Mighty Titan Overdraft will crumble!

liltdiddylilt

Hey you

Again, not having to pay any charges on your overdraft although technically it is still there is absolutely fantastic! I know things are much tighter at the minute but show me a household that doesn't have some budgeting problems at this time of year.

You're doing fab

Your pots are gorgeous, I am loving the 'Is this plastic' line! I don't think I have enough jewellery to warrant a box but I have a beautiful inlaid walnut box which plays music inherited from my Mama who died in 1999. It has her old jewellery in it, nothing is worth a £1 to anyone else but to me it is priceless.

I have never understood the reason for Beef Jerky. But go OH if thats what he wants to do with his time. These diets do not last because they inevitable stall. Cutting out bread, cake, and SO MANY things from your diet eventually kicks everyone because you will falter, with just one slice of bread, or one doughnut and suddenly you lose nothing. So let him worry about it. Him is bodybuilding and has just spent £130 on a fold out bench to store at my place for the days he is here, plus tonnes of weights, and a barbell and dumbells, not to mention the tubs of various powders he dissolves into milk and drinks by the gallon. Whatever makes him happy, but I make him pay for his extra special foods . Weird on days like today when hes gone home for the week til I am back at work. It just sits there in the corner of my room... Lol

You'll be losing weight eating without him and bum him out :rotfl:

Hope you're ok otherwise! x

hohum

llllllilt thanks for dropping by!

I think my scepticism has had the desired effect as boyfriend is now determined to prove me wrong although I am amused by his discoveries through actually reading the label of foods. Like I've been telling him for years, hot dogs have carbs in because of the fillers in them. Mushy peas are carby. Anything sweet has carbs in...But he's doing really well!

Had an annoying letter re class 2 NIs this morning...it looks as though I may have miscalculated what I owe and still owe them £53.75. I can't work out how I did that though, so I've requested a statement of charges and will try and figure it out. I think it will have to so with the retrospective certificate of small earnings/ exemption from class 2 for 2011-12. Looking at it again, for some reason they have only applied it from Sep 11 not April 11. No idea why. It's not due until 31 Jan though so I'll wait for statement and see what's going on. Have set aside half of the money due now just in case. Is totally do-able, but annoying as I thought I'd cleared it!

I did some more spending...thanks to YNAB i had been setting aside birthday money. For once, I can afford to buy a 'big gift' for boyfriend. I have bought him a Kindle Fire HD. He travels a fair bit, plus has been using the iphone his dad gave him to watch videos. Using vouchers and special offers, I got one at t3sco for £80 down from £120. Then me and his brother went halves, so I have only spent double my usual present budget . I am really excited about giving it to him. Just have to wait now. Can be quite safe about sharing this on here as there's one thing he doesn't do and that's hang out on money saving message boards!

liltdiddylilt

Haha oh wow what a present!! I have been looking at the kindle fire phone, but I have an iPhone 5 and until it dies of old age I am not getting a new one!

YNAB is certainly working wonders for you. I am going to sit and tinker with mine, as I need to stretch my 'savings' budget out into other things. Have worked out for all xmas, birthday & annual bills I need just under £800 a year. £67 a month will cover those things, but I need to branch it out properly instead of just whacking it all into 'savings' or at the minute 'Christmas food'

Gutting about the NI contributions. Are you not going to ring them and ask why they have applied it incorrectly? I would be desperate to sort it so you have more willpower than I do!

I still lay odds on bf giving up. Same as Him will get bored or depressed with his bodybuilding. It isn't the exercise that kills him, but stupidly having to eat 3 meals a day. He usually manages 1 meal in the evening and a snack or 2 during the day. Usually noodles or hotdogs. So now he is trying it makes me laugh. Good luck to em though. More than I am doing to get off my sorry bum and exercise/diet!!

hohum

liltdiddylilt wrote: »

Haha oh wow what a present!! I have been looking at the kindle fire phone, but I have an iPhone 5 and until it dies of old age I am not getting a new one!

YNAB is certainly working wonders for you. I am going to sit and tinker with mine, as I need to stretch my 'savings' budget out into other things. Have worked out for all xmas, birthday & annual bills I need just under £800 a year. £67 a month will cover those things, but I need to branch it out properly instead of just whacking it all into 'savings' or at the minute 'Christmas food'

Gutting about the NI contributions. Are you not going to ring them and ask why they have applied it incorrectly? I would be desperate to sort it so you have more willpower than I do!

I still lay odds on bf giving up. Same as Him will get bored or depressed with his bodybuilding. It isn't the exercise that kills him, but stupidly having to eat 3 meals a day. He usually manages 1 meal in the evening and a snack or 2 during the day. Usually noodles or hotdogs. So now he is trying it makes me laugh. Good luck to em though. More than I am doing to get off my sorry bum and exercise/diet!!

I've got a category in my budget for 'shiny new iphone' which currently has the grand total of errr £0.

I did ring them and must have got on to the same mardy bloke that boyfriend spoke to once. 'Your payments were applied to previous years debt'. On enquiring whether that included offset re certificate of small earnings, yes apparently it did and no they couldn't do a statement (?). eventually he agreed that they could do a statement of charges up to April 2014, which I hope will help me figure out what's gone on. Suspect it's the certificate of small earnings - I will have assumed entire year written off, they will have found some reason that I have to pay £50. Am for paying NI contributions, but seeing as I was also paying class 1 NI through PAYE seems overkill somewhat...

liltdiddylilt

Overkill indeed and can't be right. Still every government or local council department who can or will claim money back seems destined to do so on very flimsy reasoning at the minute. £257.40 from one, relating to December 2013. £72.40 relating to an overpayment a couple of months ago from a council benefit, and yet the statement they sent me does not even vaguely match the payments I was getting or am now getting. I give up. I send the money back and start again, but it is a bit soul destroying thinking you're straight and finally getting some savings then having them taken away again.

