Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

angela110660

We have a printed notepad for our around the home jobs entitled "Making S*** Happen" -  very appropriate for us as we can both procrastinate for England when we want to !!! We love ticking off those completed jobs though and can be very competitive about it  at times ! 

milann

Hope you get through all the annoying jobs 👍

Makingabobor2

Well done on starting on the annoying jobs list. I managed 1 of mine yesterday, and hopefully a lot more today. Told Dh before he went to work, that my plan for the day is to work through my list and not do stuff that's not on it....so why am I sat here with a coffee reading MSE?  Obviously so I can come up with some more good ideas to help me...lol

enthusiasticsaver

I love the sound of an annoying list but unfortunately it would not work for me as the stress of the list would force me to do them.  I am a bit like @badmemory sister and have to do them as they crop up or they just nag at me. I never liked to do lists at work either.  I set a reminder sometimes but then just have to do them asap. 

Suffolk_lass

Our list of long, medium and short-term lists is called our Futule list number 371 (actually 371 could be any number, but it implies lots of persistent, long term annoyance without having a row about who is to blame) just calling it the annoying list has the advantage of removing the passive aggressive element. It might explain the hurumph I got yesterday. The advantage of that discussion is that DH has got the stuff in (too cold out) for making up beekeeping equipment and he has been through at least one box file and weeded the non relevant things

I must confess, I often add things to my list that I have just done, and tick them immediately. This is on the basis that it needed to be on the list (and, when DH was still working, it showed I had not resorted to watching daytime TV in my own post-work era!)

foxgloves

Hello Diary Readers & thanks for all your comments. I think we all probably have different methods for managing tasks, whether it involves lists or not. I stopped bothering with written daily to-do lists a few years ago & would only bother with one now if I had a huge amount of stuff to get done in a narrow window of time. Where daily household-running tasks are concerned, I just do them as they occur, same with life admin & household budget management. I prefer not to let this kind of thing mount up, I might tackle certain tasks on broadly set days - laundry on Monday, cleaning on Friday, etc, but I pretty much just get on with that kind of thing on a daily basis when it needs doing.
The Annoying Jobs List is for tasks which don't really fit into these categories so tend to get put off because I am busy doing all the more mainstream ones - so to pull an example from my current list.....scrubbing & disinfecting the bird feeders. I would walk past those regularly but they wouldn't get tackled as part of my regular household running tasks, another example is tackling the shredding pile & dividing up & repotting a huge aloe vera which is making a bid for a starring role in the next 'Day of the Triffids' remake. 
One thing I do usually find about my Annoying Jobs List is that there is a big variety of tasks on it, so I can pick things from it which suit how much time I have available, what mood I'm in, etc, although once they have made it onto the official list, they will all get done.
F

threepenny_bit

Suffolk_lass said:

I must confess, I often add things to my list that I have just done, and tick them immediately. This is on the basis that it needed to be on the list (and, when DH was still working, it showed I had not resorted to watching daytime TV in my own post-work era!)

I do this ALL the time!! Makes me feel more productive when I look back at my day and see that not much from the list has been achieved but I feel like I have worked hard lol! It is a good way to see all the extra things you do without realizing it. 

foxgloves

And here are today's small budget-helping positives:
*Did the laundry - only 2 loads & one was a 30 mins at 30 degrees. I did peg it out, but when the weather forecaster said this morning that it would be mainly dry with just the odd isolated shower, he actually meant that it would be isolated to over our house, so nothing got as dry as I hoped. Felt like a cop-out lugging it all back indoors for the heated airer, but I am glad I did, as there have been further showers since, & a couple of them quite brisk. Never mind, at least they did get a couple of hours free blow-dry.
*Baked a crusty loaf.
*Baked a cake....well more like an old-fashioned tea-loaf type thing, except it doesn't have any tea in it. We cut down on expensive yoghurts this week so as to help us come in on budget with our groceries so we can have a slice of that for dessert later.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch.
*Ordered fish box. Was really pleased to get the call from the Grimsby fish folk today as it means I have the exact figure to put in the budget when I do it tomorrow, rather than best guess.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates, again driven by getting everything as shipshape as possible before Big Budget Day tomorrow. 
*February's grocery budget was underspent by £15-57, which I have sent to the Presents Pot. I was pleased with that, as it has been a 5-week shopping month & I was determined not to budget any extra. We have also made really good inroads into eating through our freezer stores. Mr F raring to go with the defrosting, spurred on by the fact that it needs doing before the fish arrives.
*Pleasant session in the greenhouse. Sowed rudbeckia, laurentia, 3 types of cosmos, apricot foxgloves, poppies, cerinthe & dwarf asters. All either saved seed, free on magazines or given to me.
*Sowed peppers & brought in to go in my little heated propagator. That's all my February seeds sown now, except for cucumbers & a few extra sweet peas, which I will do tomorrow or Wednesday. 
*Surveys being done as & when anything suitable pops up - just one so far, but I have been paid for 3 I did the other day. Still 3 more days to go until my end of month cash-out.
*As requested, wrote a job list for Mr F. He has a few days off starting this week & is veritably chomping at the bit to get going with some jobs, including a tip-run.
I don't have too much else to do today - easy-peasy nosebag tonight as I have defrosted some turkey bhuna & will only need to cook some rice to go with it. Dessert can be fresh fruit, a slice of the aforementioned cake or both. I'm intending a bath & hair wash & am carrying on with using up odds & ends of products....which means another coffee face-scrub tonight as a little of that goes a long way. Then knitting - I did spread it out for an accurate measure & found I was still 30cms away from putting in another armhole so I defo won't get up to any shaping tonight.
Hope everyone has managed to get off to at least a reasonably decent start to the week,
F x

foxgloves

Oh, I meant to mention....regarding that little bit of grocery budget underspend......it sparked a conversation between Mr F & I about the best use of the money when this happens. As the money has already been allocated to groceries for that month, I was pondering on whether it would be worth saving any underspend to carry into the next month or to build up then using to take advantage of good bulk offers for the pantry/freezer. As is often the case, we talked ourselves around in a bit of a circle. Mr F asked me what I usually do with a grocery budget underspend on the occasion that we have one, & I said I would add it to one of our Savings Pots based on need. His view is that this is a better use of the money than trying to juggle another pot or sub-pot (or very possibly 'son of pot') & I have decided I agree. It was quite nice adding this months £15-57 to the Presents Pot, seeing its total go up on the spreadsheet & thinking that I could buy quite a nice little present with that, as well as it being over half of a nephew's Christmas money, as we usually give each of them a selection of gifts to open, plus £30 cash to spend on whatever they like or to put towards what they are currently saving for. 
So that is what we will continue to do. If the underspend is very tiny, say £2 or £4, I don't always do anything with it & just let it get subsumed by new month's budget, but I should make sure I do always ping these amounts, however small, to a Pot, as one thing we DO all know on here, is how all these little bits add up.
Right, time to count out today's cat treats before Soot comes to tell me that he's about to collapse from hunger.
F x

Makingabobor2

Good idea about the underspend, it is always nice to see extra added to another pot. I am seriously considering a "bulk buying " pot though, as this month I went to the refill shop and bought several things that were not just normal monthly/weekly buys, and it seriously impacted on the budget. So thinking if I can get away without using the Buffer pot this period, I may move that to a bulk buy pot. My new budget period starts next Monday, so will see how it goes.