Five Year Fix, Five Year Plan

LadyWithAPlan

Hope you finishing your 2023 in style and not working too hard. 

killerpeaty

Sorry to hear about the car. Cars do have a habit of being a pain!  Hope it lives long enough for you to comfortably replace it!

Hope you've enjoyed your Christmas 

FlacosFloozie

Hope the last few days haven't been too crazy for you.

Merlin's_Beard

FlacosFloozie said:

Hope the last few days haven't been too crazy for you.

I think the best thing I can say about it is that it's over! Not crazy busy, but definitely crazy complicated.

I plan to drink, eat rubbish, and watch festive telly until the 3rd, and I'm not planning on doing anything productive until my head stops feeling like it's going to explode and the hamster in the wheel has had a rest.

Merlin's_Beard

And I've woken up early by accident and then chipped one of my plates getting it out the dishwasher to put it away. The downside to coming off a very intense period of concentration is that I tend to get really tired and clumsy. Porcelain glue ordered from Amazon, chips collected off the floor!

Also had some loop earplugs arrive to try out at work to help with ambient noise/concentration (often making phone calls and typing notes in the busiest area of the building because, nowhere else). So far a fail as I had to answer "what have you got in your ears?" every ten minutes. Also not really sure what a good fit feels like, so hard to know what size silicone I should be using? More experimentation needed.

KajiKita

Argh!! To the ‘what have you got in your ears’ question every 10 minutes!  They’ll get used to it …. 😉
Bad luck on the chip. That’s why we only have cheap and cheerful glasses and crockery - we both chip things ….
Hope the hamster becomes Zen very soon 😊

KK

Merlin's_Beard

Thanks @KajiKita - there's plenty of other chipped things in that set, and it was only cheap, but just very annoying!


December roundup:

£2348 saved, which includes the £1500 back from hmrc, less the laptop, plus some Christmas gift money, less some of the holiday spends (but a lot of that was pre-saved). I think we'll call this month chaotic and leave it at that.

Emergency savings fund: £12,285.72. Trying to do my best not to go mad and refill this and stick to the plan.

Surveys this month: £55 - most of this is paid out from stuff I did in November, because no laptop for half the month.

Food spends: £183.44 - a second month under budget! Because I spent a week away (different budget) or at relatives (free food).

Books Two books bought (one a trilogy, we're counting it as one). Read: 7. Alexander Hamilton (long, dry, the basis of the musical, watch the musical instead), The Christmas Book Club (for book club, not my cup of tea but light and fluffy and everyone gets fixed by acquiring a handsome slightly two dimensional man at the end), All of the Inheritance Trilogy by NK Jemison (epic fantasy, much more my speed), the Boy In The Striped Pyjamas (a decent children's book, but I do get the complaints about using it as a teaching aid), and an old Anne McCaffrey that is objectively not that great but subjectively reignites by teenage engrossment in reading.

I have no idea what happened this month, honestly.

Merlin's_Beard

Merlin's_Beard said:

Happy new year to everyone! I hope everyone has a successful 2023, whatever that means for you.

"Refurb" sounds like I have a plan @South_coast instead of just wandering around wishing I had a garden, a dishwasher, and a coat hook!

Plans for 2023!

1. Sort my home out! Prioritising the emergency fund has meant that I've not really done a lot with anything. I'm going to leave this as really open ended, because it's such a wishy washy thing that I have no idea what I need to do beyond a general idea for most of it. Get quotes for the garden now the e-fund is back up to scratch is step one.

2. Read more books than I buy. I spent £82.63 on these books which isn't bad in the grand scheme of things, and I have a nice system where I get alerts for kindle deals on my want to read list. However. I bought 60 books and read 40 last year. I either need to swap those numbers over or find the key to immortality purely for extra reading time.

I think on the other hand, most of my other financial goals are: loosen up a bit. I've spend most of the last few years being really strict and saving for a deposit, then trying to rebuild the emergency fund, and between pandemic and moving area and the saving I've slowly managed to lose most things outside of work, and that's not great for my mental health and it's not great that I'm quite isolated in my area except for family.

So I need to, within the next few months, re-find 3. a fitness class and 4. a non fitness thing I want to do regularly. Running club is out because I constantly re-injure my bad knees and spend weeks/months sidelined, so will look for a yoga/pilates type thing.

Let's look at these now.

First of all, I have to admit that I still don't have a coathook, but I have managed the garden and the dishwasher so let's call point 1 a win

Sorting my home out is going to appear every single year for the next decade I think. So, next on the list for this: kitchen. Kitchen table, kitchen cupboards, storage cupboard of some sort so I don't have a collection of fancy gin bottles huddled in a corner even if they probably make burglars too scared to break in with their sheer messiness. Light fitting for the kitchen as well, I still have bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling in most rooms.

Garden: I need some structural bushes to go in the garden this winter. I want a shed.

2. Read more books than I buy? I've read 37, maybe 38 if I finish my current one in the next two nights. Bought, 42. Oops; let's try again on that one for 24.

3. Financially, I think I have loosened up a bit, just in none of the ways I've specified. Managed a holiday! Will definitely try and do that again for 2024.

4. I've known for about three months that my rota might go t*ts up next summer, because we've got several people in my role going on/coming off maternity. Which means that my free evenings are likely to completely change around depending on where my short day/day off land (I get picked to be swapped around because I haven't got kids). This is my current excuse for not committing to anything. (I need to do better on that, I know. It's hard to find energy to be around people after you've spoken to a new person with a new problem every 15 minutes and you just want a full day off to recover from the peopling.)

South_coast

Merlin's_Beard said:

Alexander Hamilton (long, dry, the basis of the musical, watch the musical instead), 

I'm voting for this as "Book review of the year" - short, and to the point 🤣!

Great work on the savings, however they were achieved, and excellent work on getting enough surveys carried forward to still earn £55 in a month when you were without a laptop 👍 I am with you 100% on the "peopling" outside of working hours, I can't bring myself to do very much after work. Oh, and if you drink the gin it won't be untidy 😀!

Have a great new year x

savingholmes

Great results again this year. So with you on the peopling even without 15 minute appointments. I complained I was in meetings all day when the lovely report you get put me at about 45% collaboration time. Most of the time it is less than 20% which suits me far better so kudos to you for coping with that side of things.

I loved that book report too. I think you are too hard on yourself reading 37/38 out of 42 books bought is pretty good going.