Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

PurpleFairy - They were pretty awful loans weren't they? Of course I thought mine was the most amazing thing......spare money on tap whenever I wanted it. I used to think of it as such a positive force for good in my life, but really, it contributed quite significantly to the delay in me finally realising it was time to change my bad habits. 
F x

foxgloves

Hello chilly (& quite possibly soggy) readers,
I say that because we have just had some horizontal sleet & now it has turned to massive rain. Just what we need with parts of the village & town already being flooded. Poor Mr F is on a late shift tonight & won't get home until 11pm. I've told him to keep an eye on the local news for additional road closures by then, as he is adamant that he wont be one of these d*ckheads who insists on trying to drive through badly flooded roads necessitating some other poor sod to come & rescue them!
It was quite bright this morning. I wasn't at all happy to find that despite paying out for a new roof, the shed is still leaking badly. Mr F is off tomorrow & given the likely saturation of anywhere we might have wanted to visit, we've decided simply to go into town for a coffee then to come home & have a look at where the water ingress is continuing to happen. We've got a few ideas for improvements. If it was just a wooden shed, we'd simply have had a new one, but it isn't. It's a large built one & so we'd rather patch it up if possible than have to pay for demolition, skip hire & a new one. So bah to continuing-to-leak-bloody-sheds!!
On the positive side, the sunshine this morning did encourage me out to the greenhouse to sow my aubergines & two types of peppers - now tucked up in my little heated propagator. While I was down there, I cut the last of the rocket & baby spinach which will do me a side salad tonight, pinched out my autumn-sown sweet peas & made the first inroads into my pre-Spring tidy-up. The rest of the day, I've been progressing a project upstairs in my HQ room. I'm just about to do my 'winter teatime jobs' now - drawing all the curtains, lighting the fire, putting handknitted/crocheted blankets ready by the sofa & putting cat's snuggly rug by the fireside. I'm intending to watch a film tonight - I've found one about L.S Lowry, so I'll see what that's like & I might watch another one of German crime drama I've been enjoying on 'Walter presents'. 
I do hope you are managing to stay dry & warm. My heart really does go out to all those who are rough sleeping in this stormy weather - honestly, the 5th richest country in the world yet the numbers of homeless people, including families & children are soaring. It does rather put a persistently leaking old 1960s shed into perspective.
Bye,
F x

PurpleFairy26

Hope weather is not too bad for Mr F when he returns home. Sounds like another productive day for you, enjoy your day with Mr F tomorrow 

Onebrokelady

I hope the flood waters stay away from Foxgloves HQ too,I've been watching it on the news and feel so sorry for the poor people who've been flooded
As for debt wracking up debt it's scarily easy how you can do it by just spending small amounts often,I had one big vet bill on my cards and the rest were just those little buys where you say "oh it's only a fiver or a tenner, that's not too bad " and before you know it your in trouble, what I can't get my head round is I have the same income now and slightly more expensive bills but I manage to save now but back then I never had any money spare,I lived in my overdraft until my wages paid it off,how I did I get into that mess when I must have had some money to start with,it's so frustrating that I didn't see it until it was too late

foxgloves

OBL - I know, I feel just the same. Apart from dropping down to one car shared between us (we used to have one each) when I took VR, we have noticed very little change in our lifestyle. That's good in one way, of course, but horrifying in another, as it pretty much seems to point to the fact that we were previously spending the equivalent of my salary on servicing debts & frittering. I was well into my 40s before the LBM struck. I know that's rather late in life to discover the concept of budgeting. But OBL, at least we HAVE changed. So many people are going to be dragging debt with them well into retirement. We mustn't beat ourselves up for past money squandering. It's done, we can't change it. We can make up for it now though by being extra squeaky clean on the frittering-avoidance front. You're so right about how those very frequent little £10 spends add up. £50 gone in no time. Do that 4 times & that's goodbye to £200. Multiply that by days, weeks, months, years...... not forgetting decades in my case, & it isn't hard to see why I 'never had any money for things like emergency savings'. 
We've been silly narnas but we know we won't do it again. 
F x

Onebrokelady

We certainly won't,I look at things now and find myself mentally tallying it up before I've even been tempted to buy anything,I had terrible trouble persuading myself to spend the money I saved up for Christmas,I just didnt want to use it especially when I could see that even though I had saved a tidy sum it would actually go that far,I've cut down my Christmas budget massively though now so I'm proud of myself for that
 I didn't learn to budget until I was 54 so at least you caught on before me 😂

foxgloves

Well I did, OBL but I was in debt from the age of 19 to 46 (& I'm not including the mortgage in that). It did take around three 'goes' before I got a budgeting system in place that worked for us, but once I did, I was up & away. My first system contained a really classic rookie error. I painstakingly included all our annual costs such as car tax, car servicing, as well as presents/Christmas, etc, & divided them by 12 for an accurate monthly amount, but I didn't actually physically put that money away each month, so of course it got spent, then I'd be surprised when it 'wasn't there' because I'd budgeted for it iyswim. I soon saw the fatal flaw in Budget Mark 1 & changed to having 6 Savings Piggies (cash envelopes). That worked pretty well & I could trust myself with the system, hence the fairly recent reboot to 10 virtual pots in a savings account, managed via a spreadsheet.
I have a tendency to over think & beat myself up, so I do try not to dwell on Big Nest Eggs Which Could Have Been. Mostly I just feel thankful that I chose to reform my silly Spendy ways when I did.
F x

