Cheery's country living adventure

Cheery_Daff

CARS
This does NOT include diesel, or buying new cars, but does include everything else (tax, insurance, MOT, maintenance)

2019 = £177 a month
2020 = £153 a month
2021 = £232 a month

We've ended up with two breakdown memberships this year, both cars have had new batteries, had both serviced for the first time, and one of them needed quite a bit of work.

Just goes to show how expensive they are! 

greenbee

You're making me feel VERY lazy about my financial analysis. Either there is money left at the end of the month for mortgage OPs and savings or there isn't. 

Sometimes I raid the savings instead of trying to cashflow expensive months (mostly house stuff or my very, very expensive dental work). 

badmemory

Do think it is possible that your local vet may learn more about chickens if they had to actually treat more of them?  So maybe use them for some of the more straight forward problems at first?

Cheery_Daff

Quite possibly badmemory! But which chicken do you sacrifice?? They're prey animals, so they tend to hide anything wrong with them for a good long while... It's definitely the practical and sensible suggestion, but I'm not sure it's one we'll end up taking sadly... 🙄

I'm pretty sure you're not lazy greenbee! I wouldn't have all this worked out if I hadn't been using YNAB for years - you can literally just click a box and it tells you monthly averages for each of your categories for whatever date you like 😁 Nothing that actually requires any effort! (Although there is the effort of inputting it all in the first place of course).

beanielou

Blimey.  That is a lot of vet bill.

Baileys_Babe

Thanks for sharing your financial analysis @Cheery_Daff in recent years I have been following a similar method to @greenbee I am thinking of returning to more detailed monitoring but I am going to delay until the new year as we have a lot on in the next couple of months.

badmemory

Obvious I don't know much about chickens isn't it.  I was just thinking along the lines of - if a doctor doesn't know anything about an ailment then they get faced with it they learn quite quickly.  If it is something you know about then you can guide them to learn.  It would be less stressful for both you and more importantly in this case the chickens.

Cheery_Daff

You're right of course 💜 I'm pleased to see the British Hen Welfare Trust is offering bursaries to student vets to train with chickens, and there has been a huge increase in chicken keeping in recent years, so hopefully everyone will get more familiar in the near future. We just had a bad experience with our local vet, who basically said 'there's something wrong with her, but I don't know what, she'll probably die, do you want me to put her to sleep now?' We took that chicken to our current vet, and she's still alive 18 months later, so I've now become quite reliant on them! Pair of softies that we are... 

BB, I just never got properly out of the habit of detailed tracking from my old DFW days. I did drift a bit when before we moved, when we'd paid the old mortgage off and I was working full time, and there was no need to keep track. But since we moved, the mortgage is enormous, we only had pretty much one income for a while, and now I've dropped to working our days, so I'm quite glad I've kept detailed records and can see where things are going!

Also now we're paying for the kitchen which will leave our savings VERY depleted, so we want to get them built up again in case anything untoward happens. Clearly we can pull our belts in far more than we do now...

Gosh it's dark, isn't it?? I suppose at least the clocks are changing tonight - sad for the end of the day but will at least making getting up easier for a while!

themadvix

Greenbee and Baileys Babe, I’m with you too - did a rough budget yesterday for the first time ever (for month-to-month spending, I do have pots for annual stuff) and wondered when I posted that on my diary if I’d get kicked out of MFW - so glad I’m not alone!

Baileys_Babe

We also do pots for annual bills and less frequent things like car replacement.