From Flat to Farmhouse

FloppyDisk

smallholdingsister wrote: »

Apparently I am a deluded seller and it is overpriced.

I feel like I may be in the same boat. Country prices are already dipping around here so I'm just hoping the city prices hold for a little longer.

Conversation with the lodger has been had which was all very positive so time to think about sales tactics and final painting projects. Any rules that I need to follow for getting photographs taken??

Donkey is having the week off with the hot weather, bad flies and rock solid ground, he looks bored already but it has given me time to fill up the freezer with batch cooking.

Watty1

Just catching up. Congrats on fab result out with horse. Moving to nearer lifestyle sounds an excellent plan - you might save on travel costs too?

FloppyDisk

Turn up for the books - the house that initially sparked my interest when I thought of having one to rent is back on the market. I wonder if a survey has thrown something up. It could mean a mortgage of about 50k!

smallholdingsister

Must be meant for you.

FloppyDisk

How rubbish am I? Long story short, met a rather nice chap the day I put my flat on the market and that threw a spanner in my plans to move to the country and buy multiple animals, probably a good thing....

These days I am pretending to be grown up with the horse on livery while I plough away at the mortgage. My initial fix is up at the end of June which I am hoping will make a big change to my 3.99% interest rate and monthly payment. I still don't know what I want to do after that, moving to a BTL mortgage while I chase the country dream is an option, as is doing up the bathroom and extending the lease so for now I just want to spend the next 5 months knuckling down and pulling some savings together.

So that's where you lot come in, off to read some diaries for MFW inspiration!

Watty1

Nice to see you posting! possibilities, possibilities, possibilities

hiddenshadow

Nice to see you back! Good luck deciding what to do when your fix is up, always tricky weighing up the options.

FloppyDisk

I have managed a strong start! Shifted my savings onto mostly 3% thanks to MSE and will switch at the weekend for get a bonus and regular saving account sorted. Still overepaying the pennies but just holding on to the bigger bits for now until I sort out all those options.

The tax man even helped with a nice refund and I managed to knock £140 off horsebox insurance. First lesson of the year at the weekend, much needed after both horse and I went flying a few days ago, at least he is raring to go but perhaps I need to check my life insurance while I'm at it. :eek:

FloppyDisk

The sun's out and I'm feeling motivated! Everything is all going swimmingly except my food bills, is £250 a month for 1 person a long way off reasonable?? I am never going to be a super scrimper but I still can't get my head around meal planning in advance. Help?

Oh and I've seen another lovely little country house that could make a nice investment and be a mortgage free option if I do get rid of the flat. I have GOT to stop window shopping!

hiddenshadow

We've got our groceries down to £225/mo (average) for 2 of us. This includes breakfast, dinner, and lunch is invariably leftovers from dinner.

Regarding meal planning, I took a super simple (and probably inefficient) system. We have a Trello board that lists recipes by type (pasta/soup/dessert/etc), copied from here: http://blog.trello.com/meal-planning-with-trello

I skipped the last half of that article (dealing with the calendar) because it was too complicated. Instead I added lists that include 8 cards: 7 recipes (copied from the lists by type) and a shopping list (including everything needed for those recipes). Then at the weekend when we shop, we copy/paste that shopping list, remove anything we already have, and go. We started with 4 weeks' worth of lists, and are now up to 8 because we added extra ones as we came across recipes that sounded yummy. I think it's a good balance between work (setting up/maintaining the lists, figuring out what week we're on, etc) and variety.

Shopping-wise I broke the weekly list into 4 sections:
- one-off things for that week only (meat, special ingredients, etc)
- veg (so all the produce is listed together for ease in the grocery store)
- staples (that we should have around and shouldn't need to buy, but if we spot on sale should stock up on)
- spices (again, shouldn't need but should buy if on sale)
...that makes it pretty easy to scan the kitchen for what we already have. I'd say we spend maybe 5-10 minutes each week prepping the grocery list before we run errands.

Cost-wise, it's inefficient because I really haven't done anything regarding combining meals to take advantage of bulk buying. We know roughly what ingredients we need, though, so if we spot anything on sale that's frozen or has a good shelf life, we'll stock up on it and then not need to buy it again when that week comes around. We've probably shaved about £30-40 off our monthly grocery spend since we started meal planning, so it's not too bad. If we really focused on it I bet we could get under £200 pretty easily.

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Re: window shopping, I've made myself stop looking. Rental-wise we're not going to be moving for 3 months so it's still at least a month too early to look. Purchase-wise it's just depressing to see lots of lovely things but know we won't be buying any of them. We could, but it would be a bit foolhardy...we want to try out living in the area for at least a year or two before putting a ton of money into property. It is so fun to look, though, even when you know it's pointless...