Working Hard Debt Diary - Here goes

WorkingHardDFW

Good news - just checked my ebay and 5 of my 17 listed items have bids on which is great. None are particularly high value but they total £20 to date and a lot have at least 8 days to run. Plenty of others have watchers, a few don't though but they'll either sell or they won't.

Counting the days until I can give BT the boot. Its really getting to me that we're paying £50 pm to BT and £19 to Sky when we can get the same service from Sky at £45 all in.....7 days to go.

Not much happening on the MSE front today. Tomorrow is DS's birthday and you just seem to have to spend money. We've got some of his little friends coming on Sat but even a little tea party costs pennies to put on - even the DFW MSE way. Like I said in my previous posts I'll be glad when the B/days are over so that I can stop spending on bits and pieces.

Good news on my glasses front. They got chewed by the puppy on New Years eve :mad: . They were covered by the insurance but the excess is £150! I went into the shop today to asked if they could be repaired. They originally offered to put the lenses in a new frame (£100!!) but after some discussion and suggestion from me they are going to fit new arms at £5 each - Result:T

Not doing to well on the Food challenge for April though. We've got a budget of £300 pm which is for a family of five. The money goes across to a Tesco Clubcard Plus account and gets used in Tesco or taken out as cash if required. I'm convinced that I am spending more. Just checked the spending diary and this month I've spent the £300 budget already. Plus another £20 not yet entered. I'm not sure where I am going wrong . I need to get to grips with it since if the food spending is going over that is going to impact on the remaining budgets...........Eck!! At this point I am not sure what the answer is .......I will ponder it whilst I bake birthday cakes this evening......the joys of being a DFW Mum:T :A

I was so pleased with my progress on the DFW front that I have decided to apply the same skills and discipline to losing weight. I might use another forum (feel slightly disloyal there) but I think it more appropriate. So here goes to starting a Weight Loss Wanabe thread..............:eek:

beanielou

Join us on the 'Loose weight ' thread.
You'll find it at the top of the 'I Wanna' sub board.

WorkingHardDFW

I've got a difficult decision and would appreciate your advise...

I've been offered more hours at work as I think I've mentioned previously and I am lucky enough to be able to choose from the following options:

• Increase my hours by 20% which would bring in an extra £200 per month with no additional child care costs - Extra £200 pm
• Increase my hours by 40% which would bring in an extra £400 per month but with I estimate an extra £120 childcare costs - Extra £280 pm
• Increase my hours by 60% either now or in Jan when my youngest goes to school. This would result in an extra £600 per month but no additional childcare costs if I wait until Jan since I would not be paying nursery fees (£243 pm since we get funding) and my DD will be at secondary school so no afer school care. In fact by then we'd not only have my extra income but the extra £243 as well - Nice . Clearly if I did this now I would have extra childcare costs of approx £120 pm. [I know my childcare costs may seem a little illogical but my contracted hours are 2.5 days now but I pay for childcare for 3 days].

Just writing it down shows me the logical answer. Increase my hours by 20% now with no additional outcome. This extra £200 pm with be a fantastic help in knocking down the debts. Whilst the other options additional income would be fantastic the down side would be losing the time at home with the kids while their small and the additional childcare costs.

More importantly I will still be at home two days pw with my youngest DS before he starts school. That will be so important since we don't get that time back :T

At the end of the day its not just about the money...

WorkingHardDFW

I am having problems with overspending on my food budget:eek:

My budget is £300 for a family of five (2 adults and 3 kids with good appetites).

I thought I was doing OK. Buying sensibly, shopping not just at Tesco but also at Lidl and Aldi for fruit and veg and bargains. Although I have two kids birthdays this month (so extra spending on homemade birthday cakes, sweets etc etc) I've managed to spend a whopping £362 :eek: .

Short of listing out everything I buy I not sure where I go from here. We eat well using fresh ingreidents, cooking from scratch (One child has a wheat/gluten intolerance) and I have started using lentils, beans etc to bulk out mince type meals - still I have overspent.

I don't think my budget is too tight from looking at what other spend per month so it must be something that I am doing wrong...

Thinking about it over the weekend I thing that I need to do the following a little more:

• Start being systematic with buying ie buy my fresh veg/fruit for the week on a monday (day off) to last through
• Plan my meals a little more - I shop online and I am good at stocking up the freezers with staple ingredients but we've fallen a little short this month so perhaps I need to revisit the quantaties.

Hopefully these actions will help but any suggestions appreciated:rolleyes:

I will try again for May although we've got a family party at the end of the month so that will either have to be a seperate budget or I will go over again.

WorkingHardDFW

Thinking about my food budget has lead me to review the budgets and two are going wrong :mad:

These are:

The cars budget. This has lead us into trouble before and therefore I am so keen to keep on the straight and narrow. Theory is that all spending on cars for petrol is taken from one special account and income from that is from expenses that both I and OH get from work. Any surplus should go into the savings account towards other car costs. All others costs (servicing, tax, insurance etc) are paid for from a seperate account into which a set amount is put each month. Fine in theory. However analysis the spending diary (what a godsend) for the last few months shows that we are barely breaking even on the petrol front (not helped by the huge increase in prices) and therefore the savings account is being under funded. Sorry that is all very long winded.....

