Diary of a 30-something idiot

stymied

How are you getting on with balancing the budget this month @foxandflowers? Will you be able to retrieve your Switch?

Has your work course started yet?

foxandflowers

Current state of affairs:

£32,807.41	Stepchange
£7,316.00	Friend 1 Loan
£2,000.00	Friend 2 Loan
£201.53	Ramsdens
£297.74	Credit card (husband's)
£156.80	Cash Generators

Current bank account balance:
£24.82 (have cashed in my Loqbox and cancelled it)
Days until Payday:
6

Plan:
Pray something on Marketplace sells ASAP to get me through the next six days as we have half a wilted lettuce head, 3 eggs and a pack of tomato pasta sauce in the fridge. Buy some frozen sausages or something to get us through the next few days until the Premium Bond cashing in lands. Stepson has been away and is not paying rent for some unknown reason, he is totally incommunicado since getting back with his baby mama last weekend. 

Get paid. Go to Crack Generators and get my Switch back. Pay Stepchange, Friend 1, and slightly above minimum repayment on CC (£350 budgeted). Take van to garage to get brake switch relay replaced as they are not working. Pray this does not cost more than £120. Set aside £895 to Monzo to cover all the bills. Move £600 to Chase to cover food/fuel/bus. Stick to meal plan as even eating boring food is better than having no food. Absolutely do not spend any money outside of what is budgeted. Whatever is left will have to go towards Christmas now. Rinse and repeat for next month except pay off Ramsdens, and hopefully not have to fix the van. 

We are moving at work to a new building so that will save me £25 in transport costs a month as of the 21st October. I still can't work from home. Once that starts my transport costs will fall even more. After Christmas I will start chucking money at the CC, and have that paid off by February. Then comes whether I increase payments to Stepchange/Friend One/or start paying Friend Two., or a mixture of the above. Work is thankfully going better than it was, and I recently got my first pay rise of £900 per anum. Just waiting now on the strike ballot to see if we get our payrise backdated at what the NJC have put forward, or what the unions want.  

Radical decluttering is due to begin at Fox Towers, so hopefully lots of things can be sold to get some cash together for an Emergency Fund without having to take it from my very tight budget. I daydream of having a set of steamer trunks to hold my spare bedding, my crafts and my sentimental junk in. I do not daydream of going in the attic and dealing with giant spiders and 450 different duvets and wires.

I feel very disheartened logging in and reporting further failures. Especially as there are people that think I'm trolling. I think people assume that because Mr Fox is at home doing childcare and house work that he's not contributing, and if it was the other way around... I think most people wouldn't have such an issue with it. Also, we are married. At this point, I'm the kids stepmother, and I have been for years. I'm not going to stop contributing towards them? People think that finances are very black and white and should just be "focus on you and your blood only" and don't take into account that I've watched these children grow up and been involved in their lives for the last decade. They call me mum. Thank you for your concern, but please stop asking about it.
 

mumtoomany

Hi, @foxandflowers, lovely to see you back. We were all worried about you, when you hadn't posted. Glad you're getting a pay rise, hopefully that should make life a little easier for you. Have you got a community pantry near you? Not a food bank, but a place that stops food going to landfill. I believe you pay a few pounds and can have lots of food. Might be worth looking at. If you have spare money after Christmas, please use it to save for an emergency fund and then to pay back your friends. Step change can wait. In fact is it worth telling them how much you are struggling and reducing your payment to them? 

Hugs to you and your family, mumtoomany.xxx

mumtoomany

Just private messaged you, hugs, mumtoomany.xx

Sarahwithlove

It's not the fact that he's a man. It's that he isn't pulling his weight and isn't willing to make the same sacrifices as you are to get out of the debt. But you are happy with the situation and don't want it to change so I will instead focus on your debt busting efforts. 

Personally if it was me when the savings of transport etc come into place I wouldn't up payments I'd instead focus on emergency fund and sinking funds so that you don't have to sell items etc. Then once you have a better handle on your budget look at increasing payments. 

stymied

Glad to see you back @foxandflowers

Do you mean getting back together with or is baby mama back at your house?

Are you having any success with Olio now that you’re less rural? Food bank or community pantry also sounds like a good idea. Have you already used all the different company “free” recipe boxes (may charge postage)?

Stepchange payment is the lowest priority plus CC since they’re unsecured debt. I would cancel both payments at least until next year.

Debsnewbudget

I know you were thinking about YNAB so I wanted to let you know about the app I have just restarted  using.
its free and its called Good Budget,
you set up your income and allocate it to the different envelopes (limited number on free version, but enough categories)  you the enter your expenditure each day, any regular payments can be set up to go out on the correct dates.
It then monitors your spending against the envelopes. 

It works like the old fashioned cash envelope budgeting. You can see reports n what you have spent.

i used to use it years ago but then stopped, however just recently money has been slipping through my fingers again so I restarted it.  It has been a complete eye opener on how much I am actually spending in the different categories and how overspent I am. I am however hoping it will allow me to set a realistic budget with a few months data.
give it a go and see if you like it.

littlegreen

I stumbled upon your thread and, whilst I have not read all of it (forgive me 142 pages is a lot ) I have caught up on recent pages.

