Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Dottles1 - Yes, I very much agree that it feels better to know, even though it means I haven't got the money. When I was struck by my LBM, it took me three goes to get the budget method working correctly. I also move money from different pots when I need to, & you're right that not making a note of it, or remembering in which direction the money travelled, can make accounting more difficult.
Re bullet diaries. The best thing to do is probably to google it, as it's definitely a 'thing'. It involves making up a blank notebook into a diary which you then totally & utterly customise in order to organise all aspects of your life. I did this last year & it worked well. I had some of the recommended pages - calendar for each month, bullet to do lists, each month had a grocery budget tracker page, I also had a birthdays page, a Christmas planning spread...what I was going to bake, etc, a presents planner, a book list, our camping list, emergency supplies list......all the sort of info I like to have to hand. The bullet part is the coding by each task....bullet points which are crossed through when the task is done, or arrows to migrate the task to another day. There are loads of ways of doing one of these journals. Yes, I did find it helpful, esp to have everything in one place BUT I did find all the page ruling, page numbering, headings, making the book up into what I wanted it to be, etc, took simply AGES, I didn't want to be doing that again, so this year, I bought a page to a day diary which had enough room for me to rule each page vertically in half so as to get my task list included for each date, as well as a box at the foot of the page for meal plans. I've still included some of my other info at the back on the blank pages, but I wouldn't spend all that time ruling up a blank book again.
I love having things organised on the home front though.....I always say that being organised always saves us money.
Hope this helps a bit, but you can see loads of lovely bullet journalling pics online.
F x

foxgloves

Hi Squirrelly, & welcome!
What a nice thing to say. I'm glad you enjoyed reading through my diary. What a baddie I used to be with money, for sure, but things are very different now. I think you will be able to get rid of your £6K quite steadily if you concentrate on just how much the small things add up. Every £1 saved is an extra £1 to chuck at it......every little bit really does help. If you save £5 on cleaning products or household stuff like toothpaste & shampoo because you found the ones you like in a pound shop for less than you usually pay, then that saving can be an additional debt payment. Once you're doing this as a matter of habit, it is really noticeable how the figures go down.
Mr F & I have found a balance. We do have treats, & because we don't have them all the time these days, we both agree that we enjoy & appreciate them much more. Four takeaways or so a year instead of at least one a week, booking a holiday cottage every other year (which we save to pay for) rather than two a year whether we can afford them or not, enjoying a lunch out together in a more meaningful way than always nipping for a quick panini & fries because we haven't planned ahead & thought about taking our lunch to avoid wasting yet another £15 +. All these things are much more appreciated now because they do feel more like treats & less like bad habits.
We've also discovered that we LOVE camping....we did have a bit of outlay to start with to get the tent & essentials, but most of the other stuff, we sourced from home & it is SO cheap to take our tent off somewhere lovely, compared to always renting a cottage. We still go to gigs, to the opera, have day trips, shopping trips, etc, the difference is that now we budget for things. Our lifestyle is not at all spartan & 'hair shirt', but it is 'cut according to our cloth' in terms of what we can afford.
Best of luck with paying down your debt. It will feel amazing when it's gone.
F x

foxgloves

CCL - I was touched that you have such faith in my budgeting skills! I'd have loved it if I'd found that £91 & it was 'real' & ours to spend, but it wasn't to be.
Never mind, I'd always rather know what the error is where money is concerned. I had m y head in the sand for decades where my finances were concerned, but now I am all for transparency & being able to account for every quid!
F x

Blackcats

Glad the money mystery is solved. I have my version of a bullet journal - I have a section for money things (accounts that have a maturity date so that the lovely banks don't automatically transfer my savings from a 2% rate to a 0.000001% rate on maturity) I also have a page a month - each month has a motivational quote to set the tone, then I list goals, de-cluttered items (fun to look back on at the end of a year) and then planned and actual budget figures for my various categories which is also good to look back on.
I make it pretty with different coloured pens and the occasional sticker or cut out picture. I've also pinched simple drawings for each month - I'm no artist but I copied some tulips for March and an Easter design for April etc.
It's very personal and fun, but it definitely wouldn't pass muster with serious bullet journal officianados.

