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£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....
Comments
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I share your pain a little on the formal clothes - we need Prom outfits (boys admittedly not girls) and there really is no option but to buy it all. They used to borrow the shirts/shoes/ties for things from OH but have now outgrown him so its suits plus everything else.
Could you allocate the accountant savings plus overtime to the clothes - I don't think you'd pre-allocated these two amounts as yet although I somehow suspect it isn't enough?
Sometimes you just have to live
The serious message of course is making sure you have the reality of a full year's ToPM family realistic spending - not budget, but actual - BEFORE you start committing to extra debt. You've said again things are still taking you by surprise in this second year. The petrol is one, I know that isn't more money anywhere just a switch between pots but the learning is more about the true cost of doing business.
At this stage I'm sure a million thoughts are buzzing round but simply put it looks like its all about more income, from wherever and whenever and as much as possible!
More income. This keeps coming up, and I keep explaining the maths, but increasingly feel like I'm simply not believed. I'm going to have to ask people to start posting links to jobs I could reasonably be expected to get, which would net me more than my current income, as I genuinely don't think it's possible with my background and experience, but possibly I am completely out of the loop with jobs. Childcare costs would be a huge factor with three children, and we just don't have the kind of family help where we could rely on even a single week of the year being reliably covered by them. I don't find it a hugely helpful suggestion when, to my way of thinking, it simply isn't an option right now, but if someone can prove otherwise I am open to the discussion. Otherwise I'd quite like it to stop being suggested as a panacea.Trying to figure out a whole new life. Trying to figure out a whole new budget.
Divorcing, unclear on final debt total right now, but focusing on building a financial buffer zone.0 -
Treadingonplaymobil wrote: »Will do! I can't remember if I ended up buying the last lot on ebay or amazon, but I will check and link when I buy more.
I would be interested in hearing about vanilla pods as well. They are EXTREMELY expensive this year in comparison to previous years. I think I read somewhere about a poor crop pushing up prices.
Anything even vaguey reasonably priced will be very welcome!Debt: £11,640.02 paid in full! DFD: 30/06/20
Starter Emergency Fund (#187): £1000/£1000
3 month Emergency Fund (#45): £3300/£33000 -
I'm with you on the more income comments. I know people are trying to be helpful but self employment just doesn't work like that. I fail to see any diaries with employed people where the 'advice' is get a better job/demand a pay rise, because people assume you get paid the right amount for the employed work you do. Childcare for one child is bad enough never mind the three you have. My wraparound care for one child is £200pcm plus extra in the school holidays £26 a day for holiday club/£15 per day for sports camp. so just in term time you would need £600pcm for three school age children. Also the logistics of a 9-5 don't necessarily mean more money, as well as childcare there would be extra transport costs, possibly a second car. so add £70 for tax and insurance on a second car and say £130 a month on fuel. That's £1000 a month in term time...double it in the holidays. You'd need to pull an income of £30k to break even. Most people don't earn that!!! .
You take it on the chin well TOPMdebt consolidated 16/8/18 £9,788.01/£12,618.12(Total debt at LBM 1st Jan '18 c..£19.5k)
EF/FIT savings £97.24 Other Savings £12.17 House Deposit £4,762.64/£20,000 23.8%0 -
I don't think that the "more income" suggestion is being made in a way that suggests that you aren't already working hard. I think everyone can see that you're working hard. The problem is that the solution is obviously more income, unsurprisingly.
You have already said that it would be impossible for you to increase your income by going back into employment due to lack of employed work history, childcare etc and I don't think that warby is trying to tell you to go out and get a job. I think they're just stating the obvious that the only real way to balance the pots is to increase income in whatever way possible because no matter how hard you try, you have said yourself that you have a certain standard of living which you're not willing to sacrifice, so instead of constantly trying to balance pots that literally do not balance....more income is the way.
This is easier said than done, of course, and I think everyone sympathises with you. You are trying to do a huge amount and in my opinion have made some fairly sizeable personal sacrifices (the minimal personal kitty, for one). The thing is, the boiled down basic solution to debt is to earn more than you spend. You have said that you cannot spend less so the only other way is earn more however possible. This is something that you, I and everyone else under the sun knows but occasionally might need reminding of. You do a huge amount of things that most stay at home mums couldn't cope with, let alone a working mum. It's been suggested to you before that you let a couple of SAHM things slide in favour of increasing working hours but this is obviously your decision. I think that's all that warby is trying to remind you of and I don't think their post was anything but trying to be supportive.Debt Totals July 2019::
[STRIKE]£350 Natwest Credit Card [/STRIKE]/ ]Now £0 (paid off and closed 04/2017) £15,500 postgrad loan from parents/ Now £7,000 £5,000 sister loan/ Now £0[STRIKE]£500 train ticket loan from parents [/STRIKE]/ Now £0 (paid off 16/02/18)[STRIKE]£2,000 Overdraft[/STRIKE] Now £0 (paid off 09/03/18) £1,967.83 Barclays 0% card Now £0 Total £7,0000 -
I apologize if I banged the income drum too hard.
