Teetering on the brink

EatingBeans

Ah, good question! The £50 is monthly, and I am not really calling it a takeaway budget because it is intended to be for all non-foreseen/non-essential spends - essentially the stuff that comes out the woodwork that I hadn’t seen coming. The plan is for no takeaways at all but if I absolutely must then I am promising myself that it has to come out of this pot, definitely not the food pot. 

I am not keen on tying the non-essential spend to selling because that feels much harder to track of and also probably means I will just spend anything I make. £50 is just a straight £50 that I can keep a track of in Fudget. If food and diesel are also fixed then working out if I have the cash to afford anything is super simple. Everything else is already budgeted for and almost all set up as direct debits.

I’ll be honest, given dd2’s tendency to tell me at the last minute about things that are essential spends but not already in the budget, I am thinking £50 is likely overly optimistic, but I am going to try! 

Moneywhizz

I think £40 a month is a reasonable spend for food, not extravagant but manageable if it is only for one person. Just wondering if you have a separate budget for your dd's food? Just because it is usually better to shop for two people together unless you eat completely different things. 

EatingBeans

Thanks @Moneywhizz , yes I do have a separate line for dd2’s food, mainly because I am trying to encourage her to budget and shop herself so she has a better idea about the value of money (she’s pretty good now tbf but was awful), but shopping together offers very little benefit for us as she eats totally different things to me. I will eat random things on a plate just to use them up, whereas she insists on actual meals! 🤣 We used to waste quite a lot of food when we used to combine shopping and every night was a battle trying to decide what to eat. Now she occasionally complains that she doesn’t know what to have for dinner but she’s getting better, and we both waste and spend a lot less doing it this way. The joke is we both actually go shopping together but we scan them as separate baskets (then I pay for both)! 🤣 

Although we have different food budgets it is not a hard and fast rule that we eat separately  because if one of use opens something that must be used immediately and can’t be kept - say a jar of tikka sauce - then the one cooking it inevitably asks the other if they want to share rather than throw it away. Perfect example tonight was dd2 cooked an apple crumble and asked if I wanted some. Like I was going to say no to that! 😋

Tbh the biggest issue with judging my food budget is the fact that I buy all the cleaning stuff and toiletries out of it too. It’s amazing how much that stuff eats out of how much food I get for the money!

Cherryfudge

Perhaps you could rename the food budget as 'housekeeping' - it's a faff trying to separate the two as they are often bought at the same time. 

I know you were just using it as an example, but there might be a few pennies to be saved by swapping from tikka sauce to the tikka spice tubs you can find in the spices section of the supermarket. I use a supermarket one labelled as 'medium tikka curry powder' which is effectively a garam masala. It's versatile: if you are roasting potatoes or veg, you can toss them in that, use it to flavour meat or chicken, mix with mayo and chickpeas for 'coronation chickpeas', make a chickpea tikka (you did say you were eating beans, didn't you? ), even make actual tikka masala with it. Obviously this has extra costs in terms of ingredients, time and effort but many of these are things that might be in the menu anyway and other are lower cost than meat. The advantage is that the tub keeps better than the sauce is could well work out costing less.

Sorry, that was a big digression.

I am so impressed by you earning nearly £100 extra. This debt should watch its back with that sort of determination to contend with!

EatingBeans

Thanks for the support @Cherryfudge 😁

As it happens I already have a lot of the spices as straight jars of spices and I tend to use them if it is just me. I do however keep a jar of ready made sauce in the cupboard (of the brand dd2 likes), so that when all else fails and I can see dd2 is having a bad day or something and  might need a bit of support in the form of mum cooking for her (but without admitting it), I can whip out the jar, saying I am cooking myself a tikka, and oh look, it’s something that wont keep so would she like some. You get the picture! 🤣 The joke is I don’t even particularly like the sauce but it makes her feel loved so it’s worth it. 

The things we do hey?!

Cherryfudge

EatingBeans said:

when all else fails and I can see dd2 is having a bad day or something and  might need a bit of support in the form of mum cooking for her (but without admitting it), I can whip out the jar, saying I am cooking myself a tikka, and oh look, it’s something that wont keep so would she like some. You get the picture! 🤣 The joke is I don’t even particularly like the sauce but it makes her feel loved so it’s worth it. 

The things we do hey?!

I love this! 

Humdinger1

@EatingBeans you are magnificent!  I always enjoy your diary even when I don't have time to post.   Everyone processes information differently and there are many ways to clear debt.  You're gripping it and are clearing debt.   Keep going love Humdinger xx 

EatingBeans

Oh I do love dd2.

So, I’m in bed and hear a knock on my bedroom door.
Me: Come in, how are you feeling?
dd2: Still awful, how are you?
Me: Like death, what can I do for you?
dd2: do you know where any sharp scissors are?
Me: Sharp scissors as opposed to just any old normal scissors?
dd2: yep, sharp scissors
Me: er, all our scissors are pretty sharp (or were!), what are you trying to cut?
dd2: wire
Me: 😱 well to cut wire, you need wire cutters, not scissors. (Lord knows what shape all my nice scissors are now in!)
dd2: ok, have you got any wire cutters?
Me: Well yes, you’d have to look in the tool box for…
…dd2 swiftly disappears and starts rummaging through the tools under the stairs…
I shout in: They look more like pliers than scissors and have blue handles. 
…dd2 then magically appears with the correct tool (quite impressive that she found them tbf!)
Me: Yep, that’s them. Should I enquire as to why you are needing wire cutters? (Or the state of my toolbox/understairs cupboard/normal scissors)?

dd2: Nope, all good mum, I am just doing a bit of ‘arts and crafts’. (She says with a big grin)

…My daughter is 1, apparently too ill to currently go to college, and 2, does not DO arts and crafts! 

Lord knows what she’s really up to but I am currently feeling too ill to go and investigate further (which she is almost certainly betting on). I wonder what chaos I’ll be getting up to shortly. 🤦‍♀️

Cherryfudge

Oh crumbs - I hope all your good scissors are still good! At least she consulted you, which is a 100% better than silence!

EatingBeans

Well blow me down I take it all back! dd2 was indeed doing arts and crafts! She was using pipe cleaners and a bit of stronger wire to make a bunch of flowers for her friend. Honestly they were really good and I couldn’t even tell they were pipe cleaners. Now, if she could do the same sort of thing along a Christmas theme she may indeed have a way to make an extra bit of cash for Christmas. 🤷‍♀️ (The chaos was at least contained to her bedroom) 😁

On seeing dd2’s new found crafting, I was beginning to wonder why on earth she was not able to go to college, but to be fair to her she did quickly crash out and take her coughing sneezing self back to bed. Fair enough. Thankfully I also discovered that my good scissors were sitting on my desk so she hadn’t tried to use them, which is good because the wire she was trying to cut would have definitely wrecked them. So all good. 😁

I also called in sick to work today, despite being under absence monitoring. I thought about it long and hard last night and still set my alarm for the morning to at least try and go in (I should have actually been in the office), but honestly, whatever cold/flu/covid thing the girl’s have given me has also kicked my TN off again so I was in no fit state to work this morning. 😕 I will just have to see what that means for me when I go back. I even e-mailed to see if they could push my interview back because I doubt I’ll even be ready for it by Wednesday I feel that ill. I am yet to hear a response so I need to scrabble a presentation together tomorrow just in case. 😞 One day I will have an interview I feel prepared for! 

I did however still complete a few things towards my £5’s today:

0.50	YouGov
0.30	testerup
0.36	Prolific
1.20	Prolific

It’s not a lot (£2.36), but it is something, and it brings me just over my £100, aka 20 £5’s goal, coming in at £101.84 for the month.

I posted the 3 items I recently sold to move some of it closer to actual money in the bank, then popped into Savers and Tesco to pick up more cold and flu tablets and much needed cat biscuits. Whilst there I grabbed a cheap pizza for dinner, and cookies to cheer the girls up. It wasn’t until I was going down the Travelator carrying everything that I realised just how dizzy and nauseous I was feeling. Thankfully I managed to make it back to the van in one piece and drive the few hundred meters home. dd2 took one look at me coming in and volunteered to put the ‘shopping’ away for me. So, no plans to go out tomorrow! Now I have tablets and the pets all have food, everything else can wait. 

I just can’t believe I am this ill again! It literally feels like 2minutes since I was last ill. 😞