Mighty Titan Overdraft will crumble!

hohum

Drifting, eee I'm drifting.

So doing work to do lists, may as well add in money to do lists.

Made some way with tax return but tbh that half hour a day completely sank over the weekend. Still, got stuff off to broker. Now we wait.

So list:

complete employments sections on tax return
go through bank statements to check not missed any self employment income (I've done a sales report for last tax year but just want to check not missed anything)
assemble receipts by month
cancel equifax
send off books for cash (12 in vouchers and 7 in cash if all go through)
phone santander re charges

Bit troubled by boyfriend's approach to budget this week: we have agreed that he will use money from cds for gig. However his mate really wants to go to dinner for his birthday, tonight. They are close and tbh mate doesn't have a lot of other people to celebrate with. Boyfriend plans to use the money from cds for this too....money from cds not yet in account. This is contrary to rules of YNAB! Boyfriend does a lot of 'paying for this now, because will get x later' when actually x needs to pay for bills etc. His plan is that I can go to our friend's do on Friday, and he will stay home.

I am considering asking him to look at the budget and decide what we are NOT going to fund in order for him to go and have a meal. It's pretty lean pickings in there at the moment.

I am also feeling a bit miffed because his 'spends' money is double mine this month. Which doesn't seem fair! Some of it covers subsistence payments for self employed work this month but still. £20 on tobacco too which irks me but it is not worth getting fixated on fair or not. Despite the fact that I am considering not going out on Friday just to show him. That's silly. If I were being sensible it might be that I'm not going because I choose to stay in budget, not because I'm miffed about who's got more play money. And I know he'd feel guilty if I stayed in, whereas I can take or leave going out. Oo I can be very manipulative!

We are both making an effort, he is selling his CDs and I'm selling books, not buying coffees etc. I do actually have a tenner in the budget for birthdays, which I was going to use for my sister's present. I could cover this by book selling. So I suppose theoretically that's where the money would go for him to have dinner tonight.

At the moment however I am doing too well with accommodating changing spends in the budget. He is not doing the work of allocating the money and deciding what we lose in order to gain in another category. Thinking about it, I am going to get him to decide where the money will come from to pay for dinner tonight, and I'm NOT accepting 'from money that I don't have yet'.

hohum

I did get boyfriend to look at how he would allocate the money. He gets SO stressed by discussing anything to do with budgets. It propelled him into scouring our shelves for more stuff to sell. I keep trying to stress, long term gain.

We'd have these problems whether we actually engaged with the subject or not. At least this way we are actually sorting them. Boyfriend feels 'hounded' and 'anxious' re keeping to a budget. At least he's engaging with it. I have suggested we allocate the next bit of moneys together, thinking if he feels more in control rather than imagining it to be imposed on him it will be easier for him?

He is a bit of a child when it comes to budgeting, as am I (the previously mentioned 'ah screw it' attitude). This time however I feel like I'm working with a system I can understand and that works for our circumstances.

Aaaaaanyway I came on her because I need to do a shop for the last week of April and am seriously lacking inspiration in meal planning which is unlike me.

Soooo

Spinach and cottage cheese lasagne (cheaper version of spinach and ricotta lasagne) = leftovers! Yay!
French onion tart (dough base) with tomato salad. A !!!!aladiere without anchovies basically.
Kedgeree. Haven't had kedgeree for ages. Also, since when did smoked haddock become a premium item? Ended up with river cobbler.
Ham & salad & lentils. (also more leftovers potential. Buy a gammon and hopefully not eat it all...)
Jerk chicken, salad and dumplings
Pasta and chickpea tomato sauce
A stirfry. Losing interest now! Maybe special fried rice using ham.

Lunches:

leftovers, cous cous, frittata

hohum

Haha just noticed my french tart/bread is censored! It's a pis(s)aladiere

OK, overspent by £10 on food shop in order to get free delivery. I bought a massive half price gammon to take me up to the minimum delivery of £40.00. This was with sa1nsburys which I don't usually use but hey free delivery offer and nectar points. That still means our grocery spend for April is £144.74 which I am pretty happy with. We don't exactly go without on the food stakes. Am going to have to look at delivery for the foreseeable future until car is back on the road.

Also managed to get our Santander charges refunded, on a one time only basis of course. I think she's stopped the entire £80 being taken but I will leave an extra £40 in the account & budget just in case.

