Simple living in the country - back to basics

Moneyfordreams

I'm 53, OH is 64. Just got 2 insurances policies for 60 plate 206 - £121 and a 65 plate aygo - I pushed the boat out on this on to add legal cover as I'm in the city for work - £171. - £120 less than renewal quotes - with 2 different insurers though. 

Cheery_Daff

That's useful to know Moneyfordreams. Will make sure I investigate different insurers for each, however tedious it is. 

Ha - had to laugh at myself the other day. My mum rang complaining about comparing car insurances, but saying she'd managed to save herself £200, and I waffled on about 'if you were offered £200 for some tedious admin for half an hour a day for a week you'd say yes, I know I would!' She did ask me to do hers next year, but quickly backtracked when I pointed out I'd want the £200 savings!

So. On strike today. Very tedious. We've given Bessie her tablet, and Sunshine a bath (nothing particularly wrong, just a blob of droppings stuck to her feathers - always best to get rid before they start collecting more). She's drying off in the house. And I've finally started digging holes for the fence posts for the new enclosure. I got about 45cm down one, and hit a stone I couldn't get out, and then the same happened in the second. The wind is ferocious out there and it was all most tedious so I'm back inside doing financial things. 

On the list for today: 

* banking 
- YNAB
- pay stupid garage bill
- pay Mr Cheery's National Insurance back payments
- help Mr Cheery write letter to HMRC

* blog post
* yoga
* possibly a bath
* make some flatbreads and something in the haybox for lunch at work tomorrow

I want to go to a little local history event tonight, would need to leave at 7, so I'd want tea before that, I think, and possibly a bath, although if I have a bath before hand it's very likely I won't make it out of the door, so it might just be a quick shower instead... 

In financial news
- Prolific made it to just £16.56 in January, and quite a bit of that was actually December. Just did another study worth £1.19 but that's not showing as pending, which is annoying. Cashed out and will start February total from now. 

- Happy Wheel DOWN £99 in January, most vexing. Still, it was down £167 at one point in the middle of the month so I did manage to claw it back a bit. That's only the second month I've been down since I started doing it every day since April so let's hope it doesn't happen again! 

- Happy Wheel subscriptions are due out this month so will likely be down overall, but it would be nice if the actual total I make could be positive at least! The subscriptions definitely paid for themselves last year. 

- vets cost £305 on Monday...

- still haven't had the internet banking login for the new savings account so not transferring anything over until I can see that the test £50 arrived. I might ring them and check it's on the way, it's been a couple of weeks now, and I want to get on with opening some regular savers to drip feed things into. 

Right, best go and actually look at the bank - definitely avoiding it and we all know that never helps!

EssexHebridean

Ha - avoiding banking definitely never helps Cheery! Loving you telling your Mum you'd expect the saving too - god way of encouraging the backtracking! 

Cheery_Daff

Indeed - I hate doing that stuff for myself, no way I'd be doing it for someone else without considerable incentive!

Banking done, and after paying the garage and HMRC things are looking considerably dire 🙄 BUT I did manage to shuffle things around without raiding any of the longer term pots, or the £200 monthly saving I put aside for January, so that's good - I've transferred that into a replacement wages category which I've now decided is more pressing than plastering the stairs 🙄 Need to work out exactly how much I stand to lose with the strikes - 2 days from November is taken off from Feb wages, and the rest will likely be spread through the year, but I've not done exact calculations yet.

Anyway, there's now nothing in any of the car/MOT pots 🙄 Raided all those, plus the extra I had saved for house insurance but didn't need, plus birthday presents (none til March now anyway) etc. Had £170 in the chicken pot, don't need food til next month probably, so had to find another £130 for that too - raided various other pots.

Anyway, not so pleased with all this raiding, but this is how it goes, and today is a new month, so we start again 😊

Have to remind myself that when Mr Cheery gave up his job, he ' only' had £17k in the bank. Still had a mortgage (£600 a month less than now, but still), earning a little more self employed than now (probably only about £200 a month though). I was working 2 days a week, and had no savings. And I encouraged him to leave, because I'd never had any money and figured we'd be fine, and we were. 

Quite different now, with lifestyle inflation of course 🙄 and a bigger mortgage, 2 cars, and more things to go wrong, and somewhat less than £17k... but we also have FAR more coming in every month too. And we are fine, I just need to keep reminding myself of that. (Oh, and I'll report back on January spends in my signature later...)

Tescodealqueen

Saw that someone in the Shef****d area won the premium bond jackpot getting closer to me!!!

Cheery_Daff

😂 I was impressed that someone with £3k won the jackpot!! Not me though, sadly 🙄😂

Karmacat

Cheery_Daff said:

Have to remind myself that when Mr Cheery gave up his job, he ' only' had £17k in the bank. Still had a mortgage (£600 a month less than now, but still), earning a little more self employed than now (probably only about £200 a month though). I was working 2 days a week, and had no savings. And I encouraged him to leave, because I'd never had any money and figured we'd be fine, and we were. 

Quite different now, with lifestyle inflation of course 🙄 and a bigger mortgage, 2 cars, and more things to go wrong, and somewhat less than £17k... but we also have FAR more coming in every month too. And we are fine, I just need to keep reminding myself of that. (Oh, and I'll report back on January spends in my signature later...)

When I went self employed in the early 1990s, I had a mortgage of £52k and less than £3k in savings.  Then I took a three month sabbatical and travelled in Greece and Turkey (skimming the edges of the first Gulf War).  I also had 3 lodgers (one of whom was in my room).  It was an interesting time!  It worked, though and yours will too.  Lumpy payments make things look much worse than they are.

