Free By 45

Freein45by45

Hi Ftbdreaming, thanks for stopping by! I must admit I surprised myself at how many activities I found for free last summer, not so much this year! Our school gives free milk Each day until the kids are five, then you need to pay for it (£30 for half a year). My son turned five two weeks after starting school, so we’ve been paying for it since then! He usually doesn’t touch his water bottle, and prefers milk, so at least I know he’s drinking some liquid during the day!

I like your thinking about getting your 11 year old to work! I sell vintage and second hand beads, usually from old and broken jewellery, as I’m not particularly creative, but love beads! I’ve been doing it for nearly two years, and during lockdown it has suddenly taken off and I’m in profit and thinking that I may be able to draw an actual income from it. 

I would’ve loved Etsy when I was a teenager, I was always trying to sell my jewellery at craft fairs and car boots, making my mum get up early to take us there! If she’s interested, you should definitely encourage her to set up a shop! I’ve learned so much about photography, writing descriptions, SEO, digital marketing etc over the past two years, as well as organisation of my time, definitely beneficial for teenagers. My son and I had an idea of selling printables for his Stikbots, but haven’t got very far other than the idea, but I’d love to get him doing something like that (although as he’s 6 it would be heavily supervised)!

Good luck on your mortgage free diary  as well! 😀

South_coast

FtbDreaming said:

My eldest is starting high school in September and gonna have to pay bus fares and dinner money so that’s £100 a month before she’s made new friends and starts asking for money to go out with them. 

What do you sell on Etsy? My 11 year old is a good artist... would it be unethical to put her to work to pay off the mortgage 😂

Surely you would just be making her cash neutral Ftb? Sounds a fair swap to me 😀

dano17439

Just swinging by as the title of your thread caught my attention......as that was also my goal aswell!

I just turned 45 last week....our mortgage balance is 34k-ish, at a rate of 0.99% plus we have cash savings of £13k-ish. So not quite there yet...but we do have 2 cars which we own outright which have a joint value of approx 38k, so if worse came to worse we could always down size and pay off the mortgage. So i guess we could be mortgage free if we wanted to

My point is that it can be done!, so i wish you good luck

Freein45by45

Hi Dano - that’s my thinking, it’s a challenging goal, but the worst that could happen is I don’t make it, but I’m not far off it by 45, which isn’t a bad place to be! Very well done on how far you are 😀

Today was pretty good, didn’t spend anything other than BTL mortgage that came out of my account. Listed 5 Etsy items, but spent most of the day playing lego or lego computer games with DS. Working tomorrow, but I have Friday off 😅 

Freein45by45

I stupidly arranged my click and collect from Sainsbury’s today for the same half an hour that I had to collect my son from holiday club. This meant a mad dash between the two places to get both done, and my son complaining the second we got in the car that he was desperate for a wee! I made it to both on time, and filled up my car with petrol and made it home without having to stop by some bushes for a pit stop! 

Sainsbury’s forgot all my frozen food and I didn’t realise until I got home, so I will need to stop off somewhere tomorrow to grab a pizza, as we’re out all day tomorrow doing a lot of travelling, and the frozen pizza was supposed to stop us being too tired and not bothering to cook when we got home and ordering a takeaway. I’ve complained on their web form, so will hopefully get a refund on my shopping.

I’ve realised that I budgeted for my old BTL mortgage payment this month, but because I made an OP last month, it’s £16 less, so have moved that over to savings.