Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Hello Monday Money Savers,
Not an exciting day by any means, but am feeling focused re all things budgetary:
*This week's laundry all done & on heated airer.
*Yellow-stickered pork mince defrosted ready to make pork & apple burgers plus a tamale pie base later this afternoon.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates.
*Wrote up our action plan from yesterday's Money Summit - started implementing some of them.
*Cashed out of a survey site for a £10 M&S voucher. Printed out & added to voucher stash.
*Did 1 Prolific survey.
*Contacted TV Licensing to request changing to monthly DDs instead of quarterly.
*Knitting - am on 2nd pair of socks from yarn stash. Mr F loved the pair I finished last week so will be happy with another pair.
*Did mouse checks - no casualties today, but the electric trap we purchased recently has dispatched 3 of the beasticles so at least we know it works & we haven't wasted our money. Hate killing them but we have had real problems in the past when we haven't intervened early enough (pest control man had to make 5 successive visits one autumn), & bait isn't an option with fur friends.
Right m'dears, must crack on,
F xx

Blackcats

I like the idea of caps on the savings pots that reflect best but informed guesstimates on likely spends.  I suppose for me it is a good exercise in thinking about likely spends.  I think I will have a go at this.  Do you have actual separate pots or 1 or 2 pots with a record of how much relates to each category?  One of my pots is a bit generic and I think it lulls be into complacency.
how's your mouth?  Hope it's improving. 

janb5

I`m guessing these are virtual pots that lots of the bank accounts do.  I have it on Starling where they are called spaces and I can allocate saving to different pots for car maintenance etc.

foxgloves

@janb5 - Yes, our savings pots are virtual pots but not with Starling or similar. Our current account has a sort of 'sister' savings account so all our savings pot money lives in there & we account for what belongs in which of our 10 pots via a very simple Excel spreadsheet.

@Blackcats - We didn't initially have a limit on how much to put into our savings pots. As quite a new saver, I found myself worrying that whatever I'd got in there might not be enough. Then it dawned on me that if I just kept endlessly topping up pots, it would deplete money for general savings - the difference being that money in our savings pots is for spending - car maintenance, clothes, appliance replacement, presents, etc, but our general savings do not get touched. So we decided to set reasonable caps on each of the pots, but to review these at the beginning of each year, based on knowledge & priorities. It seems to work so far. I've also had to accept that I don't have a crystal ball, & can't foresee every eventuality.
F x

Elisheba

Oh, the constantly rising price of pet food right now drives me batty. My dog will eat most food with no problems, so he's not so bad, but my cats will only eat Butchers Classic and it just keeps going up and up. Makes it very hard to budget properly.
Glad you got the pet insurance sorted. I've always found it worth it with my cats. Now they are in their late teens it's pricey, but thankfully my ex still pays half, and it's a comfort knowing I can get them treated for whatever ails them. 

Baileys_Babe

My savings pots are all tracked on a spreadsheet and most are in mini savings accounts which are offshoots of one of my main accounts. For annual bills like house insurance, I try to guesstimate how much to put into each pot a month by looking at how much it cost me last time plus 15% to cover the likely annual increase divided by 12. If when we next pay that I have anything left over I take this off the amount required to refill the pot. If adding on the 15% means we do not have enough money to cover this I then look at all of our pots and see if there are any pots we could remove by choosing not to have something or reducing how much of it we have, perfect examples would be eating out or holiday pot.

Deni_debt-free_dreamer

Morning
I'm with the c00p bank and have 3 online savings accounts - one is to support DD2's uni course which she contributes to as well; one is for mortgage OP, i'm in a fixed deal and already overpaying monthly so when my deal ends i will use the lump sum to make an overpayment; & one is general savings.  I don't allocate that out but i like the idea of a spreadsheet as others do
love Deni

