Getting back on track for 2013 and beyond

brizzledfw

Pleased re your relationship with OH..that's great news. Also Cossham..which should be great.

Boo to water filters and extra expense and extended probations..

kerri_dfw

Short-lived I'm afraid Brizzled as he can't be bothered to apply for jobs because he's "too tired". I found him a whole list to apply for, all he had to do was send emails, and he couldn't be arsed. Massive row ensued and he's now sleeping in the spare room. If it carries on like this I'm kicking him out and going it alone, it's like going out with a child sometimes.

Cherryjack

Just popping in on your diary its been such a long time..hello x
Oh my gosh im reading your diary backwards.. there's a baby!! :DDD congratulations!! aww how amazing

kerri_dfw

Nice to hear from you cherry, yes little one due January very excited.

I've just spent the morning reading the O/S boards and particularly the getting started threads. I think I'm going to start with meal planning and eating down the cupboards, then see where that takes me. I think I'm going to need to start spreadsheeting,although never been too good at that to be honest, but I want to keep a check of what I am spending. If we want to buy a house in 3 years time then I need to save £30k myself plus whatever OH saves to get us to our desired 10-20% deposit we'll need for Bath. This means I need to save an average of £834 each month including for my maternity period, so basically 27 months of saving £1112 each month. Judging by what we spend at the moment I have no idea how I'll do it. I seem to just buy stuff when I feel like it, although never full price so I guess I've learnt something in these past 2 years. The one thing I definitely want to be is debt free before the small person arrives. I don't appear to have done the debt total for August, which is naughty, but will do it for September when all bills are in.

Right so how do I achieve this then... Well currently our bills and finances are joint, except mobile phone bills...his fault he never setup his DD so I told him when we moved he can just sort it out himself and I'll sort mine. I work out the finances based on monthly and annual spends, put the annual spends into a joint online saver and then the joint account is used for joint spends, however I don't know my pin so the cat food and small bits keep coming from my pocket grrr. At the end of the month whatever is left goes into e online saver to build up a £1000 emergency fund. That'll take care of annual spends eventually.
With the house move debt freedom has been out on the back burner as have needed blinds, curtains, paint, etc. I also need to save up half the money towards the baby furniture (cotbed and chest of drawers), pushchair, and car seat. Most other baby bits I'm going to buy second hand or use freegle, freecycle, fb groups.
I have 5 pay packets until the baby arrives, bills will come to about £1k rounded, so I'll have an average of £1.3k each month leftover. Augusts pay packet has been earmarked for paying as much debt as possible, I get a referral bonus of £2k less tax this month (also one of my SMP qualifying months winner!!!) so that's straight off the VC. I have £500 to go to my work CC to pay off expenses on that. So proper saving will likely start invite septembers pay packet.

So I'm going to start meal planning and writing out my spending diary. The slow cooker is going to teach me how to cook, and im going to try to work out how to use my food mixer and magi is properly. Bread can be made in the breadmaker and as much washing as possible will go on the washing line, rather than the tumble drier. I need to cut our £300/m food budget as for 2 people that's ridiculous.

Right, off to look for veggie recipes

debtfreewannabe321

Ooh please share your veggie recipes when you find some....only easy to cook ones though I hate cooking and am not the best at it

Looks like we will start saving from the same point as you too im hoping to put away £800+ per month we will have to cheer each other on!

Cherryjack

Ahh i cant believe where the time has gone my little girl will be 2 in January and i think i was pregnant when we all started speaking.
I've just done a £95 shop for 4 of us online and used the multibuy offers on As$a.. we got so much food for that and i can only think we will spend maybe another £60-70 this month so you can definetly almost half your shopping bill with some luck. The slow cooker is amazing, my friend bought me one for christmas and ive been using it non stop for the past few weeks. Lasts our family 2 days.. so you will be able to freeze Amazon do some lovely cheap slow cooker books, may be worth a look and swap the meat for quorn etc x Good luck this month, I saved £6000 and had a brand new roof put on my house, im just £900 away now from purchasing a log burner..our gas bill was thru the roof. I have still kept the basis of this and much happier

debtfreewannabe321

Wow time flies doesn't it when I started posting on here my little one was only a year and a half old, he's off to school on Tuesday (he's 4 now!!) well done for saving the money cherry i hope to follow suit and be good at saving now I'm impressed with your shopping bill too :eek: mine is coming in at £400-500 a month (for 5 of us) :eek:!

kerri_dfw

Here's the link to my meal plan. We're going to increase it to 5 weeks so when we alternate we are cooking different meals each month. I'm currently doing the shopping list and recipes tabs (I love a plan). Just whacking everything onto the shopping list at the moment, then I'll work out store cupboard vs weekly shops. Oh and don't worry, I can't cook and hate cooking so they're all really easy things to cook. I'm not raising a small child and slaving over a hot oven, don't you worry

kerri_dfw

Signature has been updated for August, a slight backwards direction due to purchasing our sofa and festival tickets. OH still owes me money for these. However, I'm not that worried as I have my referral bonus due on Friday, yippeee Really hoping that I can clear VC this month, then work on clearing BC. Although with that being 0% until November I shall put the money to one side and only pay it off when the 0% runs out. Then I'll work on Cap1 and do the same with that as it's due to run out Jan 2014.

OH is at home today and still in bed, given that bed is my office I'm not impressed at him snoring whilst I'm meant to be working grr.

Now we're a bit settled we're going to start flyladying so today's tasks (will edit and strike as I do them):
15 Minutes?
[strike]Clear that floordrobe.[/strike]
[strike]Vacuum as much of the carpet as you can easily access[/strike]

30 minutes?
[strike]Dust every surface [/strike]
[strike]Polish those mirrors[/strike]
[strike]Dust the headboard if it's solid; vacuum it with the upolstery brush is it's padded[/strike]
[strike]wipe the switches[/strike]

1 whole hour

[strike]Strip the bedding[/strike]
[strike]get that duvet on the line outside to air in the sun[/strike]
[strike]vacuum and turn your mattress[/strike]
[strike]dust the skirting board[/strike]

kerri_dfw

Oh my goodness, I bought a cr0ydex triple soap dispenser from fleabay a few weeks ago and OH put it on the wall yesterday. I stupidly filled it without thinking "oh the buttons might have caps", so now the entire bath is covered in soap & conditioner, my hands feel overly clean, and I've wasted 1/4 thing of shower gel, 1/4 thing of shampoo and most of a bottle of conditioner to the drain I do now have a working soap dispenser which should reduce the amount of shower gel I have to buy each month, hurray OH is terrible with using too much, so this was the only way I could think to stop him. I used the excuse that it declutters the bathroom and he fell for it wohahaha.
So today I need to go and buy some more conditioner, as I used my last from the store cupboard boooo. I also need to buy shower gel as we've run out of that. I'm hoping our local boots has one of those points machines as I always get deals with them, otherwise will buy just one bottle and go to the boots when I go to cardiff tomorrow.
Then the rest of the day is finishing off my meal plan with shopping list and recipes ready for when we go food shopping next Quite excited about how this is going to work as we tried one of the recipes yesterday and it was really scrummy.