Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Pixiehouse55

@foxgloves. Hellooooo we are still on dry land. No narrowboat yet. Brought a motor home to drive around the boat yards ready. Tuesday we will be giving 28 days notice on our people/job. Then we will have roughly 20 days to sale all our furniture etc that we won't be taking with us. All our craft stuff and furniture clothes etc will be going in storage till we've found our narrowboat. Not sure of the best way to sale everything in the house yet? Open house day maybe but only allowing a few at a time?any ideas anyone? 
It's harder to sale all my craft stash than I thought😒   
I need to find time to sit and read  what you are getting up to Mrs F!!  Immissing the chats with you all. Hopefully soon I will beback. Not even had time to write on our blog.. ok off I go again. Keep safe my lovelys  XX 

Tescodealqueen

Pixiehouse55 

It's harder to sale all my craft stash than I thought😒   

There is a craft declutter group on the book of f*ce though I fear it might take a while and possibly not fit in with your timescales. Good luck x

Deni_debt-free_dreamer

foxgloves said:

Has it stopped raining today even for a moment? I don't think so.....oh, I tell a lie - I think there was a two-minute window when I squeezed in the mini-glamour outing of trotting out to the wheelie bins!
Hello diary readers, it feels like the sort of day where nobody will have done anything exciting, so I'm wondering if any of you have bucked the trend? 

Morning foxgloves and friends
We did not have continuous rain here in the NW, yesterday, so I managed to almost fully dry some washing, plant up a tub and have a walk! 
The highlight of my day though was that i finally sorted through my cupboard of plastic tubs!!  I have taken out all the ones that didn't have lids so now i feel very organised and ready to stock up my freezer this autumn with HM soups, HM tomato/pasta sauce etc - cos i have the tubs and i'm gonna use them  

Deni x

Humdinger1

Deni

I can never decide which is more satisfying: making sure that every bottom has a top, as you describe; or organising my pants drawer.   If there's order in my pants drawer, there is order in my life....truly living the dream. 

foxgloves

Thanks for all your comments, which I enjoyed reading - I never know how many people read my diary, so it's lovely to check in & find I'm not just rambling away to myself!
@Tescodealqueen - making cards defo counts, as you had fun doing it.
@Humdinger1 - Yes, I used to achieve some very silly levels of fritterings on Sundays back in the Spendy Years. Thanks for using the words 'grounded reality' in relation to my diary.....I shall bear them in mind when I am thinking 'Do people REALLY want to hear about bloody courgettes AGAIN?'
@jadewest94 - I love my slow cooker. I used it yesterday for gammon & will be using it tomorrow for smoky black bean chilli. Good luck with your debt-free mission. My partner & I are both agreed that after a good few years debt-free, we are definitely not going that route again. There's nothing like the feeling of paying off that last payment & your income finally being your own.
@Pixiehouse55 - You are still a landlubber, not a pirate! I hope you can shift a bit more of your craft stash. Do you have enough to have a market stall? Well, if you have a local market, of course. I think ours charges around £18 for a stall but they are sometimes cheaper for new people. Ours has a few crafty stalls, so if there is anything similar near you, could attract crafty folk.
@Deni_debt-free_dreamer - Useful work! You are ready to go with an autumn freezer stock-up. I've been thinking about that too, as you'll see from today's post. 
F x

foxgloves

Morning Monday Money Savers, All keeping a hand on the pence? Feel really motivated today with our household economy. I always do budget updates on Monday morning & as Postie helpfully brought my credit card statement, I was able to get that sorted out too. It had a long list of transactions (used for points as I get ridiculously excited about vouchers, tragic creature that I am!) but all the payments already made over the past month from various budget strands, meant that the only outstanding payment was the princely sum of £9-49. Even better, I had budgeted for that £9-49 on my August budget. Honestly, WHY the flying u-know-what could I not have done this 2 decades earlier?? It's not as if it is rocket science, is it? Boiled down to basics, it is "If I earn X and all my bills come to Y, then X minus Y is the amount I have left to spend on everything else". How can I be brainy enough to have achieved a Masters degree yet failed to grasp the necessity of this? I suppose I was too busy making excuses for my lack of funds, even while frittering them away. 
Anyway, enough of the self-flagellation. Today's findings go hand in hand 1) Grocery budget will need reigning in for the remaining 2 weeks because we did that big A*di pantry stock-up. 2) We have stacks of food in. The freezer is very full & I badly need to free up space for all the batch cooking/freezing I'm going to be doing to make the use of our garden produce. So I got ahead of myself today by doing a meal plan for w/b 14th Aug (our meal planning weeks always start on Saturday). I've prioritised stuff from the freezer & even counted how many containers will thus be coming out - 8, plus some prawns! I've also included plenty of our home grown veg too & have started a plan of what I am going to make with the gluts, starting with tomatoes. I'm going to have quite a tomatoey afternoon - am going to prep the 600g required for tomorrow's chilli, put aside what I need for this week's salads, then roast a big trayful with garlic, basil, a drizzle each of oil & my home made blackberry vinegar, etc, to zizz up for pasta sauce. I can leave a portion out for the pasta bake I'm doing on Wednesday & the rest can be frozen. I've just taken out some soup out for my lunch to have more chance of fitting them in. 
B-in-L's Christmas socks are coming along nicely. So straightforward to make with self-patterning sock yarn as the colours do all the work with no effort. Shall be halfway along the foot by tonight all being well. So many projects stacking up.
Right, self-fortification has taken place (through the trusted medium of caffeine) so I think I had better just pop out & see if any more tomatoes need picking before I start assigning large piles of them to various jobs.
Hope everyone manages to get off to a decent start today. 
F xx

BlueJ94

@foxgloves I honestly couldn't agree more! I'm more focused than I've ever been to pay off this debt. I just want it gone and dusted. We want to buy our own house eventually so that will be the next mission! Oh smoky chilli sounds lovely! I run out of ideas on what to make so I just don't end up using it

Humdinger1

@foxgloves you're most welcome! It is no more than the truth.  As for self-flagellation, surely that's got to be better than calling in outside help?! Seriously though, the reason so many of us overspent is because of slick, professional, relentless  pressure from sinister, vested interests with almost limitless budgets devoted to persuading us that reality isn't good enough; that we can never be happy or good enough until we have it all.  That's impossible of course; as I once read in  a book about practices in the City, you never really get rich; you only attain new levels of comparative poverty.  I think what many of us are finding is that some boundaries help us achieve real freedom, no? Love Humdinger xx

Pixiehouse55

Tescodealqueen said:

Pixiehouse55 

It's harder to sale all my craft stash than I thought😒   

There is a craft declutter group on the book of f*ce though I fear it might take a while and possibly not fit in with your timescales. Good luck x

Hi
I have my own page on F***b**k and yes I've put stuff on other craft groups on there..  Hopefully it will all be gone by the end of September 🤞 
Thank you for mentioning the group x

foxgloves

@jadewest94 - You are doing exactly the right thing getting rid of your debts before looking at taking on a mortgage. Most lenders ask about financial commitments inc. debts & deduct the amount of consumer debt from the amount they are prepared to lend you, as we found out when we bought this place. Although our combined debts were around £15K less at the time than they eventually became, this amount was deducted from the maximum amount they would otherwise have lent us. It wasn't a problem because we didn't need such a big mortgage anyway, but it did flag up that they do look at the wider picture re existing financial commitments. Good luck with getting rid of it. You do sound very focused.
F