Moving On Up In 2014

alioops78

Things are definitely going in the right direction debt wise and you're coming across a bit happier now that you're under £1k too.

What a great neighbour you have too and a great idea to swap as well.

Bolton hasn't got the memo either as the grey clouds are obscuring the blue sky and sunshine however with how stuffy the office is it's not stopping people from having odours ewwww.

Things are cracking on, thanks for asking - hubby is going to start sorting out the spare room tonight thank goodness as I was getting worried we'd still have a full junk room when the baby comes along lol. I'll be trying to sort out our bedroom as well as she'll be in with us for the first 6 months hopefully but need to get organised now.

Great that you had an awesome holiday and the holiday blues have disappeared for you now.

Cinny91

Thanks Shrimpy and Ali! Although I can't really take full credit for it as it was OH's generosity. However once it's all paid off, the credit is totally mine

Hope the room is coming together for you, Ali! Can imagine once you start making headway with it it'll all fall into place rather quickly Also have to say that paying off another k in 2 months will be amazing progress, Shrimpy!!

Popped to the shops after work yesterday, we needed sugar and OH had a hankering for some chocolate muffins (this is just a general day to day feeling for me, got to say) grabbed myself salad things for dinner as I knew if I came home empty handed I'd just graze all afternoon. So I wound up spending £7.20 which is a little bit annoying for a £2 trip! Included in that was £2.24 on loose tea for my Nan as they had Yorkshire Tea reduced to £1.12 and she was only telling me on Friday she's never seen it cheaper than £2. Still, £5.20 isn't the end of the world!

Payday later this evening/tomorrow morning so Ryder gets he's weekly walk to Asda in the morning! He's a lot smarter than he looks so naturally goes that way on a Friday which is both weird and impressive. But I say that as his biggest fan Still, I'm hoping I can get down to £900 tomorrow

Cinny91

Happy Monday.. again!

The weekend went oddly slowly, but in the nicest way possible. OH was out on Friday night with work so I had a nice evening of classic Doctor Who and honey whiskey. Keeping it classy and as extremely sociable as ever.

Went out to the magic four on Saturday - Poundland, B&M, HomeBargains and Lidl. Got lots of little bits we've needed for a while like a new broom, only exciting things obviously. Ryder got a new flea collar and squeaky cheeseburger toy (he's only excited about one of these) Also stocked up on some toiletries. While my heart may never recover knowing I got a big tube of Colgate in Walmart 57p, under £1 comes close.

We were also looking at Vegas holidays last night (naughty!) we've kind of settled on the hotel and the room we'd like, so this morning going back to Vegas seems very real and my brain has gone back into weight loss mode. Totally missed a weigh in with OH yesterday, and we've agreed to Sunday weigh ins so I'll have to wait for next week now. Hopefully it'll mean a nice loss to add to the signature this time next week! Although nothing is official until we have the deposit down at the very least, and we need to book in branch to get OH's 10% discount applied

However, I think we're waiting until I'm debt free (so mid-October) before we book it. Plus we've only been back from the last trip for 2 weeks, if we did book it I'm sure people would think we've gone fully off the rails.

Slept through my alarm this morning but still managed to get up and on a decent walk, getting home for 6:45am with one very tired pooch. Clouds are clearing up now and I think it's going to be a super hot day! So this afternoons walk will just be a quick mooch and back. Fingers crossed I can be a good house-girlfriend and get all the washing done too.

Also managed to get our tea in the slow cooker! It's butternut squash curry tonight, OH isn't terribly keen on the idea but it was smelling pretty good to me

Cinny91

How is it even Thursday already??

Had a pleasantly busy week! OH treat us to our tea out last night, so it was nice to have a night off cooking At my Grandparents over dinner today so I'm not planning on cooking anything too much for tea. The heat + hot food is just way way too much! Although I told OH I'd pop by Asda and pick up some of that rum beer stuff on the way home.. so maybe a liquid tea?

