Energy Price Cap announcement: Watch Martin Lewis explain what it means for your electricity and gas bills this winter
Ding! Ding! All change, please...
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Chair, Martin Lewis · Editor, Marcus Herbert
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Beanie - our spare room is the laundry room as well as being MrEH's office and a general storage facility!
We did our usual Wednesday night burst of voluntary role stuff last night. At the moment it's looking surprisingly quiet on that front, which is not unwelcome. The deadline for the phase we're currently in is 31st December - after that we take the information that has come in to that point and direct it out to others around the UK for comment and feedback which will be until roughly the end of Feb - and during that time we will also need to be focusing on our own area of the country - or "areas" as we appear to have inherited a bit that nobody else currently wants - and getting some brewery/beer lists together for those counties. We will probably also need to at least for a while increase the time we spend on it slightly during that phase too. We're trying to be very structured on it this time as for various reasons we have set ourselves some quite tight timelines further on in the process.
Having finished a little earlier than expected we also did a little attack on the spare room tidying - and made a pretty decent impact in a relatively short space of time. I'm planning to take some time tomorrow to get some of the filing pile sorted - and probably also do some shredding too as we seem to have a full bag waiting for attention again. Reckon it might need some structure there though as our little shredder does tend to overheat - so I'll use a timer and do 8 minutes at a time and hopefully that will get through it. I'll have to balance doing anything in there tomorrow with disturbing MrEH though.
Didn't make it to the gym last night either - I know, we're all surprised, right?! It got to mid afternoon and I decided it was way too cold - it's 10 - 12 minutes cycling there, then 20 - 25 minutes cycling back to the car afterwards, and I figured I was going to be freezing by the time I got there, and freezing again by the time I got back to the car, and that just doesn't sound like much fun to me...and as I go to the gym for fun...! I'll go tomorrow from home, then I think next week I'm going to try a slightly different approach of using the one nearer to home than to work, on a night when I'd otherwise be leaving straight from the office to go home. I'll see how that works. I'm not even pretending that I'm going to go this evening - it's just not going to happen right now!
Banking checked and all looking OK. I need to work out at what point to transfer the money over for the FD regular saver transfer - or I simply bite the bullet, do it sooner rather than later and accept a bit of a loss of interest over the couple of weeks that it's early. From February I can probably set up an automated transfer from the joint account to my FD account to cover it, but I don't want to do that yet as we want to focus the surplus on the 0% card.
MSE stuff: Cancelled a magazine subscription yesterday but I'm waiting to hear back from them to confirm. The cost was about to increase from £8 a quarter to £10 a quarter, and I frequently don't get time to read the magazines when they arrive now. I think it's one I can read on the library app if I decide I'm interested again in the future anyway. Not a big saving but definitely money that's better in my bank account than theirs!
I got a fairly quick Prolific survey this morning - I've been slack on surveys this week as there has been other stuff going on, so need to refocus there.
Realised last night that we might be able to make a small electricity saving by way of MrEH manually turning the hot water on when he gets up - as long as he remembers to do it then several days a week that's 40 minutes of heating on the cheap rate which judging by the temperature of it this morning should be enough. We will need to work out how it balances with the days it doesn't get as much time though, and with the weekend days as it might be that it just then takes more energy to heat it from colder and cancels out the savings. 2kWh less used last night than the night before anyway.
L
Lucielle's Daring Debt Free Journey
DFD Before we Die!!!! Long Haul Supporter #124
We have snow.
L - I absolutely feel you on the wanting to hibernate thing - I think I've "almost" given up on the idea of evening gym visits happening much for a while now - although I'll see how plan b re going to the one nearer home works out maybe.
Beanie we also have snow - and a surprising amount of it, for us, too! About 6" fell overnight - we knew there was a "snow and ice" warning but the met office showed no signs of any precipitation at all so we assumed just ice. Glanced out of the window mid evening and it was falling pretty hard and had already well and truly covered the ground, and this morning we have a white fluffy blanket! I'm in London now and it's fairly thick on the ground here, too - and all the trees are looking utterly beautiful!
