Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

weenancyinAmerica

Happy Silver Anniversary - Hope you had a wonderful day. Sounds like Soot is jealous of the other black cat.

Four_Seasons

Happy Anniversary hope you have had a lovely evening x

ziggy2407

Happy anniversary, hope you've had a great day!

Humdinger1

Late to the party, but congratulations @foxgloves! Ding dong love Humdinger xx

thriftmonster

Happy Silver Anniversary. Hope you had a lovely evening

Moorviews

Congratulations on your silver wedding anniversary 💕I hope you enjoyed that Cava and had a lovely evening 🥂

EssexHebridean

Hope you had a lovely day for your anniversary - we didn't do anything in particular for our Silver, but are planning a holiday with pals for our 30th!

Blackcats

congratulations! Hope you both had a lovely celebratory day.

foxgloves

Hello Diary Friends,

How lovely to come on here to find such a lot of lovely well-wishes for our Silver Anniversary. Yes, thank-you all, we did enjoy our evening. I tried out a new recipe - a festive nut roast, partly chosen because I wanted to test it out to see if would be a good one to make for my vegetarian nephew at Christmas. The verdict is YUM! Mr F, not such a scoffer of nuts as myself, loved it & had seconds! We shared a little box of extremely gorgeous chocs afterwards while watching GBBO - they were from an indie chocolatier from further north in the county & shall defo be leaving a positive review on their website. It made me think there isn't enough time in the world to eat degraded once fine bars which are now beginning to taste like little more than vegetable fat & sugar. Concluded that in future, I'd rather have just 2 or 3 high quality artisan chocs than an entire boxful of mainstream stuff…..& if that makes me a choco-snob, so be it! Oh, & btw, the bottle of cava I got out of the back of the pantry without my specs on wasn't cava, it turned out to be a bottle of Argentinian sparkling wine we got as part of a C00p offer…..& very nice it was too, so we will be looking for that again (sorry,, can't recall the name but I bet Mr F will). Anyway, on with today which is my Big Budget Day, so I'll start with that for today's money saving efforts:

*Reconciled October's budget & set November's. More numberwang to do than usual as there are currently additional 2 separate pots of money in our current account - the balance of the amount I top-sliced from my AVC payment & the last bit of my pension lump sum which is awaiting conversion to emergency cash. Nothing really to report. I paid our Regular Saver, Car Fund & bought this month's premium bonds and paid into 5 of our Savings Pots. As of this month, our Personal Spends have been increased by £20 which is primarily in recognition of the fact that coffee shop prices have risen a lot over the last couple of years & we do both enjoy a at least a weekly pop-in to one of these when out & about. We fell out of the habit of going to the pub years ago & rarely go out for meals in the evening, nor do we smoke or use any other substances, so I don't have a problem increasing our Spends a little to help with the things we DO like doing! (And much better than the old days when our VERY frequent coffee/lunch out/takeaway, etc, habit was funded by that absolute NON-budget stream, the credit card!!

*Back-pay. Mr F had flagged up that this was due & it was a little more than he was expecting. We decided to keep it as a separate little pot for the moment & use it for our upcoming holiday expenses. I am leaving the rest of it untouched as it is bound to come in useful for one or other of our pots. They are at a good level atm as had a boost from the recent allocation of AVC pot & I feel really loathe to spend from them. I know that's what they are there for, but we all know it is a lot quicker to deplete them than it is to fill them up again!

*Did a few surveys.

*Ash unhelpfully puked on the doormat…..but "every cloud…" as they say because Mr F was dealing with that when he discovered a big load of towels in the washing machine so he washed them & pegged them out followed by the offending mat. He also made me a cheese toastie for lunch because I had been busy all morning "doing maths & keeping us straight" (true!)

Right, just a bit of filing to do then that's me done for the day. Leftover nut roast tonight with salad & jacket wedges so not a lot of effort required there. I'm going to read & maybe, just maybe, get these charity mittens finished as they're dragging on now.

Good luck with your Wednesday Pence-Wrangling - it's well worth it, whether you are paying off, saving up or just staying solvent. Wish I'd discovered it all 2 decades earlier.

F x

Suffolk_lass

I know you top sliced your AVC pot with the TFLS - I just wanted to share what we did. It might offer you a similar option if your occupational pension total is below £12,570

Mr Sl had a modest sized pot and we also took the 25%TFLS but then we checked the tax years starting the April after he stopped work, until the end of the tax year before that in which he would reach state pension age. In his case, this was 4 full tax years. In your case, receiving your occupational pension for part of this year, you should look at the taxable total and consider taking that year into account too, as you were not working in paid employment for the first few months of 2026-7

So then we divided the remaining pot by the appropriate percentage - So with 4 years, so we took the total pot in four instalments; 25% in year 1, 33% of the remainder in year 2, 50% in year 3 and the rest in year 4 (the amounts varied because of movements in the funds and gilts his pot was in - hence the percentages).

His modest occupational pension was paid in each of those four years but it was below the tax threshold, so it meant he did not pay tax on the portion of the lumps he took, between the occupational pension and up to the tax threshold. It also meant he had a lump, (in his case) roughly what the state pension for the year would have been, so not a dramatic reduction in income.

Anyway, if you haven't considered it, you may want to. The financial adviser I saw before I retired from my job with an occupational pension, endorsed this and suggested everyone should take the maximum 25% TFLS if their scheme had any sort of indexation associated with it, if they could afford to.