Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

themadvix

Suffolk_lass said:

Cats peeing in wrong place
Some years ago when one of our two rescue cats was peeing in strange places, we were told it was because the other cat was guarding the litter tray as her territory and stopping said culprit from using it. We were advised to have three for two cats.
Our current (Stealth Cat) cat suffers from periodic stress-related cystitis and when she does, she pees on the black leather sofa, in empty laundry trugs, in the shower and the bath - we just need to notice. A plug-in Feli-thing and a capsule of "cys-tease" mixed into wet food is how we combat it. These latter solutions might be a bit too chemical-based for your liking @themadvix but they do work (as long as we don't leave it too long, if we do, she has a £100 trip to the vets for a jab).

Thanks SL. You're spot on about the chemically-ness, of course   We have tried the Feli stuff before, but I guess it might be worth trying. He had severe crystals in his urine quite a few years ago and has been on the urinary diet stuff ever since, so I don't think it'll be cystitis. The crystals/being bullied by the litter tray were the cause of his original litter tray woes and we've had to put up with him peeing in two places (hard floors) for the past 10 years, which was manageable, even if he has ruined our cloakroom floor and we can't have a back door mat. 🙄 We've taken him to the vets numerous times to get him checked and basically, the verdict is it's learnt behaviour (probably not helped by wood flooring not being ideal for getting the smell out of completely). This (peeing on the stair carpet) is new though. He had developed a penchant for going in the garden, which was helping (with the floor), providing we let him out when needed, but he seems to have gone off that a bit recently. I may need to remove the borage that is near his pee-spot (in my raised bed, installed for veg, of course.... clearly veg don't get grown in there!!). It's so incredibly frustrating.... but amazing what we put up with from the little wild animals we share our homes with.

Sorry for the hijack Foxgloves!

foxgloves

One of our old cats suffered with cystitis now & again from problems with urinary crystals. It's the only time he'd pee indoors & tbf, it was always the indicator which meant he needed a vet visit. Mostly it would be in the bath so at least that was easy to wash away. At diagnosis (for which we had to take in a sample), the vet showed us the crystals under the microscope & they were very sharp & pointy-looking. I'm not surprised they caused pain & discomfort.
F

foxgloves

Morning Pence Wranglers,
Well, today I was all prepared to wait in for a delivery driver to collect my box of traded books. The window was cited as 8am to 5pm, eliciting the response from me that, that's not a 'window', it's all bloody day! That ruled out garden stuff as can't hear the door, so I sat down last night & wrote myself a list of indoor tasks I could usefully do instead of feeling I'd wasted the day hanging around like a spare spanner. Naturally this meant the delivery driver arrived at 8.30 am! Decided as it's going to get even hotter, I'd stick with my indoor list & see how many things from it I can get done today. So far, I've done 9 out of 21, some of them financial admin/budget stuff. Plumber came yesterday to finish the frog job....though the amphibious element, which involved me sourcing a couple of parts with zero knowledge of plumbing gizmos, had already been done. No problem though as I had ordered the correct things & they fitted! In fact, such a quick job, that nice plumber knocked £20 off his usual hourly rate, which was a nice little saving for our House & Garden Pot. Have also paid our holiday balance & updated my meticulous holiday payment schedule. 
Tonight's nosebag is dhal (currently in slow cooker) with rice & I am also going to use the last container of Hairy Biker curry sauce & a round-up of home grown veg (yes, this will include plenty of courgettes!) to make a chunky veg curry to have with it. I'll freeze the leftovers for Mr F to take as work lunches. 
Plenty more tasks on my list for this afternoon, but Soot has come upstairs to tell me it's his lunchtime so I am going to stop for lunch & cat-feeding now & resume later.
I have the thick velvet front room curtains closed atm & it is certainly helping keep the room cool. 
Stay hydrated, it's really heating up out there. 
F x

EssexHebridean

Blast - you have reminded me that although I closed the upstairs front curtains before leaving this morning, I totally neglected to do the front room blinds! How annoying, not least as I actually thought of it while I was still upstairs! 

