Teetering on the brink

dawnybabes

The pastry is almost like cereal / croissant and the apple makes it healthy.  If you have custard with it you’re getting the calcium then it’s almost a perfect meal 🤣

EatingBeans

Ok so all I have eaten today is lots of apple pie and coffee and there is still some left. 😬 I suspect tonight’s dinner will end up being the same as last night followed by the rest of the pie to use it up. 🤣 Still, that's quite a lot of meals replaced with free stuff and beggars can’t be choosers right? 

After I realised that I would have to take my dogs into the road with me to the drivers door in order to unlock the van before taking them out, I decided it constituted a safety hazard (I park half on pavement/half in road outside my house, and it is a busy main road), I decided buying a new key battery was now a necessity. 

Thanks for the offer @kmcld2 but mine is a CR2016 type. 

I decided to walk into town and pick one up at the same time as picking up some much needed guinea pig food, but to avoid putting it on a card I searched the house for some cash and rustled enough together to get both. Normally I would consider this cheating in terms of sticking to my budget, but right now just avoiding charging anything to either debit or credit card is the main objective and in that regard this was a success. 

New battery installed, central locking now working again. 🎉

Not really done much else today other than a bit of washing and cleaning. I pottered out to look at my pond and I just couldn’t bring myself to try and fix it yet, it is just too disheartening. I have forgiven little dog and we've had a lovely snuggle this morning but I can’t help but long for the day when she’s a bit more mature and stops destroying my garden. 😞 Teenage labradors are hard work sometimes.

I have at least completed a few more surveys and done another balance transfer for £190 from NatWest. It’s all the room I have on MBNA atm but it does mean I will have paid over the ‘minimum payment plus’ amount NatWest wanted this month (£523.77 instead of my usual £270), to ‘avoid long term debt and risk of account closure’. I have held this account for over 20years and it is actually the most useful of my credit cards in terms of bouncing balances around because it does not charge fees for balance transfers, only interest. This means that I can use it to transfer a balance off a card and back onto it again whilst only incurring one balance transfer fee. Keeping them happy is essential so each month I will need to juggle however much I can in order to hit the minimum payment plus amount in addition to paying down debt. Oh how I wish for the simple life of just making minimum payments on everything and focusing on one balance at a time!

EatingBeans

Helpfully, I just got an e-mail saying my credit limit on my Fluid account has gone up by £200. Normally such a tiny amount would be pretty meaningless to me but right now it is a very welcome blessing. It means I can put my food shopping for September on that account instead, leaving more space on NatWest/MBNA so next month I can bounce around larger balance transfers and get a bit more back on 0%. Once I have a decent chunk of space I will focus on clearing Fluid as it is the highest interest rate but for now the space, and keeping NatWest sweet, is more important. This is going to be a long road, but at least it will be going in the right direction again. 🙂

flamingo22

It's so hard all this juggling about, have you done any bank switches to give you some extra cash for your payments? 

EatingBeans

flamingo22 said:

It's so hard all this juggling about, have you done any bank switches to give you some extra cash for your payments? 

I did a few bank switches some months back but I also changed a lot of other accounts at the same time so I’ve had rather a lot of hard searches in short succession. To avoid raising too many red flags I’ve put a hold on switching again for a few more months to spread out the searches. I do have a current account with direct debits all set up and ready to go though, so as soon as the older searches fall off the radar a bit I will be back on the hunt for a new switch deal. 👍