BK & Husbandface diary

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

So yesterday I got hit with the 12 week countdown fee at Slimming World, which I could have done without! But it is an expense I won't compromise on, I can't ever put back on the 6st 12 I have lost to date. Also, by buying the 12 week countdown, I effectively get 12 weeks for the price of 10, so it is the most economical way to pay for it. I don't need to worry about that cost until January 2016 now. I need Slimming world, as the weekly shame factor of weigh-in keeps me on track!!!

Friday night is grocery shopping night, I do it on the way home from work, as I resent spending my weekend in the hell that is Saturday/Sunday in a supermarket!!! We didn't need a great deal as we meal planned around what we had left. £36.19 spent, almost £15.50 of this was on 830g of mature cheddar (£3.89), 7.5kg of cat biscuits (£7.50) and a huge 18 roll pack of toilet roll (£3.95). So I am happy with this amount to be honest. We have a run to the butchers tomorrow for our meat, as we just have one more meal portion of chicken pieces. I expect that to be no more than £20, so we are under our £60-£70 weekly budget for groceries.

A lot of money has gone out on Christmas presents this week, which I am not exactly ecstatic about, but at least we are almost finished now and it is done with. While the rest of the world are skinting themselves in December, we will be clearing debt and saving, good times!!! I have spent £36.75 on TU clothing at Sainsburys, all Christmas gifts, but with 20% off we got some reasonably priced gifts. £18 on 2 jumpers from Primark for two little ladies, that is their gift complete (jeans and a jumper each). 6 more handmade gifts ordered tonight at £22.50, all handmade stuff is ordered now. I actually wish I could order little handmade gifts for everyone at Christmas, though they don't cost the earth, I put a lot of thought in to them, they are often personalised, but I just feel they would not be appreciated and people would be disappointed. Hey ho, it is what it is!!!

I was very good today, Irregular Choice launched their Star Wars range of shoes today, and I REALLY wanted the C3p0 shoes, the price was £110!!! Normally Irregular Choice flats are £60-£80, so the price was massively inflated. I did not buy them, I don't have the money, and as easy as it would have been to put them on the credit card, I am not going down that route ever again. I won't lie, I am totally gutted to not get any, but I am proud of myself for resisting. Once the debt is paid up, I will have the luxury of savings and spare money that will allow me to treat myself to things like this with C-A-S-H. I am really looking forward to it.

Tomorrow we have a lovely day out at Warner Bros studio tour (we are huge Harry Potter fans), I am really excited about it, there are death eaters in Diagon Alley that interact with you, and lots of the scenes recreated from the darker moments of the films.

We are both poorly at the moment, HF got it first, so is now coming out of it, but I am only about 3 days in. HF seemed to get it worse (he barely slept one night due to coughing), whereas I am not so bad. At least I am the cold/cough out of the way early in the Winter (I usually only get one per Winter). On a positive note, I sound like Mariella Frostrup at the moment!!!!

That is it from me for now, not much debt busting at all sadly, but my main wish for this month debt-wise was to clear Nationwide CC, and that is done, so I am pleased about that. I also wanted to get our Christmas shopping done early, and we are on track for finishing in the next week or two (there may be one or two family ones where they have not advised what they want, but money will be put in an envelope for those so at least the money is there and we don't need to use any from December payday).

HF gets paid 05.11.15, so we should be able to clear down some of his overdraft with that, and possibly start to save towards settling the Co-Op loan, all depending on how Christmas shopping pans out. We normally wouldn't be in this position for Christmas financially, we save in a Christmas club every year so we don't have to worry about finding the money for Christmas gifts. However, we have not done that this year due to throwing all our money at buying our home. It is a bit poop, but it is what it is, and we will be back in the Christmas club savings next year.

That's it from me for now, I am sure there will be much horror at the spendiness! But all of it is not on credit cards etc, so I am ok with it.

