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

[Deleted User]

Long term lurker here! Just want to say thanks for all the veggie recipes and more environmentally friendly money saving tips you share! Those muffins look delicious and I will be trying them this weekend.
I know you have just bought a lot of cleaning stuff but wondered if you'd heard of splosh for cleaning products? They send you eco-friendly concentrated cleaning products that you dilute yourself. We just used old method bottles we had at home to make it cheaper, but its better as obviously you are not getting a new plastic bottles each time.
https://www.splosh.com/shop/splosh/open/getstarted/

Keep up the amazing work on your journey.

Treadingonplaymobil

[Deleted User] wrote:

Long term lurker here! Just want to say thanks for all the veggie recipes and more environmentally friendly money saving tips you share! Those muffins look delicious and I will be trying them this weekend.
I know you have just bought a lot of cleaning stuff but wondered if you'd heard of splosh for cleaning products? They send you eco-friendly concentrated cleaning products that you dilute yourself. We just used old method bottles we had at home to make it cheaper, but its better as obviously you are not getting a new plastic bottles each time.
https://www.splosh.com/shop/splosh/open/getstarted/

Keep up the amazing work on your journey.

Thank you so much! We do try to be fairly eco friendly while sticking to our budget - we used to buy all local/organic/more expensive eco options for various things, which was part of our financial problems, so now it’s about trying to incorporate those ideas into a budget friendly life. Loving the look of Splosh, going to do the maths on that later.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 52: Day 6


Urghhhh what an evening yesterday. Horrendous drive up to my dad’s with DH and the DCs. Got stuck in the backlog from an awful accident which was upsetting - some families had a much worse Friday than us .

Hoping for a really quiet weekend, we have been clear that the DCs just need a weekend of walks and board games, nothing fancy, which seems to have gone down well, so hopefully it will be fairly MS too. We bought some chips and juice at a services yesterday, but had budgeted for it (the DCs favourite motorway services ).

Savings/Spends:
- £18.97/£28 February 'rounding down' overpayment pot
- £1,046.80/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

To do today
1. Sewing and knitting!

To do this week
1. More decluttering - particularly the lego! DONE DONE DONE.
2. Finish planning any handmade gifts for birthdays/Christmas 2018 so I can ensure they are done well in advance. Done.
3. Arrange a refund for a cancelled swimming lesson of DC2's. Done!

To do in February
1. Restart social media for my website, which has really been on the back burner so far this year. Making a start.
2. Eat the contents of the freezer and defrost it. Ongoing, doesn't feel like we've made much of a dent yet!
3. Play around with designs to discuss with the architect in early March.
4. Have a laid back half term with the DC, doing activities at home, walks and crafts. Too many busy weeks recently.
5. SLOW DOWN. This started well at the beginning of the year, but has fallen by the wayside. I have a couple of fractionally less busy weeks coming up, must make a real effort not to fill them with All The Things. This is going really well.

Suffolk_lass

Have a great weekend TOPM. We are off to a party and staying overnight tonight - DH's old school friend up from Devon. I wish we were just walking and playing board games instead, to be honest...

Loving the look of splosh

XSpender

Enjoy your lovely, relaxing weekend. Olympics and rugby for us today

My freezer is not going down very quickly either!

[Deleted User]

Have a lovely weekend xx

enthusiasticsaver

There was an awful accident on the M5 yesterday at somerset so hopefully that was not the traffic backlog you got caught in. At least you got there safely. Hope you have a nice weekend with your Dad.

Cherryfudge

I do like the look of your list for today!

Treadingonplaymobil

Limbo day

Well due to a year not fitting neatly into 52 weeks, I have a limbo day before I can officially declare I am into year two of debt busting as I started this diary on 12th February, not 11th. So talk amongst yourselves until tomorrow.

Had a lovely day yesterday, finished knitting a birthday pair of socks for my dad. Onto a baby cardigan today for a soon to be born new relative. I have so much yarn in my stash that i!!!8217;m choosing patterns to match the yarn I have to try to use it up, so everything I can knit from stash is sort of free (no spend right now, as it was bought pre-LBM).

YNAB payment came out on Friday and we didn!!!8217;t have enough money saved for it because of failing to get our monthly budget pots working until this month, but i!!!8217;ve borrowed from our entertainment kitty rather than other monthly savings pots, as I really want to keep those pots building up and not get into that robbing-peter situation with them.

