Time to sort it once and for all!

LittleMissKitty

Thanks Julie. It's nice to feel that I'm not always talking to myself
Technically we had stopped at four - little Miss E was the biggest shock of my life! But I adore her so she's forgiven.

Well, on Wednesday I was completely unaware that DH had a sedation appointment at the dentist so I had to drug myself up to the eyeballs to entertain the two youngest and then drive him home again. We must have looked a right pair bearing in mind the state we were in! Shouldn't really have been driving around the county I feel.... however we managed to survive though he now has a very sore face and I feel like hell
Unfortunately the sedation came under the 'different course of treatment' heading so we were stung for £49 and then a further £7.85 for antibiotics that I'd not planned for so I'll have to work that into next months budget. Oh, also spent £2.20 on crown corks so we can bottle the cider, £16 on oil to stop the car blowing up and £9.50 on a new broom (ours got sat on and snapped!) and toilet roll (we ran out - bad grocery shop planning) - Ouch.

I suppose one positive(?!) is that I missed the booking slot for this weeks deep water Aquafit :doh:so I've saved £6! Future planned spends for the weekend are £18.50 on getting nails done and £50 cash for drinks on the Warrior Saturday night I'm kinda hoping we don't spend the majority of it but no point going out and NOT budgeting for drinks.

LittleMissKitty

Ooo I've just worked out how to change DH's mobile phone DD an d my phone insurance from the grocery account to the bills account - excellent! One step closer to everything coming out of the same account, just DH's gym membership to sort and we will be fully centralised! :j

LittleMissKitty

Just checked the accounts for the day so I know what's gone out and what's still due. Gym membership has come out for the month so that's all the DD's paid, now we have to get to the end of the month without any un-budgeted spends!

Since I last updated:

• my mobile DD's gone out and
• I paid DH's by card so that I could switch the DD account so that's gone out early too.
• Gym memberships's gone out.
  
• We took £50 for drinks on the Warrior but spent none of it :T
• on Sunday we went to visit DH's Grandma and promised the kids if they were good they could have a McD's so we used the Warrior cash - cost £20 so £30 has been put aside to cover any school trips and/or other misc necessities that catch us offside.
• I've put 5 items up on eBay to finish on Sunday and 3 of them already have bids any money we get from eBay will go straight to the 'new car fund'

That's it for money bits and pieces I think.

I think we may have to buy the car earlier than planned, to be fair it's only earlier by about a fortnight/three weeks, but it still isn't going to look great on paper. We wanted to wait until late June as, unless something catastrophic happens, we should be happily clear of the overdraft by then and have the plus balance to buy a little nip-around. However, I've been called up to do the pre-school leavers photos (I have a casual contract with them and tend to do Christmas and Summer) which, depending on what days what kids are in, could mean I have to be at the pre-school every day for a week. It's a pain for DH to get a weeks worth of lifts to and from work so it seemed sensible to pull the 'new car date' forward to make life easier. The bonus to this is, of course, the fact I can probably pull in a good couple of £00's from the job so it'll all work out looking far better on paper in the long run - I'm just going to have to try not to get despondent when the figures suddenly dip by £400 in one go If I can cover half the cost of the car and insurance through the pre-school job then I'll be happy with myself, if I can cover the other half with eBay sales I'll be happy as Larry!

LittleMissKitty

I feel like I've been hemorrhaging money for the whole weekend
We decided to buy the car. £350 from a dealer up the road, MOT till next Feb but no tax. It's a HEAP. The paint's bubbling, there's corrosion underneath, the clutch is so heavy I can barely hold it but we knew all this, hence the price! What we didn't know was that it leaks petrol!!! :eek:
We got him (Henry, he's called Henry) on Saturday and D took him to the petrol station in the afternoon to fill him up as obviously he was empty when we got him. Not a problem, until that evening when a take-away delivery bloke (oh how I WISH it was our take-away, but no ) knocked on the door and asked if the red car was ours. We said yes, he said there's petrol all over the road underneath.
Next morning, after hubby had NO sleep worrying, we checked again and yes, there was petrol dripping out of the bottom. Hubby then, in his infinite wisdom, sends a snotty email to the bloke using MY eBay details! (git) and calls to say there's a problem, cue snotty email in reply which I had to apologise for :mad: The long and short of it is the bloke's going to come and look at Henry at some point and see if it's 'just the overflow' or if there's a bigger problem, not that he'd fix it anyway but in the mean time we've spent £610 (car, tax and insurance deposit) plus a tank of petrol - most of which is now all over the road - and I feel like I've just opened us up to a whole bunch of even MORE expensive stress. Help!!!