Firstly I think it's admirable you have so much want to clear the debt instead of popping your head in the sand - you are very open and honest, traits not many have when it comes to money. Secondly your set up and income is similar to my own in that we just have one parent earning and our income is similar when you account that we also pay a mortgage (income 2650 (salary plus child benefit for 2) -mortgage of 700) so we live off about £1950 a month. The parent not working also claims no benefits other than child benefit which goes straight into a seperate account for all child related expenses (clothes etc) 

What stands out to me of how our budgets differ is that we have a lot less subscriptions. For us, our luxury is that we only have one person having to work, that we have our children at home (they are pre schoolers), and this luxury trumps any joy we could get out of Netflix, Spotify, ps2 etc. Don't get me wrong, we have these things but we dip in and out. So we may have Netflix for a month, then unsubscribe and watch some shows on iplayer etc. We've switched to Spotify free and BBC sounds for most things. We also only eat out or takeaway once a month. If we wanted more of these things we'd have to give up the luxury of being a one salary household. 

We also budget pocket money for both of us each month, it's a small budget but it's for us to use on whatever we want but this has to include clothes and shoes. It takes out any angst about personal hobbies etc

It is hard to be a one income household in this day and age, but it is possible if you see it as a luxury that you trade other luxuries for. My budget falls down some months, this month for example is tight for groceries, but it will just mean a few more beans on jacket potato type meals and a fresh start for October. If you are both happy with the set up, and both feel you are contributing equally to the success of the household (here the non working adult does the bulk of childcare and housework) but it is a luxury to only have one income, once I saw it like this it made me work harder at our budget to make it work.

Good luck

stymied

That's a good perspective littlegreen. The outgoing debt commitments also reduce @foxandflowers available money to what seems to be below a sustainable level hence my suggestion to re-evaluate the budget with StepChange (remembering that the debt to friends isn't accounted for here) and reduce that payment. Repayment timescales don't really matter right now because Mini Fox will grow up all too soon, changing the budget again, and full and final offers will become a possibility in the future.

foxandflowers

I get paid today and leave behind another horrendous month. All the bills were paid, aside from Spotify, Netflix and my phone bill. So not all the bills. 

I'm trying to work out my budget for the month ahead this morning before the money lands this afternoon.

I really desperately need new glasses, my current ones are scratched and no longer the correct prescription. I got a new pair last September and work reimbursed me, but they only reimburse once every 2 years, and unfortunately when we had Ronnie he managed to chew that pair into tiny pieces. I don't think I'm going to be able to swing it this month though.

The van is once again in the garage, having its brake light relay, and power steering fixed, along with the weird squeaking noise investigated. I am praying that it does not cost me more than £210, because if it is I don't know where I'm going to find the money from. It's only £210 because I have £120 budgeted for it, and £50 rent from Stepson, and £40 from selling some golf clubs. I've cut the food budget for the month ahead, but I've had to increase the fuel budget as football season is back in swing. 

I used Notion to create myself a meal plan, and then generated a 10 day shopping list off it, so hopefully I only have to do 3 food deliveries, and the rest can go towards topping up milk/bread/cereal/fruit. I am pretty sure I'm going to get scurvy if this carries on. My body is screaming for water and something that isn't beige to eat. The water is definitely my fault. I am fuelled only with coffee and spite at this point. 

Mini Fox needs new clothes again. Going to have to hit up Primark this weekend and load up on jogging bottoms and tshirts so she has comfy things to wear around the house that aren't her pyjamas. Pretty sure she would exist only in pyjamas if she had a choice. I'm also pretty sure I'd do the same.

Getting myself in gear this month, and have set myself an evening schedule so I don't just waste my life swiping on my phone. Get in at 6pm - cook and eat dinner, have 45 mins peace and quiet to do a non-screen hobby, read to Mini Fox, put her to bed, do some decluttering/vinted, hang laundry/set machine/ironing, finances check in, bed. Hoping if I schedule in Vinted, I'll actually get back to making money on there. 

The fact that Christmas is around the corner is scaring me. If we don't get our pay award agreed ASAP and get the backpay, I am going to be in real trouble. 

@littlegreen hello. I think you're right about some of it for sure, I have definitely not quite got used to not having the option to be bailed out. This is the first month I can remember that we didn't borrow money, and still managed to pay almost everything. I am definitely re-thinking some of the subscriptions. I'm wondering if I gave us £40 a month each 'pocket money' if that could then cover subscriptions we each wanted without guilt. I'm probably worse than Mr Fox, because I have both YT premium and illumicrate which is £50 a month together. :[ I get so stuck sometimes in how unfair it is, and how I feel like I deserve a little treat, but £50 is not exactly little. 

Sorry, this post is very disjointed.