Getting shot of the mortgage sooner than 2049!

Bluegreen143

@joedenise good idea and I’ll ask him if he’d like to do that. We’re not used to having many issues with car sharing because he drives a van for work so I normally have the car everyday 😅 (he’s not allowed to use his van for personal use).

Speaking of the car, it’s in for an MOT and service on Friday. I’ve got enough in the annual bills pot for the actual cost. Any work that needs done I’ll take from the emergency fund (currently £1k) and replace next month. Hopefully not much needs done but it hasn’t needed any work in the last two years (beyond tire changes) and is 12 years old so we may be wishful thinking here.

Forgot a spend, we spent £50 on a Japanese takeaway last night for Valentine’s Day (our tradition is making homemade sushi and Japanese food but it’s too time consuming just now and we can’t take a whole day to make it with young kids around!). This will be split between our own personal budgets.

Today’s list

▪️Usual daily merry-go-round of daily chores and work
▪️Send an email to try to get into another Gaelic class now mine has finished 
▪️Phone local opticians to register
▪️See if I can still order a digital print of Monkey’s school picture (think I can) as I forgot and it’s been ages (bad mum!)
▪️Do easy mealplan list which I’ve been meaning to do for days!
▪️Do Gaelic conversation flash cards/sheets to use at dinner 
▪️If I have time, bake biscuits or cookies

Bluegreen143

SUCH a busy day today. Had to go into the office for the first time since October and work is super busy right now so ended up working later when I got home too. 

As for yesterday’s list:

▪️Daily chores ✔️ 
▪️Email for Gaelic class sent ✔️ 
▪️Make optician’s appointment ✔️ 
▪️Monkey’s school photo - didn’t get round to this
▪️Easy mealplan - not done yet
▪️Gaelic conversation sheets - not done yet 
▪️Baked iced biscuits ✔️ 

Today I didn’t make a list as I’m so tired and busy, but luckily Red was off with the kids and he caught up with the washing mountain, changed the cat tray and made dinner 🥰

Spending 

In an effort to work on conscious spending, I’m going to colour code my spending with a red for stuff I’d like to spend less on, orange for spends which are OK and green for spends I’m happy with (because they support our values).

£4 - snack van lunch at the office 🙈🙈🙈 I was too disorganised and didn’t make lunch last njght 🔴

£7.99 - Frugalwoods book on kindle 🟠

£115 - Amazon order - £105 on birthday presents for Red and £10 on a picnic blanket 🟠 (I mean I’m happy with the amount and that he will love his presents/we need the picnic blanket but ambivalent about having spent it at Amazon…)

£8.91 - milkman bill 🟢

FtbDreaming

Your red amber green reminded me of when I first starting going debt free (2014) and I had a spreadsheet on my laptop and would track everything and highlight it in the red amber green so I would waste less and less as the weeks go on as I didn’t like seeing reds lol! I think visual Things like that really help me x

Bluegreen143

Thanks for dropping by @FtbDreaming - I think the red/amber/green will be used to if I only remember to do it 🤣

WFH today and Red is off work so doing the school run for me so not as hectic a day as yesterday (though there is a lot going on at work).

Was meant to be going to a friend’s last night with other friends as she was hosting our fortnightly Wednesday catch up but we all decided to postpone til tonight because of having to drive in the storm which I think was sensible. So I’m looking forward to that later 😊

Also got my third PT session today (during work time but I worked late last night to work it back), annoyingly ended up with a two week break for various reasons. Including this one I’ve got four more to go - it’s a nightmare scheduling them in due to the working hours of the PT and it’ll be much easier once I just go to the regular gym classes as they have one on at 7pm which will suit me.

Today’s list 

▪️Daily chores etc
▪️Make easy meal planning list (get this off my list!)
▪️Do Gaelic conversation sheet for dinner table
▪️Hoover upstairs (or get Red to as he’s off)
▪️Put away mountain of washing 
▪️Take kids to the library after school 

Bluegreen143

Have been looking at tweaking my YNAB categories and how I can make them more useful for reporting (I’m not yet in a habit of checking the spending reports each month but think I should!).

Obviously it’s only the 18th so 10 days of spending still to happen, but this is our current spending report for Feb (not budget - so it doesn’t include money budgeted to savings - just what we’ve actually spent). This is our joint budget and not including my personal spending pot or Red’s.

