Getting rid of a London-sized Mortgage

Tropically

Thanks for stopping by SWSEGirl and Chelsea! I got a letter today which says £297808!! Woo! So in a little over a year and a half, we have paid £17,192 - pretty good!

michelle09

Wow! But hooray for being under 300k, that is great. Mystery shopping seems to be something to investigate!

erin_transport

Well done!! Excellent progress.

McTaggus

Congrats on getting under the 300K mark!!! Must be an amazing feeling!! Our first shift into the new 000'000 bracket happens next month, and am buying a naughty bottle of fizz to celebrate with the hubby!!! Hope you also celebrated yours - it's a great achievement!

Tropically

Opened my bank account to find.... £7.65 in it.

Yikes.

I have been incredible busy at work, working 12 hour days. It means that I have been buying breakfast and lunch out. It's cost about £15 a day for the last two weeks. Really kills the budget. When you only have two hours at home, it's hard to meal prep and make your breakfast and lunch for the next day. Plus I was distracted on day and left a delicious mac and cheese I made on the train.

All is not lost - I have some mystery shopping credit of £100 which is due today, and I get paid again on the 25th, really not so far away.

Does anyone have ideas on how to work around these majorly busy periods at work, when you can't stop to do meal prep?

FloppyDisk

What about the fresh filled pasta things? They do for lunches for me when I have a busy week, just a few mins on the boil while I'm making tea in a flask with a dollop of pasta sauce from a jar and then re-heat them at lunch.

fiona100

I try and get round it by making pasties (leftovers in them, not just traditional fillings) at the weekend, and stacking them in the freezer.


I don't manage it as much as I would wish. Which reminds me

mfmaybe

I'm no expert when it comes to lunch but breakfast I do this:

I have the sistema breakfast pot. It has two "layers". In the bottom I put granola/muesli type thing, usually whatever I've bought on offer. In the top I put yoghurt. At work, combine and eat. It takes less than half a minute to prepare. You could also do overnight oats which would be cheaper I reckon. I sometimes use the same pot and take uncooked porridge in (ie oats with milk poured over, not using the top layer) and microwave at work. This is cheaper than granola, but for me less easy because in our huge office the microwave is miles away from my desk!

Scrimps

What's your usual lunch of choice to take in?
I take in meals that I microwave so batch cooking is the way forward for me, freeze them and then take one out of the freezer each morning.
If it were sandwiches, you could make them a few days ahead, same with salad also, if you don't want it all combined it's possible to just prepare the components and then throw it all into one tub on the day/night before.
My DH usually makes things the night before but it means it has to be done daily....do 3 days on worth Sunday and 2 days worth on Friday.
To be honest, when I did 12 hour desk days I usually grabbed breakfast and lunch from the shop.....I think that is where a lot of my money disappeared though.

Scrimps

Sorry I meant 2 days worth in Wednesday