Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

Re Savings Pots discussions - As this year's agreed financial goal at Foxgloves Manor is to rebuild all our pots, I am finding myself increasingly reluctant to spend from them atm, which is a good thing I think, as it makes me far more likely to try & shop whatever it is from home first. I've done a couple of little budget updates today & deliberately chose to finance a fairly minor spend (£13.50) from this month's budget buffer zone, rather than take it from a savings pot I'm trying to build up.
There are currently two items I am trying to shop from home, but no luck yet, as everything I try is unsuitable or would create another need elsewhere. We can't win them all, I suppose.
F

Makingabobor2

I like the idea of a budget buffer zone

foxgloves

Afternoon Campers!
I am chatting to you from upstairs in Foxgloves HQ from where I am enjoying the thunder. Used to be quite scared of storms when I was a child (learned behaviour from my Mum) but I love them now.
Anyway, I'd better get on with today's small money saving wins, so here goes:
*Another lamb leftovers-based meal tonight, along with a big salad. 
*Froze the stock I made from 2 lots of lamb bones in the slow cooker.
*Freezer lunch defrosting for Mr F's pack-up tomorrow.
*A free bending & stretching session this morning, weeding & cutting back the long narrow border along the right side of our front courtyard. I am feeling uncomfortable still, but it is worse if I sit for long periods & don't move, so I am moving regularly but not doing anything that makes me feel worse. This morning's session was just right.
*Then planted up the gaps with calendula (grown from saved seed) & echium blue bedder, as our front courtyard is planted for bees to help mitigate the fact that such a large proportion of it is sandstone & therefore hard landscaping. 
*Did some surveys. Lots of PAs today, although some of them longer than I wanted to sign up for today & I didn't want to faff with camera either, but doing several quicker ones has made a noticeable difference to this month's earnings, so well worth it.
*Small amount of financial admin done. 
*Put the £50 supermarket voucher I earned from the university food diary study away in a drawer while I ponder best use of it. I had intended to use it with the £10 one I got for my recipe to offset this month's grocery budget so as to bung £60 into the car maintenance pot, but Mr F wondered if it would be a better idea to save the £50 one for festive groceries in December, by adding it to his nectar points. We also save our Coop dividend for this purpose, so it would come to a fairly decent amount. Still thinking about it, I don't really mind either way.
*Finally got around to doing post-birthday salvage. A decent amount of bubblewrap, 3 gift bags, some tissue paper, gift wrap & 2 ribbons added to my recycled wrappings stash. Used stamps removed for charity. Birthday cards saved as will be used for various things - pinning on the kitchen board when I next have a change round, making into gift tags, using as bookmarks, etc.
*Arrived at a 'new' outfit this morning, while trying to solve the issue of what to wear during this on & off weather. It didn't feel warm enough to wear one of my summer dresses, but I don't want to look wintery & feel too hot either. I decided to try a long sleeved floral jersey tunic (blues, pinks, coppers) with cropped dark blue leggings & couldn't believe that it actually looks like a considered outfit! I will definitely be wearing it again on warmish, but not 'summer dress warm' days. I have 2 pairs of these leggings, which as I dislike dark blue, tend to sit around doing not a lot, so it's good to have found something else they go with.
*Had an idea for solving a bit of a persistent garden pond problem using only materials we already have at home. Put it to Mr F when I spoke to him at lunchtime. Are there any words which strike more fear & trepidation into his heart than me saying "Ooooh, I've had an idea"......? Anyway, he's gone for it big time & offered to do the grunt work. 
*Watered greenhouse plants - everything else will have had a very good drink indeed from this afternoon's brisk showers.
Well, I feel I've been quite productive all things considered, & I think we are hopefully now out of the time frame for needing actively to avoid coronation coverage, so I can risk the news again. I can't quite believe how successfully we managed to avoid the whole thing - I honestly haven't seen even the smallest fragment of the service. It will come as no surprise to any followers of my diary that Foxgloves Manor is a republic, but each to their own, of course, as in all things.
Thunder still circling. Cats had a few extra treats to make up for wet playtime, but Soot is milking it now & trying to get pity-treats every time he sees me. Tough love in this house!
F x

Makingabobor2

You saying "ooh I've had an idea", is similar to what happens in our house, only my phrase is normally....."I've been thinking...." to which DH normally says....."oh dear"....lol

We've had the thunder as well, and I also hate storms due to my mum being petrified of them. She used to wake us up as kids and make us go downstairs if it thundered in the night, as she said it was safer downstairs.  Although I think its the lightening I hate the most, which luckily we didn't have today. 

