This Time I'm Really Going To Do It

Watty1

Went to meet a friend for coffee. Got day wrong - it is tomorrow :doh: £2.20 spent on a coffee and nearly 2 hours wasted. Oh well never mind


MtM day 16. Check Council tax band. Am fairly sure I've done this as part of our overall finance check in past but in keeping with project re-checked. Band C. Lower than neighbours but hardly surprising as all the houses locally are very different. See there is a note that property has been "improved" and should be re-valued in the event of a sale. Can't see that we have any case for getting this lowered. found it oddly satisfying that mr and mrs laurel hedges next door are paying £840 more than us

FloppyDisk

A day of lows and highs! Very satisfying about the neighbours but particularly in light of your lack of smart phone I imagine the wait for your friend was frustrating.

Alchemilla

Impressed you are sticking with the program.

Watty1

Alchemilla wrote: »

Impressed you are sticking with the program.

Well it is quite easy as the programme provides all the web links to check things out.


Today's task was to check energy bills. Slightly difficult as our provider's website was down so I will need to recheck this later but using our annual usage from 2013 and guessing at what our tariff is we are on a pretty good deal. I did find one cheaper but it was from a start-up company and Mr Watty wants to know what happens if they don't make it. I've no idea and was up to change it but Mr Watty started mumbling that it was only £55 a year cheaper and a quick review of the web shows that they don't have many customers yet.


No idea what to do about our gas bill as we use (or try not to use) LPG and have it delivered. Can't make any sense of how to get that down.

Watty1

Decided to do day 18 as well as away over w/end. Used energy saving calculator on line to discover that could save £45 a year if swapped living room lamp bulbs to LED ones.


Couldn't work out what the bulbs I actually required where though when I looked on line :rotfl: Think will not be a saving if I buy the wrong ones!

Alchemilla

Start-up company could be genius or disaster...

edinburgher

Be very wary of LED lightbulbs, they are hit-or-miss in a big way. Some of our poorest performing ones have been from globally recognised manufacturers, some of our best have been crappy Chinese generic ones.

Watty1

Thanks for the tip Ed. What do you mean 'poorest performing ones'? I know the living room ones we have put in take for ever to actually warm up enough to produce light

Watty1

Nice weekend at a dressage event, lots of demos to watch but expensive, although shared room with 2 pals which reduced costs, but, very with an eye on the long game have said to girlfriends wont go next year.
am hoping mortgage will be gone by then though not sure how that will be but lets stick with optimism
Sat through the demos thinking I really want to retire.
2 items sold on ebay - total £7.49 made. Am really surprised at this as the sales were for 2 bath bombs and a tube of body lotion, both from a special offer pack bought in sales in January for a bottle of perfume. That made the perfume totally free (am still using it up).

Goldiegirl

edinburgher wrote: »

Be very wary of LED lightbulbs, they are hit-or-miss in a big way. Some of our poorest performing ones have been from globally recognised manufacturers, some of our best have been crappy Chinese generic ones.

We went over to LED lightbulbs, but it turned out to be a false economy for us.


Some of the lightbulbs stopped working completely after a few months, and some of the others started failing - only about half of the light would come on.


In the end we put the original bulbs back in