And now we go again...

milann

Glad you’re getting on with the multi cooker.

Blackcats

Very interesting figures on the mortgage overpayment plans - amazing how the tweaks accumulate and motivating to set a stretch target.
more yarn for the blanket is a nice treat.  I had a lovely mooch around a real wool shop a couple of weeks ago - what bliss.

EssexHebridean

Morning all - bright but crisp here - and slightly cooler than the crazy warm for the time of year temperatures we had yesterday. I hope all those in the areas where the weather over the weekend has been crazy-wet have managed to stay dry and cosy. 

Blackcats I really do find seeing what impact small payments to the mortgage can make to the end date and interest payable  motivating. It's great this time being able to see the balance drop as the payments hit as well - although of course the flip side of that will also be that we'll see an increase again each month when the interest hits - boo! I think I have correctly worked out that at the beginning the interest looks like it worked out to just under £14 a day - so it's motivating to know as well that every chunk of £14 I pay over will be balancing out a day's interest. It will also be useful to begin to see that figure drop over time, too, just from the impact on the capital amount outstanding. 

Weekend was a nice pottering, relaxing sort of one for the most part. Lots of small garden jobs done - we now have a couple of pots with plants rescued from the back garden shifted round to the front, the extra win there was that the pots were ones our predecessors left behind too so no spend required. the front has also been weeded, and the stump from a long-dead and removed conifer was wrenched out by MrEH yesterday too. In the back we now have three clear beds for veggie growing next year, the three little gooseberry bush shoots we brought with us have been planted in, and we borrowed the mower from Mum yesterday and have mowed the lawn as well - probably the last time this year we assume. The multicooker got a go at doing roast potatoes yesterday - verdict was "not as crispy as usual but still nice enough" but I think that should be relatively easily fixed by just giving them slightly longer (and not opening the lid every 5 minutes to check on their progress, quite honestly!) although it might also be that the multicooker can't reach the same temperatures that the oven does - I would usually set it to absolutely as hot as it goes for roasties. In the interests of energy efficiency MrEH used the small top oven for making rolls for lunches for the week - but they cooked too fast on the tops really, so he'll revert back to using the main oven in future I think. 

Did feel slightly like we'd spent half of the weekend in supermarkets. M's on Friday - I had originally intended to do most of the shopping there, but on arrival remembered that store still has £1 in the slot trolleys - and I didn't have my purse which is where my trolley token lives. Lil's and Sainbugs on Saturday - on the basis that as I said we also wanted to pop into town and Sainsbugs works for parking. Then nipped in to T's yesterday for a couple of oddments and also MrEH's newspaper. Next week I plan to do mainly Lil's with the top up of any bits I can't get there being T's as I have useful coupons for there. 

MSE Stuff:
- Meals are planned for the week - Spicy ragu with pasta for tonight, Leftovers from yesterday's lamb breast with couscous and veggies for tomorrow, haggis on Wednesday (the one we brought back from the Hebrides with us!) and then Thursday will probably be risotto, I think. 
- I think I've found free parking to use when we are away next saturday. It'll mean being relatively close to where we need to be for the meeting on Saturday, albeit with a slightly longer walk back to the car on sunday when we're heading home. Can't see that being too much of an issue though.
- Front garden being smartened up for zero spend - hurrah!
- Banks checked and all fine - and some CC money shuffling done too including money being moved from the VSP to pay for the multi cooker.
- The £3 I paid for the next day delivery from the watery Cumbrian shop has already refunded back to the card.
- MrEH's car topped up with fuel - although a good chunk of what's in her will be used next weekend if we do opt to drive (which will depend on whether MrEH agrees that the parking I have found does look to be viable) - that will be reclaimable on expenses though.  £56 spent there. 

Spendiness:
- The usual weekend shopping
- £9 on deodorant refills - from personal spends.
- We have committed to a bit of spendiness in the future - a friend is planning a 50th birthday bash, which involves a group of us spending a week staying in a fort, on a small island which is only accessible by causeway. Sounds like a ridiculously fun thing to do, and it's with the same pal's we've been away with before. Allowing for the fact that it's not happening until 2025, we have sufficient time to plan for the additional week's time away as well  as the cost so we've said an immediate yes.
- The yarn - I just ordered what I reckoned I would need plus some new balls of cotton for dishcloths, and cast around to find a money off code for the website too - so it ended up at £21.98 including the delivery fee. The thing  I'm pleased about here is that usually my temptation would have been to spend more to bring it to the amount for free delivery - but actually, I didn't need another £10 worth, so doing it this way was better value!

I did manage to snag an absolute bargain in M's on Friday which I don't recall mentioning. A YS'd pack of "sliced cooked meat" - 1.5kg of it to be exact, for the grand sum of £1.52. Obviously had no clue what we were getting but I figured for that price it was worth a go. MrEH got stuck in to dividing it up on Friday evening and we've ended up with a mix of beef, corned beef, salami type stuff, ham, and tongue - and all told it's divided into about 17 lunches - and some of those will do for both of us - plus a bag of ham trimmings which will go with pasta at some stage!  We've both agreed that it's well worth keeping an eye for the same sort of thing in the future, unsurprisingly! 

