EH - Essex > Hebrides...the next step of the adventure?

lucielle

Waiting with bated breath…….
L

savingholmes

lucielle said:

Waiting with bated breath…….
L

Me too...

beanielou

Also waiting!

EssexHebridean

Ooh - lots of visitors, hello all! Foxgloves I've just literally snorted with laughter at the euphemism of "monthly present" - that's hilarious!  As for the rest of you and your intrigued-ness, you'll just have to wait, I've not decided yet if it WILL be a new diary or not! (but I'm leaning towards "will" - just so you know!) Right now I'm still here though! 

It's another damp murky day here today - got mildly damp cycling from the car, and the traffic was silly again for some reason - thankfully not protester-related this time I don't think so I'm not quite sure what the issues where - it was just tediously slow from the point I neared the end of the motorway all the way to where I park. Hey ho - can't be helped, and I was still first into the office anyway, and only late by 5 minutes. I do need to have a fiddle about with the bike though - I think it must have got a knock from someone while it was chained up at the gym last night as the front brake had clearly  been bashed when I got back to it - it wasn't clearing the rim properly as a result, and now the gears are not switching smoothly either which is annoying. The brake I think I've sorted (Although I think at least part of the issue is there being too small a gap between the levers where the cable has been slightly over tightened - I'll probably take a look at a small adjustment to that on Friday) but the gears will need some further investigation. Worst case scenario is that I cope with it tomorrow, probably walk on Thursday when I'll have additional spare time, and then pop it to the bike shop on Friday for them to take a look. I'll see what google says though as hopefully it's something I can adjust myself, it's just a case of learning exactly how!

As said - Gym last night - I'll amend my signature in a bit but that should now leave me at £7.17 per visit I think - getting there! I'm planning my usual visit on Friday too and then from next week I'll be into the £6.xx's. It feels like the gym near work is getting busier at the moment - my guess is with people feeling the pressure of upcoming christmas parties to "get in shape" (where's that rolling eyes emoji!) - and it will no doubt quieten down during December before getting busy again in the new year thanks to "resolution pressure". I had to skip part of my usual workout last night as I just couldn't get on the machine - and the backup option was unserviceable. 

Food is under control - last night's cauli & cheese pasta bake was lovely, served with lightly stir-fried fennel, pak choi and red pepper.  Mental note made that I'll need to stale and process a couple of slices of bread from this weekend's loaf though as I'm getting very low on breadcrumbs in the freezer. (I always keep a tub of them in there for topping things like pasta bakes etc, adding to burgers, that sort of thing. Tonight will be some of the leftover lamb from Sunday with couscous and veg  as that's an easy option for a night when MrEH will be at the rugby club so eating later. the rest of the week is all nicely planned out as well, and will be making a bit more impact on the freezer. Making a point of batch cooking something most weekends is definitely proving a good plan too - the pasta bake from this week will do a meal next week too, and I have several other options stashed in the freezer now too. We also have enough rolls in the freezer for lunches for the remainder of this week although MrEH might well make them on Friday morning as he often does anyway - it's nice to go right through a week without him needing to do rolls though!

What else then
- surveys are crawling - I'm getting odds and ends on prolific but generally speaking whenever I look I'm on the iPad and they want the stuff that's on offer to be done on a computer. OnePoll isn't terribly lively - if I scrape 50 points a day at the moment I'm doing well. Ipsos isn't too bad - I do have to motivate myself to do them though! if I can get to a sensible level on there to cash out to a T's voucher this week I'll do that then exchange instore for a iTunes one. 
- I will plan in doing the weekly shop at Sainsbugs this week I think as we got loads of till spits for extra points etc when we popped in there to get Mr EH's paper on Sunday - plus a "£x off when you spend £30" one as well - I'll have to plan things out to make sure that I DO spend that amount, but there are always storecupboard options I can buy.
- meal plan for next week is sketched out - I'll need to revise it and start sketching out the week after's as well with a view to the veg box contents.
- CC has had a couple of odds and ends squared away (and more importantly, noted on my reminder email as well so i can keep track!)
- I've emailed GEUK to nudge them about producing our final bill so that Octopus can get on and bill us. I think there will actually be a tiny credit to come back from GE - it'll either be that or we will owe them pennies I think, thanks to a combination of the October EBSS £66 and very low use in September meaning we might actually be in enough credit that the October bill will balance out. 

