Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Onebrokelady

amber03 said:

Finally found this site on my phone as it's not working on my ipad anybody experiencing ipad problems. Also does anybody know if these posts have dates on them. Usually when I log on I just go to the posts from the date I last read. Know its early days but its driving me potty on my phone. Glad to be reading your posts again foxglove, have been reading your blog from the start over the last couple of weeks , will be fun trying to find out where I was upto.xx

I was having terrible issues viewing the forum on my iPad but was advised to turn it on its side to the landscape position and it now all work perfectly 😊

Onebrokelady

Sorry to hear about your leak Foxgloves, hopefully the storm will blow itself out sooner rather than later, my walk home from work was interesting this evening 🙀

foxgloves

Thanks, OBL. I checked the bucket first thing this morning & there was barely more than half a cup full of water in it, so I think it is just a case of needing a little bit of sealant up around the the joints in the top pinnacle of the roof. It doesn't leak in normal rain but yesterday's was a deluge followed by horizontal hailstones, so all bets were off!
F x

Onebrokelady

foxgloves said:

Thanks, OBL. I checked the bucket first thing this morning & there was barely more than half a cup full of water in it, so I think it is just a case of needing a little bit of sealant up around the the joints in the top pinnacle of the roof. It doesn't leak in normal rain but yesterday's was a deluge followed by horizontal hailstones, so all bets were off!
F x

Glad it's nothing too serious,I had a small leak in my roof one Christmas and I put a big plastic box under it with the intention of calling someone to fix whatever is wrong but it hasn't leaked since,it must have been the combination of the amount of rain and the direction it was going in,every time we have a storm or lots of rain I check the box but it's bone dry

The weather is playing with me today because every time I decide to go and do something outside it rains then every time I sit down with a cuppa the sun comes out,I'm taking my next cup of tea out to the chicken shed to see if that confuses things 😀

foxgloves

Hello Snowflakes,
As I type this sitting up at my old desk in 'Foxgloves HQ', it is absolutely chucking it down with snow. It was only supposed to be occasional rain & hail according to the forecast, but the cars on our street are already covered & the lawn is slowly turning white. Cat has just been out in it & then made his way straight to Mr F's pile of clean clothes on the bed, where he is busily drying off his wet fur. 
Monday morning is always Weekly Budget Update time for me. I don't want to faff around with receipts, sums &moving money around over the weekend unless it's absolutely necessary, but first thing on Monday, I like to get my accounts straight. I think it gives me a feeling of confidence that our main monthly budget is where it should be & nothing is getting away from me. This morning's sessions was quite straightforward. I updated my grocery budget tracker, paid a number of transactions off our 'Just for points' credit card & moved two sums of money from Savings Pots to our current account. One was the balance of a new pair of jeans Mr F had on Saturday (we part-paid in vouchers) so that was transferred from the Clothing Pot & the other was the £35 annual payment to the council for this year's garden waste bin collection so that was transferred from the House & Garden Pot. While doing that, I decided it makes far more sense for that to be on my regular Outgoings spreadsheet as an annual payment for February, so I've popped it on there now, ready for next year's renewal.
I've been discussing Savings Pots on a couple of other Diaries & it's been making me think about the subject generally. I used to operate 6 as cash envelopes but now have 10 & they are virtual pots, so all the money is in a lump sum in our current account savings account, but the amounts in each of the individual pots are accounted for on a spreadsheet. It is a very simple system. The only thing that can muck it up is basically.........me! So one of the good things about sitting down properly on Monday morning & implementing any transfers to & from savings pots is that generally, I get on top of the process before I have a chance to forget. One of the most important things, of course, is to check that the total balance of funds in the 'Pots' savings account matches the total balance of the 10 pots listed on the spreadsheet. I like this system. It works for me. It works for Mr F too, as if he starts making "We could do with a new........whatever-it-is" noises, I can show him the available funds in that Savings Pot category. He is definitely having new TV, cimema-type gubbins this year & that money is all stashed in the 'Tech Replacement' Pot ready for when he sees a good deal. The other day when he started talking about a new bookcase, I was able to say that I didn't think there was enough spare money in the House & Garden Pot because of all the finishing touches we will need following building work, but that as the 'Tech Replacement Pot' was quite flush atm, I could transfer some? Well, let's just say he suddenly wasn't quite so keen on sourcing new bookcases!
Well, the snow has lessened a little, but is still coming down. I'm just waiting for my chicken stock to be finished, then I'm off to get on with making a big pan of chicken chilli. Planning a cosy fireside evening reading my current book (library - a Swedish crime series) & maybe some knitting. Oh......& must try not to freak out about the fact that we have a builder coming over tomorrow night to discuss our options for the work we need doing. Exciting, but also scary, as we have absolutely not the first idea of how much it is all likely to cost. Must try not to overthink it before I have the necessary information.
Stay warm all of you,
F x

