Rawr_'s Saving Diary

ChasingSunshine

Great news that you have your completion date, you will be moving in so soon! I like all your vegan ideas, have added the white bean casserole to a list of meals I should think of doing. Found a stash of beans in the cupboard a few days ago and was at a loss for ideas on how to use them up. Not really sure why I bought them, obviously some special offer ages ago.
Are you usually vegan or is it for January that you are changing how you eat?

rawr_

Hi ChasingSunshine the white bean casserole was great, I found the recipe on Pinterest incase you were interested, I find a lot of good recipes to try out on there. Me and my DH have been vegan for around a year and a half, it's gone so quick! First few weeks were a bit weird but we soon got used to it.

Yesterday was a really lazy day (always feel so guilty spending a day not doing anything!). But I didn't go out, so it was a NSD. I'm going to need to get some bits for pack up today, so will need to nip to a supermarket on my lunch break. It was one of those mornings where I was scraping around trying to produce something for pack-up, always feels good when you just about manage it!

Days until payday: 5

rawr_

The contracts on the house were officially exchanged today!! All starting to feel so real now! Not really an update in any other way apart from I had to sort my buildings cover out to start today. This will cost us £10.13 per month with Tesc0 which I thought was a pretty good price! Just Life insurance next which I know won't be as cheap...

ChasingSunshine

Congratulations!

rawr_

Thank you CashingSunshine we're pleased!

Thank god it's payday! All budgets are nice and back up to their full amounts. Have transferred my usual £600 into the joint account to cover food and bills for the month. They'll be a few change over this next month so will need to keep a closer eye than usual: our council tax will go down but then we have more insurance expenses than usual now so will probably just balance out. Just little things like that.

Incase anyone is interested, this is how I keep track of our budgets each month in a google spreadsheet:


Last night we went and ordered our oven from Curryz, I wanted to get it instore as my brother works at the carfone inside so he gets 10% discount off everything in curryz too I do love a bit of saving. We were a bit naughty though... So I've wanted an american fridge/freezer for ages, and planned on getting one second hand a little while after we move into our house, but we saw a new one in there for £399.99. We both really liked it and I let Mr Rawr make the decision. Well, we ended up buying it, and will installation costs for the oven it came to £750.59 :eek: (was supposed to be over £800 though so we made a good saving. All set to be delivered next Friday, which is the day before we move in as we get the keys Thursday evening. This money comes out of our £1300 that we have left over from the deposit/solicitor fees that we saved for things we'd need for the house.

Will be doing the food shop tonight but trying to use stuff so we haven't got as much food to move - our cupboards always seem rammed with stuff we use tiny amounts of each week though so I think we'll still have a fair bit to transport.

Meal Plan for this week:
- Wraps (quick and easy on a Friday night as we don't get home until 7.30pm)
- Naan bread pizzas
- White bean casserole and roasties (did this cassarole for the first time last week and really liked it, plus it's fairly cheap, easy and healthy. Will be doing roasties with it this time though as Mr Rawr complained it wasn't quite filling enough for him).
- Bolognese (the Monday night tradition at the moment :rotfl:)
- Hotdogs (will be using up last of reduced M*S soysages in the freezer - which I'm sad about cause they were really good! Will make a note to go one evening after we've moved to see if I can get some more reduced!)
- 'Cheesy' pasta and broccoli (had this Wednesday just gone and I tweaked the sauce recipe which was better, plus the broccoli is a good bonus. This will be the last night that I use saucepans as I want to pack them after they've gone through the dishwasher!)
- Bean burgers and chips (using some of our never ending stash of bean burgers in the freezer!)

I'm planning on getting most of the stuff we need for Ald! but I can see from my list that I won't be able to get everything there, so will need to go to Tesc0 too. I'm going to try and spend £60, including cat good, but my budget allows for £75 per week at the moment. Would be even better if it's less!

Another thing I've been doing more of this week is PA surveys - I used to do them now and again, but lately seem to be getting a lot of invites to studies which has been pretty great! I'm up to £15.45 and I've only really been doing them this week I'm hoping to put this straight into savings. Usually on payday I pay £200 into the savings account, but this month I'm going to wait until the end in case there are any additional moving costs we've not accounted for - I'm hoping this money will still be there though as it could use a boost to make me feel better about it

rawr_

I can't seem to add an image of my budgets so if anyone can point me in the right direction to do this that would be great

DD265

To upload images you need a third party hosting site like imgur, then you can copy the URL and put it in tags like [ img]url[ /img] without the spaces.

We are a day behind you - exchanged Thursday just gone and getting our keys on Friday 1st - but moving the same day as the plan is to do all the cleaning on the Friday. Also went with Tesco for buildings insurance, but that's because they provide our contents insurance and I [STRIKE]am lazy[/STRIKE] wanted to get them on the same renewal date.

Are you doing a DIY move or using a company?

rawr_

Hi DD265 thanks for the tip RE images, will try and edit the post above a little later. Congrats on your new home! Been building up to this week for so long and now it's here I am pretty stressed We're doing a DIY move as it's only 10 minutes up the road - hiring a van for the big stuff.

