Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

Onebrokelady

foxgloves said:

@Onebrokelady - A rent increase on top of all the other increases in bills is going to be extremely unwelcome for very many people & I can understand that you are worried. It just all seems deeply unfair at the moment. Another big oil & gas company on the News this morning with eye-watering profits. The current energy market model seems utterly dysfunctional, with ordinary people as per usual bearing the brunt of blatant profiteering. 
F

It's making me so angry. These companies are blatantly profiteering but our government are making money out of it so won't do anything 😡 

Onebrokelady

foxgloves said:

Morning Campers!
I'm trying to keep busy so as to control the pre-dentist nerves.....not that I'm even having much done today, but that makes no difference to the butterflies dancing the fandango in my innards!
Not much to report.......2 useful shopping from home items & a weird letter in the post.
Items shopped from home  - a bottle of something nice to take to our friends later, which was found in the back of the pantry, leftover from Christmas. Also a new phone charging cable. I noticed yesterday that mine has worn & the wires are showing through, but I remembered a box of phone bits & bobs from when I was clearing out one of those drawers earlier this week, checked in there just in case & found a brand new unused one! I think I must have just continued using my old cable when I changed phones a while back. Anyway, that was a result.
As for the weird letter......well I'm baffled by this. Postie brought me a letter from HMRC this morning. I was surprised to see this, as I haven't paid tax since I took VR several years ago & as I was on PAYE, all of the finishing work tax stuff was dealt with at the time. This morning's letter informed me I am due a small tax refund - & it IS small, but, nevertheless a useful amount for adding to a savings pot. The letter informs me that I am owed this from £157 interest earned on savings between 2021 & 2022 & that they need to refund me £31. I am being refunded because this £31 is under my personal tax allowance (of course it is!). The oddest aspect is that the £157 doesn't match any amount of interest I earned that year (or just to check.....the previous or following years either). 
Anyway.....to add to the weirdness, I went onto the website as instructed by the letter to claim the refund online & discovered I first have to set up a 'Government Gateway' account. I'd got all the info so started doing that, but the website rejected my information, saying it had 'no match' for me. .......this is despite me having used the very details (correct) which they had used in this morning's letter! As I was thus unable to claim the refund online, I will be sent a cheque within 6 weeks. 
I am baffled as to how I can actually be owed a refund as have not declared any interest earned, with all of it in aggregate being well below my personal tax allowance. My prediction is that having filed this letter, I will receive another in a few weeks time to inform me that it was sent in error & I am owed nothing. 
Weird though, no?
Anyway, it took my mind of teeth for a little while.
F x

There is currently a scam going round that sounds the same as this. Normally if you get a refund from HMRC the check is attached to the letter that tells you about the refund

Sun_Addict

My SIL got a letter saying she was due £2k rebate from a pension scheme she’d been in years ago. There was a number to ring with her bank details. I told her not to ring that number but ring the helpline to check if it was genuine. Unbelievably it was genuine and she got £2k she didn’t even know about. 

ladyholly

foxgloves said:

@badmemory - I think that there was a lack of due diligence in various matters during the pandemic. I suppose an element of this was due to it being unchartered territory for governments, banks, businesses, etc. You'll doubtless remember the government exercise which was run a couple of years before Covid struck, when a fictional serious flu pandemic was used to test the resilience of the NHS, etc, to cope should it happen in reality. The report apparently made it clear that there would be insufficient critical care beds, PPI, etc, but the recommendations were not acted on. What surprised me when I was initially reading about this simulation exercise/modelling, was that there was no aspect of the economy looked at. It seems fairly common sense, I'd have thought, to have measures in place which could unroll in such a situation......as of course we did all find ourselves in only 2 or 3 years later. Just taking all the panicky buying of PPE alone (some of it paid for & completely unusable)  - this is how so many contracts ended up being handed to friends & family  - no putting out to tender, which as a public sector employee of many years, I know is how things have to be done. I think the loans were problematic too. It's a known fact that many were obtained fraudulently & I don't think the Gov't has not done a lot to recover the lost money, which I believe is a significant amount. 
So yes, I understand entirely how crushing & anger-inducing it is to be suffering 10% inflation (higher on food) & budget-crippling energy bills & agree with you entirely.
F

Sorry going back a couple of days but with reference to this remember who was Minister of Health who had overall responsibilty at the time for deciding what would happen after the exercise. None other than Jeremy Hunt. Worrying isnt it given his present job.

badmemory

I agree ladyholly it is very worrying.  But then the last 6/7 years of government have been even more worrying than usual.  This lot aren't doing the Maggie Thatcher thing of selling the family jewels, what few there were left they are giving away to their pals.  I feel so sorry for the teens & twenties of today.  Then of course they are being basically instructed to hate anyone over 60, because WE are stealing their future from them.

foxgloves

Hello Diary readers,
Thanks for all your comments, especially concerning my strange tax letter. I am aware of the HMRC scams & I don't believe it is one of those. I am sure the letter is genuine & not fraudulent, but I do think it is likely to be an error. It's a small amount of money, so I am not wasting any more time trying to access it online & I'm definitely not intending to phone them, as a long wait in a phone queue listening to earworm music is worth more than the £31's worth of my time & sanity. I've filed the letter & will see if the cheque materialises. I actually think it more likely that I will receive another letter informing me that they have made an error.

