The ups, downs, and occasional sideways bits of trying to be mortgage free

Busy_Mee1

Wow your renovations sound hard work but worth it. The dust is never ending though isn't it.

Glad all going well on the financial front. What's the weather like over there ...is blooming freezing here at the moment.....

ChasingSunshine

Your new dining room sounds like hard work. Great you can DIY so much of it but still physically hard labour but as you said so much cheaper than getting someone in. Great that you are on the painting stage now, hopefully you can enjoy the room soon.

Good news that DH has another pay cheque this month esp when its an expensive time of the year for you. How are the solar panels performing in the heat or do you have to wait until a bill comes in?

armchairexpert

I've finished all the gloss paint (windows, doors, cornices) in the dining room. Just the walls to go now. Poor Mr E has a tendonitis issue or something that's making his hand very painful and means he can't hold a paintbrush. He's not a shirker, so it must be very uncomfortable for him to admit it. He keeps feeling guilty and coming in to "be helpful" by giving me tips, which is of course the opposite of helpful so I keep shooing him out again.

On the money front in general: I've been working ridiculous hours recently, and I've been thinking about how to maybe spend a little bit of money to make life slightly easier. I can't quite justify a cleaner, and I don't want to hire a dog walker or add more child care to the mix, so the thing I've decided on is making cooking easier. That means adding a bit of money to the groceries budget and making, e.g., stir fry with chicken breast instead of poaching a whole chicken and shredding the meat for things. I prefer the latter, but realistically, we're now juggling two full-time working parents with two young children, various pets and a large house, and something has to give.

Last week, I impulse-bought two boxes of tomatoes, thinking "what a bargain, I'll make chutney". Turns out you don't need 15kg of tomatoes to make chutney. We made five jars, plus a triple batch of bolognaise (12 servings), a triple batch of tomato soup, and then turned the rest into seven large jars of passata. I reckon all up, it took about 10 hours of work and also we had to buy a food mill thing. Next time I'll just buy the chutney.

armchairexpert

Total mess up.

Last week I lost my bank card (and some other cards). Presumed them stolen, reported to the bank and police, cancelled both my credit card and transaction account because the same card accessed both.

They turned up too late to fix this. In the meantime, I had to get a bunch of cash out of the account, and I was also behind on updating YNAB and the online transaction record is missing two weeks. Which means I have no idea where almost $3K has gone. I can retrace some of it - $200 for a dental appointment, $500 for my stupid cat to get stitches and anaesthetic, Mr E took $300 on a business trip as spending money, there was probably $200 in groceries somewhere in there, I took Little Girl out for a pizza because Big Girl was at a party. I hate not knowing, though. And while I definitely didn't do anything particularly extravagant, I'm sure I loosened the purse strings a bit more than usual because the money felt invisible.

I guess all I can do is estimate on YNAB and then do a reconciliation adjustment, but that is going to annoy me forever now. Grrr.

That is all, as you were.

Wanna_Bee_Free

Goid morning ACE, I’m a long time lurker here, love your thread! Thank you very much for your diary!!

A similar thing happened to me last year and I despaired I’d never be able to recreate the YNAB trail for my money. I was amazed at how much I managed initially when I sat down and tried. After that I then used my calendar and other people to get to about 80%. I had an annoyingly large amount I called adjustment or something to get YNAB done, went to sleep and remembered the last thing overnight. You might surprise yourself with how good your Sherlock Holmes skills are, especially if you interrogate the witnesses too! Good luck with it!!

armchairexpert

I remembered that I'd paid $850 in school fees, so that made me feel a bit better that I hadn't just frittered it all away. Mostly I went through and looked at all the discretionary/variable spending rows (family entertainment, groceries, that sort of thing) and anything that was carrying a higher balance than usual got dinged!

Nothing much to report. I'm winding up several large projects at once which means a) I'm tired and busy and b) I can't bill for any of them yet, so my cash flow sucks even though I'm working a lot.

ChasingSunshine

Glad you have managed to find most of the discrepancy in YNAB. Hard to be working so much and still struggling with cash flow but does that mean you should have a nice lump sum all at once when you are finished these projects? Though suppose that is hard to think about when you are still in the middle of the madness and trying not to spend what you haven't billed yet.

armchairexpert

It means exactly that, but it's when I'm working the long hours that I start to feel like I 'deserve treats' - so expensive cafe coffee, a new lipstick, clothes - even though I haven't really earned them yet!

Anyway. The work's coming in and that's what matters. I do sometimes wish I had a nice steady salary I could rely on and do projections with, but I like being self employed most of the time!

I'm still trying to get back to the position I was in last year when I had the whole next month's income budgeted for before the 1st of the month (the YNAB future buffer). This month, Mr E's second pay lands on the last day of February, and frankly we've already spent some of it. I reckon I can repay the red pots and get a little bit further ahead this month, but it won't be by much. I'm cheating, really - YNAB's budgeting-to-zero ethos says that I should only allocate funds I have, and instead I'm just spending as usual knowing that money is due in on Thursday to turn the red lines green. To do it their way would mean taking money out of places where it's being saved for big annual costs to cover the small costs, and then replenishing those pots next time, and that seems like an unnecessary amount of juggling. I do have plenty in the account overall, because of all the annual pots like Christmas and things, so not worried about accidental overdrafts.

Jacket potatoes and salad for dinner, nice and cheap. I have been trying to eat low carb, but it's so expensive, so now I'm trialling a sort of low carb-whole food hybrid: i.e., carbs are fine as long as they're vegetables or fruit, basically.

Cherryfudge

Are you still sweltering? It was fab here for a week or so: really like late spring but now it's more seasonal (10 degrees, grey and damp today) so reading back over your January posts is a bit mind-boggling. And are you still up to the eyebrows in work? I hope some of the pay comes in soon and you can see the reward of your labours.