foxgloves

Evening Cherubs, 
Well, I can't settle to anything atm. Spoke to builder this morning as he wanted to clarify something & he said we should hopefully receive the quote tonight. So that's all I can think about.
Mr F was off today as he was owed such a ton of time for yesterday's shift so we went into town this morning for coffee together, which was nice, & we also walked down to the river to see how far the flooding had reached. It's pretty bad. One of the downsides of living in an old & attractive town on a major floody river. Definitely not an NSD - I went to town looking to purchase specific things - but I did find two of them on offer, which knocked about £30 off, & amazingly found a lampshade I liked for just £4 😁. I'd been wanting a lamp in the conservatory but was able to shop a decent base from home, so that's definitely been a saving.
We've been down to the soggy shed this afternoon to try & ascertain why water is still ingressing despite new roof. It does appear to be coming in through a corner of wall & at the base. We moved some stuff up off the floor & swept a puddle out with a sort of squeedgie thing on a pole I bought back when I was spendy. I also took the opportunity to bag up 3 sacks of stuff for the bin. Mr F v reluctant to get rid of two pairs of ancient DMs (with holes in) that he wears for gardening, but when I found mould growing in one pair, he did say they could go. Hey..... (spots way forward with shed decluttering).... I could just sneak down there & paint a bit of yoghurt on, give it a couple of weeks before holding up furry item & saying 'You don't want this, do you?' You see, always thinking.
Credit card bill this morning. Much bigger than I expected, before I looked at the most recent transactions & realised I've paid most of those across from Savings Pots already, but that the payments won't appear till the next bill. It does, however, mean I can total up those recent payments & knock them off the amount I need to pay to clear the bill in full, as we like to do each month. 
Well, I must get the curtains closed & a few tea lights lit, but I shan't settle to anything properly until that quote pings into my inbox. Hope we don't need to wait till tomorrow.
Cheers all, 
F x

foxgloves

Hello Chilly readers,
Well, it's chilly here. An absolute wazz down this morning through to early afternoon with more stormy winds, but a few glimpses of actual sunshine this afternoon.....at this rate, cat might even be tempted to go outside! Anyway, I'm sure nobody comes on here for a weather forecast.
Have kept myself very busy today. Builder's quote did not arrive last night & has not put in an appearance so far today. I am trying to be patient as he phoned us yesterday to clarify whether we had done the research he suggested (we had) & did we still want him to quote for two possible courses of action or had we definitely decided on one or the other, so I know he is working on it. But I'm getting twitchy now because I'm a planner - we both are - & really want to be progressing all the control freakery aspects of the plans, both in terms of tasks we need to do before hand & managing the budget for all the work, which is very much my department. Well, I knew when I checked my emails first thing & nothing had arrived, that I'd be fighting the urge to pick my phone up & look every 5 mins, so I decided to keep busy instead.
So I've sorted all the clean laundry & done the ironing (not too much this week which suits me fine as it's one of my worst jobs), made some bread rolls, which are just on their 2nd proving, mixed up a sourdough loaf to bake tomorrow, made a good start on next week's meal plans, tidied up, done some surveys (there seem to have been quite a few on Prolific Academic lately) & hugely progressed an ongoing project up in Foxgloves HQ with the radio on. I've also made tomorrow's packed lunch & work snacks & done a bit of filing. I feel I've been quite productive on the whole. I've also been watching the progress of a holly tree in the garden.......a bit of a saga....but while still just about vertical, it has obviously been affected by the storm. I'm really hoping it doesn't come down as it will break a neighbour's fence if it does. Mr F assures me it will be OK & it isn't nearly as wobbly as I think it is (I think it is pretty wobbly) & we are due to have both it & another tree removed next week so it won't develop into a problem. Hmmm. I do hope not:
A real use-it-up meal tonight. I'm doing pasta with home made pesto (great basil crop last summer so I made loads & froze it), a couple of rashers of l/o bacon (shoved in freezer as I knew it'd come in useful) & a variety of chopped use-it-up veg......an onion, a soon-to-sprout clove of garlic, some chopped l/o pepper tops from the freezer & some bendy celery. With a bit of grated cheese on top - also from a chunk which needs using up - it will be a nice tasty meal from nothing all that special, although home made pesto is lovely, of course.
Anyway, I do ramble on, don't I? I'm going to take advantage of this lull in the rain to pop down to the greenhouse to cut a couple of lettuces.
You can tell I'm keeping busy, can't you? Ohhhhhhh, that bloody quote. Why doesn't it come? Then I can stop fretting about it & moaning......although it might be that the work we want done is going to cost so much money that I start off a whole new set of even bigger moans. Who'd be a control freak, lol? It does get the better of me sometimes.
Bye for now,
F xx

Blackcats

I hope the quote arrives soon and also hope that it is less than you have planned.
Whilst I didn't actually have a flex loan it would have  been just the sort of thing  I'd have really loved and absolutely abused.  What I used to do was get a loan, pay it off, get another loan, pay it off .....etc etc etc.  I remember when I started you needed to fill in a form and post it off.  Then you could apply over the phone and then on line.  In my old way of thinking this just made it so much quicker and more convenient.  I now feel slightly affronted that a flex loan would have saved me so much time and effort 😂  I never planned how much to ask for, I just estimated how much I'd be likely to be approved for.  I always gave the reason for loan as "home improvements" - that always seemed to work.  The reason was really to pay off credit card debt and fritter the rest.  

I did have a credit card that enabled you to write cheques so, of course I did that too 😱
There are a few of us on here that must have contributed massively to profits of the financial sector and retailer profits.