On a good note we cleared our shed and utility room and I sold £78's of stuff on eBay so I can pay for Thing 5's swimming photos

indebtinsussex

how is it going attempting to be debt free, are you still on the straight and narrow? xxx

LittleMissKitty

Just wanted to pop in and say It's all going well computer's exploded so I've lost all the financial spreadsheets but I should be able to recover everything soon and I can get back on track and give you all the gory details!

LittleMissKitty

Still not fixed the computer! We're looking ok, still hovering around the zero mark on the current account but it's far better than the large minuses we used to have and July was an expensive month so back on track and we should (hopefully) have some money to pay off debts at the end of this month

LittleMissKitty

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!! :hello:

We have bought, put together, taken apart, put together again, poked a bit and finally successfully turned on our new computer! I'm in the process of transferring over the files from the old HDD but I started with the spreadsheets and spent this morning updating EVERYTHING we've spent since June. It took a while.

Our total spend over and above bills this year is (drumroll)
.......
.......
.......
.......
.......
£16553.59 :eek: which is scary. But we are still hovering around the zero mark on our account which is far better than we have been previously.

Update from my little sabbatical in a nutshell is:
In June we bought a laptop so I could stay in touch with clients while we worked out what we needed to buy to fix the computer, three different homebrew kits and a birthday pressie for DH.
In July we bought birthday presents for all three boys (with rather awesome use of the Tesco exchange even if I do say so myself!), supplies for the pre-school galleries for work, samples for a baby-show thingy I had booked a stall at (Those were financially evil _pale_ ), everything I needed for my daughters 1st birthday photoshoots, a new electric stapler, dremel, chair, seating foam, wadding, trim and fabric for my 'was-meant-to-be-thrifty-and-old-school-but-ended-up-costing-a-fortune' reupholstery project and a new PSU & motherboard for the computer.

So far this month we have bought the photos from the littlest babies underwater photoshoot , worked out that we DIDN'T actually need a new motherboard & PSU :wall: so bought a new HDD and have finally achieved 'alive computer' status.

I've gone on lock-down mode this month! Hubby is under strict instructions. Spend days are Monday ONLY (unless a genuine emergency happens obviously) food and petrol are both to be purchased on Monday and no other spends are happening unless already sanctioned. We have a camping trip planned on the 19th which will require an extra fill-up at the petrol station, school uniforms and new lunch boxes to buy for the kids (this comes out of the 'sundries' account) and DH is going on a residential course for a week with OU so has been given £100 and told not to spend it . If we stick to the plan we should start seeing money left at the end of the month and I can start skimming it off before payday and throwing it at the debts. I WILL do this!

LittleMissKitty

Hello my poor abandoned diary,

As is traditional for this time of year I have (a bit of) the enthusiasm a new year provides for sorting my life (finances) out.

August to December last year was pretty much consumed by DH's finals and me actually having real clients, strange people that thought paying me money was a good idea - weirdos.

Christmas was budgeted for. We went over, but not by much (It was the food I swear - £278 for ONE SHOP!) but DH is having a time of it at work and desperately wants to leave. To do so with any chance of matching or, hopefully, increasing his current salary he needs a particular qualification. With the promise of the insurance money for his bike (promised within 10-14days on November 11th, yeah, right) we booked the required 1 week course for late January. We left it as long as we could in the hope this money would appear but it was getting a bit close and he was concerned the course would book up so we booked it anyway - and completely missed the tiny little plus VAT bit so we're now massively overdrawn.

Massively to the tune of £700. AND it's my 30th this month. AND we now have to find money for a 5 night stay in London and food.

So if you pray to a deity (I'm not fussed which one) if you could be so kind as to ask them to hurry the insurance people along a bit I'd really appreciate the help!

LittleMissKitty

Ooooo, the insurance company've released the money! woohoo!
That means the cost of DH's course has been covered and we're out of the over draft. :j

This prompted me to go all MSE and add up all the outgoings and set up various bits and, to add even more awesomeness to the day it looks like our debt may be less than we thought :rotfl:

So I've set up an account to put money away to pay back the initial £1k to my parents. They've lent us £9k in all but are insisting that £8k is a gift as they gave my brother the same when he bought his first house.
I've got a standing order organised to pay the next two months council tax break money direct to the account so we don't waste it and I stuck £85 I got from working unexpectedly at the weekend in there to start it off so by March 1st there should be £325 in there and not a penny of that will have affected the budget

Talking of March we now have the court date (18th) so we'll know soon if we'll have increased the debt or if we can pay it off altogether _pale_ If we're lucky they'll settle out of court before then and we'll be debt free! Can't see that happening though, but you have to live in hope.