I therefore need to review the car budget to reflect what we are acutally spending. Unfortunately this is one area that we can't cut back on since we both need to travel for work.

I wonder if we'd be better just paying a fixed amount from our income in the petrol and car savings account and just treat the expenses income as income? Any thoughts?

The food budget. Again this is one where i wonder if much talked about rise in prices is having an effect? Again we've got no room to manover on this one so I am just going to have to make it work and stay within budget.

I am so determined to stay within what is now our budget so that we can still throw what we are doing at the debts. With my potential extra income from June I don't want to loose any of that to daily living costs however I also appreciate that its the going over budget that runs up the debt. The money has to come from somewhere.

So I guess the next couple of months will be critical. Can I stay in control of these two major outlays .........challenges we love challenges........:T

WorkingHardDFW

Not a good day today.

One child off sick from school so day has gone to pot.

All my ebay items are going well. One item I've given up on and listed it on freecycle. At min 5 items of have lots of bids and watchers (most with 2 days to go). Only 3 have no bids and no watchers. Planning to have an ebay listing night tomorrow night in preparation for Thursdays free listing day. I'm trying to plan for a Thursday evening to be my listing day because if I list regularly I'll get into a good pattern.
Tomorrow is the day that I can give BT the heave ho :T . Couldn't do it before since my 18 month contract (:mad: ) doesn't expire until the end of May. That will be a saving of at least £26 per month. That has got to be good.

We've decided to ask my Mum for our Christmas present - she was going to get us a mirror for the front room but we've not got around to finding one - a water butt for the back garden. We figure it will save us money and help the environment. Very green and MSE.

Discussed the two problem budgets with OH last night and agreed that we need to keep an eye on them for a couple of months. If we are not coping we may have to review the budgets but hopefully we will since I sooo don't want to reduce the amount which goes on the debt each month.

Thats all from me folks

Just realised that I don't do short and sweets posts do I

waddy80

Just wanted to pop in and say as usual you have an inspirational diary. Also I know you mentioned your food budget,

WorkingHardDFW wrote: »

I am having problems with overspending on my food budget:eek:

My budget is £300 for a family of five (2 adults and 3 kids with good appetites).

I've managed to spend a whopping £362 :eek: .

All I can suggest is menu planning. Try to call in on the old style board as I feel it really helps (although really haven't been doing it myself!)

Good luck with everything and keep working hard!!!

WorkingHardDFW

Thanks for that Waddy80.

I'll have to have a go at meal planning although I'm not so sure that I can find the time but needs must so I guess the time has to be found.

Not so sure at my diary being inspirational though . Its our journey and so far its been Ok and we've achieved a lot of which we are both proud. I think the hardest part is yet to come in the month in month out grind of staying without our budget.

We are pretty motivated. OH wants to change his car when we are debt free and I'm not sure what I'd like to do.......need to think about that one ........maybe a city break with the kids somewhere lovely.:cool:

I read other peoples journeys and find them great so I'm glad mine is the same.

WorkingHardDFW

Yippee :T :T

Finally sent the email to give BT the heave ho in favour of Sky.

Received confirmation from Sky that our phone line is transferring from the 6/5/08 and i guess we'll just wait for BT to produce the MAC code.

Its so true, small steps make all the difference. When we are completely transferred to Sky we'll pay £45 per month against the £71 we are paying now. It may not seem much, £312 pa, but that will cover yet another cost increase - nursery fees which have gone up by 5%.

Good to have one thing achieved off my list for this month.

Mind you I'm sure the transfer won't be as smooth as it should. When we moved from Orange to Talk Talk it was a complete nightmare - but that was down to Talk Talk.....

WorkingHardDFW

I've got to post today to share my frustration with my OH.

As you can see we've come a long way on our DF journey and knocked an incredible £10K off our debt - which we are both so pleased about.

However my OH is now making noises about 'living like this', not having plentiful stocks of food in the house, not being able to watch the footie match on sky etc etc.

We don't have an extravagant lifestyle, we rarely go out together, OH plays sport which we allow for and budget for (a social sport so beer money is included in that!) and we eat plenty of fresh food etc. We also give our 3 kids the opportunities to do things as well.

I don't think we had an extravagant lifestyle before but running up debts like ours £52K at the highest came from a sizeable amount of overspending.........

To be honest his grumpiness over the weekend really hacked me off. At one point I felt like saying stuff it let go and spend spend spend.........I don't think I could have done that but I felt like it for a short while.

A classic example is that I managed to get hold of for my DS at the weekend a new bike. She has outgrown her current one and is doing her cycling proficiency at school next month. I saw one in the paper and got it for £40 which I thought was ace since new I'd have had to spend £100. My OH only comment was thats '£40 further away from my new car' !! :mad:. Technically he is right since the money will come from my ebay sales which therefore means its not going on the debt but she needed a new bike....perhaps I'm wrong.

I could go on and on about it but it wouldn't get me anywhere. He is on board about being DF with his goal of changing his car for another sports car (:mad: ). I know he was having a bad weekend as well but for pity sake its not the end of the world to run out of something.

Sorry about the rant but I had to share that with you folks who I am sure will understand.. back to the grind!