Light the fire...

Fortune_Smiles

Hope the lucky streak continues for you 🍀

Fortune x

savingholmes

Hope the wider family all recover quickly from covid and your immediate family avoid it. You sound like you are getting loads done then. Great wins and even better sized EF. Well done on repaying the shop loan too.

woodfired

Thank you all for the welcome back and the well wishes.  Mum and Dad are pretty much back to full health thank you very much.  They have been lucky.

I've been back at work for a week and starting to really prepare for Christmas.  The tree and decorations are up, I've written most of my cards, bought most of the children's presents and made a dent in the list of other family prezzies.  I've also bought a few luxury bits whilst food shopping and hidden them away ready for Xmas, although, I must confess to cracking open one of the tubs of quality street this weekend whilst watching Elf.  Oops. 

Its month end today and I've made a £170 OP this morning before the main payment goes out tomorrow.  I did have more funds to spare but I've put those aside to cover the rest of the presents.  There may be a little left to sweep into the driveway fund hopefully.  Oooh, and I had another win on the lottery this weekend, £69! That will go in the drive fund, very happy with that.

Today I am at home, sorting out some paperwork and generally getting the week organised as I'm back to work tomorrow and I like to be prepped if possible.  I would like to get some more done in the garden but it's far too wet and miserable at the moment. 

Anyway, hope all is well, take care everyone.xx 

lucielle

You're lucky on the lottery, lucky if I even get a number!
L

savingholmes

Well done on op. Nice win

lucielle

Hi Woody, hope everythings ok with you and your family.
L

savingholmes

Happy New Year. Hope you are okay.

woodfired

Hello Everybody, sorry to be MIA once again!

I have been maintaining my MSE ways but life is so monotonous at the moment there never seems to be anything of interest to say!

However, its that time of year again when the accountants bring the glad tidings of the tax bill so I finally have something to talk about.

This month I have been paying off the £4k deferred 'on account' tax from July, that is all clear now and earlier this month I requested £10k be returned from the PB account once the draw is completed at the start of Feb to cover the payments due now.  I was half expecting to need to cash in more bonds but the good news is DH has £8500 ish to pay and I am due a small refund of £700 ish so the net amount to pay is under £8k, excellent news.
I am expecting next years bill to be significantly heftier as my business has done really well, albeit with rocketing wage costs to offset, and DH, after a really quiet 3 or 4 months, has also had a record year.  Plus we received some help in the form of grants which are all taxable income.  I am going to try and get the accounts and tax finalised this summer so that we can plan our payments instead of being last minute as we have this year.

Financially, things are going OK.  My business lent DH £30k to repay the finance on his machine as the interest was ridiculous and the monthly payment astronomical.  He has since repaid half of this to me and is on track to repay the rest in the next 3 months or so which is excellent.  He took out a small bounceback loan for the remainder of the finance amount so the repayments will kick in later this year for that but his outgoings will have dropped by £1500 per month so he is feeling less pressure to be manically busy all the time.

Our personal finances look OK too, I have a chunk of money still in PBs, although the prize rate has been slashed and I can tell - haven't had anything for ages! - and the drive fund is around £6500.  We are hoping to get that started in May when our builder friend is free.  We have no idea of costs and he works on day rate, albeit a 'mates rate' so can't really give us an idea either as we simply don't know how long the groundworks will take, its quite a big area and we are altering quite a lot of things so it will take a couple of weeks at least.  The plan is simply to save as much as possible and hope we have some money left over.  If it goes over what is in the bank account then we will have to dip into the PBs.  It needs doing and will make such a difference so it will cost what it will cost so to speak. 

On the mortgage front, we are on track to have paid off a perfectly round £10 000 by the anniversary next week.  This includes OPs of about £1500.   Its not a huge amount but considering the work we have done to the house, the amount we have in savings (we were down to our last thousand when we moved in back in Feb 20) and the fact DH was on half a wage for over 4 months, we haven't done too badly.  Plus, if we only continue to OP at that rate we would still have paid the mortgage off 3 and a half years early.  Once the drive is done we will up the OPs again.

Right, I think that's enough for now.  Thanks to you who have checked in whilst I've been awol, you are a lovely bunch and I will try to be better at updating

WF.x

lucielle

Wow, you've been busy.  Ouch to the tax bill know how that feels as just paid ours.
L

greent

I'd say that that is a fantastic achievement in the past year (11 months) - well done to all of the woodfired family