KMNs diary - curbing spending and maximising saving with a new baby

Blackcats

From what I hear from my grown up children and from work colleagues this part of mat leave is tough.  There is more to do with baby and friends which usually costs money and additional costs of weaning etc.  I think doing your best is good enough - between you and OH you have enough for your family's needs and you've got a good plan for your return to work.  

kiss_me_now9

Blackcats said:

From what I hear from my grown up children and from work colleagues this part of mat leave is tough.  There is more to do with baby and friends which usually costs money and additional costs of weaning etc.  I think doing your best is good enough - between you and OH you have enough for your family's needs and you've got a good plan for your return to work.  

Yes, there's an abundance of fun things to do but unfortunately they all cost money! Went for coffee again yesterday as we had a long hospital appointment for LO (not to go into too much detail but there's some concerns about how slowly he's developing with a few things) and after spending £7.50 !!!! to park in my place of work !!! as I don't currently have a staff permit for 3 !!!!!! hours!! (many expletives left my mouth) I went to meet some NCT friends and spent another £20 on coffee and cake. Not my finest MSE day. 

Payslip is up now and it's about £1300 for September. I think the Amex 'only' has £300 on it (despite me saying that I wouldn't keep spending on it, as it's not working very well atm) so I should hopefully be able to put a hundred or so in my savings account this month and hopefully not be in the same position at the end of next month. 

There are a couple of pricey, not needed things I want but I am trying so very hard to resist. It feels like I've not had any nice treats though (even though realistically, going out for coffee once a week and doing nice things with LO are nice treats) and the materialistic child side of my brain is having a minor tantrum

kiss_me_now9

I ran home from our baby group with our running buggy today - normally I'd head home via Tesco with a coffee so that's some cash saved. I've pulled some (very) old puff pastry out of the freezer and plan to make some cheese twists this evening. 

I've also started playing around with air dry clay, my main plan is to make myself a paint palette. I've wanted a ceramic one for years and never found one at a reasonable price so if I can one then that's a massive win! 

kiss_me_now9

Thank god for payday! It's been a hard week or so. £120 in savings, hopefully that'll boost it a little bit. I'm really pleased I've moved to a higher interest savings account - I was getting about 20p on my savings in my old Starling account, in my current one I now get 4.95% so the last couple of months I've had £25 and £28 in interest for doing nothing! 

I've booked us onto a sensory play course from the start of November, a bit pricey at £54 but I think LO will really enjoy it and I wanted something to replace our makaton course. I find it really hard if we don't have something booked for more than two days in a row. I need to book onto our next sing and sign course as well, but that can wait a little bit - the dates aren't released to people who haven't been before until the end of the week. 

I was going to go to our running club track session tonight but we've had a terrible thunderstorm that lasted about an hour and I hate running on the track in the wet, it makes me nervous. So in a minute I am going to the gym to do a treadmill work out. Not my normal style but better than nothing. Saved myself £3.25 there as well. 

I've made my little paint palette and painted a few bits of clay that I made the other day (two ring holders and a couple of attempts at models). I've also sanded and painted the clay hand and footprints I did of my LOs hands/feet a few months ago. I now need to get a good varnish and seal them so that they are protected but I don't know what to get. I was going to book to take him to a paint it yourself pottery place to get some christmas baubles with handprints on made for my parents/in laws/us as a keepsake but I'm now going to try and make them myself instead. I can get a decent sized christmas tree bauble cutter off of eBay for under a fiver and I am pretty confident with some practice I could get his handprints on the dried ornament fairly well but my biggest hurdle is getting the clay to dry flat! Need more practice with that. I think I've been doing the wrong thing by leaving them in the window to dry - I assumed it would help but looking at youtube suggests that that may be speeding things up too much and causing the clay to crack. The baubles at the cheapest PIYP place I found (which is by my parents, so would involve a 140 mile round trip too!) are still £12 a bauble so if I can get this to work with a £5 cookie cutter and a £2 block of air dry clay from Hobbycraft I'll be very happy! 

kiss_me_now9

The air dry clay is going really well! I've made three 'test' models which finally dried flat (they took nearly a week to dry though ) so I'm going to get some guide rings for my rolling pin and buy a bauble cookie cutter from somewhere. I've bought a varnish and sealed the hand/foot prints and they look so sweet! 

I'm tempted to make some more ring holders and try them on etsy. I've still got the printable files that I'm playing around with and really need to do something with but it's hard to find the time when I basically have between 7pm and 10pm 5 evenings a week as 'free time' for everything I want to do. 

Money wise I'm still ok atm. OH is away for work next week and I need to make sure I don't just buy takeaways every night! Trying to avoid spending on the Amex this month as well as I think we get our cashback in October so the balance should be very low which means more money from my pay cheque into my account not theirs!

kiss_me_now9

I've been making more clay ornaments with a different brand of clay and they look so much nicer - much smoother and have dried nicer. One looks almost professional! The other ones are a bit dodgy but that's because I cut them out of clay that wasn't all the same thickness all the way round (despite my attempts to use guides). 

Money wise I am so glad it's the end of the month, pay day isn't until Tuesday but I am scraping around now. I have thankfully received my £200 switching bonus from Nationwide so that's helped a lot. I took £75 out of my savings account to cover a few bills this week but I plan to put it back with a bit extra when I get paid. My new Nationwide account has a savings account linked to it  - 3.75% interest so not amazing but it's a useful feature for me as I often forget when bills are going out and am terrible with maths so can find myself very close to being overdrawn. Having a small savings account attached where I can siphon a bit of my pay off and keep it instantly accessible helps mitigate that and is something I was missing with my last bank account! I'll still keep the majority of my savings in the higher interest account but just keeping a little in there will help me stay afloat. 