I (perhaps mistakenly)thought you made a rather deliberate choice of how much to work in a year and that there was at least a bit of flexibility in that. I've done the whole childcare and working thing, I know how difficult it is. I didn't mean a wholesale career change and £££ more, just that every £100 extra you can squeeze would be really valuable.
I will shut up though as requested, not least because I have just thrown caution to the winds and after 30+y of employment put myself forward for VR and need to go and think 'what have I done' a bit more.
Wishing you well, as always0 -
Good luck with the VR Warby. Will you be looking for something else or taking a break?
TOPM I think I have also banged the more income drum a few times too and I think the stress of balancing pots must be a struggle on a budget where there are certain things which are non negotiable and a fixed limited income. Silver queen makes a good point about maybe allowing some things to slide in favour of giving you some free time to work or whatever. I certainly don't think anyone implied you weren't already working hard.I’m a Forum Ambassador and I support the Forum Team on the Debt free Wannabe, Budgeting and Banking and Savings and Investment boards. If you need any help on these boards, do let me know. Please note that Ambassadors are not moderators. Any posts you spot in breach of the Forum Rules should be reported via the report button, or by emailing forumteam@moneysavingexpert.com. All views are my own and not the official line of MoneySavingExpert.
The 365 Day 1p Challenge 2025 #1 £667.95/£301.35
Save £12k in 2025 #1 £12000/£80000 -
Just popping in to say....
1) Wow, that mileage really adds up!
2) Thank you to Cocalls for the NT cards link, they are lovely and significantly cheaper than individual cards off the high street.
3) I seem to remember one of my DS rented a prom outfit, and I know DD got hers from ASOS which saved us a lot of money!
Back into lurkdomI think a bit of sunshine is good for frugal living. (Cranky40)
The sun's been out and I think I’m solar powered (Onebrokelady)
Fashion on the Ration 2025: Fabric 2, men's socks 3, Duvet 7.5, 2 t-shirts 10, men's socks 3, uniform top 0, hat 0, shoes 5 = 30.5/68
2024: Trainers 5, dress 7, slippers 5, 2 prs socks (gift) 2, 3 prs white socks 3, t-shirts x 2 10, 6 prs socks: mostly gifts 6, duvet set 7.5 = 45.5/68 coupons
20.5 coupons used in 2020. 62.5 used in 2021. 94.5 remaining as of 21/3/220 -
Week 71: Day 4
Off to have my first in-person life coaching check in with my friend this morning. It's been going really well for the month since we started, with weekly phone check ins, and I'm hoping we can have a good session today and start our second month with some good goals. Mine were mostly about habit setting this month, in an effort to make my time more efficient, eat more healthily etc, but next month I think I want to set one or two goals that are genuine 'tick this off when done' ones too.
Re working time - I'm sorry it's caused such aggro here over the past 24 hours. I guess my working time arrangement hasn't been that clear, which has perhaps suggested more flexibility than is there. Here's a quick rundown:
Over the course of last year, I increased my working hours more and more. Since last September I have had four school days a week (9:15-2:45) of childcare, so 22 hours a week, term time only (which averages to just under 18 hours a week over 48 weeks a year). By December I was trying to work more or less full time hours, so was stealing another 15-20 hours a week from family time, weekends, time with the children after school, anywhere I could get it. This was completely unsustainable, in terms of my mental health and our family, and I ended up hugely stressed and a bit doolally.
I made a conscious decision to cut my hours in January this year, and arranged them at more like 18hrs per week on average, which gave me a 'housework day' during the school week. It quickly became apparent that actually that wasn't enough working hours to sustain a sensible income and business growth - I could just about manage to tick along, but not grow, and certainly not move my business away from being client facing, which requires additional working time which is currently 'unpaid'.