Cheery_Daff

You're right about lumpy payments of course, and I do distinctly remember feeling similarly last year at the same time 🙄 

And yes, I too was definitely more carefree when I was younger! Also more willing to live in a shared house and I had a lot less stuff to break 🙄😂 But it's a good reminder that there always options re lodgers etc (which I'm not prepared to take right now so things mustn't be that desperate!)

Speaking of desperation, I went to an odd local history talk tonight. They're often things like local aircraft wrecks or noted dignitaries, and this one was about the local workhouse. The speaker had done a lot of reading of the archives, and concluded that our workhouse was actually a pretty cheerful one, because they had an annual 'treat' and occasionally took inmates to the fair etc (lots of other examples, mainly from the minutes of the board of guardians, which I can't imagine are unbiased).

Anyway, the phrase she kept using was 'people wanted to go into the workhouse',  and I've been coming back to it ever since. 'Want' is such an odd word to use in these circumstances. It was quite clear they would have starved to death outside, so 'wanting to go into the workhouse' isn't quite the same as 'wanting to go on holiday to Spain this year'. Anyway, she showed some interesting stuff from the archives, but I interpreted it VERY differently to the way she did. She talked about 'people using the workhouse as a maternity hospital'- because several women had gone in a few days before giving birth, then left again a few days later, but again to me, this smacks of absolute desperation, not making use of a friendly neighbourhood service. With no family, no food, nobody to watch the other kids, it's quite likely she would have died in childbirth, leaving all the kids orphaned, so again, it feels more like 'I'll die if I don't do this' rather than 'ooh, I've heard that workhouse is nice, I quite fancy a week in there'.

Anyway, it cost £3 and included two pieces of cake (and would have included a cup of tea if I'd got there early enough) so a veritable bargain for a thought provoking evening 😊

VintageHistorian

People will do anything to convince themselves that "things weren't that bad in the old days".

My 3x great grandfather went into the workhouse and died 2 weeks later. He was an old man and although he had 3 sons the family clearly weren't well off. My Dad's theory (which I agree with) was that he went into the workhouse because he knew he was sick and also knew that his wife and sons couldn't afford a doctors visit (pre-NHS you had to pay) but even worse, they couldn't afford any kind of funeral or burial for him without beggaring themselves. A paupers burial wouldn't have much dignity but would still be better than what his family could pay for.

Does that mean that he "wanted" to go into the workhouse? Doubtful, I'm sure he would have preferred to die with his wife of many years by his side. But abject poverty meant that dying at home would place a huge financial burden on his family and he felt like he couldn't do that to them. Of course, this is us reading into it from 100+ years later, perhaps his family told him to go to the workhouse!

But I agree with you, the idea that people were happy to go into the workhouse because they got a Christmas treat (usually a slightly nicer dinner) or maternity care that wouldn't kill them instantly, is taking an extremely optimistic view of the whole Victorian attitude to social care.

Karmacat

Cheery_Daff said:

And yes, I too was definitely more carefree when I was younger! Also more willing to live in a shared house and I had a lot less stuff to break 🙄😂 But it's a good reminder that there always options re lodgers etc (which I'm not prepared to take right now so things mustn't be that desperate!)
Heavens yes, there's absolutely no need for you to take in lodgers right now!  

Speaking of desperation, I went to an odd local history talk tonight. They're often things like local aircraft wrecks or noted dignitaries, and this one was about the local workhouse. The speaker had done a lot of reading of the archives, and concluded that our workhouse was actually a pretty cheerful one, because they had an annual 'treat' and occasionally took inmates to the fair etc (lots of other examples, mainly from the minutes of the board of guardians, which I can't imagine are unbiased).

Anyway, the phrase she kept using was 'people wanted to go into the workhouse',  and I've been coming back to it ever since. 'Want' is such an odd word to use in these circumstances. It was quite clear they would have starved to death outside, so 'wanting to go into the workhouse' isn't quite the same as 'wanting to go on holiday to Spain this year'. Anyway, she showed some interesting stuff from the archives, but I interpreted it VERY differently to the way she did. She talked about 'people using the workhouse as a maternity hospital'- because several women had gone in a few days before giving birth, then left again a few days later, but again to me, this smacks of absolute desperation, not making use of a friendly neighbourhood service. With no family, no food, nobody to watch the other kids, it's quite likely she would have died in childbirth, leaving all the kids orphaned, so again, it feels more like 'I'll die if I don't do this' rather than 'ooh, I've heard that workhouse is nice, I quite fancy a week in there'.

Anyway, it cost £3 and included two pieces of cake (and would have included a cup of tea if I'd got there early enough) so a veritable bargain for a thought provoking evening 😊

Like Vintage Historian, I've got ancestors who died in the workhouse; I mentioned my 3 x great grandmother recently somewhere - she died in 1911 and her body was reclaimed by the family and buried with her parents, who'd died in 1860, and her own grandson, who'd died in 1904 as a newborn.  But there were also two of her granddaughters who were put into the workhouse temporarily, after their father died in an industrial accident - they ran away regularly, and came home.  Even by then, 1916, it really wasn't that great.  My great grandfather on another branch of the family suffered from dementia, and he was put into the workhouse in the 1920s and died there -  I think by then they *were* becoming a little bit more like a hospital for end of life care. 

But it still sounds really grim, even by then.  Yeah, "want" isn't quite the word.