Great that your froggy job is now complete, and that saving on the cost too - it's always nice when something which has become a "thing" while being thought about turns into something far smoother in the execution! 

foxgloves

@EssexHebridean - Yes, & the thing about frog swallowing is that the frog often turns out to be no bigger than a smallish piece of sushi when we DO decide to tackle it. I shall try to remember this for the next amphibious critter which is preparing to loom.....
F

foxgloves

Greetings Friday Frugalistas,
I meant to post earlier but had a sudden urge to paint my toenails - 'Blue breeze' - perhaps I thought it'd make me feel cooler.....it didn't! Right, so here I am & the day has sped by for no reason that I can think of other than I have been bitting & bobbing with various things & suddenly it is late afternoon. Anyway, a few budget-helping offerings:
*A no-spend day for me & given the level of heat, I should think Mr F has almost certainly had one too.
*Watered all the veg first thing. 
*Tapped off lots of liquid plant food from the worm composter into a 5L container. Fed some to the pear tree as it will be feeling the heat & dryness of the soil.
*Chopped some bits off the grape vine as it was triffiding so far over the aubergine plants that I could barely see them. Worth doing, as several have already set fruit & one in particular is getting close to picking size.
*Today's pickings: 6 more courgettes, coriander.
*Potted on 10 hollyhocks & 4 foxgloves (fancy variety) which I grew from free seed.
*Checked for surveys & started one, but it was more nonsense than I wished to contend with so I abandoned it. I do think there should always be an option to say you wouldn't buy a product at all. It can't be very helpful to their survey results if all the people who wouldn't buy any of the products featured have to pretend that they would so as to progress to the next screen & it must skew the findings.
*A few more rows of knitting.
*Easy use-it-up nosebag tonight. Leftover pittas defrosted plus the last container of leftover harissa lamb. I intend to stirfr that with onions, garlic, chilli & chickpeas, stuff it in the pittas & serve it with stir-fried courgettes seasoned with za-atar. Mr F is loving courgettes atm (thankfully, as it's glutmongous here!) & actually asked if we could have "a load of them" tonight with the lamb pittas instead of salad. Leftover fresh pineapple for dessert so lots of use-it-ups going on there,
*Mended a garden ornament with a piece of embroidery thread, mended a food cover with a length of ribbon & 2 beads from my craft box.
*Oh & some food waste avoidance help from our local hedgehog last night too! Neither Ash nor Soot will eat the posh perle duck variety so we have had an unwanted pouch in the cupboard for ages. When our prickly friend rocked up, with it being such hot dry weather, I plated up the offending cat food & took it out for him & he yummed it down. 
Right, I think that's today's tasks covered, although have been doing lots of thinking too........new post....
F x

