Cancer, cash and carrying on

beanielou

Boo to the chemo hangover.

lucielle

Hope you feel better as the day goes on

L

ohdearhowdidthathappen

Thanks Beanie and Lucielle

Over the worst of it, I’m in the tired zone now. The heat isn’t helping 🫠

Was hoping to do some fun stuff with the kids this week, but I’ve got an appointment every single day 😶… might be able to squeeze in a cinema trip or bowling maybe. I’ve let my youngest 2 invite a friend over each one day which will keep them out of mischief.

We’re off to the Peak District on Saturday, can’t wait, I love that part of the country 😍

Blackcats

have a fabulous trip to the Peak Diatrict

ohdearhowdidthathappen

Thanks Blackcats

Have emerged from the chemo hangover so should get 2 ‘good’ weeks before the next infusion.

No major plans for the next few days, need to buy a few bits to get the kids ready for school. I have enough money in a pot for that.

Other than that will just be muddling through the next few days. Appointments, chores, getting ready for our holiday.

Really sad to read about H@yden P dying, I used to love Her0es and N@shville. It’s really sad to see people struggle like this 😞

ohdearhowdidthathappen

We’re getting a lease car through the NHS scheme.

Bit of our car history…Before we started money saving, we had 1 car on PCP and another on lease. When the lease ended, we also sold the PCP car which had £6k ‘equity’ in it. Got a personal loan out to top this up and bought a car for £15k. Then we paid that £9k off in about 6 months. Getting rid of both of these outgoings saved us £500pm which helped us build our FFEF. Nice.

Anyway, we’ve not been fans of a used car. It’s a perfectly good car, but we don’t enjoy the extra maintenance and it just feels old and rattle-y (we’re such spoiled princesses 😂). We’ve decided to continue with only 1 car which is a big saving anyway and because we’ve got the income we decided to look at alternatives.

The NHS lease scheme is pretty good as I’m on the higher tax bracket, we can get a lovely car for £250pm and it includes all running costs ie tax, insurance, breakdown cover, servicing etc. All this stuff is costing us an average of £150pm at the moment. So by our maths, it’ll cost us £100 a month to lease a car. There are no upfront cost like a lot of leases either.

Annoyingly, our used car has depreciated loads! We bought it for £15k 2.5 years ago and it’s now only worth £7k. Low mileage, full service history. We didn’t overpay at the time we bought it, so who knows 🤔. We’re going to get the best price we can and put the money into savings. Or I guess that could pay the lease for 6 years 😂

I know as it’s a salary sacrifice there’ll be a small hit to my pension, but I’m not overly fussed. I did the sums and it’s minimal and that’s even if I get to retirement age 🙄

Dakota_Rose

That sounds like an excellent scheme in my opinion, particularly if you’re not fussed about owning it outright. I am a big fan of a used car but only because Mr D is handy with fixing things 😂, otherwise I’d be much less of a fan.

EssexHebridean

Exciting about the new car! My little Clio took ages to lose much on what I paid for it - just over £8000 in early 2019 - and even now isn't doing too badly, it was showing somewhere between £4-£5k last time I looked. For a while its value actually increased which isn't something I'd seen before with a second hand car! I came to the conclusion that for me leasing wasn't the right route - I like feeling I own my car, and I'm quite happy to keep them for years now! (not always the case, I went through a new car every three years for a while, although always paying the loan for one off before the next one happened.)

ohdearhowdidthathappen

Thanks Dakota and EH

When we originally traded the 2 payments for one paid off car, it was a lovely feeling and saving that money definitely contributed to saving our FFEF so quickly.
But neither of us are a fan of a used car and the depreciation has been annoying.
For £100 a month, we’d rather have the use of a new car 😁 Some of it is because we still need a 7 seater, perhaps when we can get away with a smaller car, a used car will make more sense for us again.

ohdearhowdidthathappen

Off to the Peak District today, can’t wait. We’ve saved a spending pot of £1k plus we’ll have our usual £200 food budget.
Sounds a lot for a week, but there are 9 of us as DD is bringing her boyfriend and DS is bringing his girlfriend. It works out at £171 a day (£19 per person) so we’ll be doing a mix of days out and quieter days.
We won’t have the budget to eat big meals out, so we’ll eat dinner at the holiday home each night.
We want to go to Chatsworth House and kids want to do Alton Towers, so they’ll take a chunk of our budget 🙈