Debt free by 40 -- 19 Months and counting

sweetpea26

I agree that the mother is at fault here Steph. How insensitive is she!! Tough on you and your son. Try and rise above it Steph and don't make yourself too available to her.

Your DS is at cricket now and will meet lots of other boys. It hurts us mams when our kids are hurting. God bless.

StressedSteph

Thanks for you kind words Dawn, Clearmydebts and Sweetpea. Its just another of lifes injustices, it's just harder when it happens to your child. Oh well. .


Alls quiet here really, We have all been really tired this week and Ds is off school today. He says he just feels very tired and he has abit of a temperature.


Finances continue to be tight but manageable. Hubby is only getting paid for four days this week due to the Bank Holiday :mad:, so no spare money to push into savings account.


On a good new point, we did afford to buy a few flooring tiles for our extension so hubby should be doing that this weekend and then we can actually start using the room :T. Its destined to be a place where we kick off our wellies and wet coats. At the moment we walk straight into the kitchen with it all and it drives me crazy.


Not a lot else to report, I'm super busy in the polytunnel and lots to do on my hobby farm .


Hope you all have a fab weekend. xxx

misstara

Hi Steph

Hope DS feels better soon and that finances pick up. Having a tight month here as well but trying not to stress out about it too much.

Hope it's a beautiful day where you are and you're enjoying pottering about the garden in the sun

StressedSteph

Morning all


Hope you had a good weekend. Not totally sure where mine went?. Don't feel like I achieved much just general pottering and tidying.


Super annoyed with Ebay. I sold my Dd's Xbox for £140 to a total nightmare of a guy. I advertised it at £160 or Best Offer. So he offered me £130 + postage. I replied with a counter-offer of £140 + postage explaining how the Ebay & Paypal fees will easily take £10 from me at the checkout so I needed it a little higher.


He conceded and accepted the counter-offer. All good, Packaged it up amazingly, Hermes tracked and out the next day, then he starts moaning because it didn't have any Skylander Giant characters only the regular sized ones. I tried to explain that it was all explained in the advert and he has received everything that was in the photograph.


He then starts asking for a £10 refund to cover him having to buy a Giants character, this is obviously a retaliation for me upping his offer £10 at the checkout. :mad:.


So in a bid to please him, I tried to get abit clever and I purchased a Skylanders Giant for £3.49 from Ebay and arranged for it to be sent to him direct.


I then get a claim come through from him Via Ebay asking for either a full refund or £6.51 Grrrrrrr.


He made me so mad I accepted his request to send it all back. His poor child will have to hand it all back over because of his fathers pettiness. It is crazy as its going to cost him over £8 to post it back :mad:. I just have to hope it still works when it gets back to me as not sure what Ebay would do to help me if that happens.


I am sooo done with Ebay, it really feels like it is not a place to sell privately anymore, people are just too wise on how to play the system. I know I probably would have saved myself a lot of hassle by just paying the £6.51 but I just couldn't face giving him the satisfaction .


He got everything in the advert as listed but because he didn't read it correctly I had to suffer.


Think if I do list anything on Ebay in future it will be Cash on Collection and nothing else.


So will have to refund £150 out of my savings account soon , but hopefully it is still all working and I can re-sell it again cash on collection.


All very frustrating...


Apart from that I had to pay for the childrens annual Swimming fees at school £40.


Bank account is super tight, although I realised that I do now have almost 1.1/2 years worth of history on YNAB. So I thought I might go through the categories and see what the common monthly amount spent actually is. Mainly on my Misc accounts like school costs, Household goods, Days/nights out etc, so see if maybe I can start to put aside a little every week to hopefully cover those costs rather than having them feel like overspends all the time. Try to be abit more realisitic about what I spend every month and also try to squeeze them a little tighter. I really do feel like I have slightly started to spend and then adjust YNAB after the event, which is TOTALLY the wrong way around.


Off for a coffee, have a good Monday xx

lhead123

Oh no that sounds like a nightmare!

You should have just told him it was all in the description and left it at that. If he had opened a case though ebay they would have sided with you.....

Now i'm worried he will send you back a faulty xbox that wasn't even yours and ebay have a bad reputation in that respect and will take the money from your paypal to refund him anyway, leaving you with an xbox you can't sell and £150 down....hopefully he will send you back your original xbox!!!

xx

StressedSteph

Morning Diary


Will keep my fingers crossed with the Xbox lhead. Complete Nightmare .


Beautiful weather here today in Dorset, kind of wish I didn't have to work this morning, but at least I have the afternoon free.


