Actually no, I don't need that new mop...

PawsForThought

NSD today and OH treated me to a very belated, gorgeous birthday meal! He's such an angel And the sun was out so all in all a winning sort of day!

I was meant to meet someone for a coffee before my training but as the weather was nice we went for a *free* walk instead - saving a couple of quid and getting some free exercise!

PawsForThought

A fairly spendy day today with a little dentist trip, and I squeezed the grocery shop in so that the number of NSDs this week looks better, hehe

I also realised that I go on holiday in a couple of weeks, but after Mari-Kondo purging my wardrobe I don't have many things to wear in lovely non-British sunshine! So I shopped. It's been a while since I bought any clothes though and I've been squirreling a bit of money away each month for this sort of thing, so I don't feel too bad. And with student discount and a giftcard, I got a lot for my money.

You'll be pleased to hear that the holiday was extremely MSE - OH had accumulated a ridiculous amount of loyalty points with a travel company and they paid for the whole 3 night holiday, including the flights, a rental car and two trips for £11! I got some Euros for my birthday so in all it should hopefully cost us less than £100 - just food and petrol. So excited! :beer:

PawsForThought

Phew - such a busy day today that I haven't had time to spend any money, even if I'd wanted to! Maybe that's the secret to success?

Spent the morning cooking - made mini veggie and feta frittatas for easy grab-and-go breakfasts for the week, a massive veggie lasagna and some adorable mini white chocolate and Malt-easter bunny cheesecakes!

The afternoon was full of the joys of laundry and cleaning the house (embarrassingly it took several hours). Got a friend coming for the weekend so this evening and tomorrow should be fairly cheap and chilled as we're both 20-something grannies..

Finally had 30 mins to sit down and relax with a cuppa before she arrived. Took my hair out of my 'housework' scruffy bun and found some strange and unknown substance all over it :rotfl:

No time to relax after all (but finishing my tea first).

PawsForThought

Another NSD - technically... I owe my friend £3. She very generously offered to let it slide but I will probably buy her a coffee or something next time I see her :rotfl:

A lovely weekend, very relaxing and allowed myself to indulge in some amazing, unhealthy food for a change - heaven! How I've missed this. Must not use it as an excuse to fall off the wagon as I usually do - even if there are yummy leftovers...

Been musing about opening a proper grown up savings account which doesn't have flexible access.. slightly terrifying thought but I think a necessary baby step to becoming a proper adult :eek: I'll look into it this week. I can do this!

Only 7 NSDs so far this month. I will do better in the second half of the month.

Time to set some goals for the week:

• Savings account - research the best for me and open up. Jiggle budget and set a realistic goal for monthly savings.
• Run 4 days
• NSD 5 days (DDs and work-related travel costs don't count, but essential groceries do count - to make me accountable for any poor planning and top up shops!)
• Set up fundraising page for 10k and start pestering potential sponsors
• Holiday purchases planning - so far I have an extensive list of: euros, library books and suncream!
• Healthy eating - put the weekends delicious amazing junk food behind me and get back onto the good stuff - this tends to benefit my purse as well as my body so extra points!

PawsForThought

I didn’t sleep very well last night. Two rather conflicting things happened as a result of this.

Firstly, I must have caught some kind of shopping bug when I treated myself to some new holiday clothes the other day because in the wee hours this morning I did [STRIKE]some[/STRIKE] rather a lot of online shopping. Including what I bought the other day, I have spent nearly £200 on clothes in one weekend, yikes :eek: Some will be returned as I’m in-between sizes and some are me ambitiously testing ‘new’ styles, which never usually goes well. But that was bad. The website also had my credit card details auto-saved, so it all went on that, despite the fact that I’ve had it locked tightly away in a drawer since Christmas to make sure I don’t spend on it! Depending on how much I get back from refunds, I plan to pay it off over 2 or 3 months in smaller chunks, totally manageable!

I definitely am feeling gentle waves of guilt knocking on the doors of the part of my brain that told me I needed these things. But I’m not going to beat myself up – I do have money allocated for clothes and I will return some of them. Plus it should mean I don’t need anything else for a long long time! Moving swiftly on...

Secondly, and somewhat ironically, I also decided on some Savings Goals for 2019! By December I want to have:

• Non-flexible saving: 2000 – Open it with £300 I have squirreled away, pay in £100 per month. That will give me £1100 by December. So I’ll also need to put away at least 60% of any additional earnings from PT work. The other 40% will be distributed to the other savings pots and for treats
• Christmas funds: 400 (£40 per month plus 15% of extra earnings)
• Holiday funds for girls' holiday 2020: 400 (£40 per month plus 15% of additional earnings)
  
• TOTAL: £2800 by 01 Dec 2019

Additional earning goal: £300 per month

• NFS: 180 extra per month (and an additional 900 by December – meeting my 2k goal)
• Christmas and holiday: 45 extra per month (an extra 225 each by December, taking me way over my goal! The extras can be used for related expenses, or put towards 2020 savings)
• Treats/socialising: £30 extra per month

Of course I can’t reliably commit to an extra £300 per month and depending on the work it might be more or less. But I think it’s a decent aim!

Now the hard bit of actually doing it. Will be browsing Indeed on my breaks

The third thing that happened from not sleeping well was getting amazing sleepy cuddles from my wonderful dog.:smileyhea

PawsForThought

I've been dreaming of the beach for the last few days, and the books I'd like to take. However, when I went to the library website to pre-order, one had a 16 week waiting list and the other an 8 week!

