Bricks Not Books

VintageHistorian

Happy New Year! The planner is very nice, I was chatting to Mum earlier and she was saying it's interesting how we've all got different things in ours. I'm using mine to track my talks, blog posts, and side hustles, she's mostly using hers for meal planning and tracking sewing projects, and my sisters are using theirs to keep spending diaries!

So here we are in 2020 and it's time to review goals. I can't remember what they were :rotfl: The main one was to overpay the mortgage by £1000. Sadly we've missed that target, with a total 2019 overpayment of £707.82

However I'm not disappointed by that as A) any overpayment is better than no overpayment, and we had some big expenses for the house this year. We replaced all the windows and were forced, by necessity, to replace the front door as well. Without the door we would have been able to OP more, but then we would have wanted to replace it this year instead so still would have needed to save up money for it. We also got a new carpet for the smallest bedroom, bought the shoebench for the hall, and got all of our plug sockets replaced with rocker switches. Oh and trimmed the damn tree again.

This month we are getting a new carpet for the stairs and upstairs hallway, paid the deposit yesterday. Has come to just over £400 as it's a more expensive carpet and a longer job, but this should be the last carpet we will need to buy for this house. Just need to sort out lamp shades next as they're ancient ones that I suspect may have been left by our vendors vendor!

I'd also like to get a quote for something to do to our patio but suspect that will have to wait until summer.

So, goals for 2020. I would like to make another shot at overpaying £1000. I want to get the emergency fund back to £3k (spent some of it replacing the door - it was an emergency). And I need to have £1700 in the new car fund by the end of the year. I've opened a regular savers account with Coventry Building Society for the car, so I can earn some decent interest during the year.

I also want to have a think about what to do with some extra Tilly Tidies during the year. Currently I just TT my current account, which just goes to the mortgage. I might do some TTs for my various savings pots, but put it all in the emergency fund for this year, with the promise that they can go to the car fund next year. Things to think about!

Mortgage comes out tomorrow and then the first money shuffle of the year begins!

And I'm back to work tomorrow. I've thorough enjoyed these past two weeks and could probably do with an extra week just to give myself some boredom that will push me back to the office, but needs must :rotfl:

Have a good week everyone!

savingwannabe

Happy New Year VH. I think congratulations are in order as you still made a substantial OP I think as well as paying for so many new things for the house.

Here's to a great New Year. It's my first day back today too. Onwards and upwards my friend. :j

VintageHistorian

I am currently £15 short of hittin £60 OP target for this month. Nothing pending in Quidco, no cashouts coming from any apps, none of the penny jars are close to being ready to bag up. January really is the longest month for money.

That said I did the food shop yesterday and haven't swapped the money out of the food pot yet so when I do that later I'll see what I can TT.

New carpet is down on the stairs and it is lush! So much nicer than the worn out tan colour it's replaced, and lovely and soft when you walk on it barefoot.

Work has been extremely busy the past two weeks. Not stressful as such but extremely full-on. I made my to-do list for next week yesterday and it's already taking up about 2/3rds of a side of A4. Better than twiddling my thumbs feeling bored, but also very demanding. This weekend I'm trying to make sure I have actual downtime, normally I get bits done around the house across both days. Instead I'm trying to get all the essential bits (laundry, blogging, money shuffle, cooking etc) sorted out today. I've also bought Mr Kipling cakes for mine and DHs packed lunches this week so that I don't feel I have to do any baking tomorrow, and bought an easy dinner for tomorrow night. That means my Sunday can just be spent with books and the Nintendo DS and hopefully I'll be recharged ready for Monday.

Dinner tonight is gammon steaks with fried eggs, homemade wedges, and green beans. Lunch will just be a ham roll, got a pack of 6 fresh-baked rolls in Tesco for 17p yesterday as they were yellow stickered. Must remember to put some of them in the freezer to be rebaked in the coming weekends.

Moneyfordreams

Hurray for stair carpet.. :j

VintageHistorian

It's so soft MFD - I keep finding excuses to go up and down it barefoot (but our hallway floor is wood and very cold and the kitchen floor is tile and very cold, so this isn't always a great idea!)

Did a last big TT of £16.69 after my last post. So total OP for January was £62.59, a nice way to finish the month.

February has started off with the standard £37.70 payment and a £3.93 TT. I had to do a Delay Repay claim for Mr VH during the week. Will only be about £4 as his train was 'only' 20 minutes late, but it all counts in the long run!

Work is extremely busy at the moment. Lots of competing priorities and lots of people wanting my time. Some of this is rather annoying as it could have been dealt with before Christmas if only people had replied to my emails! But it means I need to make a more concerted effort to have time off at weekends and in the evenings and not feel that I have to fill the time up with "things to do". As a result this morning I baked lemon cupcakes, did the laundry and hung it up to dry, and then switched off my laptop and had a lovely bath, then sat in bed and read my book for a few hours. Will do the same again tomorrow.