Plus another cheque paid into the bills account means my future bills/ savings pots are going up! £10 each into car insurance, car repair, emergency fund, friends wedding and month's buffer. It feels like a drop in the ocean when really I need £700 in the insurance, £500 in the car repair and £300 in the wedding fund (will also be a little holiday for us) but HEY HO.

plus let us not forget:

creditor/Starting debt/ amount paid/ balance
negative balances in red

Bank 1 unauthorised OD / £45.53/ £45.53/ £0 :T
Evil pricy boyf OD/£96.73/4.29/£92.44 and moved balance to account that doesn't cost £44 a month in charges :T
NI arrears boyf/ £320/ 89.61/ £230.39 (he got pressured into making these high repayments but it will be cleared in 3 months)
NI arrears me/ £200(ish)/ £10/£190 :undecided
Mighty titan OD/ £1934.83/ £10/ £1924.83 this is a repayment eg doesn't include the interest payment which is also covered, £24.78

So despite our net joint income this month standing at what I think is a pretty meagre £1779.22 we have 'paid back' (with overdrafts that means left in the account) £159.43 towards our debts and covered £117.49 of debt interest and charges (£40 of which I may be able to release to other purposes).

Which is not too bad. And next month by handling our money better I hope to reduce the amount we pay in charges & interest on our credit.

I will not reflect on the approx 7 years it will take to clear my overdraft if I continue to pay only £10-£15 on top of the interest I accumulate.

I so totally need to not be paying 19.4% interest on it, the evil beggars (more if you consider the £6 charge for the pleasure of using the OD too). But i think it is wise to try and create a buffer & emergency fund because our incomes are so variable. Soon I will create more options for us and hopefully that will include not having to pay so much on our small amount of credit.

hohum

Not much to report on weekend except got paid some more money and spent a little on drinks for home (£5) and a drink at the theatre (£5.60, bought a drink for friend who let me have spare ticket).

Realised we need to rejig income slightly so that some is allocated to May to cover the bills that come out on 1st and scupper us usually! They are now covered. Don't know what boyfriend will get paid this month so basically worrying about covering food and transport. Can cover bills with my wage.

It's relentless though this being aware of the budget. I am sure in time this will get easier as we bring interest down and bring up savings but mostly I feel like I'm staring into a month with the full knowledge that right now I don't know what the end will look like. We manage, we always do but being more focused does make that feel more scary.

Plus worrying about how little people might lend us and worrying about total lack of pension provision. Not sure if I am ready to add pensions to the juggling!

Boyfriend says we should focus on my overdraft rather than savings for things he'd like. He has sold £90 of books and £45 of CDs on music magpie and ziffit. Sadly most of that will go on living rather than debts I think. It will cover his weekend away too which is his goal. He is walking everywhere because car needs mot and we don't have the money yet. This (and the fact he isn't buying crap in top up shops) means he is losing the weight he's been after the budget diet

hohum

Serious wobble last night. Overwhelming anxiety and a feeling that I am constantly holding back the tide of EVERYTHING. Our house is a mountain of stuff that I must manage in order that it does not overwhelm me (more rationally, boyfriend left some stuff out in communal areas. The dining table is a constant bone of contention eg it is not a storing area). The money is a constant tide of shuffling, re-allocating and trying to figure out where the hell I will magic the next bill from, work is holding on and responding to endless to dos. Then there is the mortgage, next doors leaky pipe, driving lessons, stupid volunteering obligations blablabla.

Helpfully my response to all this is to hide and not engage with sorting any of it out.

I know what will actually make me feel better:

ticking things off a to do list
exercise
meditating

But did I do any of that last night? Nooo of course I didn't. I just looked at forums endlessly and stewed over not being able to afford a house, not having a pension, being 34 in a few months and rapidly running out of time to have a family.

So today is a new day and I'm going for slaying some to do lists. The procrastination monkey can get lost. Have also already done some yoga this morning. Signing off from this forum for the day which although helpful can lead me to obsessing over things in a really unhelpful way!

hohum

Much better. Did some tasks which were being a bit of a monkey on my back.

More money in: another £50 odd from second job. Have allocated it to may's income. Would be nice to put it to debt but no, am making sure it covers this weeks spends. So bills, driving lesson, bit of food, bus fare. Unlike the beginning of this month when I was walking 45min to work and back.

So far it's clear we have a pretty sizeable 'discretionary' spend in comparison to other categories eg I spent £67.33 this month on coffees, wine, hobbies and birthday cake. And that is cutting down on my coffee habit! I may start tracking this in those categories (will seeing exactly how much coffees cost me finally stop this madness ). Drinks at home and out cost me £20 odd. That's 2 bottles of wine at home and two glasses when I'm out. I am stopping having glasses of wine when I'm out dammit. Costs as much as a bottle at home!

Having cash to buy coffee makes me feel like I have options so am loathe to stop it. But that £20 on wine could go towards a debt or a saving. Priorities, priorities.

skintygerlinky

Hiya Ho Hum


Im sitting her on laptop after just compiling a to do list so must move!!