@badmemory - Yes, I also feel sorry for young people today. I rarely hear people blaming 'baby boomers' in real life for their predicament, but would always challenge it if I did so, as I think it's borne of lazy journalism. I don't count myself as a 'boomer' as was born in the final year of the span attributed to that group & am therefore of the cohort which came of age in a time of recession, huge unemployment, followed by being priced out of the housing market by a crazy period of gazumping, greed & mortgage interest rates peaking at 16%. I think this is probably quite a different experience from people born much earlier in that timespan. Of course, the problem with any system attempting to categorise social demographics is that it can only work in a fairly general way. For instance, there is nobody in my family or cohort of friends who hold the political views most often attributed to this age-group of people. Many of my friends have been or still are, both left-wing & what I would describe as quite 'hippyfied' in their overall outlook, rather than particularly money/profit oriented.
F

badmemory

My mother would probably originally be one of the stauchest conservatives back in her 30s (she'd be almost 100 now) until I at 15 had a word.  By the time of the miners strike she even contributed to Arthur Scargill's thing.  I would have done too if he hadn't been so fixated that he wouldn't have a ballot.  I only know one person who voted for Brexit & one who voted conservative, the same person.  I have concerns about those exit polls actually.  I wonder how intimidating they actually were (I've never actually seen one) & if people just told them what they thought they wanted to hear.  Personally I would have told them it was a secret ballot & where to take their clipboard, but then when I hit puberty I hit stroppy.

foxgloves

And I'd better pop today's post on while I am on here, as I am shortly going to be curling up on the sofa with a hot water bottle, crocheted blanket & my book, which I'd like to finish today.
I want to tell you about our trip to the blue & yellow plastic plant emporium yesterday, as we were very well-behaved. I used to spend silly money there back in the day, but we stuck to exactly what we called in there to buy - a wooden crate with handles for our glass recycling, which can be lifted easily in & out of the car & looks a whole lot less manky than the ancient hessian bag currently used for this purpose. The other item was a shallow easily washable crate for collecting empty cat food pouches/stretchy plastic for recycling at the same time as we take the glass. Both items found & purchased & we just enjoyed browsing until we got to the lighting department. I've been wanting a new lamp in the conservatory for a long time but haven't seen anything suitable. It sits on the windowsill, so needs to be quite narrow. There were some highly suitable lamps. Despite my repeated emphasis on re-building the savings pots this year, it wasn't long before we had pretty much talked ourselves into buying one - it was about £22, but when we located the boxed ones, it became clear that we also had to purchase the bulb, which was an additional £7. Well, I wavered all over the place, but then I had a look at some other lighting displays while Mr F was looking for the right bulbs & I suddenly thought how we could actually shop this item from home. I remembered a large glass hurricane lantern lurking at the back of the TV unit doing nothing & knew that we had an unopened box of white fairy lights which we bought a couple of years ago for 50p in Wilk*s January sale. Suggested to Mr F we save our £29 & make a nice light ourselves. I've done that this afternoon. There are 100 lights on that string, so when I plugged them in to test out what they looked like in the glass vase, they did give off quite a decent amount of light, fitted properly on the windowsill, unlike our old lamp & also look attractive. A shopping from home result!
Mr F was then inspired to renovate the main conservatory light by cleaning it, fitting new bulbs from his stash (mostly brought from my parents house when we cleared it out) & permanently disabling the ceiling fan & removing the blades. We barely use the fan & the blades are very difficult to clean. Another free improvement.
Right......other small money saving wins today:
*Decided to speed around this morning so as to do all our town jobs within 2 hours for free supermarket car parking.
*Did not visit coffee shop, partly as we were being quick & also because we will have our coffee out tomorrow & didn't want a double coffee hit to our Personal Spends.
*Had a quick tot-up of Week 3's grocery spends & we look to have come in £6.49 under budget. I wonder if we can do similar next week & end up with a little bit to send to a savings pot, which would be good as these little odds & ends do add up.
*Divided up a chunky pot of snowdrops given to me yesterday by best friend. They've made a couple of nice clumps under the winter jasmine outside the front door.
*Paid another 2 x £ coins into my secret tin.
It's not my cooking night & a very easy one for Mr F as we are having spaghetti with some of the slow cooker bolognese sauce I batch-cooked the other week. We are intending to watch either a film or another couple of episodes of a Finnish crime drama we have been watching recently. 
Wishing everyone a calm & pleasant weekend.
F x

Four_Seasons

Hi Foxgloves, hope your trip to the dentist went well.  I also shopped from home today - thanks to a suggestion of yours on another diary - I had been looking at raised beds and when you suggested an old drawer with the bottom out I thought I had seen an odd drawer in the garage (its a tip, one of this years projects!) in fact I found two, so thank you for saving my pennies.  Have you finished your friends wrap? please could you tell me how many stitches you had on and how long it turned out, am thinking ahead for the day in December (too soon to mention it) I really like the idea of a gift baskets with homemade bits and bobs in.  Enjoy the rest of the weekend x

Makingabobor2

Well done on not buying the lamp, and I bet your home made one looks much better anyway. x