Have £200 ready to go too my Grandparents today, had to alter the day I go and see them so I won't have £300 for this month - but I can just level it out with £400 next month.

Going to see a friend on Saturday for a coffee, so I've been hoarding coins for the car park all week. I never have money money so any £1 coins have been super precious to me! Hoping the weather stays nice, also hoping I'm not tempted to buy too much stuff as she really brings the spending side of me out!

Also having a BBQ on Saturday, along with OH getting a cross trainer delivered. Hoping this helps me with some weight loss and fitness too! Trying so hard this week for the first weigh in on Sunday, little bit worried about the BBQ being extremely counterproductive to my loss but we're planning lots of yummy kebabs with plenty of veggies and my absolute favourite of BBQ'd corn

Cinny91

My mind can't really wrap itself around the fact it's Friday, I feel like it's Tuesday so I shouldn't complain.

Feel like I've not posted in a while and there's a pretty valid reason for that feel, it's been over two weeks! Still, I've been behaving myself. No unnecessary spends and even when I was faced with a beautiful pink Joules coat at a 40% discount I resisted (I might have tried it on, but I resisted)

Managed to get some of the £5 Morrisons vouchers with the sun yesterday - had to go to 3 shops before I finally got my mitts on some but I did it! Got 3 in the end so that's my weekends shopping sorted

So far this month I've oulled £200 together for repaying my Grandparents, still have another 3 paydays before the last Friday of the month so I'm hoping to push more towards £400, as long as nothing unexpected happens.

Think that's it for updates! We've both had one day off work each this week due to a weird bug that's going around. Thankfully we're both better now, and I got a day in my PJs watching netflix to boot Mostly excited because we're both back onto food today so I can cook the meal I've been mentally eating for the last 3 days! Cider chicken with peaches and sweet potato mash :T Cannot wait until tea time!

Cinny91

Happy Hump Day!

Had a quiet morning at work so I've pulled together a meal plan for the next 10 days alongside an online from from Morrisons. Works out at £55 with £5 cashback. Going to run it all by OH before I order, he's still not a fan of meal plans but they're all new recipes to try so *crosses fingers*

I've also put a budget together to see me through the end of the month, paying my Grandparents £400 looks 100% doable. If I can be extremely well behaved in terms of personal and grocery spending, I might be able to bump it to £500.

Had a little splurge over the weekend while has influenced the hardcore budgeting and planning this week! Totally atoning for my sins. I wound up at Matalan on Saturday and they had all their 2013 A/W stock out.. and who am I to say no to that?! 100% stocked myself up on fresh fleece lined tights, leggings, slippers (for OH too) snoods and other autumn wardrobe goodies for a total of £34. I did the nerd thing of adding up all the prices of things pre-sale and we saved over £60 on stuff we really would have wound up buying over the next few months.

And to top it all off, I bought my non-dog-walking coat for this year. Was a total steal at £19.99 on ebay and I love it so much. Super excited for Autumn to get its butt here already!

After I get back from Ryder's walk this afternoon I'm going to tackle the pantry.. yay. It's become the place that all our various tat has gravitated towards, and there is so much stuff in there that we just don't need. So the goal is to get it tidied up and ready to actually house food. The shelving unit in there is a little too big too, so I'm going to see what I can do in terms of making it work for the mean time.

We've also decided to do a little decorating over the BH weekend. We've picked out this wallpaper for one wall in the living room, and this one for the kitchen. Plus we're putting vinyl down in what's Ryder's room and, fingers crossed, we'll finally be getting a dining room table in the kitchen. All DIY jobs to keep costs low, just hope we don't fudge it up! OH used to fit carpets as a weekend job when he was little so here's hoping he remembers

Cinny91

Can't believe almost another week has passed!

Happy to say I did clean the pantry area and it's actually being... used as a pantry! I wasn't happy to do it, I kept procrastinating by cleaning other parts of the house to put it off, which was oddly productive for a procrastination. But it's done, huzzah!

