Put away your purse & become debt-averse

gelmc

Hi Foxgloves,

Yes spendy decades indeed! Thanks for your response. The logical part of my brain recognises that it is a question of choice, however, I feel powerless to stop this at times :mad: Although I am beginning to have some experiences where I am able to walk away - twice in the last week!

Once was in Primarni although my hubby did say do you really need it, and then today by myself in TK Mx with a marked down bottle of hand soap. I remember thinking that it's only £3 and it's in the clearance section, then another thought came to challenge this along the lines of well all those £3s add up. Maybe I am making some baby steps to progress.:j

I know it's just a case of altering my perspective and through repeated practise ie HARD WORK. I can do this! I can do this! I do honestly believe that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

Oh, and I looked up the Grimsby fish wholesalers you mentioned in a previous post. Can I ask do you have two freezers? Mine is overflowing.

Gelmc xx

foxgloves

Hi Gelmc,
Well done for walking away from two purchases! Yes, you are too right all those little £3s add up. If you resist £3 items ten times, that's £30 in your purse to chuck at your debt or use for something more meaningful than hand soap! I used to like nice bottles of hand soap too, but I hardly ever buy them now. We made the decision to go back to bars of soap because of all the plastic waste & we haven't regretted this & quite like shopping around for nice bars at good prices.
No, I don't have 2 freezers, but it's something we are looking at when our current elderly freezer carks it. It's not a fridge-freezer, though, & it's quite tall, so all of it is for frozen stuff, unlike the half & half models. And my partner is excellent at Freezer Tetris, which helps a lot.
When we do our meal plans, we always make sure we include some of our batch cooked meals from the freezer, so we are taking stuff out very regularly, as well as stuffing it in.
F x

foxgloves

Another bit of free resourcefulness this morning. I always make some gift tags from our Christmas cards when we take them down, but decided to be a bit more systematic this time. I cut all the clean backs off & added them to my bulldog clip scrap pad in the kitchen, then I found a jam jar lid & drew round the nicest bit of all suitable cards to make circular tags. A quick go with the hole punch, as usual, & a piece of red cord I found in my craft box & they look really nice! I think the neat circles make them look better than the years where I just snip out the images I like in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. So those have been packed away in my wrappings box all ready for next time. I like to do them now & put them away all ready made, otherwise by the time I want gift tags in November, the cards will still just be sitting somewhere untouched & I'll have to make the effort to do them. Felt organised & slightly virtuous!
F x

foxgloves

Last year, I tried a bullet diary. I already had a lovely hardback lined book so I worked out what pages I wanted & then spent time ruling them up, including a monthly calendar & a 'daily job list section' & all sorts of other pages for all the info I thought it would be helpful to have in one place, instead of in other notebooks & on pieces of loose paper. And over last year, I've got on really well with that. I did the little round 'bullets' for daily tasks, for striking through as I completed them, & it has been an excellent tool for keeping myself organised & productive, especially in what turned out to be an emotionally difficult, sad & stressful year.
Can't you just tell that there's a 'BUT' coming? Yes, it all worked really well, but oh my days, ruling that bloody book into all the different calendars, sections, lists, headings, you name it took AGES.......I'm talking days rather than hours, & I knew when I was thinking about this year's diary that I wouldn't be doing that again.
So I've compromised. I've bought a nice stylish (& very affordable) A5 hardback diary from Sainso's. I picked it because it has a whole page to each day, which I could see would allow me to divide each day into different sections. I've decided the most useful daily divisions are Schedule (outings, appointments, meetings, social stuff etc), then my daily task list (which will be bullet point style like last year to facilitate crossing off & seeing how I'm progressing, plus I can put an arrow through any bullet for jobs I need to migrate to the next day), then a little box for meal planning information, which will basically be that day's planned meal, & a section for notes, which includes birthdays, anniversaries, memos & anything I need to write down pertaining to specific days.
This year's diary doesn't have all that many blank pages at the back, but there are sufficient to include my annual Christmas present planner, emergency supplies list (am slowly building these up) & a few other odds & ends. I'm removing my monthly calorie/fitness tracker page because I always have a separate little diary for adding up my daily calorie intake & it will be simple to add my daily calorie burn/step count to that. That just leaves my monthly grocery budget tracker sheet. I don't have room for that info, but have found it incredibly useful over the past year, so I am going to design a small spread sheet type thing, print out one for each month, then I will use some pretty paper clips I found while sorting out my office (just sitting in a tin doing nothing) to fasten the current month's sheet in to my diary. I only need it between budget days, then it can be chucked & a new one clipped in.
Having said that I have modified my system to save me the days it took ruling up all the pages & dating them last year, it still took me several hours yesterday divvying up all the pre-printed pages in my new diary exactly how I want them. Oh well, it's done now.........the bullet journal was an experiment last year, so I suppose I should just be pleased that it worked well & brought the organisation of different life strands together.
It's mr f's cooking night tonight, so I think I'll crack on with that little grocery budget sheet now, then I think it might be Bum-on-Sofa-O'Clock.
Hope everyone's feeling all the determination of a New Year & a renewed start.
F xx

PurpleFairy26

I see it as an evolution rather than revolution foxgloves :rotfl: your BJ journey last year got you to somewhere better this year

I've had a thick book for a couple of years that I got a barginous price in w h sm1ths a few years ago when the smalls had a voucher from there. I use a page a month that's has all my tasks for the month on, May be big, maybe small but will be on there. My bullet journal (if you can call it that, it's just a small book with about 30 pages in it) and is no where near as grand as the one you talk of, took me about an hour or so to do all my pages, partly because it's not dated apart from my January water tracker page. Oh, and I'm not that creative :rotfl:

Glad you have found something that works, it's a bit like budgeting isn't it

crazy_cat_lady

I love the idea of a bullet journal but oh my goodness the time to set one up and the pressure to keep it all filled in :rotfl:
I now have my scrap notebooks or things I was given as gifts and just have one list of things to do that day, frog list, shopping list and spend diary. Lots of little books lying about the place cluttering up my kitchen table :rotfl:

Onebrokelady

The diary sounds great, DD uses a bullet journal and gets very creative with it but I can't be bothered ,I just want a bog standard notebook to use as an organiser which I have now got
I've never been organised enough before to make a proper list of things I need to do but I've done it now and can't wait to start crossing things of the list

maryb

I have what I call my Plot Book which is one of those French spiral bound exercise books with squared paper. Every month I work out a cash flow budget and meal plan and then tasks and goals. Long term information goes on a new page working from the back. Because the paper is squared, it's fairly easy to divide up the page without having to draw lines

foxgloves

CCL - I don't feel pressure to fill it in, because for me, not feeling organised soon starts to morph into feeling out of control, but yes, setting it up in a completely blank book took me ages last year.
Maryb - I like that name for your notebook. If it went missing, you can say 'I've lost the plot...book'. I have a small separate notebook in my handbag for jotting stuff down that I want to read, etc, & one for keeping my healthy eating on track. The important thing is just finding a system that works & we are all a bit different.
F

1LuckyLady

I love my Bullet Journal but its nothing like the ones you can see on pinterest or youtube and you certainly couldn't call mine pretty or creative! I didn't set it all up in advance though, I currently have a page each for the kids chores, a page each with their pocket money cashbook so that they remember what it is they've earnt/ spent and saved. I have a freezer list, a to-do in the garden list , to-do in the house list (fixing up) and regular to do list. Once a page is full/used I set up the new page and make a note of the page number at the beginning of the book so I can find what I need.
Its definitely a case of finding what works the best for you as we are all different. I do love a good list (actually I love a list with lots of things crossed off it!;) )