Giving every £ a job

[Deleted User]

Lovely of your friends and such a nice surprise!  And hope you manage to get bills reduced for your DF.

Blackcats

Foxgoves - you are right, I should re-allocate the unspent money from the eating out budget.  I'd budgeted £40 for the meal and so I'm arranging to take a family member to our local brewers Fayre where the do an unlimited breakfast for £10 per adult and children eat free.  This means that for £30, 3 adults and 3 children can have a nice get together.  The children feel grown up going back and forth to the buffet and they can order whichever ingredients they actually like for their hot breakfast.  The other £10 is going to council tax.

thank you Rebecca - I've taken meter readings and I'm going to try and get through on the phone again tomorrow as today all I got was "your call is important to us.  You are currently caller number 3,499,999 in the queue".  I think it must be hard working in busy call centres where it seems to me that the caller:staff ratio is incorrect.  I'm particularly dreading the vir gin meedya call .... 

MissRikkiC

That’s excellent value for a breakfast!! What a brilliant idea (one I will no doubt be adopting in time!) 

Well done on your CT payment. And the SKHy bill! That’s some reduction! 

We will be cancelling ours later this year, we literally only use it for sport and hub thinks he can get that elsewhere for less so he can sort that out! 

savingholmes

How lovely about the meals. 

Hope you have / had a lovely non-working day (didn't see dates).

Well done on the colouring in. I find that motivating too - as well as the £ it represents.

Well done Mr Blackcats on the savings. All sounds good.

Blackcats

Thanks MissRikkiC - we now watch sports via a "magic 🔥 twig".  It's not 100% reliable but I'm getting more tolerant of its foibles.  Last night the last 2 minutes of the match got stuck in a loop and we joked that the game might never actually end. 

Thanks SH - you are a million trillion times more artistic than me so I'm sure your colouring in is amazing.

had a great outcome for my dad's gas and electricity - turns out he was £570 in credit but they still wanted to put up his payment by £100 per month.  So now it's down to less than he was paying before.  I did politely say to the call handler that having £570 of a priority customer's money was very unfair and that it's a good job that they hadn't pushed my dad to chose between heating and eating.  Needless to say they were not the slightest bit interested. 

Still not enthused enough to ring the v media call centre 😵‍💫

booked travel for our September holiday - that means travel costs paid with May's wages and I've got July and august to top up the holiday pot to cover accommodation.  It's self catering so relatively cheap when we are there.  We stock up at the local Lidlees and treat ourselves to fantastic local seafood from an amazing fishmongers.  A couple of years ago we treated ourselves to a seafood platter at a gastro pub £90 (I know 🤦‍♀️) and a couple of drinks (£20) and were so disappointed.  Last year we bought our own from the fishmonger and it was absolutely wonderful.  With the added bonus that while the fishmonger prepared the platter we could sit in the sun eating a sausage roll from the butchers next door. 

foxgloves

@Blackcats - That really was unacceptable expecting your Dad to pay an extra £100 when his account was so much in credit. Some of these big energy companies are seeing their profits soar because of rising energy prices. But aren't they passing these costs on to us in the form of huge tariff rises? There's a corporate p*sstake going on here somewhere.
It also reminded me that some years ago, my parents received an unexpected rebate of well over £800 from their energy company. They never looked at their statements that closely, didn't use the internet & assumed that, as used to be the case, people were only charged for what they'd used. They hadn't realised so many consecutive bills had relied on estimates. I did say that they needed to be more pro-active in checking their bills, but I also think that the energy company should have issued a rebate before it became such a large amount.
I haven't yet had any problems with our current tentacled provider, but generally it isn't an industry I trust.
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savingholmes

Well done on sorting your dad's bill. I agree that having been on so called green energy for years I am disgusted that the price rises are so huge. Obviously the renewable energy can't have been what was claimed

[Deleted User]

Well done sorting your dad's bills but totally shocking that they were trying to put his DD up when he was so much in credit!  Shameless isn't it?

Your holiday sounds great - I find similarly that doing the food yourself is so much better these days and does, as you say, avoid a lot of disappointment (as well as cash!)

foxgloves

I don't think it's got anything to do with green energy, @savingholmes, the entire industry runs on greed & shareholder profits.
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Blackcats

It's only dawned on me recently how much power (excuse the pun) that the power industry has over us.  They set how much money they want from us and collect that money every month, setting tariffs that are fairly incomprehensible, charge those that can least afford it more on pre-pay meters and keep our money in their coffers when they have charged us too much.

had amazing good fortune with olio last night - jersey royals, asparagus, plums, lettuce, tomatoes and giant crumpets!  Will make a nice breakfast with the crumpets - I'm a butter and jam person and didn't know there was a marmite and cheese option until I saw OH create that travesty of a combination.  Oh and hot dog rolls - we've got some spicy chilli sausages in the freezer so with a few other bits and bobs that will make a meal next week.