No real plans for February. Bought a belated birthday pressie for my youngest sister, which she's thrilled with (vegetarian and vegan cookbook called "East"), and bought an extension cable reel to take on my talks so I can plug the projector in easily. Speaking of talks, I have two next week so that will be £50 towards the car, and then a little break until April!

Dinner tonight is a picnic dinner. Sausage rolls, potato omelette, some cured Mediterranean meats, mozzarella sticks, Kettle chips, and salad. Have a good weekend everyone!

VintageHistorian

Two talks this week all done and dusted! Monday night one was a WI one. Very engaged audience, bit of laughter, the occasional shocked gasp and quite a bit of sympathic tutting and mutters of "what a shame", and several members came up to chat with me afterwards. Really lovely group and I'll be very happy to do more talks to them in the future.

Thursday afternoon lot were a friendship club and much more muted. The room couldn't be made quite dark enough as one set of windows didn't have any blinds or curtains, so the projector images didn't show up well against the wall. I think some people at the back also struggled to hear me, but there was no microphone and I couldn't speak louder than I was without shouting at the people in front. Got the occasional chuckle but not much else out of them, and only one woman came up to ask me a question after, and another stopped me to ask something as I walked past her. They were a much, much older group though and I think the friendship clubs are mostly a way for elderly people to get out of the house. WIs have a strong history of educating rural women, which I think some groups still take very seriously.

But you can't have a wonderful audience every time! I've now got two cheques I need to pay in so that will be done next weekend.

We survived Storm Ciara. One of the fence panels was bent, but when we emailed the neighbours on that side to say DH would deal with it on Wednesday they emailed back saying they believed it was their responsibility and would sort it out! Not going to argue (we can't remember what the solicitor said anyway but the neighbour on our other side replaced a fence panel shortly after we moved in...we must be responsible for one side surely!) and it has now been fixed. We'll see what Dennis does.

DH's train refund came in at £4.10 so I paid that off the mortgage with a tiny TT on Wednesday. I then went to sort out the food money today and made another TT of just over £4, and filed another Delay Repay claim for DH for Tuesday night, so that will be another £4.10 and I'll only need to find another £5 this month to hit £60.

I'm trying to juggle multiple financial things in my head at the moment. On the one hand I want/need to improve my pension provision (didn't start full time work until my mid-20s), but at the same time I know I'm terrible with maths so doing some kind of self-managed fund would stress me out quite a lot.

I also don't want to shove lots of money per month at a pension at the moment as we'll probably be looking at moving house in 2 years, and I'm very aware that we should start saving towards all the fees and costs associated with that. I've looked at houses in our area and the bigger ones that we would be looking at (for very long-term) would be right at the very top of our budget. We wouldn't really have any flexibility unless we sold our house for more than I currently anticipate, or we manage to pay off more of the mortgage and save a few additional thousand as a buffer to potentially get us over the finishing line if we find somewhere we love but that's slightly out of reach. But of course that takes more savings now, in between various other things I'm saving towards at the moment.

I might open a LISA that I can just put £20 or so a month in for the time being, just so it's started, and then look at ramping it up in a few years once we're more settled. It's hard to think in certainties at the moment as we just don't know what our lives will be like in the next 5 years. 

Starting to get a grip on work once more. I knew it would start to calm down if I got through two weeks of chaos. Tuesday was a bad day, but after that I started to feel more in control and less like I couldn't see the forest for the trees. On the plus side I made my first ever marble cake (basically plain sponge mix and chocolate sponge mix swirled together in a big tin) last Sunday for a charity cake sale at work for my favourite charity, the Motor Neurone Disease Association. I melted dark and white chocolate chips and swirled them over the top as icing. The cake sale was for two days and apparantly my marble cake was a hot favourite! They raised over £600 in total, which is an incredible amount and I feel very proud to have contributed to it. Will definitely be making that again in the future!

We had roast pork for dinner tonight. Tomorrow will be toad in the hole.

Have a good weekend everyone!

savingwannabe

Well done on both of your talks educational, motivating and financially beneficial.  I didn't get a notification by email that you had posted but there is a section at the top of the screen that has notifications so I am glad I read your motivating post. On the fence panels front, well done you have nice neighbours like me, I have 4 fence panels that will need changing after the last storm and lovely neighbour will do it for me. A pension is good I didn't really start a proper one till I was 30 and it is ok now so I don't feel I missed out. Well done on thinking about LISA savings I think your current  house sounds lovely but if you do move in the future I know you will be prepared and it will be utterly perfect I am sure.

