The Road to Financial Security

QB_Wolf

All sounds very exciting Pushkin, that outside office sounds great.

Pushkin

QB Wolf - yes am very pleased with it so far - it's by far the most amount of money we have ever spent (bar the house purchase and that of course is mortgaged ). Feel a little guilty but given that we chose not to move the decision was to spend some serious money sorting out current house out and improve our life here - this will get our teenage son & his play station out of my lounge

Need to get the garden sorted next....

Good luck with the house hunting...

Pushkin

Expensive morning as we did a trip to C0stco which is never cheap, i was however horrified that it came to £303:eek: Anyway meat, washing powder, dog chews, toilet paper, coffee beans & a few other bits all stocked up. In theory the next few weeks supermarket shop should be pretty low with only the fresh stuff to buy. Of course I track all this on a spreadsheet and we are under budget its just a shock to pay that much out in one go.

DH and I have just carried a the sofa bed into the garden office so it now has its first official piece of furniture :j He's aiming to get the telly and PS set up this afternoon, we have an arial specialist coming in next week who will sort out broadcast telly & internet and do some work to neaten out many many cables within the house.

We are also planning a trip to 1kea over Easter to get a tv cabinet and doubtless some other bits. Our house could possibly be mistaken for an 1kea shop as so much of our furniture is from there :rotfl:

We are sadly in that limbo zone where every part of the house seems to be in a mess and you wish you hadn't started - well I do anyway!

I am also really cross with myself. We have a bank account with the money we have set aside for all these house improvements and I have a spreadsheet to track it all. Anyway I hadn't updated it since January and I now can't reconcile the figures and seem to be around £1000 out which is a bit of a nightmare! So thats another task for later.

amycool

Spreadsheets not adding up are very annoying! Don't think I've ever been a grand out though! :-) I hope you work out where it's gone.

I'm glad to hear that the office is built now and you can enjoy it after all the stress.

Pushkin

Hi Amycool - I know its shocking isn't it - I need to go back through my bank accounts & credit card statements for the last 3 months. Really not like me and am very cross I haven't tracked it properly for the last couple of months.

While I'm demonstrating my poor financial management I will also confess that I've just discovered that when we went to Cologne at Christmas we had 2 lots of travel/holiday insurance. Before going in December I bought an annual policy, yesterday I got a letter from Virgin money informing me my annual travel insurance policy expires in April.

Better to have 2 lots than none but this is obviously something I need to add to my admin spreadsheet to avoid doing it again - also wonder a little at my memory :mad:

DS slept in the new garden office last night - I am chuffed that he is so chuffed with it - not sure I like the fact he now has the ability to play on his PS while in bed though

Pushkin

Well I have found the £1k I couldn't account for - not sure if thats a cheer or a boo - since we've essentially got that much less than I thought :eek: and I am starting to fail dramatically in my financial management.

I hadn't accounted for a wardrobe we bought DS in December (£584) and I thought I had paid for our new tumble dryer in Jan (£279) without touching that money but that was not the case.

Don't want to go through that again so am going to track every penny I take from that account as I withdraw it from now on.

As I have said before this doesn't come naturally to me but of the two of us I care more about money than DH does - if that doesn't sound too harsh. If I didn't do it we wouldn't do any of this stuff at all so I am trying not to give myself too much of a hard time but 2 failings have cropped up in 2 days so not feeling too great. Wow this is becoming my psychiatrist's couch again!

Beautiful day here, am going to the cinema with a friend later which seems a shame given the weather but haven't seen a film for ages. Have very very little money left in current account due to that tax bill and the C0stco bill yesterday so need to minimise spending until Wednesday when I get paid. I have about £30 cash in my purse which should cover today and then should be plain sailing :cool:

Credit card bill for April is however over £1k so few bits of juggling coming up to get through that month - wow life would be boring if I was mega rich - what would I spend my time doing and thinking about :rotfl:?

On the plus side I have 3 bids on an item I'm selling on £bay and have just claimed £7 cash back which should come through this week as well.

BookWorm

Hi Pushkin

Don't beat yourself up too much. We all make mistakes and at least you found where the 'problem' was. Learn from that and move on.
Don't ever worry about unloading here - after all it is your diary - and also if it helps then that's a good thing.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend

BW

cookie9

Well done for sorting Sky out. I feel your pain re home improvements. It is an expensive business.

Pushkin

@ Bookworm - thanks - I think the beating up is all internal - when you try and track every penny spent it's rather annoying to come across errors like this!

@ Cookie - thank you but don't hold your breath yet - I'll believe it when we receive the new $ky box and the monthly payments reduce as promised. Next payment due out tomorrow so we'll see!!

Pushkin

Electrician found the break in the circuit (is that technical talk right - I'm out of my comfort zone here!) and fixed the issue yesterday. He is going to come back and break up the main ring because we have one big one instead of smaller ones - we want to get it up to current regulations as believe this is the reason our buyers pulled out - it was right after they had an electrical survey done.

It will cost about £1,000 - not cheap but important for both our safety and our chances of selling the house when we come to do that.

DH also had the arial specialist round and done a quote again for around £1,000 to put internet in the new den (what we have christened our garden office cos it sounds less pompous!) and sort out all the cabling within the house. Again not cheap but we have so many cable nests I think it's time to bite the bullet.

DH is also nagging me about booking our summer holiday - I'm not really that bothered if I'm honest (bah humbug) not helped by the fact that we disagree about where to go!

Pay day tomorrow - the day I feel rich :rotfl: - it's a one off.