Get a grip woman!

themadvix

Excellent decluttering there SL! And a nice bit of money too for it. I’m finding that things are selling ok at the moment, which is good (not that I’ve got anything much on there).

Suffolk_lass

We trotted off to town to shop yesterday. The car had the three bay parcels and two lots of charity shop donations in and was quite full in both directions!. I was buying stuff while DH was getting rid! We treated ourselves to coffee and a toasted teacake after the main town shop in a recently opened cafe that is my current favourite. I am tracking but not including treats in our annual spend tracker. DH has had £70 cash for his bike-related socialising (evening meet and their postponed Christmas Party). Mine is the cafe trip, chocolate and ice cream in the SM (Mrs sad-o) - I did not want to go to the party because last time (2 years ago) I was coughed over and was really ill with a really nasty chest infection for weeks afterwards and also I have a planned medical procedure late this week and will have to take a PCR test and isolate three days before that.

Apparently DH had to persuade the charity shop that the curtains were a good idea - evidently nobody buys them - maybe too affluent round here, although I think people may not realise how good they are for saving energy in winter. Anyway, he suggested they would make good bags and they took them, with the box of crockery someone else had donated, but had been at our house for about three years. The Bay of E stuff automatically marked itself as dispatched as soon as the scanning occurred (impressive!). 

I bought loads of food (fresh, stores and treats) and we have plenty of bowl fruit to see us to the end of the month. I forgot eggs (none being delivered currently) so one of us will get some either from local shop or a gate seller. These and milk might be it now, for Jan.

I am additionally tracking subscriptions and DD more closely this year, in addition to what was my annual stores budget (now monthly) and general grocery shopping are costing and separately tracking pet spends (many and more than I expected!). Tilly tidies are at £184.05 this month so far (in the dead-zone really now) and this increases to £275 with the bay proceeds (I am including the carriage in the savings as it arrives in a lump so savings will comfortably top £500 once the RS and dividends (the income rather than accumulation holdings) are added.

I'm not sure if the lack of offers on certain things in the SM is going to be a thing with inflation, but it is a thing in my receipt from the SM

Watty1

Great bay of E selling.  Makes me think I should get a bit motivated and sell stuff. After all not sure who wants a lot of it so I might as well sell it!

LadyGnome

Just catching up on all your news.  Good luck later this week.  The new puppy sounds wonderful and I am glad Stealth Cat is adjusting to his presence.  I am very impressed with your selling.

I checked the bees end of last week and one of the hives was light.  The warm winter had fooled them into starting laying early so I chucked some more fondant on top pretty sharpish.  I'd missed hefting the hives for a couple of weeks thanks to work followed by Covid (fully recovered now luckily) and they had finished all the fondant I had given them earlier. Luckily I got some more on to them just before it got a lot colder.

Suffolk_lass

That's a good prompt @LadyGnome. I'm just going to suggest to DH that he does a bottle-bank run, picks up a dozen eggs and checks the bees. We also need to clean the commercial dishwasher in the Village Hall and order some cleaning stuff (I have some for ours but will need to dig out and read the manual to see if it is suitable. We "have" to do these today as we will be isolating ahead of my medical procedure on Sunday.

Meanwhile I have just received the materials from the Village (History) Recorder, from whom I am taking over. Lots of interesting things to peruse. I have some more plastic crates coming and my ambition is to organise this into one of them and set up a mostly online repository for new stuff (although some will stay as paper).

And lots of old paperwork to go through and mostly junk or put out for burning. 

I also did my vegetable seed audit and ordered my 2022 seeds. I will need to go to a local place too as I want small bags of potatoes, onion sets and fewer than 1000 lettuce seeds (I buy from a commercial seed merchant) - in the past I have offered (free) spare seed locally but very poor take-up.

Gosh - the third week of January and the usual falls-off-a-cliff reduction in posts to read each morning. Down from 150 a day to 50-ish. Much more manageable!

MissRikkiC

Suffolk_lass said:

themadvix said:

I remember having a book as a child called The Naughty Little Puppy and ‘chew, chew, chew’ was the recurring catchphrase throughout the book - it sounds like you might be experiencing this first hand!

Oh yes, edges of cardboard, plastic parcel tape, toilet training mats, jumpers, bedding, sleeves, toys. Everything! - these new teeth need to be thoroughly tested and exercised!!

I’m just catching up. Ours chewed the corners of every wall that stuck out. Yep. Chewed the plaster off, and all the skirting to go with it! That was his worst thing though, albeit in a rented house not great! 

Suffolk_lass

A quick check of the bank accounts this morning showed the running costs account needed a bit of anticipatory tidying, ahead of the milk bill going out by close today. Although there is only the newspaper subscription to go out, we are expecting DH's one-off tax rebate to appear there in due course.

More surprising is the bills account which is showing a lump sum withdrawal from DH's DC pension (it is filling the income gap between giving up paid work and us receiving state pensions). That was a lovely surprise we expected next month, it will confirm on 24th. I do wish he had acted when I first asked him though as the funds had dropped by over £600 in the intervening months. DH sees it as a thing to do with his tax return but he always leaves that until January and the markets have been lower in early January for the last several years (missing out on the stock market bounce-back growth in the Autumn).

