Madnessa's Debt Diary & Change Life by Xmas Challenge

Madnessa

This morning I already spent £2 on a hot chocolate. However I have bought my own sandwiches in today.

Had big argument with OH last night! He went to our old flat (rent is paid till end of month as we timed the sale of our new flat quite badly) and turned the electric boiler on as he fancied having a bath. He then put one pair of jeans, one t-shirt and one set of underwear in the washing mashine and washed them. :mad:

After I calmed down I fined him £5 as we have a perfectly good shower in new flat with gas boiler and a nearly full washing machine ready for washing. At least the £5 will cover the cost of wasted electicity.

I am now off to try and join some challenges :T

The unecessary spending one will probably be a good one for me!

I will report back about how I get on.

PS just found out my first mortgage payment will be 16 June and the next one will already be on 1 July :eek: :eek:

Madnessa

Just went through our bank accounts and managed to scrape together £39.10 to pay off a little on CC. So that is now at £3,700. Still way to much but if I can get together £200 next pay day I will be at £3,500. That is the plan anyway.

Hopefully if I write it down I will stick to it. Also next month I will try and get together some more little bits of money to make an extra payment.

Just hope there are no financial emergencies in the next few months as I can't afford any of them! :eek: I'm sure I've just jinxed myself saying that.

I have joined the Unnecessary Spending club and this weeks total is £5.52. Would have been better putting that on my CC too! Anyway I will make sure that this weekend I do not go out or spend any money.

Have also spoken to OH and Grocery Shopping will also have to go down. We now spend about £50 in a good week. From now on I have set a budget of £35 and if that is ok will reduce it to £30 next month. My aim is to be spending just £25 per week on shopping from August onwards for two people.

Problem is I am a fussy eater and OH is a big eater. I think I am going to try cooking lots on Sunday (which will also be our shopping day) and then freezing meals for the rest of the week. We both like pasta so I will make some different sauces.

From now on I will also make sandwiches for work instead of buying ready-meals or expensive soups as I used to.

There it is now in writing! As good as a contract

pania

fantastic start madnessa and the food shopping is something i am definately trying to pull in myself, although god knows why as OH pays for that and he just spends any money i save!! The old style boards are fantastic.

Just a thought re the gym, yes you may be in a contract but can you drop it down to off peak only? Ie can only go during certain hours? this may well save you some money as is quite substantially cheaper.

good luck!!
Pania
xx

Madnessa

Good plan with the gym Pania

Will get on to them today to try and change that!

Have also already done the letter saying I want to cancel the membership from next year as it is one of those contracts that renews automatically unless you cancel on time :mad: I hate it when they do stuff like that and it's always in small print.

i might have a see if there is any way the membership can be put on hold and payments stopped for a couple of months as this would help quite a bit.

I have to keep writing these ideas down otherwise I WILL forget them

dreams_R_free

Best of luck, Madnessa. I'll be following your thread and cheering your successes.

One thing I noticed on your SOA is that there's nothing there for telephone and internet connection. Are you using the internet away from home at the moment and is it something you need to budget for if you are planning on getting it installed at the flat? I don't mean to rain on your parade:o but I wondered if it was just an oversight

Take care:beer:
Imp

angelavdavis

Hi Madnessa,

I read your thread and it sounds like you are doing really well!

One thing I found to be a motivator is to keep your grocery receipts and whenever you throw something foodwise in the bin because its gone off, go through the bill and work out how much money you have wasted.

Do this for a couple of weeks and see whether there are items that you automatically put into the basket that never get eaten. I found this helped me identify that we always threw certain veg away. I also seemed to buy pate that never got eaten either - when I queried with my OH, he said he didn't like it! Aargh men - it hadn't occurred to him to let me know!!

Old Style had a thread about "what food items have you thrown out this week" going for a while and this is an extension of that really.

Madnessa

We don't have a fixed phone line and we're not going to get one either. OH gets great deals with his O2 as he only has to top up £10 per month and he gets 250 free evening and weekend minutes so we mainly use his phone. We would like to get internet in our new flat but I would like to wait till we are more financially stable!

Madnessa

Great tip about the receipts. Will be doing that and will make a list of all the waste for about a month.

Thanks!!!

Madnessa

Just phoned the [STRIKE]bastar[/STRIKE] erm... I mean lovely people from my gym and it turns out I can't freeze my gym membership on my contract. The contract from before I joined contains this option but I have missed the boat on that one!!! :mad:

This is not over. There must be a way of getting out. Only problem is it is a joint membership for two (and by the way we do normally go about 4-5 times a week but we are now doing up our flat so won't have enough time over the next few months). We can hardly both go to the doctor saying we are too unwell to use the facilities so we can get out of it.

I must try and find another way

Madnessa

Oh dear! Had very big spend yesterday but was nearly all things we needed:

Hot choc: £2 (on my unnecessary spend)
Weekly shop: £20.26
Petrol: £44.49 (should last at least 1 and half weeks I hope.)

Total: £66.75

So I have to make sure that today is a no spending day (and hopefully the weekend too) so we should be ok... I think.

I also still have about 10 pound coins at home for a small emergency but if something major happens we have nothing!!!

I have also done meal plans for the rest of the month and shopping lists. Next week's shopping list is estimated to come at just under £25 (would be great if we could keep it at that and the week after we will have to do a very big shop as our cupboards will be quite bare by then. I think this will be about £55-£60.