Will come back and read your diary properly later on tonight -but well in for starting it and thinking about how you want your financial future to be.
Good luck and I look forward to reading more! xxxxxxxxxx

hohum

skintygerlinky wrote: »

Hiya Ho Hum


Im sitting her on laptop after just compiling a to do list so must move!!


Will come back and read your diary properly later on tonight -but well in for starting it and thinking about how you want your financial future to be.
Good luck and I look forward to reading more! xxxxxxxxxx

Thanks! I have been lurking on yours - it's not always easy but you do make it a good read.

Soo update for today:

EDF randomly volunteered to refund our surplus from DD (£51). This is unexpected, normally it sits there and I have to request they hand it over? We're locked in to a price freeze because I started getting twitchy when everyone put up their prices. Currently pay £50 a month for both gas and electric and it seems we're pretty spot on with that. Quite pleased with that for spend.

So, what to do with this bonus £50 when it arrives? Put it in to one pot or spread across all the debts and savings?

Was alerted that wedding I thought was in nov is actually in Oct. Whoops. There is a question about whether we stop in Barcelona beforehand. For: we will prob need to fly in to Barcelona and have never been there before. Against: even cheap accommodation is £50 between us for the night, min stay 3 nights. That's an extra £150. I don't think we can justify it. It seems daft though when we're just there...maybe we can use left luggage and do a day in the city before heading over to destination. I was going to treat the wedding as our 'holiday' but don't think we can really justify extra days and spend.

Extra monthly cost of £70 from mid month is coming in monthly car insurance premiums. That is the cheapest we can get it :eek:. Did all the price comparison etc, even annual premiums came in more expensive. toxic combo of self employed/ 'high crime' area / speeding points/old car/ high mileage. When we lived in an area considered to be less risky his car was broken into twice. Had no problems since living here :wall:.

Good news? Well all the bills went out no problem (no scrambling to transfer from one account to the other), my bus pass is covered for the week. There's money in my account and money in the bills account. Budgeting def works, and using YNAB works for us. Next exciting instalment: what the heck will we get paid next week? It's all so exciting. By exciting I mean pretty much a pain in the bum

hohum

Boyfriend apparently not aware of such things as bank recs...

Asks me to transfer him some money (it's in the budget, that's fine). Funny, he should have a tenner in his account so something's missing from the spending tracker I think.

I ask if he'd mind doing a print out from the bank statement so we can go through and see if we can catch the error...

'I may have overspent on my expenses'

Oh really? I wonder if my boyfriend thinks I am daft. it was like pulling teeth to get him to give the details too.

It's only a small overspend but I don't know how to get him to get his head around if he hides the overspend, it still happens. And if we budget (esp using the YNAB system) and think we have more money than we actually do, we will be in trouble.

I am soft though, I didn't make him take it out of his spend money for this week. I asked him where we would find the money to cover the overspend from, we're taking it out of the birthdays fund. Forget that I have to find a present for my sister grrr...

I would also like to point out that his discretionary spend last month was twice that of mine.

Grrr again.

The thing is he IS making an effort in many other areas. He's walking everywhere, he's not buying stupid snacks, he's sold loads of his books and cds (this is a big deal, he likes his objects).

I can't force him to have that moment of realising 'oh if I spend this, I can't have this'. Maybe I'm making it too easy by solving the overspends and juggling the money. I'm annoyed with him right now!

hohum

So this morning:

unfortunately boyfriend had not realised that his bank make charges a month in arrears, so whilst april has minimal charges, march had £32 more than we expected

fortunately he noted when his charges come out so we checked the bank

unfortunately I had not budgeted for that amount of charges

fortunately EDF repayment came in and we were able to cover the charges

unfortunately that means I can't put it too anything else and we had to give it that blummin bank (soon, soon we will dispense with their services!)

then i got a letter from HMRC

unfortunately my debt on class 2 NIs is more than i thought, and is actually at £331.61 and they wanted repayment by July 2014. Hollow laughter all round.

Fortunately when I phoned them lady was quite relaxed about me paying in instalments and not seeming to want to send heavies round (I have no idea how boyfriend ended up speaking to the only mardy person in NI collections when he phoned them last....)

Unfortunately I still don't have enough money to reduce the debt in any serious manner

Fortunately I asked the lady about certificate of small earnings, which I may apply for this year as I will mostly be employed rather than self employed. I found out that this can also be applied retrospectively. And wouldn't you know, most of my arrears relate to the tax year where all my income came from employment meaning I would be eligible for exemption. Thus reducing my arrears to £105.30

After arriving at work...

fortunately I had packed a delicious lunch of leftover kedgeree to see me through the day

unfortunately I left it at home on the kitchen counter

:wall: