Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

Makingabobor2

Good luck with your number crunching. I look forward to seeing the results.

rtandon27

@foxgloves - wave the white flag when you are ready to surface!

foxgloves

Hello Monday Money Savers,
Thank-you for your comments & contributions. I shall reply properly tomorrow, as today I am all behind like a cow's tail (as my Mum was fond of saying). Useful stuff on the non-spendy front:
*Wrote up new list from yesterday's freezer audit. I think we'll be able to knock up most of February's master meal plan from that.
*Baked a batch of bread rolls.
*Tonight's meal will use a portion of the roast pork I divvied up yesterday as I'm making pork & leek hash with stir-fried shredded greens with garlic.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Did this week's laundry. On heated airer as feels too cold for effective pegging-out atm.
*Did a couple of surveys.
*Took delivery of our fish box, divided it into portions plus a box of trimmings to make a fish pie & froze.
*Big Budget Day. While I have both reconciled January's budget & set February's, it was a more lengthy process than usual thanks to some or other software update which affected my spreadsheets. This came to my attention when I was making a note of our remaining Personal Spends for carrying over into the new month. I remembered Mr F saying he'd have to transfer a chunk of money from his Reserve Spends to cover a shortfall caused by an expensive muso CD box-set he ordered arriving earlier than he anticipated. Yet this didn't appear anywhere on his Personal Spends spreadsheet despite the fact I saw him updating on Friday. Tracked this problem down to a software update which has affected the 'shared' nature of these spreadsheets. We can both update them, but for some reason, they have split into 3 different versions. Turns out that one of the updates has introduced some sort of AI function which it is possible to disable & Mr F says he is getting onto this pronto (he takes the accuracy of his Personal Spends very seriously!) This is very tedious even to type, but the time-wasting was significant as when I tried to get an accurate spreadsheet, it would update what I was inputting, then erase something else, so in the end, when I'd got a 100% accurate version, I actually printed it as no longer had any trust in it. It is perfectly sortable by disabling whatever bin fire the update introduced according to Mr F but it did take a lot of my time this morning & I didn't manage to allocate the very welcome back-pay which landed in our account this morning to the Savings Pots. I did pay 3 of the pots as normal, so the Holiday Pot is on schedule. I have paid our our general savings too & also sorted out another year of car tax.
So not as much achieved as hoped - tbh despite reminding myself yesterday that the Grimsby fish man was coming today, I still forgot until I spotted it in my diary & so that was another interruption........ as was removing Soot from the bookshelf twice. They had a new toy for their birthdays (Well, 'gotcha anniversary', really) yesterday & let's just say that I think the cat-nip in it must be at the skunk-end of herbal as they are so desperate to get another fix, they are prepared to get into trouble mountaineering up tall bookcases. I had to limit their play with it last night as Ash looked as though he was about to go & get all the Pink Floyd albums out.
Oh & no hour of cleaning today. I am definitely doing this as the preferred way forward but just haven't made the time today. Will aim to do a bit extra tomorrow.
F x

PennysIntoPounds

Boooo to AI, I really don't understand why it's constantly forced on us from every direction despite it being absolutely dire!
Happy gotchaversary to Soot and Ash 😊
Looking forward to seeing pics of Ash in his kaftan ✌️

Makingabobor2

Sounds like your spreadsheet was as bad as mine the other day. I am rubbish as Excel, so Dh makes the spreadsheets and I just input the data and update. I asked him to add some extra rows to one the other day, as I didn't have a clue. So he added them and I started adding data, and then realised it wasn't actually adding/subtracting the amounts....so like you, took me twice as long as I had to wait for him to come home from work to sort it out.

Blackcats

The cats high on catnip and high up the bookshelf made me laugh. 

Sun_Addict

Your cats are so funny 🤣 My older cat loves catnip but the young one seems to be completely indifferent to it. I had a catnip plant in the garden a few years ago, I think it only lasted a couple of days before it was totally flattened by cats, not all belonging to us 😆

Suffolk_lass

I have a patch of Nepeta too and the rabbits seem to like it too. Our cat is an indoor girl so it isn't her flattening it

foxgloves

Morning, & thanks for all your comments.
@PennysIntoPounds - I'd love to get a few quid for Mr F's current phone but it is already 2nd hand (used to be mine), buttons are falling off & it defo has too many scuzzy faults to sell. I agree with you re AI. Have really noticed recently how poor a well-known big search engine's (think star-sign) AI is, esp when checking random facts to assist with our newly-discovered enjoyment of cryptic crosswords. Sometimes it answers completely different questions & I've also found factual inaccuracies & altered spellings so that it fits something the AI can find rather than what I have requested. In my mind, it needs to be used critically, or avoided.

@Sun_Addict @ @scandimore - Yes, it's amazing how much cleaning I can get done in an hour. I am going to stick with it.

@2Scratters - We aim to be a zero food-waste household. If you don't have the time or inclination to deal with surplus or leftover food at the time, you could freeze it until you do? (unless it's a furry lemon, of course!)

@Suffolk_lass - Good luck with those squash. Hope they grow for you. We love them. Hope the seeds weren't too expensive to buy as I have quite a lot of saved ones. Oh, & white smoke? More like swearing when I saw what an MS update had done to my spreadsheets!

@Makingabobor2 - Mr F made our original budget spreadsheets to my specifications. I missed out on my Excel training years ago at work, & because of a related issue at the time involving poor communications, I had a hissy-fit & deliberately didn't re-schedule it. Most of my professional use of Excel involved inputting data & manipulating spreadsheets designed by someone else, so it was never a problem.

@Blackcats & everyone commenting on cat-nip tales. Yes, they are both hopeless addicts, I'm afraid. I only bought that new toy on Sunday & by last night, it was so soggy & horrid, I wished I'd had access to my grabber just to pick the blimming thing up more hygienically! The first thing Soot did this morning after his breakfast was sit on the coffee table trying to work out which high shelf I'd hidden it on. He hasn't found it yet though.

F

foxgloves

And I may as well get today's post on before I switch off my laptop & go & sort out some lunch.
Hello Diary readers,
I'm making steady progress through the stuff I hoped to achieve today - budget-friendly stuff as follows:
*Mixed up a sourdough loaf for baking tomorrow.
*Veggie fajhitas tonight which will use up 3 highly annoying tortillas from the freezer. (They have frozen wonky so take up far more space than they have any right to do)
*Picked a small bowl of rocket from greenhouse as a base for a salad to go with the above.
*Did my daily 1 hour of cleaning. Actually, I am trying not to use the word 'cleaning' as it has connotations of such tediosity. I am re-framing it as an hour of caring for our home & our stuff. There, you see, it feels less grim already, doesn't it? Anyway, during today's hour, I scrubbed & polished our stainless steel cooker hood, removed the filters for cleaning, then ditto splashback & back of the glass cooker lid. Mr F has volunteered to clean the cooker itself as he can reach into the back of it much more easily than I can (arms like a gibbon).
*Finished off those last Big Budget Day tasks which I deferred when sorting out the tech issue with my spreadsheets wasted a whole chunk of my time. Paid the wheelie-bin cleaner plus paid a transaction off my credit card thus getting our accounts absolutely up-to-date. Filed all resulting paperwork.
*Transferred Mr F's back-pay to the Savings Pots account & then allocated it between 4 pots as discussed. I prioritised the Car Maintenance Pot as we have £574 worth of routine work to do on it (tyres, brakes, etc), then the Tech Replacement Pot so as to ensure the money is in place for Mr F to replace his shonky phone in March as planned. Then the House & Garden Pot received the next biggest amount as it was on the low side for the work we have planned to do refurbing our veg plot & finally, the Appliances Replacement Pot as that was emptied out by our washing machine staging a dramatic death (simultaneously tripping the electricity supply!) As this year's Project Surbiton is entirely about re-stuffing our 10 virtual Savings Pots with cashola, we did both think that this was a helpful start, so early in the year.
*Still to do - Make tomorrow's packed breakfast. I can see that there is a big box of something-or-other defrosting on the worktop to serve as packed lunch.
I'm intending to progress some more recipe copying this afternoon as this has been hanging around & I'd dearly like to have this task finished by the weekend. I enjoy handwriting, which does help with the dullness of copying, but I've enjoyed finding old favourites which I haven't cooked for ages. Plenty of inexpensive recipes too, as many of them would have been collected back during our debt-busting days. Lunch first though, & I had better distribute cat lunch too before Soot meows himself hoarse.
Take care, m'dears. A grey old chilly day today.
F x