Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

Whatlifeis

We have a lot of cats in our neighbourhood who used to like nothing better than sneaking through our cat flap to steal food. It wasn’t the food that I minded so much, it was just that our cats didn’t feel safe. 

So we installed an electronic cat flap that only lets ours in (it unlocks the flap by recognising their microchip) which works brilliantly. Much more secure and happier cats nowadays and it’s saving me a small fortune in cat food, as it appears I had been feeding quite a few

Blackcats

We also have a cat flap that works on the cat's microchip.  We installed it when a couple of local fancy pedigree cats were coming in and causing trouble.
my black cat has taken to lying at full stretch to help keep cool.  The trouble is he does this wherever it suits him - on the stairs, in doorways .... he doesn't bother moving so we have to squeeze past him or climb over him.

Sun_Addict

We no longer have a cat flap since we had the back door replaced with patio doors but when we did have one I will never forget waking up one morning to find a strange cat asleep in our bedroom and our cats grumbling at him 😐

Suffolk_lass

We have a cat and dog "window" in our back door. Stealth cat is an indoor girl and dog (min' Dachshund) watches us and yips at us when we are tending bees that he can see.

At husband's first flat, there was a catflap and when he was working in USA, he rented the flat to friends who paid the bills and looked after it in lieu of rent, while they saved a deposit for their own place. They had a cat (he never had) and one night were woken by caterwauling. Our friend clapped her hands and the cat flap went 6 or seven times as the neighbourhood cats departed. It was only then that they concluded their cat probably didn't have a thyroid problem, after all!

Humdinger1

Just looking in for some political discussion, if that's OK @foxgloves? Not surprised but merciful Gods! Love Humdinger xx 

WinterWarrior

@Humdinger1 did you also see the report saying that a future pandemic is inevitable? I’m honestly not sure any party could cope with one faultlessly, but the track record is shocking.

Humdinger1

Yes... a functioning health service would be a good start.   Am doing what I can to build all our immune systems and getting heavily involved in electioneering now ahead of the General Election. Xx

foxgloves

Hello Diary Readers & thanks for all your comments, which I have enjoyed reading. Re cat flap ingress by baddies....I'm not sure we could have a microchip scanning flap as our cat door is a little tunnel through the wall. We are a bit limited in terms of what fitments we can have. 
Re the political stuff - Well, I had a big grin on my face when I read '90 days'. 90 years would not me enough for me where this lot are concerned. SO unprofessional - I'm referring not just to the main perpetrator, but to the MPs who are openly defending him & using the linguistic tropes of conspiracy theory. Having worked for the public sector for many years, there is no way any of us would have got away with such unprofessional behaviour. We'd have been on a disciplinary for bringing the council into disrepute. The rules by which we had to abide around the whole issue of shooting our mouths off were very much stricter than those applying to MPs. And as for Ms D throwing a tantrum because she didn't get a seat in the Lords......it is just embarrassing. I would just want to gather the last vestiges of my self-respect & go. Thank goodness the House of Lords looks set to be reformed (I'd prefer abolishment as it is so undemocratic) - Maybe one day we can have a written constitution too, so all of us can have access to the rules, rather than rely on 'gentlemen's agreements' which probably never were fit for purpose, but certainly are not now.
Re the Pandemic investigations - I think the findings here are going to continue being very interesting, but also enraging. I don't think any government could have got everything absolutely right, as they were very difficult times, but some of the errors are staggering - that's without the door that was opened to cronies when huge contracts were being given out - or corruption as it would be known in more lowly public sector settings. I remember sitting on the sofa with Mr F watching the scenes from Italy - a modern country overwhelmed by Covid, people queueing for food & being locked down apart from essentials. I said 'It's coming. We can't avoid it. Why isn't there massive visible planning happening here?', but the Government was !!!!!!-a-hoop about lovely Brexit & we heard more about that then the danger we were in from pandemic spread. Then I read about Operation Cygnus - a trial run 'exercise' which had been done a couple of years earlier to see if the UK could withstand a bad flu pandemic. The findings were that no, it could not as there was a shortage of ventilators, ICU beds, etc. Recommendations were ignored though, meaning we got off on a bad foot as soon as cases started spreading. Neither did it help having a cabal of Tory MPs vocalising their opposition to Lockdown, as this just fed the conspiracy theory brigade. At the end of this enquiry, somebody will say 'Lessons must be learned'. And this MUST happen. We will probably have another pandemic in my lifetime, probably flu, maybe a mutation of the avian strains. It has to be managed better. I am utterly convinced there were way more covid deaths than their needed to be, especially if the UK had been locked down earlier. Even just a week or two would have made a difference, but it was well & truly out of the bag before there was a sufficiently radical plan in place. Then Track & Trace was hopelessly inadequate. I think we as citizens certainly learned lessons. If I heard there was a pandemic flu on an East - West trajectory, there are things I would definitely do to plan, but Government missed too many early opportunities - perhaps their esteemed leader thought that we are an island so hopefully the virus couldn't swim, I don't know, but I do remember how scary it was at the time watching the TV News & thinking 'Why is so little being put in place here, when we can see what is happening in Europe?'
One of the things I learned on the domestic financial front is that we did spend more, as items weren't always available & with not knowing how long Lockdown or indeed the Pandemic would last, we were buying extras of things when we saw them & stocking up. It took a long while for our grocery budget to get back to normality. Also, having had covid (albeit one of the later less serious varieties), I have a better idea of what I need in stock in terms of medicines, which are the most comfortable facemasks......only small things, I know, but it was all new to us, wasn't it, at a time when people were understandably frightened & stressed.
I will be following the Enquiry with interest.
F