PurpleFairy26

Sounds like a productive day @foxgloves😀 do you have a recipe link to your chicken chilli - sounds right up our street. 

Glad the leak was small. 

I find (generalising of course) if you want to knock things down it’s fairly reasonable. Cost come in if you need a steel (but again not as expensive as you might think) and if you want to replace bathrooms (which just seem eye wateringly expensive) however a loo on its own is cheapish. 

moving_forward

PurpleFairy26 said:

Sounds like a productive day @foxgloves😀 do you have a recipe link to your chicken chilli - sounds right up our street. 

I was wondering about chicken chilli myself *insert bulging eyes staring in at foxgloves window**

foxgloves

Thanks, Purple Fairy. We don't need a bathroom, thankfully. We had ours replaced a few years ago. We would like an additional loo removed & the tiny room fitted out with our washing machine, as there's only two of us & we don't really need two loos, esp as both of them are downstairs. Too long a saga for on here, but a previous owner of our house has done some very odd (& rubbish) alterations & we now need to deal with some of them. I think our damp wall is going to cost us money but it is a priority job.
Re chicken chilli. I don't have a link. It's actually a recipe for leftover turkey from the WI Christmas cookbook, but I sometimes make it with chicken. I've changed the recipe a bit too, as I like my version & it's more economical too. So no link, but I'll try & remember to ping it to you longhand. It freezes really well & makes 8 decent portions (we're quite oinky in our house, lol) 
F x

foxgloves

More thoughts about Savings Pots..... 
When I first started budgeting, I used to deduct our regular monthly bills, food etc from our starting balance on payday & just leave a generic chunk of money in the account for 'everything else'. We soon came to grief with this because we'd stock up on say bags of compost, plant food, seeds at the garden centre, smugly using this money, then we might replace a couple of household items & buy a birthday present & a few cards. But if one of us then needed say shoes or something, the chunk of money left in the account for 'everything else' would usually be gone with no meaningful accounting re what categories we spent it on. That's when I decided to try cash savings pots & our relatively new virtual pots are just an enhanced version of the same system.
Rather than seeing the amounts in each pot on the spreadsheet & thinking "Ooooh, £200 in the clothes pot, I'll have those tops", I find I'm much more likely to make a considered decision. Do I want those two tops? Well, yes, but do I want them enough to see the total money in that pot dwindle down to a smaller amount? Very often, I find myself deciding I'd rather keep the money.
So not like the old Spendy Decades at all, when two new tops & usually something to go with them too, would have won out every time!
F x

moving_forward

We use ynab to do our virtual pots. Still have the odd slip up but nowhere near as bad as when we just had a lump of money to spend without allocation. I do use spreadsheets for alot of things but i find ynab quick and easier to show mr M_F the "pots" We are trialling an increased personal allowance to include alcohol hair beauty and clothes spends but Mr M_F seems to think he can get away with no new clothes ever and wants to blow all his on tech. Early days so softly "encouraging" him to think about what clothes he may need in the next quarter.