dreaming

Totally agree that even small o/payments to mortgages  - are worth it. When I was working the company brought in a Starbucks and 4 workers got into a "round" of buying each other drinks (all seemed to be "something/something coffee with something/something sprinkles so quite expensive) and each went once a day (so start time/elevenses/after lunch/4 o'clock slump time). One woman asked if I wanted to be included and I said no thanks, I can't afford to spend that sort of money 4 times a day, every day. "Oh no", said she, "I only buy once a day". As we worked in a finance office (and were presumable fairly intelligent) I'm not sure how she didn't realise that although she only paid once a day it was for 4 lots of drinks at a time - probably at least £12 a time. Me? I happily carried on having my once a week treat (a large tea costing about £1.25 at the time) and put the same amount for the other 4 days in a pot, along with any other bits I'd saved, and every few months made an overpayment to the mortgage. Even if I only covered the interest I figured I was winning, and when I took early retirement at 58, mortgage and debt free, I even managed to smile when the same woman told me how "lucky" I was.

lucielle

All sounding good on the mortgage front.  A colleague has been talking to DD1 about this and DD1 is going to pass the info onto DD2.  Hopefully something will stick!
L 

LadyWithAPlan

I love my multi cooker . I think you will find the pressure cooker bit v useful - you can do HM chicken stock in 20 mins, cook beetroots in 20 min.. cooking apples in 5 min. The steamer takes ages  but the saute function is v good and seems far less sticky than my normal frying pans.

Mine is a Clever Chef - i won it - as otherwise I would have bought a IP with a dehydrator function

badmemory

I stopped telling people about paying off the mortgage as they tend to think you are made of money & call you lucky.  There is nothing lucky about paying off your mortgage by yourself.

savingholmes

The garden sounds like it is coming along a treat. 

I'm sure you will make short work of the mortgage or any mortgage neutral equivalent depending on what you decide.

foxgloves

Great to hear you have space for some food-growing in your new garden, @EH. It's amazing how much you can get from quite a small space. 
F

EssexHebridean

Thanks everyone for stopping by! I've had the past 7 years of people telling me we are "lucky" to have paid off the mortgage - so am well familiar with that one. Smile and grit your teeth, and repeat...! 

Dreaming I think all too often those sorts of maths escape people - and let's be honest, a round of 4 coffees even once a week is a decent spend - and it figures that every few weeks it's going to be twice in a week, isn't it! That would leave me with no spending money at all, some weeks! These days if people invite me to participate in stuff that I simply don't feel is financially good value for me, I usually just opt to decline without giving a reason. I refuse to say "I can't afford it" because for me, it's usually not true, and for me to be saying I can't afford things then diminishes the phrase when someone who genuinely can't afford it uses it. Saying "I'm choosing not to spend my money in that way" either just sounds like you're being ar ess eee y in the extreme, or requires huge amounts of explanation - mostly for the aid of folk who ultimately won't understand the choices I am making in any case. A "No thanks, not for me" and a smile is just an easier approach a lot of the time. 

L it's great that DD is already being encouraged on the OP route - honestly, there aren't too many regrets in my life but not starting OP'ing on our first mortgage far sooner is definitely one. Here's hoping she takes it on board!  LWAP your multicooker sounds like it has a lot of the same features ours does. My only concern about the pressure cooker (aside from the slight hangover from childhood when PCs were slightly scary things - and until I ran it for its check cycle the other day I had NO idea how much that was still with me!) is that it does inevitably produce quite a lot of steam at the end, and we have no external ventilation in the kitchen. The ability to cook beetroot that fast is a dream though! 

How's everyone's Tuesday been then? Work is still quite stressy for me at the moment - settling a bit but still likely to remain quite "difficult" for a while for various reasons. It would be easier if someone was willing to let other people take more of the workload, and indeed if that other person would stop actively taking on workload from others who are quite capable of doing it themselves. Apologies - cryptic, but from necessity. sigh. It'll pass. 

Got a call this morning to say that our bench (The Transport Museum one) is being delivered on Thursday! Now of course Thursday *should* be a MrEH WFH day, but this week he might have to go in - which is frustrating, and might mean we have to travel separately and I have to wait in for the delivery and then travel in later. They've promised it early for me - 8am - 9am - so it should be workable if that's what I need to do, and quite frankly I'm owed some slack at the moment! Eeek - how exciting though - I was expecting it to be at least another couple of weeks away! 

Other than that things are ticking along at the moment. Banks are all as they should be - it's still quite frustrating not having a proper comparison between last month and this on the finances but it is what it is - last month was always going to be an "out of the ordinary" one, and I know the sums add up and match the budget so I need to trust the process. CC is looking happy now all the transfers canceling out spends have landed. I need to transfer the money from my spends account to cover the yarn which has now been dispatched apparently - what's the betting THAT arrives when nobody's in, too! 

Food this evening will be the Tuesday standard couscous  - and I plan to use the multicooker to cook the veggies and then heat and crisp the cubes of lamb and see how that works. Just need to work on which setting will be needed for that. The couscous itself I'll do moroccan style I think with some chopped dried apricot and the couscous spice mix I bought in the Turkish supermarket the other week. Hopefully my now repotted parsley plant will provide some herbiness to add to the mix. I have very little planned for this evening apart from some general pottering and odd tasks - Mr EH is at rugby training so the TV beckons I think, and some more crochet (although I now have two large squares on two separate hooks both of which are awaiting the new yarn to finish - I think I've got three rows left to do on the one I started last night before that comes to a halt awaiting the delivery too). 

In actual money saving, I managed to snag one of the National Trust free passes so we've earmarked somewhere to visit on Sunday rather than heading straight home. It's been an absolute age since we've been to visit somewhere specific, and we may as well make the most of being outside the area and the travel costs being paid. We'll undoubtedly get tea & cake while there but it will still be a good value day out. I am pleased to have grabbed the pass as last time I applied too late and they'd all gone.