Cherry takes the reins

Honeysucklelou2

Can't beat apples and blackberries as an Autumn dessert! A good reminder about Christmas cake ingredients, thank you.

Cherryfudge

Pay is in, and some of it is out again due to my eagerness to get rid of the mortgage. I overpaid another £100 the other day for September (I think I mentioned this already). This month's pay is higher than usual due to overtime in August so I've paid £220 each to the mortgage and savings. Daren't do more in case I've missed anything on the outgoings, but if I do I can at least take it out of savings again.
I've also paid the milk bill: £8.76.

ETA: I also put my timesheet in for September last night. I thought there wouldn't be much as I'd been on leave but there are a couple of sleep in payments and a little bit in the way of extra hours and weekend enhancements so I'm happy with that.

VelvetFreak

Well done on the OP and savings

Cherryfudge

Nothing spent today.

DH's meeting went... okay. He has a further couple of months to make the job work or be out of it. I didn't expect that, at all. I thought he was either going to be in, or out. Of course this both prolongs the tension and gives him more time to find something else, though the irony is that the work and travel take up so much of his time and energy that he struggles to research alternatives.

So today I'm thankful that DH still has a job, and for a quiet shift (again), for having a jar of walnuts to nibble (as I love them) and for DS2 looking very much the part in his newly-arrived staff nurse uniform (proud mum moment).

VelvetFreak

That’s very annoying re. not knowing about DH’s job, but good to have a bit more time to figure things out. Work is just the pits sometimes, why do we have to do it

Cherryfudge

Another rainy day and I can tell I'm putting off doing the prep for tonight's study. The house is too quiet as DS2 is at work. Last week I even picked up another shift to avoid Quiet House Syndrome.

There's also a fair old amount of cleaning and tidying being avoided.

Money-wise, the account that DH's salary goes into hasn't yet updated for October so I'll go back to it later. My money is more than half spent already as I paid the mortgage overpayment as early as possible in order to save pennies on the interest. The result in terms of the mortgage looks brilliant, though. We're close to £1,900 now, and the month's interest is £7-something whereas last month it was £9-something! Amazing how big these changes look when not in the shadow of thousands of pounds.

Now there's a nice phrase. No longer do we have thousands of pounds of mortgage! Not even £2,000, as we had yesterday.

The next step will be adding to my pension contributions, but I don't really know how much will go into the pension (which is a poor, underfed effort) and how much I should save elsewhere. I only have nine years till retirement but suspect I might go on working longer if my health holds out, and less if it doesn't, as my work depends very much on physical fitness. I do have colleagues who have retired and come back to work full time because they enjoy it so much! That's very dependent on individual working circumstances, though. Anyway I'm thinking ahead quite a way. I haven't got rid of the mortgage yet, and it's not really that long since we were living on an overdraft.

So today's list is:
make scones
list ingredients needed for Christmas cake
prep study
tidy dining room
clean kitchen
clean bathroom.

Honeysucklelou2

That's amazing progress on the mortgage, well done.

Cherryfudge

Thank you. It seems to be going down quite quickly, I suppose because we are only paying a bit of interest now so overpayments are purely eroding the capital.

Autumn came with October. The weather cleared this afternoon but I had the heating on and two jumpers in the house. Dh and I searched the loft for our winter duvet: turns out DD took it by mistake when she moved so I've told her to keep it and I will get another tomorrow. the loft is a mess: I think she must have moved a lot when she took some of her things.

Most of the jobs got done, apart from the cake ingredients. The cleaning was a bit perfunctory but at least some is done. The study material proved more complicated than I'd expected but when I showed my friends we got into a good discussion so chances are we'll make that our topic over the next few months. There is a DVD to go with it which turned out to be difficult to get hold of but I think I can get it from an online Christian shop. I'd hoped it was on Y0utube for free but it isn't... will be worth the outlay if the rest of the book is as good as the beginning.

The scones, incidentally, were a Good Idea. I rarely make them at home nowadays, yet when I first got married I practised making them till my husband had to ask me to stop!

I've got a few bits of shopping but tonight I realised DH's birthday is creeping up on me and I need to get him a present as well as helping DFiL get something. I think that accounts for tomorrow.

Spending:
Toiletries/makeup £3.98
Medical £0.30
Housekeeping £11.57
MS:
3 items on offer from the shopping that I was getting anyway.
10th coins into savings 22p
Decluttering:
4 pieces of paper.

I'm thankful for quite a lot today, especially a good evening over the study, DS getting some of his remaining placement hours done, pizza for tea, cheese scones and some blue sky breaking through before the end of the day.

VelvetFreak

Well done on the mortgage
Not long to go now.

Sun_Addict

Mortgage figure looking very impressive indeed