I have now found a sort of middle ground. I am much more committed to working during school hours, one evening a week for a couple of hours and 1-2 weekends a month (although this has been sacrificed in favour of DH's overtime in recent weeks). So my hours are not vastly increased, but they are increased. I haven't done the sum, but I suspect I'm up to 21-ish hours on average over the year, maybe more. I have also, over the past couple of months, been trying to also make them more efficient. I am observing my working practices and trying to improve them so I waste less time. I am also being stricter about not working on my non-working evenings, as the effect of being more strict about working during my working hours is that I also need to maximise the time I spend on 'housekeeping' (general life admin as well as cleaning, and extension stuff) and with the DC when I'm not working. Because I am no longer allowing myself to do this during my working days, I absolutely need our evenings to make practical running of the house things happen, alongside DH.
All of this is a basic level, without the 'nice things' aspects of life I like to include - making bread, candle making, cooking from scratch, missing work to go to the DCs school plays etc etc etc - all this gets packed in on top in the little gaps of time that remain. I have got much stricter about not letting these extras rule my time, but also about not giving up the things I feel make a real positive impact to our lives. On the whole, these days if I want to do the 'nice extras', I sleep less- something I'm not prepared to do on a daily basis so I can work more, but am prepared to do once a week for nice things.
All in all, I feel like I have a good work/life balance at the moment, and squeezing in any extra hours work would be nigh on impossible without affecting my mental health or the time and attention I give the DCs. BUT making my working time more efficient and profitable is an ongoing process, and one which is already going on on a daily basis and I hope will keep my earnings on their steady upward trajectory. I'm never going to see a massive instant jump in income by committing more hours to work, but I do feel that my recent slight hours increase and, more importantly, my constant focus on shifting things around - making work more efficient, judging the true (time and money) cost of every outing, meeting or break from my normal work routine - to ensure my income inches up every week and month, is paying off and will continue to do so.
I am still trying to squeeze in a few 'unpaid' hours a week alongside growing my income, as I have a really clear aim that I want to stop being client facing in two years - it's not profitable enough for the time I spend doing it, the prepping, baking, cleaning for clients etc means my hourly rate is not as good as it should be (and is set by the industry really so not particularly movable), and I don't love doing it. I want to write more, I feel it's a huge strength of mine, and I feel I have the skills to make a living from it again. I think this will be the biggest income boost once it actually starts to pay its way, but in order to make money from a website I need people to visit it, and the time investment in social media, content production, photography etc for the website means a lot of unpaid work in order to get to that point. It is these 'unpaid' hours which perhaps make it seem from the outside that I am working very hard for a fairly low wage - if I ditched these hours I wouldn't see a drop in income level, but equally I would have no prospect of moving my business on to one which is both more profitable and more sustainable for us as a family. If you subtract these 'unpaid' hours from my working week my hourly rate is really not bad.
I am the world's greatest self-punisher, and even I feel that I genuinely couldn't fit much more in at the moment. I feel my income is maximised, I have a business plan to both increase income steadily and make a move away from the less profitable parts of my business over the coming two years, and my work/life balance, while not perfect, is in a good compromise place between working and family time. There aren't many extra hours to grab, but I do grab them when they're there (less sleep again usually).
Hopefully that sets things out a little more clearly so you can all understand how I structure my week and working time.
Another change I am going to make once I have my 17/18 tax return done (hopefully before the summer holidays) is to catch up to the present with my book keeping and get back into monthly book keeping, so I can make a clearer assessment each month about my income for that month, rather than only looking at it a full year at a time. I think that's something I'll talk about here as it becomes relevant, as it will help me assess how my income shifts month to month and, again, where I might make efficiencies and improvements.
RIGHT. Hopefully that's enough information, but please feel free to ask more questions if you'd like to know more - I think I get the best advice when people have the fullest possible picture, so I'm really happy to share more about how I structure my time/week/working hours if anyone has anything else they'd like to ask.
Moving onto looking at it from a budget point of view, I think my biggest weakness this year has not been a budget that couldn't balance, but a budget that wouldn't balance because I wasn't reporting and using my income in an honest way - by which I mean I was setting a budget with a much-too-low income, then relying on the perceived extra to top it up and make it balance in an as-and-when way rather than a more structured one. This meant that the so-called extra always felt like bonus money, so if it got spent on fun stuff or the wrong budget category <I'm looking at you, house stuff budget pot> I felt like it didn't matter, when actually it did, because it was actually needed to balance the budget. I think that shifting over to this new budget is a far more honest way of doing things, and will challenge me to genuinely keep my earnings up rather than treat anything earned over the minimum as a bonus and not worrying too much if it slides.