Ps -i think you would be proud of me. I needed paper clips. There were 2 choices - plain silver or pretty, pretty coloured ones for twice the price. Ok that was only an extra £1 but as someone on these boards says "the pound I don't spend today is a pound I don't have to earn tomorrow". Guess what? The silver paper clips do exactly what they are designed to do and I've still got that £ rather than giving it to the shop. I think there's hope for me!

foxgloves

There certainly is, Blackcats... ...... especially as I believe that naughty plastic cactus is still in the shop, where it needs to stay?
I used colours in my old bullet journal, but the only drawing was some wobbly holly around the top of my Christmas Planning pages. Have always been a creative type in terms of crafting, but can't draw at all..... except for holly & small cats..... but back view only so as to avoid having to draw faces!
F

foxgloves

Morning Non-Spendy People,
Just having five minutes on my backside with a coffee before pegging out laundry - a bit of a laundry mountain, actually, following a lovely family weekend with guests staying. They're now on their long drive home & we've just about got spare beds stripped & put away and all those sort of jobs. Tired too, as Cat took a very dim view of there being a nephew in both of the rooms he likes to kip in, & decided to stage a yowling protest outside our bedroom door at 1.45am. Rather than have him wake our guests, we let him into our room, where despite being moved four times, he managed to sleep smack in the middle of the bed & purred his head off all night!
Starting today, we are entering a strange situation on the domestic front........ I have absolutely zero meal plans for the week ahead! This is deliberate. I knew we would have lots of random leftovers from the last couple of days which would coincide with quite a bit of home grown garden produce & a full freezer, so we are intending a full-on 'Use-it-up' week. For today's lunch, we will eat up the leftover sandwiches from yesterday's family picnic. And in the spirit of this anti-food waste drive, I shall do my duty by drinking the leftover cava...... how that got past my sis last night is anybody's guess!
But given that I'm £91 down on what I thought I had left in our budget, our 'Use-it-up' week is also going to be very useful on the financial front.
OK, time to get next load of laundry on. Then I might sit in the sunshine with the big Christmas pressie I've started knitting.
Or I could use up the leftover biscuits maybe?
F xx

Blackcats

Using up cava and leftover biscuits sounds like a very necessary chore. Cats are such so and so's aren't they. Disrupt their routine at your peril. And middle of the night purring seems to be at a much higher volume than middle of the day purring. If mine come into the bedroom at night they also indulge in the most thorough washing regime imaginable.
Glad you had a nice weekend.

Kantankrus_Mare

Inspired by Foxgloves decluttering, I went into my loft with my daughter to start on the clear out. :eek:

We have been in this house for 26 years and as I am loathe to throw anything out that might come in useful for someone else, I tend to stick anything no longer used in the loft. I say every year I will have a car boot sale but it never happens.

So anyway.....we went through the mounds of clothes as a starting point. Any that had been barely worn or in good condition, I put aside for said car boot sale. (I WILL have one before the summer is out) The rest I bagged up as I had seen a shop nearby that pays 55p per kilo for old clothes. We ended up with seven huge bin bags. :eek::eek:

I took said bin bags to shop today and almost wish I hadnt bothered. There was a young foreign girl in shop who looked as miserable as sin and pointed at her tin.....waving her arms about saying (no money no money!!) She even opened the till to show me.
She had twenty pounds and some oddments in there. Did I have change? I told her I did.

She then proceeded to take each item out of bags giving it the once over and rejected a fair few items. Silly me for assuming she would just weigh the bags and I would be away with a little cash for my efforts. :rotfl:

I was determined to be rid of this pile of "no good to me " clothes so sat myself on the settee nearby and waited patiently. She didnt speak one word of English at all and half way through checking my bags she phoned someone and had a heated discussion. I think it was Polish. Anyhow she got faster through the bags and finally wrote the weight down. She got out her calculator and worked out a figure of £14.85. I showed her my purse saying I hadnt got enough change so she shrugged her shoulders and gave me £20!!

What a carry on :rotfl: What is the point of having a shop with no money and someone who cant speak English?

