Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Blackcats

I share your pain about so called cheap wrapping paper 🤬.  I had a beautifully square, easy present to wrap - but every corner ripped and drove me to distraction.  

The blanket sounds lovely - it's nice to be able to start and finish a single square in one sitting.  The colours will be pretty too.  I made a throw a while ago with soft heathery colours and a variety of designs for each square but it wasn't planned out like yours - some squares were simply stripes or checks rather than stitching designs but I really like it.  In fact I'm snuggled up under it right now.  

Pixiehouse55

foxgloves said:

Pixiehouse55 - I love gammon with parsley sauce. I tend to buy a ham hock because they are so cheap, then just give it 8 hours in my slow cooker. I save some of the cooking liquid which sets to a jellied stock & it gives a good flavour boost when making lentil soups & gravy. 
What are you knitting at the moment? 
F x

Hi MrsF I am knitting a jumper for my nieces little boy, they are very much old fashioned the way they are bringing their son up. No electronic games. They have a very old TV so when we brought our new one we gave them our old smart TV. Joseph loves sitting and watching peppa pig!! They are very strict with him, that may change he is 3 next month. Last year we brought him new clothes and a wooden garage which he loves bless him, he doesn't get new toys or clothes.
The ham joint was a bargain for a fiver and it was huge!! Another meal tomorrow out of it, sandwiches for Sylvia's lunch box( our lady that lives with us) and possible a few more meals/sandwiches. Cooking is much easier with Sylvia she eats anything apart from "chewy meat and not curry Wendy"  lol John is the fussy one. I sat and done my knitting today as my back knees and feet were playing up.. I'm very excited as I will be clearing my credit card this week when we get paid, then a small amount on the other one to clear then throw all spare cash at our mortgage 😊.  
Keep safe everyone. X 

foxgloves

Blackcats - I bet that blanket looks lovely. I love all those purpley, heathery shades. I did wonder about doing some multi-colour squares, but I have a stripy blanket I made a few years back for taking when we go off in our tent, so I decided to do each square on this current project a different colour - there are 10 shades (King Cole 'Forest' yarn which is made from all sorts including recycled PET bottles & old jumpers & knits up beautifully) - & the variation is provided by having assigned a different textured pattern to each square. I am using my Debbie Abrahams' book 'Blankets & throws to knit'. It contains lots of different blanket projects (there are some amazing ones including one with little stylised beach huts, some with beads, etc) but the very many charts provided for the various squares can be used to knit any number of variants, so I'm using 10 of these, some slightly adapted to put the same size moss stitch border around each one so that the finished item looks coherent. I am going to try & get some more of the yarn tomorrow in town, as I find this a product category which can go out of production fairly quickly. What a shame this will mean passing so close to the cake shop.......
F x

foxgloves

Oh that will be nice, Pixiehouse55. I don't think it does small children any harm at all to discover the joys of non-electronic games/toys before they become obsessed with screens. Your little family member has a lifetime ahead of him to get into the electronic side of things. We didn't even have a TV when I was growing up. I was bought a portable for Christmas when I was 16 & my parents never did have one. I used to watch TV at my friends' houses but it did feel odd being the only person at school without one. I used to moan to my Mum 'but everyone else has a telly'. She said I should 'enjoy being different then' & I should say we had a baby grand piano instead..........not really a route to go down if you wanted to avoid getting a pasting, so I never felt this was the sensible 'no-telly' explainer to go with! Can remember the hardest girl in my class (everyone including most of the lads were very wary of her) asking me if I'd seen something or other on TV & I said 'No, we don't have a telly'. Well, she looked at me & I wished I'd made something up, but then she said 'I wish we didn't. We just sit there in front of it every bloody night in our house & nobody talks to each other'. I've never forgotten that.
I had a work colleague a while back who used to moan about her son (he was about 9 or10) playing electronic games all the time. He had an X-box, a Playstation & a Wii. I said 'Well, you pay the electricity bill & you're the parent, so why don't you limit his screen time if you're worried about it? Her reply? 'Because it's easier not to'.  
I do wonder if the gaming generations will end up with osteoarthritis in their thumb joints like me....mine hasn't come from electronic gaming, but I'd rather not have it nevertheless!
F x

