Beating Lifestyle Inflation and Staying Mortgage Free!

earthgirl2

SH I searched for help with handwriting and it was the top result. Let me know if you need further details though. 

Looks like the lodger will be coming tonight. If he wasn't coming we would have been offering the room to the Ukrainian appeal for housing, so I'm a little bit sad that we won't get to offer to help.. we've decided that I'll do some free English tuition instead via one of my agencies. 

In money saving news, I got an enormous olio bag and my weekly shop was £54.

Karmacat

That's lovely, earthie, what a great thing to do.  Back in the day, I knew a lot of Chilean refugees, who ended up being able to go back to Chile when things changed a little bit, but they were often stuck here for up to 10 years - they really need language help.

Alchemilla

We're hoping to house one or more Ukrainian people.

savingholmes

Thanks. Hope your lodger arrives and settles in. 

Well done on keeping food spends low.

earthgirl2

So a really busy and spendy week. The highlights (lowlights really) would be DS1 getting into trouble at school, and the teacher phoning home. I went ballistic in a non shouty way and put quite a few things in place, conversed with the teacher and asked for a meeting, only to be told that she had overreacted, she didn't mean what she had said, and actually all is ok. I'm still taking the actions though as they are working! This took so much time, and will continue to take about an hour of my time per week.

Spends
I had to take DS2 to the podiatrist - £20. His toe nail fell off after a football injury and the one underneath is causing him pain. The nurse at docs told me she wouldn't do an urgnt referal and I had to go private. She said it would take 6 weeks and I couldn't leave him in pain for that long and must go private. After an argument she agreed to filled in the referal. At this point I still thought 6 weeks wait, and DS2 was in pain, so I relented and took him to the private podiatrist the next day. The NHS one phoned whilst I was there, and said she had no idea why I had been quoted 6 weeks, it was 2 days for an urgent appointment. She said some people don't like filling out the paperwork to refer within the NHS. I complained to my docs surgery - it's likely he will need more appointments and possibly surgery and shouldn't have been told to go private - he is only 9 years old. The nice NHS Podiatrist said she will sort that out for him and gave me the appointment I needed, but I had to pay the private one as he was being treated there whilst we were on the phone!

DS1s school shoes fell apart - so £40 for new ones.

2 Birthday presents - £35 spent - still haven't conquered tweens birthday presents.

2 mothers day presents and cards £12

Book fair at school and the boys came home with order forms for £50! I have bought 1 book cheaper from A (£7) and another I've ordered from the library. I'm ignoring the rest.

One tutoring student has dropped out due to school pressures.

Everything just feels so much more expensive.


Some good money saving / making news though:
The lodger seems nice and has paid for the month
Looks like I might get dads LPA finally finished with no further cost.
DS1 got into the secondary school we wanted
I have decided to cook the mothers day lunch rather than go out for dinner or anything so that will save lots.
The work cars have been briliant and saved me loads of money.

So to improve money situation:
Double check things the surgery tell me, if they refuse to fill out paperwork
Think of cheaper ways to give tweens presents
School shoes?
Buy second hand books, or where possible, order from library - kind of what I did.

beanielou

Tweens presents are hard.  

What a faff with the surgery.  

Good news on the lodger. 

themadvix

A frustrating week for you Earthie, between teachers and lazy nurse at doc's surgery. What a palaver! Glad DS2 will be able to be sorted on the NHS after all, and it's also good that actually DS1 wasn't as badly behaved as first thought.

Price rises are definitely becoming noticeable though, agree with you there.

Karmacat

That's dreadful about the lazy nurse!  Do you have the time to make a complaint?  Especially as you had to fork out because of what she said.  I made a complaint back in the day about a CBT worker at my local practice because she "sacked" me as a client, and was refunded for the book she'd recommended I buy, because I'd got the electronic version from the library and dismissed it as a load of tut.

badmemory

If you want to get really cross with a nurse I recommend having an age 70 health check.  It is a total tick box exercise & they have no interest in whether you have any ailments you haven't told them about.  Then just to make sure you are really angry they tell you that giving up smoking 30 years earlier has not been of any benefit to your health.  I now avoid the doctors like the plague & don't trust a word they say.  Well at least they can't say I'm one of those pensioners that fill up all the appointments.  I had to speak to them a couple of weeks ago & the receptionist couldn't even find me on their new system even though I have a monthly repeat prescription.  It's no wonder the phone lines are always busy that was 30 mins before we even got round to why I was ringing.

apple_muncher

Well done on dealing with the teacher. What a twit, to consider something important enough to call you, to then backtrack because you followed through. Presumably whatever was noted has been removed from ds1's record...?

Glad the lodger is turning out ok.