Trying to get the balance right…

savingholmes

I think pausing when you have something tangible to show for time and money spent so far makes sense - unless you save a lot of £ by stopping now. Some courses you are committed financially even if you give up part way through.

Moralpanic

Hello everyone.  

I’m back from my holiday and looking forward to catching up on everyone’s threads.  

Holiday was lovely and everything was much cheaper than we thought.  Food and excursions cost a lot less than we anticipated which was great.  I came back with €15 so I’ll save that for another holiday.  

Back to saving again now.  We have plans for a new bathroom and the money is put aside for this.  It was due to start in November but they’ve had a cancellation and asked if we could start next Tuesday.  Obviously this is ‘terribly inconvenient’ so I asked for a discount and they gave me 6% discount.  

I’m very happy with that.  It will go towards a new blind and tv stand in the living room.  It means we can still overpay mortgage and put into savings when we get paid. 

36p gone into savings whilst I was away from Save the Change.  

Also hubby has covid now so we’re saving money this weekend by not going anywhere! He’s feeling ok now.  

beanielou

Glad that you enjoyed your holiday.
Hope all goes well with the bathroom 

savingholmes

Great news on the discount. 

Glad you had a nice holiday.

Hope OH recovers quickly

skint_spice

Good news on bathroom.

Hope DH isn’t too poorly.

Moralpanic

So I am back 18 months later… I fell off the posting wagon but fortunately kept in budget.  

Current situation is similar to before. We have just fixed our rate as our fixed rate was ending.  It’s increased by £50 but it would’ve been an extra £300 if we’d moved onto variable.  It’s only fixed for two years so we will reassess then.  We aren’t over paying at the moment as we are putting all spare into our pension pots.  They’re looking so much healthier than they were two years ago.  

The savings pot is ok but I’d like it to be bigger (who wouldn’t). I’m trying to put extra in each month but it depends on any extra expenses that month. 

Our big upcoming expense is for youngest’s uni accommodation in the autumn. This will be about £8k. Our plan is to pay for his accommodation and then he has his maintenance loan to live on.  He will have to get a job if it isn’t enough money for him.  We did this with our eldest and it worked out ok. He didn’t need a job but he is far more frugal than his brother. 

Moralpanic

We use a Halifax current account which has a ‘save the change’ facility.  I am going to put all of this each month against the mortgage. 

January’s was £30.93 and February’s total was £20.43 so I will move this to my mortgage account rather than the savings. 

Moralpanic

Small wins today. 

I bought train tickets for our holiday in July.  I used our Two Together card, which saved 1/3. It’s our second time using it and it’s now paid for itself with 11 months to go so that’s good. I also used a Blue Light Discount so our tickets were £65.  I’d budgeted £110-120 so that was good.