2020++ - smiling and waving and looking so fine

ceremony

I hope you manage to get a desk sorted out. Having an office makes life so much easier. It's weird how you get into and out of 'work mode' more quickly just by moving into different rooms. The lack of distractions helps too. I live in a really small house and we use our one spare room for gym space that I'm not willing to give up, so the WFH thing is a nightmare. The sofa's become my office and I'm getting dodgy wrists from typing at weird angles.

mark55man

completely agree - although I have a couple of desks I can work at, it is more comfortable just to sit on the armchair or the sofa, laptop on (doh!) lap, bluetooth headphones on and just get on with it.  I tend to only use the desk for detailed spreadsheet work, when I need a better monitor.  I think I am surprised I haven't had more posture issues, but I don't think sofas will be making their appearance at our offices any time soon 

mark55man

So this mornings admin/penny juggling has been trying to reduce the charges I am incurring on my pension (SIPP).  As of last year it was about 0.5% on my company SIPP and about 1% on my non company SIPP with the same provider.  These charges are well into 3 figures per year but are a bit sneaky as you only see the gains or losses of each fund in total with the charge being built in.  You can drill down and see the detailed breakdown but it isn't provided by default.

Some spreadsheeting later and I think I have saved about £50pcm in terms of extra return in my pension, rather than cash in hand.  Also I believe I am achieving the same investment results but more efficiently which is also good.  Mainly this involved moving from Waitrose type funds to Lidl type funds, but where you know the underlying ingredients (assets) are the same.

As an added excitement I also spotted an opportunity to squeeze the pips a little in that my work scheme discounts these charges by 0.75%  (ie 75% discount of a charge of 1%), but the most Lidl of schemes are only 0.5% so only part of the discount is applied.  So although there are other considerations (its better for me if my work pension grows more strongly), I should be able to save even more by making sure the work pension has all the funds where the full discount can be applied and the personal pension has the cheaper Lidl funds.  I hope that's clear !!  It's helped me.

Plus I put some new curtains up in the lounge this afternoon, which made OH happy !! 

savingholmes

Congrats on the curtains and the pension review. 

Sarahwithlove

Not a bad way to spend your time. Every little helps. 

mark55man

yep half a day now, resulting in me being maybe £1-2K better off in 2024

you have got to live in the here and now (especially nowadays), but looking ahead a bit now and again also works

mark55man

So this morning, I have mainly been tweaking my Facebook privacy settings.  I did this by going down all the settings categories and tweaking a few that I was not happy with.  I then did the privcy review which was very quicker and covered much the same ground, and was really rather good.

I enjoyed doing the "view as" where you view your account as if a stranger.  I was particularly pleased to see in 2011 I had joined a group (in response to the Obama birth certificate circus) called "Trump refuses to certify that he is a *** pile of garbage" - the public links were focussed on really quite old stuff so they must have changed their security model at some point.

mark55man

This afternoon, its been lampshades and curtain rails.  Plus, well, you know that upstairs storage room that you don't show visitors, I'm pleased to say that for the first time in a while I have touched all 4 walls, although not all of the floor is yet visible. 

I will be picking up my new to me car tomorrow, and it (she?) is going to find its way to the tip very very soon!!  I started last year with a declutter objective.  So long as the tip stays open, this could be the year to get it cracked!!

savingholmes

Mark you're putting us all to shame, decuttering, weightloss and paying off debt.... I thought men were only supposed to be able to spin one plate at a time... LOL

mark55man

Funny you should say that SH - my weight loss has significantly slowed down this year, as I'm not quite fully with the programme - OH has lost half a stone, I've lost half a kilo in 2 weeks