Accidentally logged onto OH Amazon to see how much they would cost to buy and saw that he had £3 of kindle credits, so after some fiddling I worked out how to attach his amazon account to my kindle using their family library thing and he kindly let me use his credits. So I've got the book on my kindle for a sweet 32p!

Then saw in my emails that Audible were offering 50% off for 4 months plus an extra free credit, so I got two audiobooks for £3.99 which would have cost me £39.82 feeling half way to my holiday already!

Savings account - I have opened a regular saver which has no withdrawal access for 12 months
Run 4 days - Sunday and Tuesday done!
NSD 5 days Sunday and Monday done, hoping for another today!
Fundraising page set up, just have to pester people
Holiday purchases planning - books done, Euros and suncream to do on Sat
Healthy eating - I could have frozen the leftover cheesecakes but I did not. Oops...

PawsForThought

I was so close to achieving 4 NSDs in a row, but I'd had my heart set on having sweetcorn with our dinner tonight and alas - there was none!

I had to nip out to return a bunch of the clothes anyway, so I feel that 75p is a reasonable price compared to the money I will get back when they process the refund!

Once the refund has processed I'll have spent nearly 8 months of my monthly clothes budget this weekend; I didn't buy anything in Feb or March though. So I've set myself a rule that I can't buy anything until September (longer if possible but no doubt something will need replacing by then - I put a foot through the 'stylish rip' in a pair of jeans the other day. It's now a far less stylish and rather wide, gaping rip, but they're fine for walking the dog!)

It does add another month of repayments onto CC, but I applied for a part time job yesterday so hopefully that will come to something.

PawsForThought

Run this morning and since been finding new and exciting ways to procrastinate. Had a sort through of some photos on my phone with a view to getting them printed/stuck into an album at some point; cleaned the fridge (discovered the source of the unidentifiable smell!); meal planning for next week including sensibly budgeted meals and snacks for visitors; baking planning for weekend with my friend (ahhh, sabotaged from my healthy eating again!); got back into surveys! Setting myself a mini challenge to pay for 2 presents I have in mind with rewards from surveys, so need to properly get back in the game

Not much to report, plodding through the mid-month rather languidly, looking forward to a long weekend! Should probably do some work now

PawsForThought

What a gorrrgeous Easter weekend we've had! A friend came to visit and we did lots of lovely free or cheap things; we went for a picnic and took the dog for a 2 hour stream-side stroll (she was so worn out! I don't think I've ever seen such a long tongue), made pizzas from scratch, played swingball and had ice cream in the back garden and just generally had a lovely catch up! We did also nip to the pub to meet a couple of friends and I paid for drinks and some chips for us as my friend had spent £90 on her train ticket to visit. Seems like a fair trade off to me! :beer:

The grocery shopping was quite expensive as I went to Tesco instead of Aldi and had to stock up on suncream - have I mentioned how BEAUTIFUL the weather has been?? I also, after much investigation of the forgotten back of the shelves, was delighted to discover a bunch of YS fish for the freezer - which I'm really pleased with but it was a much bigger chunk of money at the til than I had hoped to fork out and nearly double what I would normally spend at Aldi. Will have to be extremely careful next week, I think there's about £13 left in the joint account for the rest of the month :wall:

Re-jigged my budget slightly to add a little bit more to paying off the CC each month so that I can still have it paid off by my DFD despite my little shopping slip up. If I get any additional income that will make it even faster! So looking forward to being debt-free and starting to accumulate savings, what an incredible (and somewhat novel) feeling it will be to see positive numbers in my account!

PawsForThought

So last week was a bit mixed in terms of achieving goals, but I had such a lovely weekend that I'm feeling fairly positive!

Round up of last week (14th-20th)
Savings account - I have opened a regular saver which has no withdrawal access for 12 months, and I've allocated funds to begin saving separately for Christmas and for a holiday next year
Run 4 days - done! Finally starting to feel like I'm making progress here, as much as I despise doing it!
NSD 5 days I managed 4, which I think is pretty... okay
Fundraising page set up, and have £50, just have to pester MORE people
Holiday purchases planning - books done, suncream done, still got to get Euros, and now we're hoping to book another trip and do some research on beaches/mountains to hike!
Healthy eating - Well, it was Easter, what do you think?

Not too bad but I think there's room for improvement! I think something that might be helpful for me is to have not just NSDs, but also a strict allowance. Because it's all well and good have 5 NSDs but if my spend on one of the spendy days is absurd then really it's not doing me much good. I will have to have a ponder when I'm walking the dog later - that's when I get my best thinking done, and she always has really good advice.

Moving forward,

Goals for this week (21-27)
Run 4 days - a bit ambitious as I've only managed 1 so far so will have to do without a days rest
NSD 5 days - 2/3 so far, there is hope!
Holiday planning - book trip, order Euros, research hike spots
Healthy Eating - no excuses this week! Meals are planned, just have to look away from the stack of Easter Eggs in the kitchen... I will use MyFitnessPal in a very honest way and limit rather than just not inputting my sugary snack intake to make myself feel better :rotfl:
Additional income - get signed up to the university temp bank - there's a bit of potential work available in my dept and I need to be contracted to do it. It's totally flexible and pays really well and would be amazing experience too! I've also seen another PT job that would be nice if my first application doesn't come to anything, so will be applying for that too (the dept work is only very temporary)

The NEXT week will be payday (well, sort of - I get my student finance in 4 installments throughout the year but keep it in a 'holding' account and pay myself monthly from it to stop me going overboard). Even though most of the money is allocated, I'm still absurdly excited to move it around and watch the CC creep closer to 0, and put some numbers into my beautiful shiny new savings account!