Learning to walk before I run

South_coast

Or just multiply your balance by the interest rate as a decimal, ie if your balance was £200k and the rate was 1.5% then it's 200,000 x 0.015 and then divide by either 12 or 365, depending on whether you want monthly or daily

edinburgher

This recipe was a serious hit this evening 👌 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.olivemagazine.com/recipes/meat-and-poultry/dry-brined-turkey-crown-with-green-herb-butter/amp/

edinburgher

Aiming for a quieter day today - DD1 going out for a party at lunchtime and Mrs E planning on collecting her from town and doing a little shopping this afternoon.

I have been having a think about Zop@ and have discovered at least one thing that I don't like about it. I purchased a couple of small gifts for Mrs E the other day and wanted to withdraw £12 from the £50 I'd paid into a boosted pot. Only I can't do that, the only option is to convert the whole pot into an instant access account again. While it's slick enough in the app, it makes me realise that boosted pots are only any use for large lumpy expenses or genuine emergency fund type savings. Not quite as slick as I had thought!

Bumper CC payment of £93.15 today that takes me comfortably under £3,000. Now less than £40 a day to have it paid off before my 40th birthday (ooooh - spooky)! I am Benjamin Buttoning my debts... Mrs E has had an enquiry about the Lego set we're selling on FB marketplace for £40, too, but not a firm lead yet as FB marketplace is the wild West when it comes to flakey buyers.

I hoovered yesterday (the place was mockit), will mop the bathroom and kitchen and use the cleaning spray for the bamboo floors today. Also got a mountain of dirty laundry to process in the background. Still, no overtime and a few hours off this afternoon, all good

edinburgher

Ok, so I've kept processing the laundry mountain and I made a lentil and parsnip bake (DD1 isn't a fan of pulled pork, DD2 loves it). I didn't go anywhere near the floor cleaning but rather enjoyed my time off, sat and ate Twiglets and had a nice wee daydream

Managed to sneak in a little bit of financial sensibility tho, as I've realised that I can combine tumble dryer loads instead of 1 washing machine load = 1 tumble dryer load. It appears that c. 1/3 of each laundry load is air dry only, so you can combine 1 1/3 loads quite the thing in the tumble dryer on the "extra dry" setting. Probably not quite a 50% saving in electricity costs and only works if you're doing loads in multiples of 2. Still, the amount of laundry we generate, this isn't too difficult to achieve. Combined with my new regime of washing everything at 30 degrees bar towels and bedding, this should get us a good bit of the way towards my aim of cutting our energy usage by 10% this year (significantly more expensive costs incoming from April).

The attic conversion has definitely added to our energy bills, which is odd, as there isn't too much up there (say 3 LED lamps, 3 LED downlights and a radiator). I suspect the elephant in the room is the 3kW fan heater that we run for perhaps 15-20 minutes when the temperature drops below 16 degrees. There's an insulated floor and a heavily insulated ceiling but I suppose you will lose a fair bit of heat regardless when a room is exposed to the elements on 4/6 sides?

I am not sure what else we can do re. energy use. Bar the tumble dryer (not a heat pump as we had a bad experience with an early one of those) and perhaps 20 minutes a day of the fan heater, we're pretty innocent. All LED lights, energy efficient washing machine and oven, central heating on at 19 degrees when it's on (timer and thermostat), cavity wall insulation, window coverings on all windows (granted, usually blinds or shutters as opposed to curtains). The only other "naughties" I can think of are leaving the microwave on at the wall and a couple of small LED lamps in hall/landing when we go to bed in case DD1 wakes up and is wandering about in the dark.   

Edit: On second thoughts, perhaps standing still might be a good energy use target as we've added an extra room?

Lovely parents have offered us a free holiday for my upcoming 40th, so having a think about places it might be nice to visit again or for the first time. I think they're meaning in the UK but still, incredibly generous and it will be lovely to spend time with them as a parent and a child

Edit: starting to think up new financial goals, as I think my original 2023 goals (pay off CC and up SIPP payments by 10%) were too easy. The CC is well in hand and I am giving thought to just setting up an AVC for my increased SIPP payments. This could help to provide a tax free lump sum towards the mortgage a la @savingholmes. I need to check with Strathclyde Pension Fund whether AVCs are 100% tax free when taken at the same time as DB pension if I take the DB pension early, as is the plan?

edinburgher

Finances yesterday:

• £6.83 from Prolific to my personal spends account
• 41p cashback from Ch@se
  

Finances today

• £42.67 paid off CC
• 18p cashback from Ch@se
• Earned 50p on YG
  

SuperSecretSquirrel

If you have a sensor dryer I don't think your "more than one washer load per dryer load" will benefit you. I expect two 30 minute runs to cost the same as one 60 minute run, so there's no benefit to overloading the dryer. In fact I think it might be less efficient to overfill as you end up with a big tangled mess of wet clothes that don't really "tumble" properly. It might save you some time traipsing back and forth to empty and load the dryer, but I don't think it will save money/electricity.

The led lights in the new room will cost next to nothing to run (same goes for your microwave on standby, any mobile chargers left on, etc). The heater would cost about 34p per blast at the moment on a standard price cap tariff. I guess it depends how often these blasts occur if this would be a noticeable amount for you. I know our electricity consumption for mid-dec to mid-jan this year was only 47% of the consumption in the same period last year (245kwh vs 519kwh). The biggest change between this year and last is that we've not used any electric heaters this year. We're using more gas as a result, but that's cheaper than electric heat. That 274kwh saving isn't all down to heating habits, we've got a much more efficient tv now, and we try to air fry more and use the oven less, etc, but the heaters are the really big noticeable change. Do you have a door to close off the attic room, or is it an open staircase into the room? We heat downstairs to a higher temperature than upstairs during the day, and keeping doors closed really makes a big difference in terms of keeping the warm rooms warm and the cooler rooms cool.

I'd say adding an extra room and standing still on energy use is definitely a win, well done! 😎

Lucky you with the holiday for your 40th - lovely parents indeed! 🤗 We're planning on going away for mine too, unfortunately we'll have to pay for it ourselves, I would jump at the chance of a free holiday 😁

South_coast

I'm hoping for a holiday for mine - but that's from BF (dining out on the fact I took him away for his 50th 😀!)

badmemory

I've got my dryer timed to almost the minute for one load of washing & if I do 2 at the same time it takes less than 10 minutes longer.

SuperSecretSquirrel

Sounds like I need to experiment! I have the dryer plugged into an electricity monitor, I'll try two washer loads in there at once and see what happens.

edinburgher

Ah, remember it's not 2 full washer loads, it's c 1 1/3