Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

'Ey up Campers,
Well, I've just had a look at the cabbage bowl & despite its intensive spa day session yesterday afternoon, it doesn't seem to be doing anything. Not to worry, another few days to go yet & that's a minimum, so I shall continue to observe & give it the occasional encouraging stir.
I've done my weekly cleaning today.....I'm not a great lover of cleaning - is anyone? (Apart from my Nana who loved it) so I have a good 'go' once a week, then in between, it's just a bit of maintenance like wiping the surfaces, hob, etc, & sweeping the kitchen floor. I will get the Dyson out if things are looking gribbly, but overall, I find that if I keep well on top of tidying (you know my 30-second rule......), the place generally looks fine.
Today's garden pickings: Spinach, sorrel, grapes, coriander, jalopenos & the last 3.5 lbs of tomatoes. All this rain won't do the old plants any good now, so I decided to pick them all & the green & yellow ones can ripen in the conservatory on a tray. I like to think about meal plans on Thursday, so had a bit of a trawl through the fridge to see what needed using. Rounded up random leftovers for my lunch, & used the last of some turkey in Mr F's packed lunch for tomorrow. Half a pot of prehistoric yoghurt used to make a batch of garlic flatbreads (before it actually walked to the bin on its own). They're smelling very fragrant under their tea towel to keep them warm as I'm serving some with tonight's dhal. I've tried a different recipe for this one, so I'm hoping it will be nice. It required 200g spinach, which was why I put it on the menu this week, as I noticed our home grown spinach needed cutting again.......somewhat amazingly, as I scalped it last time & thought that'd be the end of it, but no......Perpetual Spinach is aptly named. It likes to grow! I was a tidsy bit short of the full amount needed, but the sorrel in my herb bed had also produced a new burst of leaves so made up the amount with those.
No spending at all today, as I haven't been out & I'm not really that tempted by online shopping, as I love to look properly at what I'm buying. It's my monthly Big Budget Day tomorrow & I still have £10 of this month's Personal Spends left. Go me! Back in the day, any money in my purse simply shouted 'Spend me, spend me, you know you want to.....' until I did.......as well as more from my overdraft & the awful loan account I used to have back then.
Hope everyone' had a decent day.
F xx

HairyHandofDartmoor

What a good feeling to have some money left over and not feel compelled to spend it .

foxgloves

HHoD - I know! I honestly couldn't be more different with money now, than I used to be pre-LBM. I used to moan all the time back then that I didn't earn enough to save, but that was complete rubbish! I didn't save because I spent everything I earned within about two & a half weeks of payday, then spent the rest of the month carrying on exactly the same, but using the bank's money instead. Back in my 20s, I used to receive Christmas money from my parents & Grandparents, which would add up to a decent wodge of cash. Well, as soon as the sales started, which was around Dec 27th or 28th back then, off to the city centre I'd go & I'd spend all of it in one go. My old Nana who was very frugal, having grown up with very little, just couldn't believe I never saved any, & that I could blow so much all at once, but I just thought that was old fashioned & tight. My Nan & Grandad were in low-paid jobs, but when they married in the 1930s, amazingly they were able to BUY a house! I didn't know this until much, much later when I asked Nana why there were no photos of their wedding. She replied that she didn't want to waste money on a photographer or any silly unnecessary things because every single penny was saved towards that house. I certainly remember her being very frugal. If I laughed at her money saving ways, she used to say 'Yes, well you're lucky you haven't lived through the times I'VE lived through'. If she'd known about my debt habit, she'd have been horrified!
F

Dottles1

I bet she'd be impressed with you now though Foxglove

Onebrokelady

foxgloves wrote: »

P. S You see..... you are another person who remembers Russian Slice! It was quite popular in the bakers shop where I worked. This may partly have been because they were quite big!

Yep I think size is possibly what attracted me, plus for some reason it always tasted like it had alcohol in it for some reason 😀

Onebrokelady

foxgloves wrote: »

Hello OBL,
Nice to see you back! I am just the same with reading. I love to have a big pile of books at hand so I know I shan't run out of stuff to read. I've just finished one this afternoon.....a novel called 'The doll maker' - a strange story - I suppose really it's about two eccentric & rather damaged people coming together through a shared obsession, but it is told partly through their letters to one another & also by sort of parallel-themed modern folk tales. Next book on my pile is a novel called 'The half sister', which sounds good. I hope it is. I also like audio books & am currently listening to 'Tombland' which is a big chunky novel in a Tudor crime series. I like the Scandi crime genre too.
F x

