Climbing hills

debtfreeoneday

£300 OP is great!!  That’s £300 you won’t pay interest on again!

Cornish_mum

Hi Every_penny, I just wanted to stop by to say well done; it’s very difficult being MSE when you have little kids (we really struggled with this as the level of exhaustion makes the work needed to trim the budget very challenging). I used to splurge on homeware, treats on my homeward commute (expensive chocolate and farmers market baked goods, & so many flat whites). Two things really helped firstly lifestyle magazines and social media were a big trigger for me to spend on the house and garden; so I stopped looking at them. Secondly rather than cutting out treats I spent time thinking about treats I could have that weren’t expensive. I switched fancy coffee shop flat whites for free Waitrose coffee etc. It took a couple of months but then just felt normal. Just for reference my youngest was about 2 at the time I did this. Good luck with it all. CM

Every_penny

Cornish_mum said:

Hi Every_penny, I just wanted to stop by to say well done; it’s very difficult being MSE when you have little kids (we really struggled with this as the level of exhaustion makes the work needed to trim the budget very challenging). I used to splurge on homeware, treats on my homeward commute (expensive chocolate and farmers market baked goods, & so many flat whites). Two things really helped firstly lifestyle magazines and social media were a big trigger for me to spend on the house and garden; so I stopped looking at them. Secondly rather than cutting out treats I spent time thinking about treats I could have that weren’t expensive. I switched fancy coffee shop flat whites for free Waitrose coffee etc. It took a couple of months but then just felt normal. Just for reference my youngest was about 2 at the time I did this. Good luck with it all. CM

Thanks for the tips, I agree that marketing has a huge impact on influencing where I spend my money. It's unfortunate though that I am responsible for my companies digital marketing outlets so I'm often drawn in. At least acknowledging that, should help in reducing wasteful purchases!
 
Thanks for stopping by!

Every_penny

I'm having a much better month so managed to cut down on spends. It helps that there are only a couple of birthday's to account for this month and also that I had around £500 of owed company expenses paid in to my account yesterday.

I've finally booked a company for getting the upstairs flooring/architraves done which is going to be close to £5000 by the time we've factored in decorating and re-carpeting. That's going to wipe out some savings, but they were put aside for this project. We're also sorting part of the garden - extending a sunken patio and new, wider steps leading to the front door, but keeping costs to a minimum as my husband has done all the grunt work so far. I'll will only need to pay for materials and a bricklayer, when the time comes.

I'm please we're cracking on with these jobs as I feel a tiny bit bad that the kids don't really have proper bedrooms. They simply have a bed and wardrobe each, that have just been placed in the rooms but they only use them for sleeping in. They're too little to know any better, but I would like them to have proper kids bedrooms and feel that it's their own space. Once the floor is in, I can think about how to decorate.

My aim is to keep savings at around £10K so even with the work going ahead, I should still have room to overpay above my goal of £150. 

Every_penny

It's going to be an expensive month with the building work on the upstairs starting on Monday and the front garden to be paved. I have a pot put aside for all this, but part of me will be sorry to see it depleted! 

On top of that, 15-yr old step-daughter is visiting with a friend for 10 days with theme park visits and other excursions planned. We don't see her often so I'm more than happy to do this. We try to alternate having a day home, then a day out.

There are rumours on my work horizon about a big promotion on the cards due to a management reshuffle. This would possibly mean a huge 25-30% uplift in salary. I won't find out until end of Sept/October time, but the foundations are already being laid. It would mean I can really start taking bigger chunks out of the mortgage if so. I've already mentioned to my husband that I don't want to take on any more expenditure if it does happen. We'll still keep to one car and shopping at Aldi with the plan to funnel the rest into savings and mortgage overpayments.

Nothing else to report financially other than I overpaid the usual £150 on to mortgage.

Sunday88

Hi @Every_penny just dropping by to say we'll done on your overpayment so far and I totally understand the need to balance between treating yourself and wanting to be more frugal. I also have similar aged kids and a large mortgage and its definitely a tiring age, stressful when combined with doing lots of DIY and home improvements! 
Fingers crossed for your promotion!

Every_penny

Sunday88 said:

Hi @Every_penny just dropping by to say we'll done on your overpayment so far and I totally understand the need to balance between treating yourself and wanting to be more frugal. I also have similar aged kids and a large mortgage and its definitely a tiring age, stressful when combined with doing lots of DIY and home improvements! 
Fingers crossed for your promotion!

Thanks so much @Sunday88 I'm torn between the feeling I could/should do more for the overpayment and the battle to stay sane with the kids. The promotion would be a welcome one, for sure.

rjbear

Interesting reading this thread, has helped me with my situation a lot

Every_penny

So August was an expensive month. With teenagers visiting, husband's birthday and upstairs floor work completed, I feel like the money has been pouring out of the account. There's also been decorating items to buy such as paint to do the upstairs rooms before the carpet goes down.

Saying that, I've just booked our carpet, I need to find curtains and we have two more family birthday's this month so another expensive month - all planned and budgeted for though. Roll on next month when I get a bonus payment from work, also I believe another FIT payment is due from our solar panels. I must check.

With regards to the mortgage, I have overpaid £150 again, but once the major outlays of renovations have been made, I'm going to try to overpay what's left at the end of the month.

We have two damson trees and the fruit are looking plump but not ripe yet, I'm holding out for more sun this weekend, early next week. If all goes to plan, I'll turn them into jam and can give away at Christmas. I'm saving trying to make gin for next year. We also have four apple trees and I know one has eating apples, but yet to discover what the others are.

jimjames

Every_penny said:

OK, so one thing I didn't mention is that our house has solar panels with feed-in to the grid. The house is situated nearly perfectly south facing (0.03 deg off).  Having never owned a property with solar panels before, I didn't really know how they work in terms of what electricity you pay for. Having done a little digging and discovered that it's going to be much cheaper to run appliances in the day, I'm already obsessing about how I'm going to switch around my schedule for laundry, cooking and evening showering! I need to be careful that I don't get too carried away with the energy saving stuff - we have to live our lives too! Anyone else got Solar panels and do you maximize their use on sunny days?
_EP

Not sure what other replies as this is quite old but we have solar panels. The main benefit is the feed in tariff especially if they have been there a while. As well as the free electricity we're getting just under £2000 a year in FiT payments so it easily covers the cost of our fuel bills.