Mortgage free in Forever Home :-)

Cheery_Daff

Gosh, sorry to hear your water is off. What a calamity indeed. Good you were able to help your neighbours out though. You're right about it making you appreciate what you normally have- we recently lost power for 4 days (and central heating for 6) and were very grateful indeed when it all came back on! Hope you get your water back at midnight...

KajiKita

Still no water here .....

Am taking all the empty water bottles to work to fill them today, saves spending right?!  

themadvix

Definitely refill the bottles! But I hope you don’t need them. Very poor that it’s not back on yet. 😏

Suffolk_lass

If it is off and they know you are affected, they pay you £20 compensation after 24 hours (and another £10 for each further 24 hours if it comes to that) - I'm sure you would rather it were just restored though!

KajiKita

Suffolk_lass said:

If it is off and they know you are affected, they pay you £20 compensation after 24 hours (and another £10 for each further 24 hours if it comes to that) - I'm sure you would rather it were just restored though!

Thanks Suffolk, I was wondering about that …. Thank fully, we have woken up to water restored here this morning! A looooong hot shower is planned for this evening!

in other plans, I need to do some MSE stylee money shuffling this evening - the previous job and the new job have both paid me overnight! (I wasn’t expecting first pay from new job until next month). My current account has never looked so healthy, stuffed with cash!! It needs slimming down and then tucking away somewhere safe so I don’t feel ‘rich’ iyswim …. I will shuffle the excess (above my previous standard pay) off to the useless-rate-savings account for now and sort some more premium bonds at the weekend again (I think I closed the PB account last time I emptied it, sadly). 

A good start to the day here  

KK

badmemory

If they both paid you in the same month using your normal tax code you could possibly end up owing as much as a  months personal allowance in tax (which could be as much as £200).  Always worth checking before spending/saving it all.

savingholmes

Great news on the pay

redofromstart

Hope you had a good second week and you are settling in ok

KajiKita

redofromstart said:

Hope you had a good second week and you are settling in ok

Thanks Redo  It's very intense (and tiring!) hence no mid-week posting here atm. I seem to be doing okay though and I am enjoying it, but it's going to be a rough 6 months ahead, I suspect ....

I have done the 'PayDay Money-Shuffle' (that sounds like a  well funky dance style ....  ) and I have some positive news.

Savings are now at £5,852.56 thanks to my double pay-day (this includes £65 of JL C/Cd cash back vouchers and £99.03 in Nectar points I didn't realise we had! I need to find out how to 'spend' these). So steady progress here. 

Virgin credit card (0%) first 10% of balance payment will come out in a few days taking that balance to  £6.147.90 - this I will keep ticking away at 10% of balance payments until the month before the 0% balance deal runs out next year.

Food / groceries spend came in way under budget with £496.45 left from £832 budgeted. This is partly because we are not buying alcohol from this any more (I don't drink and hubby is buying his own separately now) and eating from stores we have in, but *must* also be because the figures I used for the initial budget (c. 3 months of spend) were way high ....! I am going to leave this as it is for another couple of months and then start to shuffle this money to elsewhere in the budget - possibly savings, possibly the Virgin C/Cd debt or spilt between the two.

After this first month of a detailed budget I have have tweaked various categories upwards to reflect actual spends (vegan foodstuffs, clothes and some little spends that i hadn't picked up such as my Moneyhub subscription). 

One unplanned spend in the week - £4.19 for a new can opener when the last one split in hubby's hands!

Next month's pay should give me a better sense of my cash flow as it will be my first full pay-check and they will start deducting my pension contributions. Seems odd that they are already taking for / contributing to a pension fund when i haven't finished my probation, but hey, who am I to argue!    

Some chores I want to do this weekend / early next week:
- Update my signature here
- Move some of the savings back into Premium Bonds (might as well as it's not earning any money where it is!)
- Complete the car registering thingy-whatsit I have been asked to do, as I can't see the car allowance I am supposed to get on my pay slip as yet ...
- Some more decluttering -  tackling anything from anywhere here would help!
- Finalise my veg seed order and get it done!
- Toiletries stock list (that's been on-plan for too long already)

And some finally nice news     I was talking a while back about needing some snow drops .... I have some!! They have appeared at the back of a bed that was completely overwhelmed with half dead shrubs. I had a contractor in last September to take two of the shrubs out completely (dead and / or ugly) and prune / reshape the rest. There are two little clumps, one of which is next to an enormous dock which needs digging out. I will keep chopping off the dock leaves until the snowdrops have finished flowering, then I can lift the snowdrops, divide and redistribute them and hoick the dock-beast out at the same time 

KK 

Suffolk_lass

Ooh veg seed order - just to say I have used lots of mainstream people for years but last year I changed to Kings Seeds

They are relatively local to us and sell in both domestic and commercial quantities (so be careful if you look) - very impressed with the service, seeds and produce. I did get some in a garden centre and thought to myself, I wonder if they sell direct - well they do and good value too