Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves · 23 April 2021 at 5:14PM

Oh... forgot to tell you about today's bargain.... C*-*p were selling off salted caramel 'Nak' *d' bars (a couple of days past their bb date) for 8p each. Bargainmongous!
F x

HairyHandofDartmoor · 24 April 2021 at 4:02PM

Your bedroom will look lovely now it's been painted and with your new bedroom furniture. What colour did you go for? A new front courtyard will be good as it's something you see every time you arrive home from somewhere. Imagine if you'd had this home impovement money years ago,what might you wasted it on? You're being incredibly sensible with it now.

The saga with the storage boxes made me laugh as my DH would have done exactly the same thing 😂 .

Have a lovely weekend.

foxgloves · 24 April 2021 at 4:49PM

@HairyHandofDartmoor - Hi.... yes, if I had come into that sum of money earlier, during the Spendy Era, I think it would have been very different. I would still have paid off the mortgage but a chunk of it would have gone on clearing debts. I would have put some in savings, but because I was still deeply unreformed back them & never bothered budgeting, I wpuld have kept dipping in to consolidate because I was still so stupidly spendy. It doesn't bear thinking about, really, how much I probably would have wasted. Refurbishing our house & saving do seem the most sensible things to do. Our house is a home first & foremost, but is also an asset we want to get into good order.
Re colour.... I chose 'Rocksalt' for the walls throughout - a very very pale grey. The skirtings are white & the doors natural pale stained wood with new silver handles. The only other colour will be a greeny shade on the lounge chimney breast.
F x

foxgloves · 24 April 2021 at 5:09PM

Hello Sunny Savers,
More of the same today... prepping for carpet fitter, another tip run & gardening.
Edible stuff currently as follows:
Tomatoes, cukes, aubergines, peppers & chillies. All growing on in pots waiting till it's time for their final place.
Courgettes - Sown in modules. 1st one germinated today.
Squash - 2 sown only as have done 4 types of courgette.
Lettuce - A few ready for potting into modules, main variety seedling stage
Radishes - sown outdoors as usual but checked by big frosts. May re-sow.
Chard - potted into modules. The rest will be eaten as baby salad leaves.
French beans - will sow next week.
Sweetcorn - ditto
Spring onions - two types sown
Rocket - first sowing done
Other salad leaves - will sow as & when.
Basil - needs potting up into modules.
Coriander - sown, not yet germinated
Rhubarb - i forced one plant for spring stems, the other plant needs a good pick as growing really well.
Pear tree - covered in blossom but the frosts may mean a reduction in fruit setting. Will have to see.
Old apple tree - flowers late so no blosson yet. Not expecting much of a crop as had such a big one last year. We'll see.
Mr F's thornless blackberry - triffid
Herb bed -have added autumn-sown parsley plants & dug about 2/3 of it over, so must get that finished. Already cut a bunch of sorrel for soup.
Will be hardening off biggest bedding plants from next week.
It is worth all the work to have the enjoyment of strolling down with my basket in summer & seeing what's reafy for picking.
F x

foxgloves · 25 April 2021 at 3:47PM

Hello m'dears,
I've finished all my tasks for today. Dinner is in the slow cooker. I'm just waiting for my loaf to finish baking so am popping on to chat for 5 mins.
I've been weeding & top dressing the mint this afternoon, which is planted in an old lorry tyre left behind by Previous Owner. It was arguably the most useful thing amongst the rubbish she left behind as I've had something planted in it down in the veggie garden ever since.
Previous Owner also left us another legacy. She must have had a large amount of unpaid debt when she moved, as I was chased for this for around two years, including approaches from debt collectors, complicated communications with utility providers, etc. She owed a lot of money to an energy provider so didn't inform them she was moving.
I was thinking about this as I was sorting out my nice mint bed in her old lorry tyre & something occurred to me....... Why, when this situation gave me a good insight into the world of debt collection agencies, complex debt-induced problems with utility providers, did I not have my LBM then? I remember thinking this woman had been really irresponsible with money. Yet hadn't we been behaving similarly? Both of us clearly spending too much on credit, the only difference being that I could always meet my repayments. With hindsight, I can't see why an LBM was not triggered then. It was another 7 years before that light finally pinged on, though. Crazy!
Time to check on the bread.
F x

Sun_Addict · 25 April 2021 at 6:35PM

We were also pursued by previous owner debt collecting agencies when we first moved into our house. Took a while to convince them it had nothing to do with us. We bought our house as a repossession in the 1990s. The legacy we were left is our lovely pond.

foxgloves · 25 April 2021 at 8:31PM

Well at least your pond was a nice legacy @Sun_Addict. The previous owner here just left us lots of rubbish. We had to hire a skip at our own expense during our 1st week to help us get rid of it.
It was the same for us with the debt letters. I'd spend ages waiting on the phone during my lunch break, calling to tell debt agencies yet again that I wasn't the person they were looking for & still they kept sending letters 'just in case she turns up'. Why would she? She no longer owned the house. I knew her surname, the 3 first names she used & the county to which she was reportedly moving, so I just told them that in the hope they would stop pestering me, which they eventually did after a couple of years.
F

foxgloves · 26 April 2021 at 9:51AM

Morning Monday Frugalistas!
Off to a good start. Carpet fitters arrived on time & judging by all the bangs & sawing (sawing?) going on upstairs, are making good inroads into the bedroom. I've got laundry load on, to make the most of another good free drying day & have done my regular Monday morning budget update. Despite having some Easter treats & buying a few bits & pieces for my birthday this week, we have come in £10 under budget for April's groceries. I did allow a bit extra this month, though.
I have transferred the cost of yesterday's 4 bags of compost & box of fertiliser from our House & Garden savings pot to our current account prior to paying it off our 'just for points' credit card. This got me thinking about savings pots generally. I don't know how we ever managed without them......well, I do, I suppose we put things on credit cards (which were not paid off in full every month like they are now) or let our current account run down perilously low. This garden centre transaction came to £27-95. That's not a lot of money, but a similar house or garden-type transaction in another shop......say those storage boxes we bought recently, plus replacing say a broken piece of kitchen equipment, some supplies of brown parcel tape, a selection of seeds, a few other really hundrum purchases......well what I'm saying is that they all add up & with no savings pots standing by to take these sort of unplanned but generally fairly necessary expenses, there can soon be a situation where £100 - £200 has been spent that was completely unplanned.
Also, when we didn't have any savings pots, even when I had started some basic budgeting, I wasn't really aware of how much we were spending on different categories. If I needed 6 sacks of compost, new towels, a garden tool, whatever, I'd buy them. Once I'd established the initial 6 savings pots (now increased to10) & especially once a savings pots spreadsheet had been added into the mix, I could see how various purchases were impacting on the balance of each category & it does make me much more aware of the rise & fall of the amounts within.
Much as I love to have the security of 10 full savings pots, I am glad we had the discussion this January of what is a sensible definition of 'full' for each one. This has contributed to me being able to add additional money to our general savings, so was well worth doing.
I think I can hear the washing machine squeaking, so I shall go & peg it out in the sunshine. I am looking forward to a bit of early birthday baking this afternoon. We are meeting our best friends tomorrow in a lovely local-ish historic park for coffee, walk & a catch-up, so it will be nice to take some home baked cakes.
The hammering seems to have stopped......I don't know if that's a good or bad sign!
Wishing everyone a good start to the week,
F x