I am thinking of trying to tackle some of the garden around the house. We live in a Chalet bungalow but have a small garden on three sides of the house which is full of plants and now tonnes of weeds as well. I am pretty much up with the veg plot atm so should turn my attentions to my neglected garden.
The house is just about ok tidy-wise but frankly if I was super picky I would never have the time to do anything other than tidy so will do the garden when the weather is lovely like today.


I am making a very real effort to stop the flow of misc spending that keeps going out of the bank account. I have worked out that if I am super careful I might have another £100-£150 spare for the savings by the end of May. But that will easily be eaten up by un-controlled rubbish spending so I MUST be careful.


My low oil light is on, on the central heating monitor , not too sure what to do about that, I really can't afford to be finding £250+ out of no-where for heating oil on top of everything else.
I will stall for a week or so and then I guess I will have to order some.


Not much else to report, will find time to catch up on more diaries later this evening.


Take care all xx

mfmaybe

Nightmare on the Xbox. I too am rapidly losing confidence. When I sell horse stuff it's fine but anything else is a bit of a minefield. Today somebody is threatening to drop a star on my feedback because the person the item is for is allergic to cats and there are a few hairs on it. I never mentioned pet free home and he didn't ask any questions about it, and I was clear it was a used item that had been kicking around the house for ages. It's so annoying!

Good idea to get outside when the weather is good. I'm sitting staring at weeds too. Re the oil, does this do more than heating? We've got ours off now and just use the woodburner in the evening, and the LPG only for hot water. Is this an option for you?

StressedSteph

mfmaybe wrote: »

Nightmare on the Xbox. I too am rapidly losing confidence. When I sell horse stuff it's fine but anything else is a bit of a minefield. Today somebody is threatening to drop a star on my feedback because the person the item is for is allergic to cats and there are a few hairs on it. I never mentioned pet free home and he didn't ask any questions about it, and I was clear it was a used item that had been kicking around the house for ages. It's so annoying!

Good idea to get outside when the weather is good. I'm sitting staring at weeds too. Re the oil, does this do more than heating? We've got ours off now and just use the woodburner in the evening, and the LPG only for hot water. Is this an option for you?

Hi mfmaybe


Wow your Ebay sale is as annoying as mine. I just hate the way all the protection is skewed towards to buyer and no safety for the sellers at all. I am surprised so many people nowadays as it just seems like a scammers paradise at the moment. :mad:


Such a good idea with the heating, thank you. I have turned off the heating totally and we can switch the water heater on when we need it and use electricity instead. It will just take the pressure off me for a few months while I get things sorted with savings etc. No need to a panic with it until we get further to the end of summer.


Hope you Ebay sales sorts itself out, still no sigh of the xbox yet, thoroughly expecting it to be broken now


xxxx

StressedSteph

Morning Diary.


Not a whole lot to report this morning. I officially have £6.56 in my bank account :eek:. I had totally messed up YNAB as it thought I have about £157 available to budget . Have no clue where I went wrong, so I did a naughty and made a "!!!!-ups" category, added the excess money into there and then hid it. Not the best accounting method granted but I had no other clue how to rectify it and now I have 18 months of YNAB history built up I really didn't want to start all over again.


I need to keep an eye on that, especially when I don't know how I messed up. I thought I had all the bills covered until half way into next week and it turns out now that I most definitely don't :mad:


Got my 2nd cleaning job today, hate hate hate cleaning but can't see anything else that I can do that is only a few short hours and is flexible. Who would have thought my life would have come to this


Spa treatments have all but dried up and I just don't seem to have to confidence to put myself out there. Think its because I feel they are going to want NVQ qualifications and I just don't have them. I have the course certificates but they often want NVQ's as well.


Oh well, get this morning done then I can get gardening, the weeds have gone totally crazy in the garden around the house and need to get it all under control.


Have a great day everyone xxx

lhead123

Oh no steph have you reconciled your accounts? I do it a few times a week to make sure everything matches up - usually it turns out I've entered something and swapped digits round or put the decimal in the wrong place....

Can you download transactions with you account? if you press the import button on the account transactions page it comes up with a box telling you which format to choose. Choose that format on online banking, then go back to ynab, click choose file and import it. It will ask you which account numbers go with which ynab account and import them. It will then match up your transactions as much as possible and you just need to approve them - then you can see anything you've missed.

I find importing easier than manually reconciling everything and switching between banking window and ynab....

Hope you can work it all out

xx