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

Ooh I forgot, we had some good news this evening! We put our electric meter readings in a few weeks ago, and today we received our bill and it advises our new direct debit amount will be £31, a drop of £21 a month, which will be great for us!!! Another saving on outgoings on top of the £35ish we have already managed to cut out on spends each month

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

A quick update from me, not much to report, though pleased to say today has been a no spend day, and other than the trip to the butchers yesterday morning, yesterday was also a no spend day. We had a great day out at Warner Bros Studio on the Harry Potter tour, and as lovely as all of the merchandise is in the shop, it is tres expensive (though really good quality) and therefore nothing purchased. The deatheaters were great fun, and pretty scary actually, they seemed to come from nowhere, lots of screams to be heard!! They also had the wandmakers there too, it was really interesting to hear them talk about making them, and we got to see and hold the original wand of Victor Krum from the film.

As I mentioned, no spend day today. We have had a very productive day at home today, the garden is now "Winter-ised", hedge cut back, border plants and the plants from the tubs all pulled out and turned over, lawns mowed etc. Put it this way, when the guy at the tip helped us lift the tonne bag up in to the compressor to empty it, he asked if we had a dead body in the bag!!! We had just sat down with a cuppa when our friends called to see if we were in as they were on their way through on their way home, so they dropped in for a catch up, cuppa and a tour of our new home (we moved here in April but they haven't seen the house yet). We hadn't seen them since Easter, so it was really lovely to have a good old chat and set the world to rights session!!!

Unfortunately tomorrow won't be a no spend day as I need to post a birthday present. This is the last birthday where a gift is involved until February, I am looking forward to the break, I like to get thoughtful gifts for people, and by the time I get to November I am exhausted from the hunt for good birthday presents!!!

At the moment, the outlook for the week is good in terms of no spend days. I am going to see how many no spend days we can achieve in November, I like the idea of the DFW challenges to spur us on.

We have another small sale going through tomorrow of £5, we are selling off all of our DS lites, Wii, all the games etc, and any of these items that sell are going towards an Xbox one.We have £76 now, and still a lot of games to sell, combined with HF's Christmas money he should have enough. He is going to buy a preloved Xbox one, as it is better value and they are only just over a year old at most.

That is it from me now, I will update during the week, though I doubt there will be much to report for this week. Looking forward to HF getting paid on Thursday so we can clear some of his overdraft and put some in savings as a start to paying off the co-op loan.

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

Not a huge amount to report from me, the no spend days haven't quite gone to plan, but hey ho, only day 4 of November, we can pull it back! Just 1 NSD so far. Though today, I received a lovely RAOK in Sainsburys. We needed a loaf of bread, and I had a single pound coin in my car for this. In my rush at lunch time I accidentally left my coin in the car, and didn't realise until I had scanned it through the self service checkout. I was just in the middle of explaining to the shop assistant that I needed to go back to my car for the money and would she keep the bread to one side for me, when the lady customer on the checkout next to me asked if that was all I had and was it just £1, when I said it was, she gave me the money for the bread, despite me protesting!!! There are some good people left in the world after all!

HF gets paid tomorrow, sadly there won't be much debt reduction, but he is planning to partially clear his overdraft, and start our savings towards the Co-op loan.

I have meal planned for next week ready for grocery shopping on Friday evening (Aldi)/Saturday morning (butchers). I have planned around what we have in our cupboards/freezer/fridge, so I am hoping the grocery bill is not too much this week, though we do need steak mince, casserole beef and 2 pork loin steaks, and meat always drives up the bill!

Saturday - Homemade slimming world KFC style chicken nuggets, slimming world chips and salad
Sunday - Beef stew, roast potatoes, vegetables
Monday - Cottage pie, vegetables
Tuesday - Zingy chicken traybake
Wednesday - Pork loin steaks, vegetables (maybe potatoes, depending on whether we do an SP day on SW!)
Thursday - Omelette, SW chips and salad
Friday - Oven baked meatballs

I will update at some point over the weekend to say how much was cleared from HF's overdraft, and how much is in our savings towards the Co-Op loan.

Am I the only one who is impatiently looking forward to the next payday as soon as the current payday arrives, just so inroads can be made in to the debt/savings?!?!?! Just me?!