I did wonder if it was all a con to pay the customer less than what stuff was actually worth but I was happy with £20 rather than just dumping it in landfill.

So now have a pile of clothes/books/bric a brac/bags in loft to take to car boot. The plan is this Saturday!!

There are a few things worth more than what I could get at car boot so will look at Shpock.

Ive made a start anyway

foxgloves

Blackcats - Oh yes, they are absolute b*ggers for the drama queen nocturnal washing sessions. You just convince yourself that they will be well-behaved if they are allowed on the bed & you then spend two hours rocking up & down while they have the slurpiest of power washes. Only when you are well & truly wide awake do they tone it down & go to sleep themselves, which is how they remain until the alarm goes off when it immediately becomes all about their breakfast & you are pestered for stinky meat before you've even got your pants on.
F

foxgloves

Kantankrus - Well done on the decluttering - Sounds like you've set about it in truly awesome style. Agree about the poor customer service, though. It always winds me up.......though I suppose you did get the extra money with the young woman not having any change. I remember going into a local indie mobile phone accessories shop. It's in a little arcade of indie shops where the owners are always complaining that nobody walks through the arcade so they don't get much custom. I needed a new mobile case, so made a point of visiting this shop. The guy behind the counter was on his phone. He nodded vaguely in my general direction when I entered but then remained on his phone having a long conversation with someone (it didn't sound urgent, but wasn't in a language I understood, so I'd have no way of knowing). I looked around but couldn't find the right size of case for my make of phone, so I stood waiting for him to finish his conversation & actually give me, the customer, some attention. He didn't look at me again & didn't stop talking down his phone the whole time! In the end, I said, "I'm so sorry, I was wrongly under the impression that this was a shop" & stomped out. I haven't been back. Every time I go past, it's empty. I'm not surprised if this is the level of interest the staff have in selling stuff to customers!
Re storing stuff away in case it's useful.......I do that too, but you do get to the point where you have to make a decision. Sometimes it works....I popped a 'new' cushion on an armchair the other day which I'd not used for ages. It had been stored in the back of the linen cupboard in case I wanted it again & it has given me a tiny bit of a new look without spending a single penny. However, sometimes, stuff just sits there for years & really, I feel we could have made a better decision about it at the outset. For instance, I broke the laundry basket last week. I'd just lugged the laundry outside for the third time to peg it out, only to keep having to bring it back in because of rain & I chucked the empty basket on the lawn in a fit of temper. It already had a slight crack in it, but my tantrum smashed it up good & proper so that it couldn't be carried properly. My first plan was that I'd buy a new one, which would have been a bit of an annoying self-inflicted spend, but we were actually able to shop that from home, because we had 2 big nearly new plastic trugs among our camping gear - we decided only to take the smaller one on future trips to make a bit more space in the car, so the bigger one, which is a lovely cheery canary yellow has now been assigned a new role as a laundry basket. The old one is, of course, a non-recyclable plastic. Neither of us really wanted to send it to landfill, so it turned into one of those items we tend to store for ages 'just in case'. I said I might use it for growing lettuces, then decided I probably wouldn't as I have plenty of vegetable beds, troughs & pots. Mr F said he'd have it & would use it for his first early potatoes. It's a big basket & I had visions of it sitting taking up space in the shed we've both been working so hard at clearing this year. I said "Ok, but how likely is that actually to happen? Are you saying that you'll definitely be using this to grow potatoes next spring?' He said he didn't know whether he would or not, so I'm afraid into the wheelie bin it went. At least with shopping the new one from home, I didn't have to buy another big lump of plastic.
I re-use & re-purpose so many things, but like you, I do think there needs to be a balance, or we store simply loads of stuff & it eventually turns into another great big decluttering job.
I've never taken clothing to one of these places where they pay per kilo, but one of my friends, who dresses really nicely, took some of her old clothes & stuff she'd finished with & they pulled it all out, inspected it & refused to pay for some garments she said were actually quite nice & not in bad condition. I assumed they would buy anything & sell the tattier stuff for rag, but obviously not.
I did smile though, when you got that £20 note after all because there wasn't any change!
F x