Savings/Spends:
- £19.58/£28 February 'rounding down' overpayment pot
- £1,046.80/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

To do today
1. Even more sewing and knitting!
2. Figure out how much debt i!!!8217;ve repaid since starting this diary.
3. Clear work emails.
4. Social media post.
5. Go through who I!!!8217;m following on social media for work and make sure it!!!8217;s relevant to my business so I!!!8217;m not wasting time following irrelevant people.

To do this week
TBC once we!!!8217;re home, not going to think about it till then.

To do in February
1. Restart social media for my website, which has really been on the back burner so far this year. Making a start.
2. Eat the contents of the freezer and defrost it. Ongoing, doesn't feel like we've made much of a dent yet!
3. Play around with designs to discuss with the architect in early March.
4. Have a laid back half term with the DC, doing activities at home, walks and crafts. Too many busy weeks recently. Going well so far.
5. SLOW DOWN. This started well at the beginning of the year, but has fallen by the wayside. I have a couple of fractionally less busy weeks coming up, must make a real effort not to fill them with All The Things. This is going really well.

Treadingonplaymobil

YEAR 2: Week 1: Day 1

ONE WHOLE YEAR. Well that!!!8217;s rather impressive.

Apologies in advance if you are seeing this with the terrible formatting making all apostrophes annoying. It seems to happen when I edit a post, but not sure if it!!!8217;s just me seeing them or you as well.

Debt reduction
It!!!8217;s really hard to do a straightforward round up of how much we!!!8217;ve paid off as our debt has been jiggled and juggled over the past twelve months to reduce our outgoings without getting into DMP territory.

The short version is that we started out with a debt of over £67k last February. We paid some off, we moved some onto our mortgage, we accrued a little more thanks to some bad decisions, and our position as we head into year two is

Mortgage £192,752 (we added a little under £20k of our consumer debt onto this to reduce monthly outgoings by £300+)
Parental loan £20,000
Barclaycard £12,065
Partnership card £2,791

We!!!8217;ve actually paid off a net of c.£4K over the past 12 months, even though our consumer debt is dramatically reduced thanks to adding to our mortgage. Our priority has always been to preserve our credit rating, knowing that we will need to borrow at some stage to finance an extension, so this made more sense than any DMP options, hence the remortgage.

The next 12 months
The hope is that at the end of our next year of debt repayment we will be in a position to make a start on the much needed extension to our tiny house. As such our priorities this year are twofold - to keep paying down the debt as determinedly as possible while saving enough towards to extension to cover ongoing costs like the architect, planning and structural engineer!!!8217;s fees. The bridge of borrowing to actually build the thing will be crossed once we have a design and start getting quotes in, although our architect knows that the spec will have to be for something not too elaborate, as cost is a key factor.

I would like us to pay off £5k in 2018 (see my tracker below, we have paid off just over £1k so far), and preferably another £1k or so in the first month or two of 2019, so our debt will be reduced by around £6k at the point we start building.

We are absolutely focused on becoming debt free (I know the extension makes it appear that we aren!!!8217;t, but having weighed up the moving/making do options, this is the best one for us and our children). Our primary goal once the challenge of funding the extension is met will be to asses our new debt free date and bringing that date ever further forward through overpayments one way or another, as we currently have woeful mortgage clearing/retirement plans and will need to think about that within the next decade too (DH and I are both mid thirties). That all seems a bit impossibly far off at the moment though.

Income
DH!!!8217;s income is (assuming no illness or redundancy) totally stable and static, whereas my self employed income is much more erratic. I am trying to smooth the bumps in my income by saving a few months ahead in my business account for my !!!8216;salary!!!8217;, and I am hoping that over the year as this establishes further than I will be able to overpay slightly on the debt, but I don!!!8217;t want to rely on this, hence the somewhat unambiguous debt repayment schedule for now.

My diary this year
I have been contemplating restructuring the way I write my diary. I!!!8217;m not sure whether my daily lists are of any interest to anyone here, now that they tend to be more about my daily life than MSE stuff. Although the two are kind of inextricably linked these days - menu plans, daily work etc. I know some bits of it help to keep me on track (noting food shopping and menu planning etc) and I quite like sharing the rest. Any thoughts? What do you lot find helps keep you on track in your own diary? What do you like reading here or in other diaries? Maybe a daily MSE list, and only checking in with weekly and monthly lists once a week.