Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Blackcats

Humdinger, I didn't realise you could do a cash point dash - if I'd known I would definitely have been a medal winner in that sport.
I had some maroon clothes too - I had a tartan skirt - kind of heavy material, gathered so it emphasised the hips with a matching tartan shawl worn with a maroon blouse with a ruffled type bow collar, maroon tights and black patent flat pumps with a bow and a velvet headband 😵‍💫  I think I achieved the Sloane ranger meets bonnie prince Charlie look very well - if only such a look was ever a thing.  Thankfully no photographic evidence survives.  

CRANKY40

No Humdinger but I did very often pay by cheque because you could go shopping before payday and it wouldn't clear until after you'd been paid. 

We don't have a lot in the way of leftovers. There's only the HT and I and he doesn't like turkey so we have chicken. Whatever meat we don't use is parcelled up for another dinner or two and one of my favourite things which is chicken and stuffing sandwiches. Our christmas cake is the usual full sized recipe but I bake it in two loaf tins and give one to my best friend. I have been known to cut my cake in half and share again as well. 

 

foxgloves

@Humdinger1 - I like celeriac soup too. I intend to make more leek & potato soup this winter, so filling & velvety. My Grandma put her long life (95) down to "eating leeks every day" - none of us could recall her eating them regularly, but who knows?!

@Blackcats - No, I didn't know about the 'cashpoint dash' as mentioned by @Humdinger1 either, but you can be sure I too would have made use of it had I been in possession of this knowledge. I always say running is something I'd reserve for emergency situations, but I think the cashpoint dash could have got me into sprint mode quite effectively.....& made my financial situation even worse.

@CRANKY40 - Yes, I also used cheques for that purpose. Back in the 1980s, it wasn't at all unusual for someone to pack all their shopping into bags at the till, then write a cheque. Until bank/debit cards, that was the only way of paying other than cash, of course. It could be wangled quite well, as if it was possible to wait an extra day for whatever the purchase was, paying by cheque would, as you say, add a good 4 or 5 days on, as that was how long it took back then for a cheque to clear. Cheque books were potentially quite useful for accounting too, as there were the stubs to keep a record of what had been spent where.....although back in the deepest Spendy Era, of course I never bothered filling these in!

F

foxgloves

Morning Campers!
Hope this post finds you all bright & well, & importantly, avoiding the dreaded virus. I have decided I am sick of people saying they're 'sick of it'.......it is usually accompanied by a diatribe about masks eroding their freedom, not liking 'the rules', etc, etc. I want to ask 'Well do you think us mask wearers & rule followers are enjoying it? Do you not think we are equally sick of it? Do you think I get up every morning & think how fabulous it is to be in the midst of a global pandemic & all that that entails?' The difference, as I am sure I shall tell someone before too long, is that I want to play my part in reducing the risk of spreading it to others. So that is today's moan.....hastened I'm sure by the vote in parliament later, in which many people who need to be leading by example will vote against perceived incursions on their liberties. 
Felt quite lively when I got up so decided to see how many tasks I could do before coffee time at 10.15: Have done the ironing, made bread dough, dealt with today's post & emails, did my mid-month budget check-in (£70 astray, which was annoying, but as it is almost certainly presents expenditure which I forgot to transfer from the Presents Pot, I just did a transfer this morning, rather than spend ages trying to locate the exact error), washed my hair & have had a general tidy. 
Did anyone watch 'Panarama', about all these 'Buy now, pay later' firms which have sprung up in the last couple of years? It was interesting & looked at whether these are creating the next debt crisis. Various people talked about their experience of using them & some were already in debt trouble. On listening to one chap talk about all the clothes he was buying via these payment companies (because he couldn't afford to pay for them outright), Mr F said, "Why does he need all these jackets?" I said, "Because clothes are obviously his 'thing', like cult movies, retro-TV, obscure prog rock box-sets are your thing". Mr F was just as bad a spender back in the day, probably a tad worse than me if I'm honest. He certainly brought more debt to the relationship than I did, but tbf, my parents were in a better financial position to bail me out, which they did multiple times  - I was so grateful at the time, but with hindsight, if they hadn't have done, I would have had to reach a big scary LBM a lot earlier. I always think of this now, if I hear about parents repeatedly bailing out adult offspring. 
Anyway, we talked about whether we'd have used payment companies like Kl*rna, Cl*arpay, etc, back in the Spendy Era & of course we definitely would have done. I had a couple of mail order catalogues as soon as I was able & can well remember how the 'Only £2.47 a week' type of interest free credit made the item feel as though it was almost free! So then I'd buy something else, something I needed for the house (because I never saved anything for emergencies), clothes, etc, until that payment was much higher than the original £2.47 a week. The current schemes are pretty much the same thing. Credit for people who can't really afford the item - I do acknowledge that there are different reasons for this, & the number of families living in poverty in the UK is definitely one of them. But for those who are using them routinely (some on the programme were signed up with multiple companies) to buy unnecessary things they can't really afford, then I think they are heading for the same debt burden as those of us who met with it through overdrafts, credit cards & loans. 'Interest free-credit' somehow still sounds like a positive thing, doesn't it? Obviously it is better than paying a horrible draining high interest rate, but in our mind's eye, I agree that people need to replace the word 'credit' with 'debt'. Interest-free DEBT.......because that's what it is. The essential problem is that users of these companies are spending their wages before they have earned them & all of us on here know where that leads.
I hope I am not coming across as judgemental, or worse still, smug, because I no longer have debt, because the truth is that had these BNPL schemes been available at major retailers back before the LBM dawned, I can tell you that I would have used them for sure.
Did anyone else see the programme? What did you think?
Off to make an early lunch now - planning to trot round the garden with my secateurs later to cut a bunch of greenery for making a door wreath.
Take care, m'dears.
F x