milann

It’s a grey, wet day here too. Not inspiring me to do a great deal.
Hope the bike is an easy fix for you. 👍

EssexHebridean

Still not looked at the bike milann - oops! It might well end up being a Friday job now!  

Been doing some wrangling around our 0% BT card which runs out of 0%-ness in February. MrEH tells me that it currently has a balance of £919.55 on it - this is the card that was used for the deposit we put down to secure MrEH's new car last year, not sure if I was posting regularly at that point or not? Anyway - it's crept down by means of a monthly payment set at just above the original minimum, and a few extra payments here and there, and of course the money was originally in place for the spend anyway - now though the aim is to need to go back to the originally saved amount for as little as possible of the amount to clear it! We think the plan is to ringfence any joint account surplus this month to go towards it - it will get popped into savings for a couple of months until needed though as it may as well earn us a little interest in the meantime. Then we'll do the same thing again in December. In January it will be a case of working out how much we can send to it without risking the end of the month being left short. With the additional of two further regular monthly payments as well, the aim is to hopefully just need to transfer a couple of hundred £'s from the savings - but obviously back in the real world my aim is actually to see if I can manage to not need to dip the savings at all! 

Banks checked - and the mid-month DDs have now gone out. MrEH also topped off his Oyster on Monday, he'll need to do that again at some stage in the month too - and especially as we're out and about on Saturday and will both be using Oyster then. Mine has enough on it that I won't need to add anything which is useful. Other than that, it's all quiet on the banking front. No sign of the FD switch payment yet - but then again I can't be absolutely certain I will get it as technically I HAVE had an account with them before - it was over 30 years ago, I had a different name and was at a different address, mind you, so my suspicion is that they would have to really be scraping the barrel to decide to take that into account - we'll see! Either way it would have been early days to see it land yet in any event. 

I have cashed out the relevant points from Ipsos to get myself a T's £10 gift card, so I need to get that onto my phone. I'll probably leave it sitting there until I can add another one though as it makes sense to get the iTunes vouchers I'm planning to use it for in as big a bundle as possible. I'll keep an eye on ipsos today and tomorrow to see how much more I can build up I think! Also got a decent Prolific one last night that has already gone to paid so that was handy. 

We've had a switch around this week as rather than being in the office Monday/Wednesday MrEH was in Monday but is there again tomorrow rather than today - so I have a "straight home" when I finish night again. Makes quite a difference too as it means getting home a bit over an hour earlier than the nights we are car sharing as long as the traffic is ok. Food for tonight is going to be sausage and tomato pasta - it's going to be quite a pasta-heavy week as of course we had the cauli cheese pasta bake on Monday too - neither of us mind that, though. Tomorrow will be chilli and rice I think - using a tub of batch cooked ragu from the freezer. 

Other than that things are ticking over - we've been debating whether we should secure another decent rate fixed savings account ahead of the Autumn Statement tomorrow as right now there seem s to be a lot of uncertainty around what will happen with that. we could open one, but not fund it until we see how things are looking - that's one possibility, then if rates DON'T fall after tomorrow we can just leave that unfunded at which point it will automatically close itself, but if they DO fall as some folk are predicting then we've locked in the rate. Do need to make a decision on it though, and if we're doing it, which account! 

themadvix

I can't see rates falling at the moment with inflation so high - the BofE have a long way to go to get inflation under 2%. I think the likelihood is that if the Autumn Statement is a good one (let's hope so), rates may remain stable for a little bit. What happens after that will more likely depend on inflation than anything else.