Weigh-in tomorrow, I really want my 6 stone award at SW, but think I am going to miss out by one measley pound, sigh! Maybe next week. I am almost at 7 stone now, desperate to get there!!! I think HF may get his 3 stone award at group tomorrow though, I am so happy and proud of him as he struggles more with willpower than me.

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

So, payday for HF. All of the money has been moved around (household bills account etc). Tomorrow and Monday most of the direct debits come out. £100 for Halifax CC, £85 for HF's Barclaycard, £153 for HF's F Loan. I have updated the signature to reflect everything, 6.19% of our debt paid. I am looking forward to next month as that will be all of my credit card debt gone.

Tonight we both lost weight at SW, 1.5lb for me, 2.5lb for HF. But sadly we both missed out on our next awards (my 6 stone award, HF's 3 stone award). We are a bit gutted to both miss out by a measly half a pound, but next week we should have it in the bag!!! HF is now less than the weight he was on our wedding day so is really happy, that was his first major goal he set for himself.

LittleMissDetermined

Double well done! :T

I love it when payday comes and you can plan the debt-busting

Keep it up

LMD x

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

Thanks LMD

So grocery shopping is done for the week, £26.76 spent at Aldi. TBH, I felt it was expensive as I didn't really have much in my trolley (we mealplanned around what we had in the cupboards and fridge this week) when the total came up on the till. Last week a friend asked if we had ever compared what we buy at Aldi with the other supermarkets by going on the other supermarkets' websites. So given that I felt it was expensive at Aldi this week for what I had, I spent last night doing just that. The results are below, and I no longer feel this weeks Aldi shop is expensive!!! I am shocked how much it would have been had we done the same shop at Tesco!

Tesco: £39.62
Sainsbury's: £35.85
Morrisons: £34.54
Asda: £32.75

Our Aldi shop came to £26.76, we had to get 3 items from Sainsbury's that were not available in Aldi, total £3.80. Meat from the butchers: £8. £38.56 total cost of this week's grocery shop. I am really happy with that, as we budget £60-£70 per week.

As miserable as the weather is this weekend, it has been lovely so far. I am feeling much better after having a cough and cold for the last ten days, managed a bit of a lie-in until 8.30 this morning until my cat came in and started tapping my face for fuss!! But at least I caught up on a bit of the lost sleep from ten nights of coughing when I should have been sleeping! HF's best friend came over this afternoon for a few hours, it was lovely to see her and have a good chat and a giggle.

Tomorrow we have a lovely day at home, we will be in our "couch pants" all day as we don't have to go out anywhere! We will be having a bit of a clean and tidy of the house, putting in the spring bulbs we dug up from our old house and brought with us (we are a bit sentimental about those bulbs as we bought them on our first holiday together, we bought them from the Eden project in Cornwall). Then the garden is all set for the Winter (we trimmed the hedge, pulled out all the border plants and pot plants, mowed the lawn and weeded and turned over the borders last weekend).

No spend day tomorrow, woop!

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

Just dropping in for a quick update from us. No new payments made off debt unfortunately, once Christmas is out of the way things should get much easier.

So, this week we started to watch Hugh's war on waste, and were horrified at what the supermarkets are doing with their ridiculous policies on "wonky / ugly veg", all of that resultant food waste is just criminal, we have people going to food banks for heaven's sake!! And don't even get me started on them driving that farming family out of business! So we have decided to abandon the supermarkets for our fruit and veg. We thought this would be impossible, as we thought the supermarkets had put all greengrocers out of business. We were pleasantly surprised, as we found there are 4 in our local town, and there are also 3-4 stallholders selling fruit and veg on our local city's market. We were concerned that it would make our food bill increase, but actually we have been pleasantly surprised, it hasn't gone up at all, and we feel we actually have a bit more fruit and veg for the same money.

This week our food shop has totalled £53.09, I am really pleased with this as it includes a huge 25kg sack of potatoes from our amazing local farm shop, these will last us around 7-8 weeks so are a once in a blue moon purchase. Breakdown of our spends below, as we now split our grocery shop between several places.