Hope you get to the bottom of yours. I've given up! xx

hohum

liltdiddylilt wrote: »

Overkill indeed and can't be right. Still every government or local council department who can or will claim money back seems destined to do so on very flimsy reasoning at the minute. £257.40 from one, relating to December 2013. £72.40 relating to an overpayment a couple of months ago from a council benefit, and yet the statement they sent me does not even vaguely match the payments I was getting or am now getting. I give up. I send the money back and start again, but it is a bit soul destroying thinking you're straight and finally getting some savings then having them taken away again.

Hope you get to the bottom of yours. I've given up! xx

I spent six months living with a partner who was claiming unemployment benefit while I was a student. Our earnings were jointly assessed, including my student loan - income that you pay back with interest... System could not cope with my variable part time earnings. Every week I got a new assessment of how much council tax I owed...It was almost funny. I went from them owing us money, to me owing them money, to owing them lots of money, to less money...

Eventually with that one I gave up too! Unfortunately I was young and foolish and just moved hoping it would go away. Which resulted in debt collectors and CCJs...at least I think it did. I can't find a register of any CCJ anywhere, and I eventually settled the debt with the council. Had split with the partner by then and technically we were both liable, but it was worth the cost of not having to be reminded that I'd spent 4 years with the idiot every time I got chased for the debt. The positive thing he gave me was an understanding of how debt collectors work (further reinforced by temping for a housing assoc). I also will never judge people who claim benefits because the entire process was soul crushing, and frankly anyone who has to deal with the whole unemployment benefits nightmare has my sympathy!

---

Broker has not got back in contact. This does not exactly bode well. Bah. I might have to look for someone else.

I am JONESING for house things.And a house. And a garden. I am mapping out interior design on houses I haven't even viewed. Am out of control!

Might try an experiment next month and see how much I actually spend on coffee by tracking in a separate category to my spending money. This will not be pretty. Lots of people say how they've saved by having a cafetiere at work..I have one. I just like take out coffee more. And it's annoying to clean the cafetiere. Perhaps when I see how much it costs me to like take out coffee more, I might change my spending habits.

Similarly I need to woman up and start using my bike again. I halved our public transport costs by using my bike to work. I'm lucky in that there's a towpath route pretty much from my house to my office. Unfortunately now it's dark I have to take the road route back. This involves some slightly terrifying night cycling through a 'public transport' zone which puts me in a lane with buses and taxis through the city centre. Then an inner city centre loop which involves joining a main road at traffic lights which splits from two to four lanes. The rest of the journey is OK but for 7 mins my heart is in my mouth and I'm letting that put me off cycling at all!

liltdiddylilt

Council Tax doesn't cause a CCJ found that out when I thought they had a DD being taken out of my bank account, and they hadn't set it up right. I didn't open envelopes since it was on DD... Then a red topped one came through and it turned out I had just missed a court appearance and extra costs had been added of £160. I nearly died. £800+ I had to pay them. But no CCJ, as the council are not allowed to give you them.

Cycling is for the summer. I wouldn't dare cycle in winter. Harsh weather, stupid drivers and way too many accidents! And the 4 lanes thing would put me off for life!!

Have you used the demotivator for coffee? It put the frighteners on me after realising my once a week habit would cost me £10k over my working lifetime!!! I buy very good quality douwe egberts pure indulgence and love it!

And boo to the broker, what a palaver. Is the house you want still available!?

hohum

Just a quick one to say statement of NI contributions arrived surprisingly quickly. Was there when I get home. I am now possibly even more confused. The year that they said I owed money for is now showing as not having anything to pay. And years 2006/7 and 2007/8 are 'under investigation'. If there's one thing to make you go cold, it's something in an HMRC letter using those words...

Putting my rational head on, it could be because of lack of matching up my details with any PAYE work I did in those years. It also could well be because I had a certificate of small earnings still valid in those years. Although I am now FRETTING because I am worried I made a mistake and used the personal allowance as a threshold for reporting, not the threshold for exception of small earnings And I can't check because my tax returns are in my old laptop, which needs the hard drive extracting before I can access the files. I thought I was good at keeping records but apparently not.

Worst case, I could end up owing £400 more than I thought I did (almost what's in the emergency fund ). Or it could just be they're checking the PAYE records. I will ring them tomorrow and my order to myself is to stop fretting!

hohum

So I phoned the revenue, and got back through to the usual not mardy people. I do not know what mr Mardy was on but if he'd bothered to explain I could have worked it out. Looking at the documents, the only thing I can think is that I have calculated my starting debt incorrectly. This could possibly be because HMRC allocated my payments for the current year to the historical debt for 2011-12, prior to then effectively writing the debt off ('effectively' because they don't write it off, they just officially say for that tax year they won't ask me to pay it.). I will have to check what date they sent me the letter to say they would not collect, as basically I think anything I paid prior to that date would have been allocated there rather than in the current year. At least I think I understand myself even if no-one else does.

I then spent 20mins holding to speak to the NI contributions office, where another non mardy lady looked into what 'under investigation' means. Apparently it just means I was registered as self employed in that year, but as I don't have a record of class 2 contributions (because of letter of exception due to small earnings) they look into it.

I still can't say for certain that I was within the small earnings threshold until I double check my tax return, and I'll need to resurrect my hard drive to do that. Looks like money for a usb drive enclosure needs to be found within the budget!

^^^

Possibly most technical post so far on my thread niche interests, niche interests

liltdiddylilt

Cor blimey

I don't understand a word but as long as you know and feel more in control then it is good!!