foxgloves

@Elisheba - I completely agree about rising cat food prices. Our newbies (like our previous dear old fur friend) like the F---x 'AGAIL' variety, esp the ones which combine double stenchy flavours in each pouch. The best price for these used to be Wilk*'s & I think we got used to paying between £3.50 - £3.75 depending on what the specific offer was that week. We lost our cat to cancer during Lockdown 1 & as we had so much disruptive home improvement work going on in our house, we decided we wouldn't adopt a newbie until all the interior stuff was finished. So no need to buy cat food during that time & we donated our stocks at the time to the local Rescue. Now we're buying it again, the price rise is very noticeable. We are going to be shopping around a lot more to get the best price & will buy a couple of the 40 pouch boxes at a time if we see a good deal. Our cats always have half meat, half biscuit diet, so that's 2 pouches each per day & 28 required in total per week. That works out at 112 pouches per month. We do swap in other varieties now & again - actually, I had forgotten 'Classic' - one of our past cats loved that, I didn't know it was still available - & I do think we will try them on some tinned food too, as 1 tin per day for the two of them may well work out cheaper than only pouches. 
As a cat person, this may make you smile......Soot was poorly yesterday, so in order to feed him something bland, I poached him a couple of sea-bass fillets. He looked at his tablespoon of fish flakes as though I'd given him a bowl of gruel. Ash ate them, but even he didn't want any more sea-bass this morning. Luckily, I kept the rest of it in the fridge in a food grade container so it will be added to my fish pie tomorrow! Cats!!!
F 

foxgloves

@Blackcats - Yes, thanks for your enquiry about my wretched tooth saga. I am feeling a lot better now. Still a bit tender at the extraction site but the shooting pains I was getting in my jaw & up to my ear from the infection have gone now, plus the pain in an adjacent tooth, so I think all the saltwater rinses have finally cleared it up. I can eat toast again, so a big hurrah to that!!
F x

foxgloves

@Deni_debt-free_dreamer & @Baileys_Babe, It's interesting reading how other MSE peeps arrange their savings pots. I think that's one of the biggest benefits of them, tbh, that they can be operated to suit individual needs & budgeting systems. Once the system is set up, it doesn't mean it's all cast in tablets of stone, it can be tweaked or even re-designed as different budgetary needs arise or recede.
All our savings pots money is in just the one C*-*p savings account  but I operate 10 different pots via my trusty spreadsheet. They are:
1. Car maintenance
2. Clothes
3. House & garden
4. Holidays
5. Meow fund
6. Optician/dentist
7. Lesiure/entertainment
8. Appliances replacement (particularly things that can catch us out like white goods conking out)
9. Tech replacement
10. Presents
And, because it's flexible & is there to suit us, we currently have a temporary 11th pot in which I'm holding the money to pay the builders for the exterior work we're having done later this year. I moved it out of our current account because I felt a bit twitchy about getting over-confident seeing a much bigger than usual balance. I don't think there's any way I would have dipped into it, as I've been a reformed character for a long time now, but you know when something keeps niggling at you? It was getting like that, so I decided that I would have a temporary 11th pot so I could see that sum there in full & not keep stupidly worrying that I might have commissioned the work, then find at paying-up time, I've made an error & no longer have all the funds available. I wonder if intrusive thoughts like these ever entirely go when one has spent well over 2 decades frittering cash away right, left & centre, idk. Anyway, that's how our Savings Pots system works, with annual caps for guidance so that we can via money to general savings instead once the pots are looking healthy enough to see us through the year's demands.

Well, m'dears, I had the best of the day today. Glimpsed a bit of blue sky first thing & was out down the greenhouse like a rat up a pipe! Watered autumn-sown sweet-peas & the verbena bonariensis cuttings I took a couple of weeks ago & sowed aubergines. They're now in my little heated propagator. The penstemon seedlings have had to get their big girl pants on & brave the chilly conservatory, but I've cloched them with a re-purposed coleslaw tub. Ironing done, dinner in slow cooker (trying a dhal recipe from the new slow cooker book I bought) & only need to heat up a couple of garlic flatbreads. Sewed in the ends on a just-finished yarn-stash sock, cast on its pair & did a £2.50 survey. Finally had a sensible response from TV Licensing re changing to monthly payments instead of quarterly - a simple request which turned into a bit of a saga. My next move would have been to play the gender inequality card, so it was nice to get it sorted. It wasn't remotely anything to do with gender actually, but that would have been the unintended bias had a piece of security policy been intransigently applied, iyswim. Anyway al sorted.
Feeling chilly, I think because it's such a windy day, but I am determined not to crank the thermostat up early. 
Stay cosy.....even if it is 3 extra layers!
F x