Silveryew's steady stride.

TheSilverYew

Yes thank you, the weather was lovely^^ The mornings were misty but it cleared in the morning and we had some lovely days^^

First week of term nearly over at the college, it happens every year, but everything has been belly up. New and returning students with no student cards, no IT accounts made up, no printing account or print credit added to said IT accounts and no printers available on the accounts that do exist, jobs being sent to printers disappear off the print job list.

Just wanted to swing by to say I've won £100! I am part of a panel where you answer questions and take surveys and in their random draw this month I won! You could choose between £100 into paypal or £100 Amazon voucher. I had a think, I mean £100 is a lot of birthday and Christmas presents from Amazon! But I have decided to have it put into PayPal and into our travel fund. OH is not dismissing Japan as a destination now so everything we get from panels and fleabay goes into that travel fund now!

^_^

Thistle-down

Just wanted to say how well I think you are doing - you've inspired me to ensure I use cashback sites and vouchers for everything I can. How did you go about testing things for Boots?

Do you remember the name of the blog about the uni students challenge? That sounds right up my street.

My mom also lives in another country, though much further away than your mother. She is 82 and not in the best of health, it's heartbreaking to not be able to see her as often as I'd like. Each time I leave I wonder if I will see her again. I love my life here in the UK but had I known at the beginning how hard it was to be so far away from my family, I probably would never have moved here.

I'm glad you had a good holiday, and great luck with the £100!!

TheSilverYew

Hi^_^ Well You can sign up for it on their Boots Volunteer website; I don't know if recruitment is still open for it but you can give it a try!

TheSilverYew

So after a long while, almost a year, I'm back....

Not going to lie:
The last almost-year has brought out feelings in me I did not even know I possessed. The 'shooting fire from my eyes' kind of feeling.

We are in the process of sending a grievance to Husband's employers on the basis of discrimination and bullying from the management (the bullying from a staff member) with the backing of the union.

Mother is still very poorly. Now has been diagnosed with vascular dementia as well. We are getting dangerously close to have to ask for power of attorney as she is still living at home and it's starting to become very unsafe for her, something she doesn't see (or doesn't want to see).

Last week on Friday night Husband's parents discovered that one of the 'friends' of his younger sister had been given money by Husband's sister under all sorts of pretexts and given loads of reasons why she needed money. Husband's sister has a learning disability.
Husband's mother is financial guardian and thought she could not access her savings account as she had the card for it but as she set up a banking app on her phone, it has enabled her to access it and she has transferred £4000 to her 'friend' in the space of 10 days. The account is now empty.

As the friend has learning disabilities as well we are wondering if someone else is pulling the strings behind the scenes and have contacted the police due to the safeguarding issues it presents. But the bank's initial reaction was 'well she transferred it willingly' so don't think they can recover it. We are taking some advice on it.

Thank goodness Husband's mother asked us to not yet give her back the £3000 she lent us for the deposit for the house so that's still safe with us. She has forgotten she's lent us the money and we've been told to keep it like that until further notice.

It's not up to us but we think Husband's sister needs to have a guardian appointed and that she should not have access to her bank account at all, but rather be given an allowance. But we'll see what happens now. We're all feeling quite flat and drained by the deceit of it all; at least Husband's sister is safe and it is just money at the end of the day.

It's just so frustrating given that we applied twice for her to have sheltered accommodation and they turned her down as they didn't feel her learning difficulty was severe enough. I hope Husband's parents use this and what happened to her last year for all it's worth (she was raped by someone she befriended in her flat). Especially now that she is starting to receive threatening messages when she tells them she doesn't have any more money to give them.

Moneywise we are still plodding along steadily and paying things off. Might update my signature.

TheSilverYew

Blergh. Being poorly really sucks. Have been like this since Monday and feeling both flat as I don't have any energy but also frustrated as there's stuff I want to do, especially now that OH had finished at one of his jobs for the summer.

I've logged in to BatNest to check the mortgage; we started at £84000 in February 2016 and it now stands at £80189.95. :j

I've decided to overpay with £150, this means that our mortgage payments will be £482 a month. According to the calculator this means that we cut the payment time by 13 years and 11 months and save ourselves £22431 in interest. :money:
If things go belly up because of OHs grievance at work, I can always reduce it, but I'd like to get rid as quickly as possible.

TheSilverYew

Good Morning ^_^

Been in to check my banking this morning and YouGov has paid me their £50. This will be going into the Japan/Good-to-Have fund.
Had a lovely time visiting a market with SIL and MIL yesterday, got lots of lovely fruit and veg for a very reasonable price. They were selling pineapples at 3 for £1 so naturally we got one each!

Husband has been very down. He has a zero hour contract and has not been called into work since the 28th of July. To add insult to injury when he went in with his time sheet for July, there were two new staff working there. The weather is ok today so hoping to go to the park, and I'be booked train tickets to go see friends this weekend to try to take his mind off things. What he tells me is that he feels like he lacks purpose and that he felt he was doing something meaningful when he was working there. We do have to sort this out, it's 'ok' now because I am at home but I don't want him at home alone feeling like this all the time when I go back to work in September.

Mother is better now. She had a single dose of radiotherapy to try to shrink one of the tumours that have been giving her a lot of grief and she was really poorly for about a week, not able to keep anything down and just feeling drained. We are going home to visit her for a week at the end of August.

TheSilverYew

Oh and I forgot to say, I'm part of a panel where I got free access to Experian credit checks for a year, logged in and my score is 999 out of 999!:T

The only negative marker I have is that I'm not registered on the electoral roll for this property. As I'm not a British citizen I'm not eligible to vote, but there we are.:cool: