Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

@KajiKita - That's actually a good point about being able to access car park levels via the ramps rather than the stairwells. I am hoping the situation won't arise, but if I have to, I would in future use that method. Interesting that the homeless man who helped you identified the stairwells as being dangerous places.

@Sun_Addict - I think the situation has definitely got worse in our city, but it is noticeable in Lincoln too. Even in our town, which people from other areas of the same county consider to be reasonably affluent, there was a chap living in the doorway of an empty shop for a few weeks. He had all his possessions with him, surrounding a tent, even his mobility scooter. I think the rate at which private rents have shot up hasn't helped matters at all. When we were still paying off our mortgage, I looked up the rentable value of our current house & was really shocked to discover that at almost double the amount of our mortgage's monthly payment, we wouldn't have been able to rent our own home! I feel so much sympathy for the high numbers of street homeless trying to survive in the city centre, but I am also wary as complex needs, addiction & despair can understandably result in desperate behaviour.  I've never seen the chap you mention with the littler terrier. I hope he was helped into accommodation. 
F

rtandon27

@foxgloves - thank-you so much for sharing that story!  I love teaching by way of 'oral' tradition and that story fits the bill quite nicely in this day of everything on t'internet.

It is indeed funny how the smallest things can trigger jaunts down memory lane!

daisy_1571

I had one of those lovely cards   😍  felt terribly grown up with my lovely store card.  I remember signing my name one day on those swish-swish machine carbonated pages.   When I got home and briefly glanced at the customer tear-off and saw id signed the wrong name lol.  At the time I was either fairly newly married or fairly newly separated so correct first name and middle initial but wrong surname to the name on the card lol.  It all went through so neither shop nor issuer checked terribly closely! 

Dx 

Makingabobor2

Oh yes....I had the store cards, back in the spendy era!  I remember one year, we had booked a holiday on the credit card...."we'll be able to pay it back soon"....was our favourite phrase. And then I went into the well known dept store, beginning with D,  with my store card and purchased matching luggage and new clothes for the afore mentioned holiday!  Did we really need any of it?  No!  Could we afford it? No!   Did the luggage make any difference to the enjoyment of the holiday? No!  TBH, I think I spent the whole holiday worrying about how we were going to pay for it later.  If only we could have seen then, how stupid we were being. 

foxgloves

Well, today's indecision as to which garden task to tackle next became irrelevant when I realised I was going to be waiting in for Mr F's parcel. Have had a low-key useful day so far. 
Oh & hello, of course. I haven't even said 'Hello' to welcome my readers. Manners, Foxgloves!
*Baked a batch of wholemeal rolls.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Printed off newly arrived credit card statement & went through it identifying items I've already paid across & deducting them from the monthly balance left to pay. We only have one credit card each now, primarily for loyalty vouchers, although timing purchases with bill-paying dates does sometimes help manipulate from which month's budget I intend to pay.
*Did my regular mid-month budget check-in. No nasty surprises. I have £97-23 more than expected. Checked all the figures through again & also checked against my original October budget but I simply can't account for this extra sum. It's not anything connected to the payment error I have recently sorted out, nor anything to do with any other transactions made recently while I was suffering from covid-brain. It's so near £100, I did wonder it it was a savings account payment which hadn't gone out correctly as 2 or our savings pots have £100 pm added, but nope, everything of that nature had been paid correctly. So it's still a mystery. I'm not going to do anything with the surplus money as it may yet still be something which comes to light on my next Big Budget Day, but it's certainly odd. I checked October's column on the bills/DDs spreadsheet too, just in case there was a previously undetected error, but I couldn't see anything obvious. Ah well, it's better than being 97 quid down.
*Started a bag of library returns. One of the cook books I borrowed has quite a lot of nice recipes I'd probably cook. It's HFW's 'Good Comfort' which is classic comfort food type recipes but with a healthy twist, such as the addition of more veg & pulses. I have made a note of the title as may possibly buy that one at some point in the future. I do like to peruse cookery books from the library first so I don't end up spending money on something glorious-looking which I then only use for about 1 recipe.
*Packed away some useful bubblewrap from the new glasses into my wrappings stash. really, nobody should have to be buying that stuff with the amount of it that's around for free.
*Laid back nosebag tonight as I've got the makings of Indian butternut & chickpea curry in the slow cooker. It's from the BBC Good Food Healthy Slow Cooker book - @Sun_Addict, I think you might have originally mentioned this book, I can't remember now. Anyway, all I need to do is add chopped fresh tomatoes & a can of chickpeas half an hour before serving, then stir in a bit of yoghurt & cook some rice. It's made good use of some of the big Guatemalan Blue squash which Mr F started at the weekend. I've scooped out the seeds as I save plenty every year for re-sowing.
*Did a survey & will check for others shortly.
Hoping everyone's managing a decent day. The cats will be pleased to have us at home tonight. They took a dim view of our late return last night. Ash wanted to celebrate with a game involving the linen cupboard door curtain & Mr F's feet & was gutted when he realised we were going straight to bed!
F x

foxgloves

They were really high interest too, weren't they, @Makingabobor2. Such simple & effective marketing. Put the leaflets right next to the till so that the very many folk like us who couldn't really afford the stuff they were buying would see it as a very positive move to sign up. The staff were obviously all trained to mention them too & to explain about the 20% discount. The monthly payments, like with catalogues, weren't huge, it was really that which invited repeated use, which quickly saw those payments mounting up. Even the worst credit card interest rates are probably still lower than some of those naughty store cards.

foxgloves

@daisy_1571 - Yes, exactly that! They DID make one feel grown-up financially 'sorted' (I was anything but!) & I think even just being eligible gave one a little boost. The staff offering them at the tills probably made a lot of people feel that they must 'look' sufficiently well off to have such a thing of magic offered to them. The reality, of course, as with most consumer debt going back to its beginnings (I think in post-Wall Street Crash America?), was simply to create a means for people to buy things who otherwise could not afford them & thus keep company profit sheets on an upward trajectory. Once everyone who can afford a Big Gizmo has bought one, the only way to continue making profits on Big Gizmos is by finding a means for the less-affluent to buy them. And consumer credit (for which, read 'debt') was born.

foxgloves

@rtandon27 - You're welcome! x

EssexHebridean

Those cards also earned commission for the staff member who managed to get the sign up too - which explained why they were proffered with such enthusiasm doesn’t it! 

Blackcats

Well quelle surprise after I'd graduated from buying things from 'the book' (the catalogue) I fully embraced the concept of the store card.  The credit limit was relatively low but a cycle of spend a lot, pay a bit, spend as much as available stayed with me for years.  Then I progressed (oh the irony) to high credit limit credit cards.  My m b n/a card had a £15,000 credit limit and was used to entirely fund a 3 week trip to Oz including using it to withdraw cash whilst there.  Now I'm the type of grown up woman who sets a grocery budget and mostly sticks to it. 😇