ladyholly

A favourite delaying tactic of mine was to "forget" to sign cheques. It didn't work in shops but you could delay a bill being paid so you had money to spend. 

foxgloves

You naughty girl, @ladyholly, lol. No, I never deliberately did that because of a specific thing which happened. When I was about 20, I sometimes left my catalogue payments till pretty late & on one occasion, I quickly wrote a cheque, shoved it in an envelope on my way out of the door & genuinely forgot to sign it. Well, the hassle that ensued! The cheque was returned to me with an unpleasant letter about my 'dishonoured cheque'. I wrote a new one, enclosed a letter of apology & sent it by return of post. They cashed it, but didn't stop the debtor process, so I began receiving letters about debt recovery. I could never get through to them on the phone (call boxes for us students back then, of course) so wrote back each time stating that I had paid & they had cashed it. This went on for months culminating in a threatening letter about debt collection agencies, etc. I sent a copy of my bank statement,.but they would only drop it if I could supply them with a photocopy from my bank of the cheque. I had to pay to obtain that. I know some of my fellow students were 'forgetting to sign cheques' as a delaying tactic & it was tempting, but my earlier error, which was utterly genuine, led to this tedious & unpleasant process from which it took several months to extracate myself.
Probably just as well I learned from the experience tbh!
F

QueenJess

Ooh - didn’t see the Panorama, but might watch on catch up. I hate these companies. In a sense they are filling a void and I’m sure there are genuine and useful situations to use them, but they are targeting young people and encouraging unnecessary consumption of things they don’t need. It is an accident waiting to happen in my opinion.

I avoid all debt like the plague. I appreciate I’m lucky as I’ve never had to rely on it (fingers crossed I never will), but my parents always hated debt of any kind and so I’ve always thought the same. It never even occurred to me when I was younger not to pay the whole credit card as my parents taught me it is just useful for the online protection and it just consolidates it into a monthly payment and the money has already “gone”. I’m not sure I was entirely aware you could not pay it all, although I do vaguely remember them telling me something about it being a very expensive way to borrow money and you should never do it.

Baileys_Babe

I didn't see the program @foxgloves thank you for telling us about it. I detest the easy access to BNPL credit that is available on lots of online retailers. I will try and find time to watch it on catch up, which will be even more difficult if OH isn't interested.

Tescodealqueen

I caught the end of it. I used to pay cc by cheque at the last possible minute by post until received a nasty phone call from B*****card just after Christmas claiming that we hadn’t paid . It was held up for ages in the Christmas post and we had to pay again which mucked up January which was already tight because of early payday we have already discussed. I hadn’t really heard of these new payment options.Since our lbm we avoid credit but I do still buy wax melts though have switched to a small company and much more affordable option than my previous named brand obsession and was concerned by a social media group I am in encouraging each other to split the payment of their wax melts so they could buy before payday whilst simultaneously showing photos of their stock of more wax melts than I could use in a year. Not knowing these people in real life I felt I had to bite my tongue but it worried me a lot

CRANKY40

Mysteriously it was cheaper to buy my new tumble dryer from a catalogue on BNPL because when I added the delivery charge and the charge for taking the old one away together, the total including the cost of the dryer came to £13 less than a high street store was charging which didn't include removing the broken one. 

I had the money in my account so just paid for it as soon as it showed on the statement but the APR if I had to pay interest once the BNPL period ended was something like 34.9% 😨