foxgloves

Oh my giddy trousers........today was my mid-month budget check-in day. And it has taken me the best part of a whole day. Grrrr. Never mind, it's done now.
Greetings diary readers,
I got off to a great start this morning - 2 loads of laundry, made bread, set up the new stand-mixer I bought during last lockdown but had remained in its box throughout building works & kitchen decorating, performed swift triage of the fridge & had a 'use-it-up' lunch rather than waste things. Then it was budget check-in time, which I put in my diary around the middle of each month just to make sure everything is on target, no nasty surprises, etc. The only nasty surprise was frankly how long it took me today because there was so much expenditure to reconcile from savings pots, especially the Presents Pot. And I managed to make an error which I didn't spot until I'd transferred a large sum of money over ready to pay off my 'just for points' credit card, so ended up having to transfer a bit of it back. The other brake on the proceedings was quite a few Christmas present orders also containing items from other budgets i.e House & garden and Personal Spends. Nothing about this was difficult, just fiddly & I felt I could disappear at any minute down a vortex of spinning scrap paper, each piece containing its own budget category of sums & notes to myself. But.......to every tedious task there can often be an upside, even just simply getting it done. I have been saving into our Present Pot all year & it was interesting that when I added everything up & needed to make a £488 transfer from it to our current account prior to paying off aforementioned credit card, I winced at the amount. But then I got this figure into perspective. I don't have much left to buy & with what Mr F is secretly spending on gifts for me, I think it is unlikely that we will overspend what was saved into the Presents Pot. We also have a lot of winter birthdays. This has been a whole trajectory for me & my financial reformation. Pre-LBM, I spent ridiculous amounts of money, none of it budgeted for, most of it belonging to the bank rather than to me & yes, I had YEARS of those horrible January statements/bills (followed by the even more vile February ones, of course, as we all know). After the LBM, I still used credit cards for Christmas presents but managed mostly to pay off the balances by the end of December. If I didn't quite make it, they would defo be gone by the end of January. Then I started our 6 savings piggies (envelope system), one of which was presents. The monthly amount I put in tended to cover birthdays & some Christmas presents, but not all of them. Under my more recent Savings Pots system, the Christmas Pot has fared much, much better. To be fair, we are now buying for fewer people, but the real change has been being realistic about the amount put away. I don't mind if I spend every penny of what I've squirrelled into that pot, as that's what it was saved for, but what I've well & truly learned about the practicalities of budgeting, is that if I spend MORE than I have in there, then the overspend will have to come from somewhere else. Back in the Spendy Years, I really did do enough 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' to last me a lifetime! So, I suppose I'm saying that yes, my mid-month budget check-in took much longer today than I'd have liked & I feel completely boggle-eyed, but I do think it was worth it to keep my system, which obviously works for us, correct & operational. 
D'you know what? I'm going to find some warm socks now, sink into the sofa & do b*gger all!!
Take care now,
F x

Honeysucklelou2

You have inspired me Foxgloves, to dig out my knitting needles and try to recall what my grandmother taught me! I had seen some King Cole multicoloured wool but had no idea it was recycled. 

foxgloves

Honeysucklelou2 - I always have a project on the go. King Cole is the yarn brand, so they make all different types & it isn't all recycled, but the variety I'm using for my blanket, which is called 'Forest' definitely is. Anyway, hope you soon get your needles clacking.
F x

Onebrokelady

Loving the sound of your blanket Foxgloves. I haven't done any knitting today but intend to crack on with some tomorrow. I do love that when January comes round I won't have that stressed out panicky feeling of the credit card bill dropping through the letter box or having to use my council tax free months to pay off the bill, it now goes into savings straight away.  I have bought three presents so far and that is as far as I've got,I really need to pull my finger out and get on with it but just can't find the motivation to spend my hard earned cash ,I do like to see it sitting in the bank 😂

foxgloves

That January feeling was so horrible, wasn't it, OBL? I was definitely one of those people who used Christmas as an excuse for my first quarter of the year finances being such a mess. Yet it is such a firm plank in the calendar each year. Even putting £20 a month away would have helped, & I could have afforded to save a lot more than that. Ahhh well, at least the light finally dawned, even though I was in my 40s by the time it did.
F x

Pixiehouse55

Hellooo everyone. Well bit of a lazy day here. Popped to the shops for a pot for my aloe Vera plant so it can come indoors. To the local farm for a tray of large eggs £7.50. And a small piece of extra strong mature cheese £2.90. That's my treat this month. Can't get the strong cheese that my dad used to get when I was little, it was so strong it was oily and would burn your gums/mouth. I came home got my old clothes on to start painting, picked up and sorted out the recycling bins and done my back in, so sat with telly on dosed up with painkillers and done my knitting. Tomorrow we MUST do up tax returns,  so behind this year,!!. Oh and the pot for the plant that I brought is too small!! Will have to go back and get the larger size!! 🙁.  Hope you've all had a good day.  Keep safe everyone.... psJ back in hospital, operation tomorrow. We think they re going to put a stent in now......l.fingers crossed. Poor man has hdenough now. Getting him down ... Good night  X