Diary of a spendy cow

rising_from_the_ashes

Yay to London being on and double Yay to the car being fixed without a 2nd mortgage being required :j

mooomin

The latest NSK challenge is up for February and I've joined again :eek:

Here are the goals for February:

SFD 0/15
Exercise 0/12
Food Bank 0/£5.00
Food 0/£180.00
Petrol 0/£50
Lunch To Work: 0/10
Items decluttered 0/56

I've set myself a target of decluttering two items a day in the hopes that I can create a bit of order in the chaos. I have those tags from Oxfam that earn Nectar points, so that'll give me a bit of an incentive to start bagging things up for them and to dump things I don't need. There's a Music Magpie type of thing for books I need to remember the name of as well!

I've decided not to do the part of the challenge around planning your social activities and refusing all others. Although I want to save a decent amount of money in the current month, I don't want to do it at the expense of my social life and I normally do low-cost activities anyway

Money

Food account: £93.60 (following £10 foodbank donation yesterday)
Current account: £280
Purse: £69

I'm going to go to the supermarket tonight once I pick up the car and get some items we're needing. My parents are visiting this weekend so I might not have time to get a lot of batch cooking done, but I'm going to try. I need to write a menu plan before I go out today as well! Lots to do, lots to do...

Ali-OK

Zapper for the books.....

Good luck for the Feb challenges

mooomin

Morning all

Shameless copy and paste from the Janus thread with my progress for the month of January:

My final tally for the month is:

SFD 15/20 This includes today as I got my food shopping yesterday and have no other plans to spend. I'm chuffed with this as a first attempt as when I joined I had signed up for the NSD challenge and only aimed for 10 there so I smashed my initial target.

Food £190.74/£200 This would have been even lower, but my cat's food was on offer in Morrisons yesterday at £4 and it's £5.49 everywhere else so I bought two bags :money: That'll keep him in dry food for most of February.

Downshift 3/5 Not great, but I don't really buy branded food anyway. I don't use Basics ranges, but mainly shop at Aldi for tinned goods anyway. I did downshift to basics tatties/peppers etc and that was fine, so I'll keep an eye on what else I can shift to.

Lunch to work 12/11 I'm now planning what I'm doing a lot better and have been using my weekends to make massive pots of soup to take with me to work. Thankfully I'm not easily bored and love a good thick soup

Outings 6/4 This is estimated and over plan. I'm not too worried about this one tbh as I don't go to things I can't afford and as I'm debt-free it doesn't feel quite as bad I don't have a circle of friends who plan things a month in advance so I knew this was always going to be a big ask.

Exercise 18/15 Very pleased with this. I've been doing a lot of walking and on the days when I walk home from work (2 miles) I've been putting the bus fare in my sealed pot so it's been increasing my savings too.

Petrol £50/£50 Probably a budget I need to revisit as Mr Mooo has topped up the car already this month in addition to this, but that's because we had a trip planned I had forgotten about

Food bank £10/£10 Very pleased to find out I could donate to my local one online with cash and that they also get giftaid.

Beauty spends 0/£10 I'm not needing anything at the moment and the one thing I did buy (moisturiser as my old one ran out) I used Boots points for.

***

The car came in at £79.43 for the repairs which wasn't too bad and the squeak is finally gone :j

I did my food shop for the coming week last night and now have £68.45 in my food account until the 18th of February :eek: :eek: Thankfully NSK's new challenge for February focusses on meal planning and using up cupboard goods :rotfl:

Adpoints up to 65 thanks to a double points ad this morning. Hurrah for Friday!

mooomin

Morning all

Adpoints are up to 79 and thanks to some Canvass surveys for 140 points yesterday my balance is at 2734/£13.67.

No change on the money front thanks to another NSD which took me up to 15 for January - most unexpected!

Mama and Papa Mooo are in town this weekend so I'm off to the theatre with Mama Mooo tonight to see Evita. I've never seen it before so am quite looking forward to it

beanielou

Love music from Evita~~enjoy

EssexHebridean

That was a great result on the car, and even greater remembering that you had money aside to pay for it! Glad you can still do London. The last squeak my car was suffering from turned out to be the alternator & belts needing replaced and cost nearly £500 to put right! :eek:

Good luck with the february challenges too - I'm aiming for 15 NSD's too.

mooomin

Morning folks

Evita was pretty good - I've not seen it before so didn't know what to expect but I like it. Mama Mooo loved it which is good as the tickets cost me nearly £60 :eek: That's a great big spend for yesterday :rotfl:

I also bought a swimming costume for my holidays while I was in town which was nearly £30 but that's being paid for from the council tax free month this month. My normal payment is £122 and I have £92.50 left to spend of that if I see anything nice and summery that I can take with me. Hopefully some of the more summery clothes will start landing in the shops soon. I don't need a lot but it would be good if I could get them from Primark rather than somewhere more expensive

mooomin

mooomin wrote: »

I also bought a swimming costume for my holidays while I was in town which was nearly £30

£29.50 to be exact and it was from M&S who now have 20% off all womenswear including this swimsuit :mad:

I've ordered it online for £23.60, collecting it from store tomorrow and getting 74p cashback to boot. Then I'll return the other one

Primula

Hello mooomin
Been absent from this site for far too long and one of my resolutions for 2014 was to stop wasting so much money on rubbish so I am back. Have just subscribed to your diary, as I do remember you from before and your diary was not only very funny (in a nice way - you know how to raise a smile), but also very inspiring.
Good on you with your swimming cozzie, that's where I fall down, I would be annoyed but do nothing about it, so good for you. Just make sure you don't bin the original receipt before you return it!
P
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