£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

Treadingonplaymobil

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

:xmastree: :rudolf: :xmassign: :xmassmile

Hope you are all having a lovely Christmas day and all the budgeting, planning and preparation has been well received. We have had a fantastic day, and I am off to fall into my bed.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 46: Day 4

Hello! Have had such a lovely couple of days, completely child focused with no work or any other negative distractions. Have eaten, played board games and drunk mulled wine endlessly, and really focused 100% on the children and DH, which has been wonderful.

Slightly back to the grindstone today - have a few hours work to do this morning, guests arriving this afternoon for an overnight stay, I'm working all day tomorrow and Friday, then we're off to my mum's for new year. Way too many things! :eek:

I'm pleased to report that all the necessary bits of pre-christmas crafting and baking got done - DH liked his hat, DC3 loved the unicorn, all foodie gifts got delivered. I have some bits left to do for people we're seeing this week and weekend, but not so much.

I can also honestly say that the amount spent, and the quantity of gifts, felt absolutely right on the day - I didn't feel the DCs were overwhelmed with stuff, and everything they got (that we chose) was good quality and will be well used.

I was pleased to get DH's birthday present on sale at £30 off yesterday, which I'm pleased about. All those boxing day online sales can be useful if you're looking for something specific!

to do today
1. Pack orders for smaller business.
2. Tidy house for visitors.
3. Clear email/admin backlog
4. Wrap presents for today's visitors.
5. Ironing mountain range.
6. Check debt totals ready for an end of year round up - I'm not sure I'll get another chance as the next few days are so busy.

To do this week
1. Make candles.
2. Make florentine biscuits.
3. Wrap presents for the relatives we will see on the weekend.

To do in December
1. finish Christmas shopping! Done!
2. buy DH's birthday present while I'm doing the Christmas shopping. Done - on sale yesterday!
3. make some more candles.
4. don't try to do too much! I already have a few client bookings and lots of work I want to do, alongside the Christmas stuff. I need to make sure I don't get overwhelmed again. Yeah, this is going abysmally, as always.
5. update debt totals at the end of the month, to ensure we know where we are as we start 2018.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 46: Day 5

Firmly back to reality today - seeing clients 40 miles away so will be out all day.

We have guests staying and the wife is a SAHM of one school age child, and I confess to a bit of jealousy about their lovely lifestyle! The husband bought a house 10yrs ago so their mortgage is fairly small now, and they live sensibly, but travel a fair bit (she is from another country, long haul flight away). She has all this time to make homemade things for the family and for gifts, tcook nourishing food, make their house nice etc etc (and does all of these things). Made me think I could probably cope with being a SAHM if we won the lottery!

Argh, quite a lot to do today when I get back from working, somehow we are at Thursday and I need to get things ready for heading off to my mum’s tomorrow for a few days :eek: . Might need to task DH with collecting debt totals.

to do today
1. Work work work!
2. A bit more ironing if I can face it this evening - I defeated about half of it yesterday.
3. Check debt totals ready for an end of year round up - ran out of time to do this yesterday.
4. Wrap presents for the weekend.
5. Make candles.

To do this week
1. Make candles.
2. Make florentine biscuits.
3. Wrap presents for the relatives we will see on the weekend.

To do in December
1. finish Christmas shopping! Done!
2. buy DH's birthday present while I'm doing the Christmas shopping. Done - on sale yesterday!
3. make some more candles.
4. don't try to do too much! I already have a few client bookings and lots of work I want to do, alongside the Christmas stuff. I need to make sure I don't get overwhelmed again. Yeah, this is going abysmally, as always.
5. update debt totals at the end of the month, to ensure we know where we are as we start 2018.

DawnW

Treadingonplaymobil wrote: »

We have guests staying and the wife is a SAHM of one school age child, and I confess to a bit of jealousy about their lovely lifestyle! The husband bought a house 10yrs ago so their mortgage is fairly small now, and they live sensibly, but travel a fair bit (she is from another country, long haul flight away). She has all this time to make homemade things for the family and for gifts, tcook nourishing food, make their house nice etc etc (and does all of these things). Made me think I could probably cope with being a SAHM if we won the lottery!

But you make lovely handmade things for the family and for gifts and cook nourishing food too, TOPM

Treadingonplaymobil

DawnW wrote: »

But you make lovely handmade things for the family and for gifts and cook nourishing food too, TOPM

Yeah, but she has actual TIME to achieve it in, rather than just missing out on sleep.

Treadingonplaymobil

Just stopping in quickly to make a note of the debt total, since I have just found the time to add it up.

Currently standing at.... drumroll....

£55,647.80

That means that this year we have paid off £2,960.33, just a hair shy of £3,000 (I was going to pay an extra £40 off before posting this, but ran out of time ). It's not the most amazing debt repayment ever, but for our first 10 months of getting our finances together, trying to figure out where we went wrong and trying to get onto the right path for the future, I'm perfectly happy with that sum.

Hopefully 2018 will see a significant debt reduction, thanks to the remortgage and better budget balancing, before the inevitable increase in 2019 with the extension (fingers crossed). I'll do a more full post on 2018 at some point over the weekend.

Hurrah for debt reduction!

ellen_vannin

Well done that's a good amount paid off

and plenty of lessons learnt for 2018

Honeysucklelou2

Well done TOPM. All the best for debt busting in 2018!

XSpender

Well done on the debt reduction

Cherryfudge

Well done! And I think this year has also been something of a learning curve, so you'll see even more going in the coming months.