I've talked before about my budget/LBM process as being one of iterations (remember doing those at school?! Yuck), each one bringing us ever closer to that point of a balanced budget (and maybe full brightness on the LBM dimmer switch :T ). I feel like I have swung wildly either side of a best practice situation in terms of our budget (first huge overspending, then attempting to underspend but leaving a budget that didn't balance, then spending loads again but not quite so badly, and so on and so on), and each 'swing' brings me a little closer to the reality of our finances and what we can do with our time and money, but there is always a little swing back the other way to come to balance it a little further. Also, the peak of each swing is the crisis point which tips the swing the other way - the budget pots being emptied, my mental health reaching dire levels because of trying to earn too much or cut too hard. As we pass through the balance point I feel calm and happy and my light bulb is stronger, then we begin to swing the other way... I don't know whether we will ever hit that point of perfect balance, but I do know we started out with the swings being more enormous than most because of the level of our denial and lack of understanding of budgeting, and they are gradually swinging back and forth closer and closer to that balance point. It's a longer journey because the starting point was further away from perfect than most, but each swing brings us a little closer. I hope that makes sense!
Right, back to today. I have life coaching, then DC's class assembly at half two, and DH is away until tomorrow, so I'm not expecting to get much done today above the bare minimum. I had a mega productive day yesterday though - LOVE my days when I get to stay at home all day and just Get Things Done - so I'm not too worried. Contemplating letting DC2 miss swimming tonight so I don't have to schlep out, as his friend who he goes with is away too. Will decide later.
To do yesterday
1. Contract work for next week. Almost done, had to wait on some information from someone. Will finish it today.
2. Contract work for the week after (trying to get ahead before summer!).
3. On the subject of Christmas, start vaguely planning advent calendar - I'm going to have a browse on pinterest and similar to see if there's anything I can make/prepare for free or cheap, since the DCs' homemade advent calendar is always one of my big Christmas expenses. Made really good progress on this, have a rough plan - going to start trying to get one gift/activity sorted each week so it isn't a huge spending shock in October alongside the usual Christmas spend. I'm particularly going to set up price alerts on a particular lego set as we usually share a lego set on Christmas Eve as our '24th' day gift and I already have my eye on one. Hopefully will snaffle it a little more cheaply by starting to look now.
4. Check credit reports. Amazingly, they are absolutely fine, with good chances of getting 0% cards etc. That MSE credit club is very good, isn't it? the only open credit account either of us have that isn't accounted for is an MBNA CC (zero balance, £16k credit available) which I think we will leave open.
5. Birthday card for friend.
6. Plan cake sizes for my sister's wedding. Got stuck on this as my sister hasn't answered a fairly key question. Eye roll.
7. Read another chunk of Getting Things Done.
To do today:
1. Plan dinner -probably something egg based, a friend gave me a dozen (teeny, more like quails on steroids) chicken eggs yesterday.
2. Life coaching.
3. Work through the rest of my 'ongoing' life/work admin list as I get time (it's down to really quite sensible levels at the moment as I've been ploughing through it this week). Currently at a mere 13 items.
Mini goals:
- £21.18/30 June rounding down pot.
- £2,806.97/£5,000 2018 debt repayment goal.
- I have deleted the extension shortfall from here for now as I have had to finally - sob - rob this pot to make the budgets balance after adding too much to it at the beginning of the month. I will reassess and update at the beginning of July.Trying to figure out a whole new life. Trying to figure out a whole new budget.
Divorcing, unclear on final debt total right now, but focusing on building a financial buffer zone.0 -
TOPM , I can't comment on your post about work life balance/earnings as you seem to me to work really hard .
I think when you mention you would like to write more , I feel you have a definite strength there . Of all the diaries I read yours is one of the most interesting, not necessarily because of the subject matter , but how it is written. A definite avenue to explore in the future.This is a system account and does not represent a real person. To contact the Forum Team email forumteam@moneysavingexpert.com0 -
Cumbria_lass wrote: »TOPM , I can't comment on your post about work life balance/earnings as you seem to me to work really hard .
I think when you mention you would like to write more , I feel you have a definite strength there . Of all the diaries I read yours is one of the most interesting, not necessarily because of the subject matter , but how it is written. A definite avenue to explore in the future.
I've just realised how epically long my post above it, sorry to anyone who is ploughing through it!!Trying to figure out a whole new life. Trying to figure out a whole new budget.
Divorcing, unclear on final debt total right now, but focusing on building a financial buffer zone.0
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