Monthly bills - £647.49 (gas/elec still to come out)
Groceries - £342.13 (with a week’s shopping still to go!)
Pets - £18.49
Petrol - £48 (but it’ll need filled again)
Misc - £60.16 (but £20 is coming back as a refund) 
Fun & Family - £28.70
Birthdays & celebrations £120.66 (it includes Red’s birthday and his brother got engaged) 
Home & garden - £37.99
Kids - £22

My personal spending this month - £231 (super high but includes personal training sessions and a payment for an online course subscription which I’ll be done with in 2 months). I’ll monitor this more closely next month though.

Looking at it all, I’d like to bring down groceries the most. I think I may start separating out cleaning stuff/toiletries again - I stopped because it’s a faff, but I’d like to investigate why our grocery bill is so high now.

Petrol is higher than I’d like but in reality I’m not willing to make changes to our lifestyle to bring it down just now 😬

Misc - I’ll keep an eye on this to see if spends would be better categorised elsewhere.

Our birthday/celebration spend (which looks high) came out of the relevant pot so no worries there. It’s also wiped out Christmas savings but we now have several months with no family birthdays so I can focus on Christmas from now on. I can never save for Christmas til March cos we have tons of birthdays in Dec/Jan/Feb!

For the joint budget, we’ve spent £1,325.42 this month with £3,470 coming in to that budget. The excess will either be spent on petrol/groceries this next week, or is in short term pots (holiday, annual bills etc) and about £1,000 has been added to our savings goals (help to save, LISA, conservatory).

Bluegreen143

Morning all! Got some frugal wins and fails to report today 😆

Frugal fail:

Car failed its MOT. But looking at about £330 all in for the MOT and repair which isn’t too bad. Can meet £185 from the annual bills pot (I put £25 a month in here on top of the annual bills to help pay towards the MOT and car maintenance) and I’ll take the rest from the emergency fund - I can top this back up to £1k in March once we both get paid. 

Frugal win:

1. Have spent most of the morning planting fruit trees in the garden with Red and the kids. Free family entertainment and bonding, fresh air and exercise and the promise of fruit in years to come. What’s not to like?

2. We got a takeaway last night which is normally a fail, but MIL paid for it as a birthday treat for Red and it’s done us lunch as well as dinner last night so two free meals isn’t bad!

Bluegreen143

Having a nice weekend so far 🙂

Last night we took advantage of MIL being here to go to the pub. Imagine that, being able to both just leave in the evening 😆😅

We’ve three reasonable pubs within walking distance, but always go to the same one. For a change we went to another which I was really surprised to find Red hasn’t been in before. We’ve lived here 6.5 years and I’ve been there loads 😆

Walked there and back (which was nice after being totally stuffed as MIL got us a takeaway) but spent £30 in the pub. Usually if we go out together we split the cost from our personal pots (or one of us treats if the other is skint!) but as there was just about £30 left in the joint budget category “family and fun” I took it from there.

Today was very chilled as discussed - we can’t really go anywhere due to the car being in the garage 😆 but we were really productive in the garden and I also sat down with the kids so we could all make Red a birthday card each. MIL noticed what we were doing and then unexpectedly joined us to glitter up her (shop bought) card too so it was quite jolly 😅

Have baked two pistachio sponges for the birthday boy and I’ll get the kids to help me ice them tomorrow with chocolate buttercream. 

My sister made our wedding cake and one tier was pistachio sponge with chocolate buttercream so it’s a blast from the past. If it tastes half as good as the uncooked batter did we’re onto a winner 😋

Honeysucklelou2

Pistachio sponge sounds amazing!

themadvix

Agreed! Bet it is a lovely colour too! Where is the recipe from?

Bluegreen143

It is nice @Honeysucklelou2!

Recipe as below:

200g butter
200g sugar
4 eggs
1tsp vanilla 
150g SR flour, sifted
Large pinch salt
1tsp baking powder
100g pistachios, blitzed up (not totally to dust, it’s nice to have some bigger bits in for texture!) 

Preheat oven to fan 170C. Cream butter and sugar, add vanilla and eggs one at a time. Mix in dry ingredients.

Bake in 2x greased 20cm cake tins for about 20 mins.

The recipe had a cream cheese icing but I’m putting chocolate buttercream on.