I'm pretty sure you'll be alright on qualifying for the FD switching bonus! 😂

EssexHebridean

Haha themadvix - well I'd certainly hope so on FD - it was just the big capital letters around EVER having had an account with them that means I'm not absolutely counting on it until it lands! As for the savings rates - there is already some signs that the 1 year and above rates are dropping back, curiously - indeed, I opened a 1 yr at 4.35% last night - and while that particular account has been at that level for a while, it's now a lot further up the best buy lists than it was even a week ago! We'll see - I've lost nothing by opening it and then waiting to see what happens, and I still have almost a week to fund it, so hopefully time for any knee jerk reactions to be ironed out too. 

Would you believe I got damp AGAIN cycling to the office from the car this morning? That's every morning this week, and several of the evening returns as well - today also added a nice gusty headwind too - amazing how much harder work it all feels when you're trying to defeat that, too! The gears seem to be settling down a bit again too - so perhaps it could be just a lubrication issue - I did give it its usual spray on Monday morning but it may be that the wet weather has affected things a little. If it's dry tomorrow then I may well give it a clean and a proper overspray-and-leave-to soak in anyway - the wheel rims could do with some cleaning by the look of them anyway. 

Banking checked and all fine - and as I mentioned above I did opt to open a "just in case" 1 year fix too - although we still need to decide precisely how to deal with that one. It will fit quite nicely alongside the 9 month already opened though, and also with our various regular saver maturity dates, so I suspect  we will use it unless there are far better offers available before the point when it has to be funded. It still feels rather surreal to be thinking about savings, rather than about how to make the money stretch though - and I never stop feeling fortunate that we are in this position now, particularly with mortgage rates now back around where they were for the entire time that we were clearing ours off! 

We watched Martin's show from the recording last night - interesting stuff about black Friday and that in some cases he said he suspected black friday deals could be better than the post-christmas sales. I'm keeping a close eye on prices for the camera I've got my eye on as it would surprise me if there were no BF deals on it - but allowing that sales seem to be holding well that may not happen. I'm prepared to sit tight on it for a bit longer though - at some stage Canon will likely launch a new cashback deal and it may well be included in that, particularly if sales start to drop off at all. 

MSE-stuff: 
- No spends yesterday and not expecting any today although we may opt to order the tube of adhesive we need from Screwfix so we can walk down and collect it tomorrow morning when I come to think of it. It will be a grand total of £2.29 if we do though so hardly bank-breaking. At least if we have it that does mean we can crack on with that on Sunday morning with no delays. (And in fact I have indeed just ordered it!) It does in fact look like the corner section that MrEH stuck with the existing PVA adhesive is actually holding together - but as that took hours to go off, we're pretty sure it won't work for actually putting the stuff up on the wall/ceiling!  
- Need to get the meal plan for next week and the shopping list for Sainsbugs finalised tonight and also need to remember to throw shopping bags into my car when I go out tomorrow morning. 
- Must also get round to sorting out my eye test - I'd ideally like to do it this side of Christmas I think - that would be a nice (and probably expensive!) christmas present to myself. I'll have a look and see which optician I think I'm best to use, although I suspect the "Should have gone to..." one will end up being the location as it's easy to get to for both the appointment and collecting the glasses, and also easy to go back to for any problem resolution afterwards. I'll have a think about suitable dates for booking a test. I am expecting it to be spendy though as I'm likely to need varifocals and have to have thinner lenses too because of my prescription. There will hopefully be enough to cover it in my clothing account.
- We need to make a decision on how to deal with travel on Saturday - although I think we're clear to park on a saturday near to my office so it may well be easiest just to do that. That then puts us onto the Central line, giving us an easy change to the Elizabeth line at Stratford. 

milann

Well done on getting the savings account. Nothing lost if you don’t use it but bonus if the rates go down.

lucielle

I still need to look into savings accounts, I don't know why I'm so reluctant to do it!
L