foxgloves

Yes, we came to the end of re-watching the final series of 'The Good Life' last night & it got me thinking about Project Surbiton. Our goal to fill our 10 savings pots to their healthiest ever level this year has been achieved (though there is still lots of the year left for the manure to hit the fan). I have been budgeting for expenses as much as possible so that they can often be covered from the main monthly budget, so as to leave the relevant savings pot in tact. I must of course thank my elderly relative for a good part of this, as being one of her financial beneficiaries, which I hadn't originally expected, has meant that the savings pots, plus general savings received a surprise boost. 
I've talked before about it being our aim to relocate to the coast when Mr F retires. We have been talking about this recently & we both still want to do this. We won't be heartbroken if for any reason our plans have to change, we'll come up with a Plan B, but at the moment, relocation is very much our goal. Mr F is a few years younger than me & although I took VR a good while ago, I haven't taken my work pension & am still a few years away from my state pension. I don't want to find I am concentrating so hard on what we want to do in the future that I don't make the most of living in our current home, our garden & all the stuff we like to do around our current part of the country. I have come to the conclusion that as it is still a few years till we can seriously think about the move, I need to approach things from 2 directions.....firstly, to live in the moment & make the most of every day here where we have a nice home & sufficient garden for pretties & growing a decent amount of food. I'm making decent inroads into shifting my weight back onto a downwards trajectory.......as I said to Mr F the other day, not much point moving near to all those fab seaside walks if I am too much of a pile of cushions to enjoy them! 
But on the other hand, I do need to keep our future plans in mind from a financial/budget perspective. We'd ideally like a bungalow, with the idea that we would get it exactly as we like it, get our veg growing, etc, going, then it would be our 'forever home', without the faff of moving again later in life. Every so often, I've been perusing suitable properties in the area we'd ideally like to live. On the whole, it's more expensive for property than where we currently live, but there are properties which are affordable to us, which is encouraging. I show Mr F a selection of these now & again and have noticed that on the more expensive ones, I am thinking, "this is out of our price range" whereas his reaction is more "Well we could afford that". I respond with how much I think we'd get for our current home plus the chunk of general savings which I regard as our 'bridging money' to make up the regional price differential. He then factors in his final salary pension lump sum & mine. I remind him that mine is a smaller lump because I took VR, & also that we will want a good safety net in place for the future so can't spend all our savings on moving. He does get this, but today I decided it would be helpful actually to compare some figures as though we were looking to move imminently. I found a little bungalow in our preferred area, about 9 miles from the coast & noted the price. It's not a doer-upper (we've done that here & don't want another one!), it is the sort of place one could move straight in & unpack, so commensurate with the kind of property we will be looking for. Then I re-registered with one of the property prices sites to get an estimated value for our current home. This was very interesting, as the most likely ballpark figure is £11k more than the bungalow, the lowest estimate is the exact cost of the bungalow & the highest possible price £21k more than the bungalow. Yes, times & property prices change & fluctuate, but I at least feel I have a bit more to work with now.
So back to Project Surbiton. This was all about rebuilding our savings pots so they were ready for whatever life or general needs throw at us. They are looking pretty good atm, so I am now going to work on leaving funds in the pots wherever possible....yes, shopping from home rears its head again, of course. I am thinking along the lines that if the Pots are 'full' & I am topping them up when they have to be used i.e new tyres on the car recently, that kind of thing, then I should be able to via a little more money into our general savings. I do pay into our savings every month, but one of those accounts is our Car Fund, so is very much tied to a specific planned purchase & not, as such, general savings. It is interesting (but perhaps not surprising, as even now, I have spent more of my life as a silly spender than a sensible budgeter), that with the savings pots currently at a good level, my key aim is to keep them that way by dipping into them as little as possible! I still feel relatively new to saving & Mr F even more so - he finds it hard to take in that we actually HAVE savings, & I am starting to see the possibilities which eluded me back when I was city centre shopping twice a week & thought that saving was a concept for the seriously middle-aged & squares!
Oh wouldn't you know it, Ash has appeared complaining that he hasn't had any lunch. Well, there's a good reason for that, Matey, because you didn't turn up for it! I had my lunch, Soot had his. I called & shook your biscuits pot but you cba so that's why you now have an extra-hungry tummy!
OK, that's it from me, signing out.
F x

Blackcats

Interesting musings MrsF.  

Is your workplace pension age 60 or 65 or state pension age? By the way,  I really object to the new state pension age 😡
I took my NHS pension just under 2 years early with an associated actuarial reduction but I worked out that using that monthly pension and lump sum wisely meant that the reduction actually had a far lesser impact than I at first thought. I figured that money in my bank, here and now rather than at a date in the future was a better option for me.  I would add that a very close work colleague died at age 39 from Covid which absolutely changed my thinking about waiting just one more year and probably just another year etc etc.  
Doing the property price comparison is a great idea to help your thinking.

rtandon27

Oh dear - poor Ash, imagine missing a meal?! That's just not on kitty.

Makingabobor2

Interesting posts. Love reading all your thoughts.