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

Treadingonplaymobil

wishingthemortgaheaway wrote: »

I suspect the spender will have an eye opening moment when the saver just goes out and buys something because they've saved the cash and the spender can't.

True! Although I may have criticised too soon - he has (for the first time ever) taken the decision not to spend his money today because he didn't see anything he loved. Am definitely going to talk to them about saving a percentage of everything they have coming in though. One for the next family meeting!

Treadingonplaymobil

Ooh, and another little win - DH has changed his phone contract to a sim only, so it's £19 a month for loads more data, down from £45ish. I was going to assign the extra entirely to the food budget, but I'm going to split it £10 for food (only £2 a week, but in the words of Mr T, every little helps) and £16 for debt overpayment.

Silver_Queen

That is an absolute win. Hooray :j

Treadingonplaymobil

Had a nice day today, no major spends - had to do some food shopping, but it all came in as expected. How boring!

Finally got into the mortgage today. Sadly I was being a little optimistic and the actual balance stands at £192,617.50, £400 more than my guesstimate. Not exactly a disaster in the grand scheme of things though.

Every now and again I go through my business account and clear out my stock budget savings - I always err on the cautious side (see, I can do it sometimes ) when budgeting a percentage of income for stock, and eventually the excess adds up to a silly amount. Did that this afternoon after doing a stock order and was able to add a bit more to July's salary, so now have £110/£250 put by.

To do today
1. Menu plan and top up food shop list (the freezer is stuffed with food, so I'm hoping to get by with just milk/fruit type shops for at least this week and some of next week). Not as much food in the freezer as I thought, but should be enough to easily see is through to the weekend.
2. Keep on top of work emails.
3. Log on to CC accounts and check debt totals to update signature.

Debt repayment:
- £2.10/30 April rounding down pot.
- £1,608.78/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

walkonsand

Regarding the mortgage debt, if your payment was due on the 1st, with the bank holiday yesterday, odds are the payment shows as taken on your current account as that's a live balance, but not showing as deducted from the mortgage debt as it usually refreshes overnight, so you might be closer to what you said before.

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 60: Day 3

Going to have some actual spending today - taking the DC on the train to see a friend, and we're meeting in a cafe. Train is only £12 though, and we're having lunch on the train then pudding in the cafe, for minimum expenditure. The forecast is nonstop rain, but apart from the walk to the station we'll be mainly indoors, so it hopefully won't be too bad.

walkonsand good point about the mortgage - I'll check it again in a few days. My maths was pretty quick and dirty though, so I wasn't surprised at being a few hundred out.

I moved the 'rounding down' pot over from my business account last night so I've added it to my April rounding down current account pot and made an overpayment of £14.53. Onwards and downwards.

Ooh, I have an actual money saving/eco/plastic free tip. I have started making my own dry shampoo. It is so easy and cheap. I used a fairly basic mix of bicarb/arrowroot/cocoa (helps darken it if you have brown hair) as it's what I had in the house, but there are loads of recipes online. I particularly like the look of this recipe and this one, although they both have ingredients I'd need to buy. But compared to the 1.5 cans of Batiste I used to go through a month (and probably inhale 20% of), it's an absolute bargain. I had an old hair powder bottle which I use for mine, but I've seen people use pepper shakers or a big face powder brush to apply it. It takes a couple of uses to get the hang of it if you're used to the ease of a spray can, but it's just as quick for me now. Quick warning though - some people find bicarb irritates their scalps, so proceed with caution using that if you tend towards the sensitive.

Another sort-of-money-saving tip: we've converted to using shampoo bars from bottles of shampoo. You can basically spend as much or as little as you want on them, but they last easily as long as a bottle of shampoo, so far for our family a bar lasts roughly 4-5 times as long as a bottle, and the bars we're using cost £3.90 (there are cheaper ones available, too, but the cheaper one I tried made my scalp a bit dry), compared to £1 per bottle for shampoo. So the saving is pretty miniscule, but it also saves a bottle of plastic every couple of weeks. I am using diluted vinegar as a rinse (everything online suggests apple cider vinegar is the thing to use, but I had white vinegar in the house and that seems to work fine), but will probably also experiment with a bar conditioner at some stage too, especially for DC3's long hair - I seem to get vinegar in my eyes practically every time due to poor aim, so I haven't subjected her to that yet and am using up our last bottle of conditioner on her hair.

To do today
1. Make a packed lunch to eat on the train.
2. Clear the ironing before it becomes mountainous again.
3. Finish next week's contract work this evening.

Debt repayment:
- £14.53/30 April rounding down pot.
- £1,623.31/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.

try_harder

Loving the hair recipes .

Have a lovely day

apple_muncher

Do you have a railcard? You've used the train a couple of times recently with others, so it might be worth it.

arsenalbarnie

Just out of interest what flavour shampoo bar are you using? This is one of my next items to change to for zero waste.

mfmaybe

Like the look of the shampoo bars. I got a shower gel bar in my christmas stocking (different to a normal soap bar, believe it or not!). I really like it, but my current issue is how to store it in the shower. Any tips as to how you stop yours sliding everywhere/washing away/getting stuck to the shelf?