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - I always leave a buffer zone when I set the monthly budget. At the moment, I am leaving between £200 & £250. It was a smaller amount when we still had a mortgage & even smaller when we also had the remains of a car loan too, but I've always done it. It is there to mop up any errors in my maths (this doesn't happen very often now that I have been budgeting for well over a decade, but mistakes do happen) & in case of 3rd party errors, such as a DD being collected twice or other nonsense, like Mr F's work expenses being late, etc..... The buffer zone balance is the last figure showing each month in my trusty Money Book, which I update weekly. I never let it go below around £180, as its purpose is really to cover any eventualities like the above, but I do often charge small spends to it, all annotated, so I know exactly what we have left. Examples would be things like us needing a card for somebody, buying a few stamps, a couple of bits for the medicine box, a couple of batteries - all low value stuff where it's more faff to transfer it out of a savings pots into our current account than it is just to use the buffer zone. If I looked to be ending the month with £250 still in the buffer zone, I'd most likely transfer £50 of it to a savings pot anyway. 
F x

Makingabobor2

Thanks @foxgloves, that's really useful and something I might try. Certainly makes a lot of sense. x

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - Oh, that was exactly the same at our house growing up! Even if as children, my sis & I hadn't been woken up by the thunder, my Mum would come into our bedrooms, wake us up & we'd have to go downstairs to sit it out. She was always terrified the house would be struck by lightning. I suspect the odds of that were always pretty low tbh, but there definitely were a couple of houses in our village that were struck, which she never failed to mention. I wonder if, as we grew up in the fens, with an absence of many tall structures, whether houses often were the tallest thing, giving the perception that they were struck more regularly than perhaps they were? I don't know. Mum also moved metal things off the window sills, unplugged everything & closed all the windows. This didn't happen if Dad was home, but he often worked late & also for a couple of years, was on a posting with a 100 mile+ round-trip commute, which meant that with the late night working factored in, he couldn't come home every time & stayed in services accommodation several nights a week. 
Lightning is not without danger, but I do find a good storm does my head good - it seems cleansing somehow.
F

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - You're welcome - that's one of the things these diaries are good for - sharing ideas & ways of doing things. When I first started budgeting, the main driver was trying to pull our significant monthly overspending back within living within our means. I'm ashamed to say we were both working full time back then & earned a good joint income, but servicing our stupid debts took a lot of it & although we were always able to make payments & didn't get into any of that kind of bother, we just had learn to keep our spending to OUR money. A lot of this process involved changing our use of credit cards - we managed to get them paid off as part of our debt-busting, then kept just one each which still to this day are used only for planned spending which has been properly budgeted for. And we make the most of loyalty points for shopping vouchers, as we consider we paid plenty of interest back in the day & now it's our turn to benefit. Anyway, to get back to buffer zones......if we hadn't have had one, anything that wasn't covered, unexpected necessities, etc, would just have found its way onto a credit card in the absence of any other system. Our monthly buffer zone actually started as low as £40, but it was something, & as the idea seemed to work, I've increased it as I've been able. Tbh, it does feel like a little bit of extra security should my mid-month budget check-in throw up something a bit horrid.
If it doesn't get spent, that's all the better!
F

Baileys_Babe

Thankfully my childhood experience of storms was very different I can remember many hours spent looking out of my parent's bedroom window enjoying the sight of the lightning show against the night sky.
I suspect my Dad was the main force in this being pleasurable as he would have sat a talked to us about how fun it is and probably shared the science along with getting us to count from hearing the thunder to seeing the lightning.

I haven't seen a good storm with lighting in years, I'm not sure if it is because I now live in a different part of the country or some other cause.

Sunshine_girl2

My mum always said when it was thundering , it was just god moving his furniture to clean under it. When it finished she would say that's it he's finished now . It's what I tell my grandchildren 😂.