Meal planning is going very well, the joint of brisket we bought is actually going to stretch for another day which is impressive. We had beef, brie and caramelised onion toasties for tea last night, tonight it's shredded beef tacos Tomorrow we're using it for a cottage pie and if there are any left overs we'll be making shredded bbq beef pizzas on Thursday. By which time we'll be very tired of beef!

Was given some veggies over the weekend from the guy next door, this time it was the worlds largest cucumber and some tomatoes. We'll be using the cucumber tonight, and I've already made the tomatoes into a decent base sauce (for pizza, chilli etc) and frozen that. Made a big batch of pizza dough to freeze too, but that was mostly because the house was clean, the dog walked and I got bored.

Downside is with being sick the week before, my wages were down a days worth last week which I didn't budget for. Hooowever, it should balance out over these next two weeks.. it's just made making it to £400 a little more of a challenge. Not that I'm not up for it!

alioops78

Things seem to be ticking along quite well for you now, it's a shame about losing the days pay but there's no point dragging yourself in to work if you're sick.

Procrastinating in a very productive way I'm jealous as I don't have the energy to even contemplate putting the clothes away at the moment let alone cleaning the house lol. In fact I'm that sick of the bathroom I'm arranging a cleaner to come and do a one off deep clean on it.

How did the DIY weekend go? I wish my DH had the ability to do DIY but it seems to have skipped him and I get those jobs although might have to supervise him building the cotbed as I don't think I should be lifting etc with 10 weeks to go (:eek:)

I'm sure you'll be able to get to the £400 mark as your previous post said you might be able to stretch to £500 so I'm sure that with the carefulness you were planning anyway it'll be fine.

Cinny91

You've got the best reason to not do things, Ali! Sure you'll get a surge of nesting energy and it'll all get sorted in time No stress!

DIY weekend was this one just gone! It went really well, we got the kitchen and living room papered. Also did a few niggly jobs like filling the gaps on the skirting boards, touching up some gloss work, putting the shower rail up. Pictures are on my instagram if anyone wants a nosey!

Have two rolls of paper left over that we're returning today. Going to have a look at flooring for Ryder's room while we're there, might actually be able to cover the cost of the flooring with the refunded money :money:

Tried to keep costs down as much as possible over the weekend, had a very frugal day yesterday. Using plums from a friends tree with blackberries I'd picked on my morning walk with Ryder for a crumble (also used the left over filling to make some spiced jam) We got some whipping cream for 5p on Sunday night so I churned that up into butter, taking a couple scoops out once it reached the "stiff peaks" stage to have over the crumble, then used half the butter and buttermilk to make scones, leaving the rest of the butter to make the crumble topping :beer: Wondering where I pick up my OS badge?

Also popped to Co-op last night as OH's world has been opened to the wonders of stickered items. So we had a pretty interesting 30 minutes when we got home hauling all the meat out of the fridge from the shop we did on Friday, and separating everything into portions for freezing. End result is 17 meals worth of meat, with lots of awesome variety. We did also make our meat portions a little smaller too.

Despite really pulling the purse strings, I am a little worried over my ability to make it to £400. I managed to leave a bill out of my budget so alongside my days wages lost from the other week I'm down £100. Plus we did an unexpected big shop of £65. I'm thinking £350 will be my limit for this month. I'm feeling a little bummed out about it, but it is still £150 more than I'm expected to repay.. which is still pretty great! It will leave me with £550, and if I knuckle down I'll have this knocked out within the next 2 months. Still on track for past-Cinny's goal of debt free by the end of October.

eta: Looking at my signature has reminded me I haven't weighed myself in a while, whoops! Will update that part tomorrow.. hopefully..

ruby_eskimo

I think you definitely deserve an OS badge for your weekend! Now I want crumble and I do have some extra apples I could use... Glad to hear the house is coming along well, will have to check out your IG photos now.