Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Mint1955

Fab diary and thanks for the laughs I love your stories.
I may have missed it but 42 pages in two days of reading has been some going lol

Did you buy the new coffee maker yet?

foxgloves

Thanks Mint, what a nice thing to say. And yes, we did buy a new coffee machine.....& it's all paid for, not bought via the Evil Weevil that is credit!
It makes really good coffee. I just need to get mr f to chuck out his collection of random old pieces of cafetiere now.
F

foxgloves

Hang on, Mint1955.....you mean you've read my entire diary in just 2 days? That's some dedication to my spendy tales of woe, but I hope it is really clear just how much my attitude to money & 'acquiring stuff' has changed. There were quite a lot of pathetic flickers & vague sputters, but in the end, that lightbulb pinged on good & proper and we haven't looked back.
Last night, we were talking about when I took redundancy & worked out that in May, it will be 8 years ago. It halved our income, yet we have not once been overdrawn. This shows two things very clearly: 1. We must have been spending the equivalent of my salary on running a 2nd car, servicing debts & just bad financial management & frittering.....
and 2. Budgeting & being resourceful works.
And I much prefer how we behave around money now, that's for sure.
F x

foxgloves

Morning dear readers,
Well I still haven't sorted out my seed box. It's fallen off the end of my job list for a few days now, so the time has come today. I love this job - looking to see what veggie seeds I still have in stock, making a list of what I shall need to buy, etc.
First, I'm just going to pop out for a quick walk around the village for a bit of free fitness activity, then it's seed box time.
Hope everyone's getting off to a productive (or restful, depending on what you need) start to the weekend.
Keep those purses tight shut where possible, m'ducks.
F x

Onebrokelady

I only drink Rooibos tea by complete accident,I was trying a caffeine free diet so this tea is naturally caffeine free,I really liked it so started drinking that instead of black tea,then when I decided the non caffeine diet wasn't making any difference to my symptoms I tried to go back to black tea and it tasted disgusting,I find it really bitter and just can't drink it,I used to love a nice cup of Earl Grey too but I'm not too keen on that now,I'm currently trying to find a good loose tea Rooibos so I can use the lovey teapot my DD bought me one birthday but I can't find any in the shops
Have fun sorting through your seed box,I love the promise of new seeds,I just need to get somewhere sorted to actually grow something

Mint1955

Yes I do have the time as I am now living in Cyprus having sold up and paid of mortgages etc sold or gave away most of our uk belongings as we had a holiday home out here.

We were doing the spendy debty thing and chasing our tails and with me 10 years older than OH we just decided that enough was enough let’s enjoy the next 10 years as I would have been 59 when we moved for good in 2015.

Life is simple with money saving, budegeting and lots of free stuff to do always at the forefront as we just putball the money in the bank and we live of the interest as much as we can as no pensions until I am 66 in 2021 as a 1950’s woman and OH will then be 56 and can look at possibly taking his work pensions but hopefully we will have retained money in bank rather than spend the lot!!!!!

foxgloves wrote: »

Hang on, Mint1955.....you mean you've read my entire diary in just 2 days? That's some dedication to my spendy tales of woe, but I hope it is really clear just how much my attitude to money & 'acquiring stuff' has changed. There were quite a lot of pathetic flickers & vague sputters, but in the end, that lightbulb pinged on good & proper and we haven't looked back.
Last night, we were talking about when I took redundancy & worked out that in May, it will be 8 years ago. It halved our income, yet we have not once been overdrawn. This shows two things very clearly: 1. We must have been spending the equivalent of my salary on running a 2nd car, servicing debts & just bad financial management & frittering.....
and 2. Budgeting & being resourceful works.
And I much prefer how we behave around money now, that's for sure.
F x

carrielovesfanta

foxgloves wrote: »

Hi CLF,
The book is 'Blankets & throws to knit: Patterns & piecing instructions for 100 knitted squares' by Debbie Abrahams. It's published by Collins & Brown & the ISBN is 978-1-84340-471-2
p.59 just makes me want to go on holiday right now!!
Cheers,
F x

Thanks very much

foxgloves

OBL - I was sent a free sample pack of rooibos tea a while back, & I'm afraid those did end up on the compost because I could barely gag it down! I'm sure it's a lot better for me than all my coffee though!

Mint1955 - How lovely you have been able to upsticks to the sunshine. The whole retirement/pensions thing is a bit different when there's an age gap, isn't it? I'm also with a younger man. My thinking is that if he can stay in employment (a sector which is sadly being devastated by ideological 'austerity' cuts) until he can take his pension, we should be able to via a goodly amount of mine into savings, as I'll be of pensionable age 6 years earlier than him. We also dream of relocating to somewhere special to us, although still in the UK, so that's another reason to keep our finances/spending on an even keel in the interim. It's still quite a good few years till I can take my pension, so I'm not wishing my life away.
F

foxgloves

Greetings Sensible Money People,
Well, the lovely mr f has been having a clear out. OK, the carrier bag of cables which LOOKED like it was finally going is still holed up in the spare bedroom, but I'm still hopeful, because frankly, where old tech crud is concerned, even getting them as far as a bag, is a start.
He's also stopped dropping hints that he needs another shelving unit to house CDs/Blu-rays, etc, & is instead sorting through everything to see if there are any he no longer really requires.So we'd got to the stage where there was a hopeful looking pile sitting on the landing ready for the charity shop when I received a '15% extra' code from Ziffit. Decided just to run everything through & see if we could make up the minimum £5 trade, so as to use the code, & amazingly, with the addition of 2 paperbacks I'd picked up from the charity shop & had finished with, & one that was a bit of an impulse buy ages ago which kind of wasn't as useful as I thought it might be, I managed a trade of over £20 for a pretty unassuming pile of stuff. Every little helps, so it's all now neatly sealed up in a recycled box, waiting to be delivered to our local pick up point.
Code expires tonight, I think, but if it is helpful to anyone, it's BLUEJAN.
And now it's time to get my feet up by the fire (which cat is hogging, having stuffed himself with lamb stink).
Stay warm all of you - a real big wind getting up outside, though I gather Tuesday is set to be the worst day this week.
F xx

Onebrokelady

Wow,good news on the Ziffit front,I've been eying up my DVDs lately and thinking they could go,I never watch them and you can find most things online so I don't know why I hang onto them really,I also have a quite big cd collection which I love but again I don't listen to most of it,I do have a CD player for them but just never use it,I tend to listen to my radio more nowadays