Returning to MFW, my elusive unicorn!

coldcazzie

Grogged said:

coldcazzie said:(I'm the kind of person who eats grapes/sweets in pairs and has to have the volume on an even number... )

This made me laugh (twice, as seemed more appropriate! 😂😂)
I do the same with the volume, unfortunately I just reduce sweets to an even zero... 😞

glad I could make you chuckle today!

If I have coloured sweets I pair them up by colour. If I have odd ones then I either bite them in half and then eat the two halves, or give them to someone else. If I eat grapes I pair them up by size, and the same with satsuma segments. Thankfully the kids are used to my odd ways and happy to eat the spares!  

The volume thing is only ever problematic when I'm in the car.... EYES ON THE ROAD, CAZ!! 

coldcazzie

Shopping today, and transferred the Prolific payment into the OP/SHTF account.

OP account currently stands at £167.41, which is 33.48% of target for 2020.

Shopping Spends
Aldi: £37.74
Tesco: £30.41
Tesco: £5 (beer)

Food shopping is currently at 76% of budget, with 1 shop left to go before CC tickover.
Petrol is waaay under (unsurprisingly!) at 32% of budget.
Health and pet spends are also very low this month at 20% and 26% respectively.

Good job these are under budget really, seeing as booze, vape and entertainment are all over budget this month!

I imagine that the pet spending will be much higher next month as we will need more cat food in the next couple of weeks (we usually buy in bulk from an online supplier and store in the attic). Still got lots of cat litter, chicken and rabbit food are plentiful. At this point in the year I would usually be considering buying some hatching eggs for one of my broody girls but that seems rather like a non-essential purchase right now, plus I think I would be pushing it to introduce more hens into the limited space we currently have.

South_coast

Good to see you're prioritising the spends there Caz - booze, vape and entertainment 😀!

coldcazzie

South_coast said:

Good to see you're prioritising the spends there Caz - booze, vape and entertainment 😀!

Except I don't vape or drink alcohol!  

coldcazzie

Had a rush of approved Prolific submissions and cashed out another £6.57.

OP acc now stands at £173.98

coldcazzie

Tax Return completed

I usually transfer money for work expenses from my business account into our joint account once a quarter. The ones since 5th Jan 2020 are due now. However, I also have to pay the yearly amount for my website on the 24th, and I don't have enough to do both, so I decided to dip into my National Insurance pot. I have a long time to make the National Insurance payment (next year), and right now saving for that seems less important than the website payment and squaring my expenses - I already cancelled the regular saving payments when it became obvious that my income would be dipping over the next few months. I am slowly trying to wrap my head around the changes I will have to make in order to keep on working...and I think that my reluctance to spend lots of time thinking about it is a reflection of how anxious the uncertainty is making me.

AMEX cashback was calculated yesterday but is not yet showing on the statement. Cashback added up to £160.42, minus membership fee of £25 = £135.42. All of this will be going towards the children's maths subscriptions (£246 for 2 years), and we'll be making up the rest from elsewhere.

Upper back is feeling achey (the good achey) from pilates yesterday. Manged to get the laptop to recognise that the camera exists, but only by telling it to check for system updates and then rebooting it first. Le sigh.

Think that concludes my ramble for today.

South_coast

Probably best to just gird your loins (what a strange expression that is - anyway, I digress) and jump straight into the business stuff. Your brain will process it much better when it's hard facts than as a rumbling uncertainty and what's measured can be managed and all that....

coldcazzie

I forgot/glazed over the fact that it's a bank holiday tomorrow. Manwife™ suggested we shop today but I suspect everywhere will be manic either way.

3 items that I put on ebay ages ago (and have been auto-renewing every week since) have sold today. Didn't even realise they had bids will package them up this evening and make a trip out on Saturday morning, I guess. Think it'll be about £6 for the OP/SHTF pot.

coldcazzie

Good pilates class this morning. About to sit down and do some more meal planning and then write a shopping list and brave The Outside.

AMEX cashback has hit the account. Somehow my spreadsheet and the card activity list are not matching up. The card activity list has us spending 63p more than the spreadsheet, and I have no clue where that 63p might be??

coldcazzie

I did not make it to the post office this morning (didn't remember until 1pm).

Today the kids and I went out in the garden and filmed them doing some dance moves for a video their dance teacher is putting together while everyone is in isolation. It took us 23 takes, and then we stitched the outtakes together into another video for the lols  

I need to update my spreadsheet with the shopping totals from yesterday - I only queued for about 10 minutes each outside Aldi and Morrisons. The shoppers in Morrisons were much less willing to keep to the social distancing rules. Morrisons were completely out of lettuce, so my next door neighbour picked one up for me in the evening, which was lovely of her I offered them some eggs in return (at the time we had 46 eggs lol) but they didn't need any.

Dinner is in the slow cooker tonight. Now I'm going outside to read my book and eat ice cream in the sun