I've just googled and read some preview pages of The Doll Maker and it seems like my kind of book,I love books like this but will read almost anything, my last favourite trilogy was the book series that begins with The Bear And The Nightingale then I thinks it's The Girl In The Tower and Winter Of The Witch,it's set in Russia and is a proper folk tale,I absolutely loved it:)

foxgloves

Hi OBL,
Oh well you might like it then. It was certainly good writing, just a strange story. I'm reading one called 'The half sister' now, which I think will turn out to be about families with secrets. I like a good run at a book when I first start reading it, so I can really get into the characters, style of writing, etc, so I think I'll try & get a few chapters read later on - Mr F is late home tonight, so I shall be eating later & may as well use that extra little bit of time. I will read most things, but am not really into fantasy. 'The Doll maker' isn't fantasy - I think I'd put it towards the 'magic realism' type of genre.
F x

foxgloves

Hello Diary Readers,
Well, I've successfully carried out my monthly Big Budget Day today & am pleased to report that a) I'm still in one piece & b) We're still solvent. I've also taken the opportunity to tackle an annoying admin job which I've been putting off for nearly a year & to have a damn good filing session.
While I've been doing that, for some reason I suddenly remembered a couple I used to know ages ago, when I was about 4 or 5 years into The Spendy Decades. I don't want to give too much detail, but the context in which they popped into my head was very much budget-based & probably to do with the fact that I'd been engaged in caffiene-fuelled number-crunching for a solid couple of hours.
You see, these people were absolutely hopeless with money. They had both received an expensive education & came from affluent families, but it was plainly obvious from all the unofficial bits of cash borrowing from friends & acquaintances, etc, that financially, this was a chaotic approach. When a stroke of luck led to them coming into a significant sum of money (which would be a life-changing amount for me & Mr F, because I'm not talking about a few thousand quid here), they had spent it before it had even been through the legal process of arriving in their bank accounts. I lost contact with them, but heard from a mutual acquaintance a few years later that they'd had their home re-possessed, their 3 children were now in local schools as their school fees had not been paid & it had all gone from bad to worse. Another mutual friend who had been closer to this family than I was, but had also lost contact with them (they moved to a different city) & I used to discuss this at length......how could two such well-educated people be so stupid with money, how could they burn through such an enormous sum so quickly........well, I'm sure you can imagine all the questions we were chewing over, as it kind of all seemed so very avoidable.
Not once, not ONCE in all the conversations I had in the following few years with friends who also knew this couple, did it EVER occur to me that my financial attitude was actually pretty much the same as theirs - the only difference in truth was that my own situation involved much smaller sums. Everything else.....never having a budget, failing constantly to live within my means, spending on impulse, frittering on 'easy wins' because I hadn't bothered planning things like packed lunches, shopping lists......or simply because things like a few magazines, a nice couple of bars of chocolate, a new make-up item or something to wear, etc, never seemed like big indulgences. They're not - the only problem with this kind of spending is that it all adds up. You've only got to blow £50 four times (& that is very easy to do) & that's £200 you won't see again - Do it ten times & that is an amount it's bloody difficult to claw back the next month. I wonder what happened to that couple. Maybe one of them had an amazing LBM & they are now reformed characters, I don't know. It just occurred to me this morning when I suddenly thought of them for the first time in ages, that I must have been well & truly in denial not to have seen even a spark of similarity between their attitude to money & my own. I thought they were hugely financially irresponsible & that they were a classic case of that old saying about 'living a champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget'. I have not come from their upper middle class affluent background, so in my case, I'd have to say a 'Waitrose Lemonade lifestyle on a yellow sticker Panda pops budget' but you get my drift, I'm sure. Despite the differences in actual income & amounts, I think it occurred to me for the first time today that for all the yardage of gossip my friends & I got out of discussing this, in my case, there was a distinct element of the pot calling the kettle black!'
Funny, isn't it, how past memories suddenly pop into your head?
F (fully reformed)
xx

HairyHandofDartmoor

Dottles1 wrote: »

I bet she'd be impressed with you now though Foxglove

I agree that your Nan would be very impressed with the new frugal Foxgloves .

HairyHandofDartmoor

That spendy couple you were reminiscing about are certainly a living life lesson :eek:.


They remind me of a relative who sold a house many years ago, frittered away the money over a number of years, bought another house more recently with a big mortgage, built up big debts and remortgaged to consolidate, but is still having money problems. All down to what appears to be compulsive spending. Another life lesson for the people around them :eek:.