I hope work calms down for you and it becomes easier as the days become lighter. Yum to your cake and also to raising money for charity at the same time. I cannot believe how much you fit into  your working week. Well done you. Enjoy the rest of the weekend my darling, think of me marking!!!!! love swxxxxx

Fortune_Smiles

VintageHistorian said:

On the plus side I made my first ever marble cake (basically plain sponge mix and chocolate sponge mix swirled together in a big tin) last Sunday for a charity cake sale at work for my favourite charity, the Motor Neurone Disease Association. I melted dark and white chocolate chips and swirled them over the top as icing. The cake sale was for two days and apparantly my marble cake was a hot favourite! They raised over £600 in total, which is an incredible amount and I feel very proud to have contributed to it. Will definitely be making that again in the future!

Sounds as though you should join the WI VH 

Fortune x

VintageHistorian

Fortune_Smiles said:

VintageHistorian said:

On the plus side I made my first ever marble cake (basically plain sponge mix and chocolate sponge mix swirled together in a big tin) last Sunday for a charity cake sale at work for my favourite charity, the Motor Neurone Disease Association. I melted dark and white chocolate chips and swirled them over the top as icing. The cake sale was for two days and apparantly my marble cake was a hot favourite! They raised over £600 in total, which is an incredible amount and I feel very proud to have contributed to it. Will definitely be making that again in the future!

Sounds as though you should join the WI VH 

Fortune x

Waaaay ahead of you Fortune! In fact this week's meeting ended up being a games night as the speaker cancelled. I think the last time I did a Beetle Drive I was 11 and staying at a school campsite XD

Money shuffle for the month is done so first OP for March has been sent - and it was a whopper! Cashed out £26.17 from Quidco, so added that to the standard £37.70, plus 38p from an ebook sale (better in my pocket than Amazon's), and a £1.90 TT, I've already overpaid £66.15 for March!

And the February OP was £63.04 so that's three months I've broken the £60 target. With such a good start to March I think to think I'll continue the month well, but I'm sure I'll have forgotten that by next week XD

Dinner tonight is spaghetti bolognese, with the bolognese from the freezer.

VintageHistorian

Well, I've been working from home for nearly 2 weeks now. We were asked to be discreet about it as work didn't want to induce panic, but everyone now seems to be WFH where possible.

I'm counting me and DH very lucky right now. I can work from home (once I downloaded a VPN and sorted out some other bits). DH's place closed to the public yesterday, staff are in to finish bits off and then next week they're not allowed back in the building. There isn't a great deal any of them can do from home, but they're all being paid properly as they're part of the civil service and the government can't be seen to be refusing to pay it's own staff even if they can't do much (at least for the time being, if loads of people lose their jobs and taxes plummet then who knows what'll happen).

Last week, before this all kicked off seriously, I had Thursday and Friday off to use up my last annual leave before the allowance rolls over. I had a day in Ipswich, where I managed to buy some nice winter woollies for this years Christmas shoeboxes in a charity shop (will give them a good wash before they get packed away), some nice chocolate for me and DH and to post to my youngest sister, and a Mother's Day card for my Mum. This evening I've ordered flowers to be delivered to Mum and Dad's house on Saturday. I couldn't think of much else to buy her for Mother's Day and I figured if they're stuck in the house (Dad has some underlying health problems) then at least she can have some beautiful flowers to look at.

I will need to brave the supermarkets on Friday evening. I was hoping the worst of the panic buying would have stopped by now but it sounds like it's getting worse if anything! We have plenty of tins, and the freezer is relatively full, but I'm worried at how long this will last so don't want to be eating my way through the frozen food just yet. Balancing it out with some extra frozen during the week but still having an okay supply of fresh would be much better. So we'll have to see how Friday goes.

The local market has been cancelled but some of the stallholders have offered to come in for an hour so people can pick up orders made online. I've emailed one of the farm stalls and ordered some eggs, minced beef and stewing beef, all things I can use to make a multitude of other meals using bits from the freezer and some jars. I think I might do a freezer audit tomorrow evening so I know where any gaps are. It's the uncertainty of not knowing how much, if anything, will be available on Friday that's starting to get on my nerves. I also want to get some bits for the food bank basket as they announced they're running really short on some key bits

DH had a bad journey home last week and another bad one this week, so that's two more Delay Repay claims put in this evening. If they both pay out it'll be £8.20 to OP. Not being at work is also saving me some cash as I'm normally tempted by various food outlets. I'll stick the leftover cash in an envelope towards Christmas, and work out which savings I want leftover money to go in to.

I never got round to booking our hotel for Winchester for the end of April. I'm tempted to cancel my annual leave as I'm not sure I want to use it when we can't go anyway, but haven't discussed it with DH yet. If we could definitely go in May instead then that would be fine, I just don't want to book something and then struggle to get the money back later.

Still, grateful that we have a roof over our heads, and that my parents and my in-laws are taking sensible precautions without needing to be nagged or shouted at. My Dad has been avoiding talking to people for years, he's been practicing self-isolation without realising it XD

Stay safe everyone!