, a 14% yield is really impressive if you think about 5-10% yield is considered commercial.

By the way, I was a muppet today. I was going through the kindle store downloading free books... well.. I should learn to read because I managed to buy one for £2. It's fairly gutting considering that money came from surveys so probably took 1 hour to get. :rotfl:

eco_farmer

luckily for us we were already on the right contract but weren't getting the best price so now we are producing higher quality milk the price paid to us has risen:j.

talking of books am reading Seb Coes book"running my life"(xmas pressie) and i throughly recommend it, he's had very varied life experiences!

one very good bit of O/d busting came yesterday in the post.The inland revenus think i have paid £300 too much NI if i can prove it thats a right result!

eco