£6.61 - Aldi (pasta,3 packs of sugar free mints, pack of stewing beef)
£7.84 - Lidl (2 4litre skimmed milk, mayonnaise, 2 tins of mushy peas, 10 pack of french fries, 10 pack of cheese curls, tin foil and 18 medium eggs)
£7.50 - Farm shop, 25kg sack of potatoes
£5.95 - Market (1 large honeydew melon, 2 pink lady apples, 2 massive conference pears, 1 punnet of grapes, 5 large oranges, 8 satsumas)
£10.92 - Greengrocers (2 large flat mushrooms, 2 large peppers, 1 large cucumber, 2 leeks, 2 extra large parnsips, 6 large vine tomatoes, 3 courgettes, 1 extra large savoy cabbage, 1 large sweet potato, 1 swede, 10 apples, 7 carrots)
£9.87 - Butchers (1kg of chicken pieces, 2 chicken breasts)
£2.40 - Sainsbury's (3 loaves of bread)
£2.00 - Morrisons (4 tins of John West tuna)

Our meal plan for this week is below:

Saturday - Omelette, chips and salad
Sunday - Beef stew, roast potatoes, dumpling and savoy cabbage
Monday - Zingy chicken traybake
Tuesday - Cottage pie
Wednesday - Lemon and herb chicken
Thursday - Homemade chicken nuggets, slimming world chips and salad
Friday - Oven baked meatballs
Saturday - Chicken and leek pie


We had some fantastic news on Friday, my husband was given his annual letter regarding his payrise, we had already been discussing it this week and how my husband expected it to just be a standard 2%. So imagine our amazement when my husband got the letter telling us the payrise will be 7.5%!!! This is just the best news for us, we will start to see the payrise from his 5 January 2016 payday. This is going to help hugely to save faster to either clear the Co-Op loan or buy a car to replace mine, whichever we decide once we have the £5000-ish saved up. I am so proud of my husband, he works so very hard and deserves this financial reward so much.

It has given us a real boost, as have been feeling frustrated at not clearing any extra payments from our debt other than clearing Nationwide and our standard direct debit payments off everything.

We have our last £50 payment going out 5 December to clear the electricity debt from our rental property (long story of a mistake made by our electricity company), so that will be an extra £50 freed up each month. We will probably continue to put this £50 in to the household bills account to build up a buffer in there for any future emergencies, we hate that we don't have anything like that, so this will make us feel better about our situation. Also, in the new year our TV licence payment will halve which will again free up £12 a month, though we will continue to add this amount to the household bills account to add to the buffer along with the £50 as mentioned above.

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

I have almost enough mymail points to get a £20 giftcard for Waitrose, another few weeks and that will be ordered, we can get ourself some nice Christmas goodies with it. We also have £5 morrisons voucher to use towards Christmas things. We have just over £30 of nectar points for Sainsbury's, and £20 in Tesco clubcard vouchers. So our Christmas and New year grocery shop where you buy all those extra goodies should be pretty much "free". I think I may be repeating myself here, but hey ho!

I have joined nectar canvass and prolific academic this week, so earning extra money that way. I have also started doing Yougov surveys again, I only need 300 more points and then I can get £50 from there.

Newlywed_Saving_Ninja

Oh, and in non-debt related news, I achieved my 6 stone award this week at Slimming World, chuffed to bits with this, I would like to lose another 9 pounds before Christmas, totally do-able as 6 more weigh-ins until Christmas, and I don't really have any obstacles in the way (I can't go to the work Christmas party as HF has bought tickets for the opening night of Star Wars, after buying them work then announced the Christmas party was on the same night, sigh!). I am gutted to not be going to the work Christmas party as it sounds really good and is at a lovely venue. Nevermind, maybe next year. Also, I just get stressed about what to wear and people looking down their nose at me because I am not young and a size 10 (it is that kind of company, or at least feels like it to me), so infact I probably would have bottled out anyway!