Little man has his first cold and is feeling very miserable and grumpy with it so parenting has been hard these last few days, he refused all his naps yesterday but has been asleep now for an hour and we'll go for a walk when he wakes up so hopefully a bit of fresh air will make him feel a bit better. 

I'm starting to think harder about what I want to do when I return to work. Essentially I cannot do anything until June 2024 as otherwise I'll have to pay the NHS back £6k, which I do not plan to do. What I do after that is one of four options - 
1) Carry on in the [new] job role in the NHS, working occasional weekends, in a stressful area with very little pay/reward but maintain my professional career and hope that a different government gets in who cares about our health service and maybe reforms it to make it an environment that helps people again. 
2) Look for another adjacent job, probably something a bit less stressful with more admin focus, hopefully with better pay and no weekends/overtime needed. 
3) Take on a franchise of a mum and baby group near me - there's one that I would be interested in and would be good at (it's a fitness franchise - I love the gym and running) - but it's a big leap into self employment and very uncertain obviously with no guarantee of income.
4) Just quit my job and drop our nursery place so LO goes to a child minder twice a week but I look after him the other 3 days a week and OH pays me a small 'living wage'. 

Option 1 would mean that we could feasibly have another baby in Spring/Summer 2025 as I'd qualify for the NHS maternity again and realistically if we want a second kid then this is the most appropriate option I think. Option 2 means we might have to put off having that second kid for a few months and lengthening the age gap between our LO and any future siblings (I'm quite keen to have a 2 - 2.5 year age gap max). Option 3 is terrifying but could be amazing - however would likely be a big drop in take home pay and may not take off. I really hate the idea of option 4 but if the new job is awful and I can't find anything else, it may have to be what we go with.

kiss_me_now9

Gosh, they say time flies when you're having fun... or looking after a baby! More of a toddler now. 

January has been an incredibly tough money month as we got paid on the 20th December AND I dropped from my larger mat pay to the minimum for the last three months. I repeatedly asked our payroll team to spread my payments out evenly over the whole year but every single payment has been different (bar three in the summer) and all I can do now is be mildly !!!!!! off. Luckily I twigged that this would probably happen and have been siphoning off a little bit of the larger pay cheques into my easy access savings for this precise eventuality. I am pleased to say that at nearly the end of the month I haven't had to remove anything from my savings though I am now down to my final £12... But we only have swimming (50p parking and £2.75 for a post swim coffee for me) to pay for before I get paid again. Would normally have another coffee to pay for tomorrow at my gym but the lady taking the class is sadly off sick for the week. Saves me £3! 

Jobs wise it's starting to get to crunch time.Things have definitely progressed quickly since my last post on that front. 

I got rejected from the Civil Service job (finally - 4 months after applying) which was incredibly disappointing and upset me far more than I thought it would if I'm honest. I'm still keen to keep trying for their posts and am lucky to live in an area where they have several large government offices (not the London ones) so I can keep trying. 

I had an interview for a different NHS trust for a band 5 role. Got offered the job, came home and did the maths on the difference in pay, realised I'd be taking a £10k a year (full time equivalent) pay cut AND cutting down to 3 days a week and very quickly realised I could not afford to do so. If I had taken the job we'd have had to take LO out of the nursery setting and try to up the childminder days which are £15 a week cheaper - it was coming down to that fine a wire. It's a shame but on reflection I don't actually think the job was really my cup of tea anyway. 

I have now formally turned down the post I was initially offered by my trust as it really wasn't something I wanted to do, hugely different way of working - I've always worked on the wards with patients and their families face to face to prevent things going down the pan, this role was 80% zoom or telephone calls and then reactively going out to houses when things have fallen apart often irretrievably. Yes it was in the area I loved and am passionate about but it's a very different horse when you look at it close up. I still haven't been told what team I will join when I return and my maternity leave ends in the last week of February... Typical for that place. 

I have applied for a band 7 post, a bit of a jump into space with that one. It's managing a team I used to work with very closely and am on good terms with but as I don't have any specific management experience I am not really expecting an interview. It's fixed term for maternity cover and I could hopefully do it as a secondment but it will be a lot more work, a lot more pressure and a lot more hassle I think. Despite that, it would look great on my CV, I'd be picking the area that I actually quite like working in and it would mean no more weekends which is fab. Would be difficult when the secondment finishes though as it's quite a difference in pay but I can worry about that if I get the job. 

In other exciting (!) news we have finally confirmed our new bathroom, so hopefully that will be fitted by the end of April and we will finally have a bath which will make life so much easier and safer for bathing our little boy. I've also started a youtube channel recently which has gone up to 100 subscribers in the one month I've been making videos so that's exciting. 

Blackcats

Long time, no see 😀
well done for getting through January which is definitely the longest, toughest month of the year.

I'm sure you don't get a moment to yourself but I thought this NHS management development course might be of interest - distance learning, good skills and good for your CV 

https://www.leadershipacademy.nhs.uk/edward-jenner-programme-course-one-exploring-what-leadership-means-to-me/

kiss_me_now9

Blackcats said:

Long time, no see 😀
well done for getting through January which is definitely the longest, toughest month of the year.

I'm sure you don't get a moment to yourself but I thought this NHS management development course might be of interest - distance learning, good skills and good for your CV 

https://www.leadershipacademy.nhs.uk/edward-jenner-programme-course-one-exploring-what-leadership-means-to-me/

Oh that's fantastic thank you! I'll have a look at that and see if I can start it - if I do get an interview that will be a great asset to talk about

kiss_me_now9

Unfortunately I've not been given an interview for that job. It was a bit of a chance as I haven't got any formal management experience (though if I say so myself, I'm quite a people person and get on well with most people, know my !!!!!! and am fair - all qualities I would want in a manager). Gutted tbh. It will be interesting to see who gets it.