The office is cold enough that currently I'm still in my thermal leggings and top, and fleece. If it creeps past 18 degrees I might get changed, but then again, I might not! I was VERY glad of those layers walking from the car this morning I must say - nope, it definitely wasn't the right weather for cycling!
Banks are checked and all fine - and I've done the CC shuffle for the grocery spend for November too - we did come in over as I suspected - but I'm not surprised that was the case to be honest. Not too bad, anyway. A bottle of Baileys slipped into the trolley on Saturday - I'm tempted to blame MrEH but quite honestly either of us took much tempting at £10 for the litre bottle!
As the CC month has now finished I can get the rest of the money shuffling done now - there are a few household bits I need to work out where they're coming from, but all in all it's pretty under control I think. Need MrEH to send me some dosh over for some spends of his.
The first of the fixed term accounts has delivered up its interest too which is encouraging - I like monthly interest as it is nice to see it building up as you go along.
Right - there is some "big news" too....
So - it seems we might be about to undertake a little more "all change" than I was first imagining when I christened the new diary, as although the Hebrides move is off the table for at least 5 years, we've decided that a further 5 years with no garden is not something we want to contemplate - so never being the types to hang about when a decision is made, we viewed two houses on Saturday! Also never being the type to do things by halves, both are Grade II listed, and likely to be money-pits (well of COURSE they are!). One is a definite no - too small, and literally uninhabitable right now - as far as we can see it doesn't even have a hot water system! It also has no useable heating system, and all manner of other problems/issues too. The second however, we utterly loved - and it really would be way more house than we could have dreamed of. It does still need some work - but we could move straight in as everything is at least functional at the moment. The issue of course is that as this is a bit of a knee-jerk situation, our place is a few weeks off being able to get it on the market, and even once it IS, we still need to get an offer/go through the process... We know there is EVERY chance that we might not get the house we loved - but we do have advantages - we'd be looking at a relatively small mortgage for a start, and we'd be able to think about OP'ing that reasonably quickly too. Our place is fairly likely to go to FTBers, so perhaps no chain below us. All we can do is offer and hope, we think. MrEH is dealing with the offering bit today - and if everyone would like to join in with the hoping. we'd be grateful! (And no - sorry, there will be NO pictures or links to the listing as it is a very distinctive looking building and would literally inform the general public of our possible future address!) We are EXPECTING to lose it though, to be quite honest, just because there is little chance of nobody else offering before we're in a position to progress.
Our plans immediately are that regardless of what happens with this one, we are prepared to work flat out to get ours on the market. The hallway is a whisker away from finished - the final bits of caulking and the skirtings to be painted. We will then call that done, all bar probably a new lampshade. An hours work though, realistically, plus time to mask round the floor. We've already cracked massively into more decluttering - and even MrEH is getting stuck in and being willing to let stuff go. 8 bags of stuff have gone to the charity shops over the weekend, and we already have another 2 ready to go. A couple of black sacks of rubbish too. We've agreed that we will do an hour a night on evenings we're both in - that will make an impact hopefully. There are a couple of bigger jobs to do too - but those will have to wait for the weekend - we did make strides towards doing them though. A lot of it is about creating additional space in cupboards meaning that we can clear more stuff away - hopefully that will make the place look both bigger and nicer. A balance has to be struck between taking too much time and creating delays that won't give us any financial gain, but equally, the bits we're looking at are probably the difference between marketing for £200k or even £205k - and expecting to get £195k perhaps, and having to market for £190k and expecting as low as £180k. For an added week - 10 days, that's probably worthwhile. All the stuff we're looking at doing would also improve the place for us while we're still there, too.
Very exciting indeed. Fingers are crossed - had to uncross the toes this morning because walking on snow and ice is hard enough!
My spends = £50.54/£35
Joint treats = £57.50/£80
Good luck. May the runes be with you!
F
Sir Francis Bacon 1561 - 1626 (Philosopher & statesman)