I was up with the larks this morning. The forthcoming medical procedure on Sunday is in my head with all the "what-ifs" there when I woke up at 05.10 this morning. Thanks to pup, having to visit the loo meant the end of my night as he heard me and I had to come down and see to him. I took him outside and I'm supposed to stay out with him until he does his business but this morning he started yelping and barking to go in, and really pulling on the collar (a cat's snap-together clasp as he is still so small) which he burst out of with DH yesterday. So not being willing to chase him in my nightie, wellies and dog-walking jacket I gave up and brought him in. I fed him and immediately, before I could try again, he toiletted on the carpet. Lovely (not!)

LadyGnome

Not an ideal start to the morning SL.  He'll get the hang of it.  Do you think the ground is too cold for him to stand on or is it just generally too chilly?  How old is he now?
You'll have to forgive me but the image of you chasing a small pup over the fields in your nightie and wellies sounds like a wonderful 1950's Ealing comedy.

I am interested in how you are managing the pensions gap.  I'm 52 but thinking I might want to finish at 60 so I will have a fair bit of bridging to do.  Mr G is 4.5 years older than me so we'll get his state pension when I'm 62.5.  We have rental income and I get a v small DB pension at 60.  I think 62 is doable but I'm plotting getting it down to 60.

Good luck for Sunday - I'm sure everything will be fine but the anticipation is never great.

Suffolk_lass

Thanks @LadyGnome, I do think the ground is too cold for him and also he sleeps in his crate in front of the aga, so it is a bit of a body-shock going outside as soon as he is up. He is 10 weeks now. I spoke to my friend who has three and she said it's a thing with winter babies. I am trying to get him to use the washable toilet mats and sometimes he does, but first thing in the morning he seems to be sneaky and lots of little deposits (lack of focus rather than wilful, I think). As you say, it will happen and I am just impatient.

As to the pensions gap, we both have occupational pensions that we basically live on, with mine paying the bills and DH's for the running costs with a top up from mine to make sure there is enough being paid in to cover the bank account loyalty payment conditions. We are drawing down the DC pension in annual lumps in the four complete tax years between him finishing teaching (he was a late starter) and being 66 (his SPA). This is partly to minimise the tax he will pay (as his pension is several thousand below his personal tax allowance) and partly to pay for the big things we want to do while young and fit enough in retirement.

We were both able to draw these from schemes with normal pension age of 60 because we were old enough to have those reserved rights. We did both work until 10 months after that, me to finish my project (ha, ha, the never-ending project) while also keeping a period of temporary uplift in my salary in the best of the last three years, he to finish the school year and include the summer hols in his (his form were year 11 so we thought it best he see them out before retiring). Don't forget your DB pension will be increasing between now and 60 (schemes usually have a conditional increase clause of a minimum % increase or indexation against a prince index (RPI or CPI) even if your accrued benefits are frozen). I don't know if you know those conditions or have an up to date statement of accrued benefits but it is worth exploring both. We also have a little rent from DS's house which we part own, but not much profit (and one of the housemates is leaving next month, so we don't expect any next year).

I think the biggest surprise is how little we could spend if we needed to pare back. I ran a spreadsheet of all the regular payments, when they hit, how much they increased by and so on, so I could see what we needed, what we might expect to need and so on, also planning to clear the remaining mortgage, and prior to that, recycling the credit card and loan payments into the magic snowball. 

I do still keep the spreadsheet but it needs updating. I do still save by Tilly tidying and a RS at 3.5% but these small accumulations sometimes get sucked up into emergency or planned spends. House insurance here is a nightmare (thatched) and averages over a hundred a month, we run two cars (3 if I count DS's which I paid the insurance on this year), two motor bikes and a motorhome so all of these mean we spend more than the average household but they are luxuries we choose to have. We don't feel rich but I suppose we are really, compared to many.

The other thing you both need to be all over is state pension. You need to consider doing a small thing that lets you pay class 2 voluntary contributions to cover your years between work and SPA. Carers allowance is free (child, or parent claiming attendance allowance are the easiest). Or a small thing like exam invigilator or a self employed stamp if you can do something that pays less than the self assessment threshold (but you may pay tax if you are taking your DB then). 

Be aware the SP forecast on Gov.uk is predicated on you paying or receiving NI credits until the April before your birthday when SP becomes payable. The thing is, they change the number of years you need with little or no warning, or the age at which you can take it, leaving insufficient time to plan properly. So if you can be prepared, do so.

In my case, I fully supported the equalising of SPA between men and women (1997) and by year of birth I was going to see it move to age 62 for me. Then with less than ten years to go, the coalition government moved it out by another four years, rendering all my financial planning a farce. I'd like to say "but I'm not bitter" - but I am.

Suffolk_lass

I had a lovely 2 hour lay in this morning, until just before 8.00 as DH got up to see to pup. He triumphantly told me he did a p** outside, but quickly added that he did three more inside! Progress I feel. 

Today I have to fast from 09.00 and I just can't face any of the low fibre options that I could have, so will stick to coffee and water today. At least it is at 10.30 tomorrow morning so I can eat after that. It won't do me any harm to fast for 36 hours (we ate at about 7 last night). I still have the disgusting jug of cleansing stuff to face this afternoon (and again this evening) but I can do this. It is a follow-up to one in 2018 and is precautionary but you can't stop your brain, can you! So a day away from here, I think.

In money spending, the filter jug handle broke off when DH picked it up this morning, so I need another