WinterWarrior

I’m not sure a written constitution would be better…looking at America as an example. There it seems to be all about money, you don’t have a chance of campaigning without it. But, I don’t have any better ideas. I just hope we will slowly improve. 

foxgloves

And now I'd better get today's post on......
I've been quite productive on the whole, but my main task has been my regular mid-month budget check-in, so I'm going to talk to you about that. This is basically a reconciliation exercise, taking off various figures (current account balance, how much left in our Personal Spends & the grocery budget, how much outstanding to the milkman, which regular monthly DDs are still to go out, etc.....you all know the drill. The purpose is to check that the amount I have left in the budget as things stand today, matches the balance from my original budget. With me so far? And I'm sure you are starting to get the feeling that I am going to say there was a great big massive smelly error in the figures. You'd be right. There was.....well, not massive, but enough. I checked everything twice & definitely had £58-18 less than I should have had. I will usually overlook a £10 discrepancy, maybe a little more too, but £58-18? That's a sum of money I could do something with....& it was missing. 
Well, I went through bank statements, paying particular attention to that twilight zone between Big Budget Day on the 27th & the end of the month & while I found an omission from the trusty Money Book of £5 (Wheelie Bin Cleaner!), I was still £53-18 short. Went through the grocery budget in detail (because it's bugging me now), ditto my credit card payment log-sheet, but everything was ship-shape. Turned to my bulldog clip of receipts for any hint of a clue - nothing. Pinged Mr F to see if he could think of anything. He said he thought that amount sounded like a Waitbl00m shop, so I went through those. Nope! As a last ditch attempt, I decided to look at our Excel spreadsheets - or more specifically Spreadsheet 1, which is regular monthly bills/DDs. I wondered if I could have accidentally taken the Bills figure from another month by mistake, but the one on the spreadsheet matched the amount in my Money Book. Then I went down the June column a line at a time to see if I might possibly have accidentally deleted a figure from the formula.......I hadn't, but neither had I got very far down that column of figures when I spotted the problem. When inputting the increased figure for one of our bills back in April, I had mistakenly typed a comma between the £53 & the 11p, instead of a decimal point, rendering it unintelligible to Excel & thus excluded from the addition formula!! Honestly ALL that forensic investigation when the problem was a sodding single comma!! It reminded me of a fable we used to be told in primary school assembly about the great big elephant who was affected by the actions of a tiny mouse.
Anyway, to bring this interminable tale to an end (hands up if you've nodded off.....oh , you can't, you'd be asleep!), having corrected the spreadsheet & today's check-in figures, I was delighted to see that I am only 7p down on where I expected to be & that is at the very good end of acceptable tolerance!
This did leave the June buffer zone £53-11 down on where it should have been, but I have re-credited the budget with the £75 I put aside in June's budget to pay the piano tuner. I haven't yet booked him & will simply postpone the re-tuning to July or August.
The End!
Love F x