I'm with Aviva for contents insurance and planned to do the same as you so it was all on the same renewal date, but even with my customer discount it was still £25 a month. Tesco was very reasonable, will probably look to move my contents insurance across when this comes up for renewal.

Good luck with the move!! :j

rawr_

Had a chance to go through my budgets now and add Friday's food spends.

Current food spend: £65.30 / £398.85 (I don't plan on spending £398.85 on food, this is just plus surplus in the joint account as I like to pay more in as a cushion.

Also had to get some diesel today which cost £60.01. Here's a snap shot (hoping the image works) of my budgets, and how I work them out in Excel. I can't imagine not keeping track of my spending this way anymore and have no idea how I kept track before. I guess that's the problem, I didn't!


Today I had to take Mr Rawr to the dentist - he's been in pain all weekend cause he has a wisdom tooth coming through, the poor man He's got some tablets to try and cope with the pain, and has to go back next Monday. Not what we wanted the week we're moving! He's too tired as it's kept him up all night and he's feeling fragile so I bought him home and sent him to bed; so I'm having a work from home day. Had to rejig my schedule slightly but these things can't be helped.

I'm contemplating not going training tonight as I have one more room to box up, and Friday is starting to look like a busy day so don't want to leave it until then! I want to get the microwave cleaned this week, along with the washing machine - and want to give the fridge/freezer a good clean as I'm going to offer it locally for free. Not worth anything and would rather someone make use of it who needs it rather than take it to the tip. Will try and check in later this week!

rawr_

We're all moved in! So I've been a bit busy obviously since last week, moved as planned on Saturday, and been sorting things since.

Have spent quite a lot of money on new bits which I'll break down in a moment, but this all came out of a separate budget that we put aside once all the house deposit and solicitor fees had been paid. Our other budgets are also changing, because theres a few things that are different here. For example we will probably use more electric here as theres an emersion heater for our water, but then we'll use less of the oil as it'll be just for heating I guess. I'm expecting it to take a few months until we know fully what we are spending month to month, but I plan on doing regular meter reads to get it as accurate as possible.

Budgets so far are looking like this:
£260.66 / £598.49 Food/Other - This is now a food / other budget, and I put an extra £200 in this month as a buffer to make me feel a bit better. So I haven't spent £260 on food since the 25th January guys don't worry :rotfl:

£177.25 / £259.85 Personal spending - All of my bills have come out now apart from Netflix which is in a separate budget already. So I have £177.25 left in my account to last me until the end of the month, which is totally doable.

I spent £48.72 on food yesterday, which for us is very good. Next week we have the in-laws with us as we have a funeral to go to on Friday, so they're coming down and staying with us for the weekend, so I'll expect to spend a bit more next week.

All of the other joint bills have now come out apart from Council tax, which I think Feb & March are council tax free months. Plus we are due £80 refund which I'm yet to found out when we get this...

Our first mortgage payment also came out this week, which was a shock as I didn't think our first payment would happen until 1st March. Mr Rawr hadn't started paying into the joint account to cover the mortgage yet as I said he could start from 1st Feb, but I was wrong - so I had to take the money our of my savings to cover this as we'd already accounted the leftover house deposit on things we needed, so this is now down to £2826.02 I was sad as it's now below the 3K mark, but my aim will just have to be to get it back up again sharpish!

So in the last week we've spent just over £1800 :eek: :eek: :eek: on stuff we needed to get for the house, some planned, some not so planned but realised when we got here. Last Friday we had to be at the house as we were having some stuff delivered from Curry's - so I dropped Mr Rawr at the house to wait in whilst I went back to our other house to do some more packing. The heating in our new house wasn't working and we couldn't work out why... turns out after calling out a boiler engineer (that came on out Saturday) that there was a part that needed replacing on the boiler, which he came back on Sunday to fit (luckily he managed to do something that allowed us to have heat on our first night here!). So this is just an example of one of the unexpected costs!

£750.59 - Oven and a fridge freezer - the oven was a must, the fridge freezer not so much but we were going to end up buying one later on anyway, and Mr Rawr told me to just do it and get one (so I blame him)
£110.02 - Van hire for moving day - £80 for the hire, £30 on fuel.
£307.55 - IKEA - we needed furniture for our bedroom as had a built in wardrobe at the other house. We bough a couple of large chest of drawers and a couple of bedside tables, a bookcase and a load of other smaller kitchen and decor bits.
£70 - Boiler repair
£583.62 - Apparently we just love Curry's - our washing machine didn't take the move very well, and when I first put it on was jumping around all over the place and was SO LOUD I didn't dare turn it on anymore. We also bought a dishwasher, but we're getting this money back as it's a housewarming present from the in-laws, so we'll be getting £200 back.

Sorry for this essay, I feel like that was a lot for one post. I'm hoping to check in more often now I'm settling in. Also seeing as I can't get pictures to upload here, I'll do a breakdown of all my budgets at the start of the month, which for us is the 25th as that's when I get paid!