£15,000 to 0

On a different, strange and not very MSE note...a post that may see me bludgeoned to death by the MSE gods.

I have been giving it a lot of thought lately and having slowly been inspired by TOPM's outlook on life and a long chat with my sister at the weekend, I've actually decided...wait for it...to spend more.

I'm in my early twenties and my OH is in his early thirties, although we joke that developmentally he's in his early twenties. We don't have kids and have no big financial obligations at this stage besides rent. My OH earns barely into the 20k's and I earn 25k now. We live apart and pay about £1k rent between us, but we both are in the early stages of our careers. His job is a bit more flexible in that he could potentially move to a different location closer to me but we both feel that there's a lot of potential for promotion where he is now, whereas if he moves to a location closer to me, that would not necessarily be the case. There's no way that I can move to be closer to him. We live far enough apart that it would be impossible for one of us to commute daily - ignoring even the cost, the time it would take would nullify any benefits of living together.

Because of the above and the fact that he's never ever had weekends off until he started this job late last year, we tend to spend every weekend together and are both getting a bit worried that we aren't making the most of our (relative) youths and all we ever do is stay in with each other and never see any of our friends. He literally sees his friends twice a year at the maximum.

We've both decided to spend a bit more time (and money) with our friends and enjoy ourselves whilst we can. I'm getting sick of being worried about spending any money whenever I'm out with friends because it has meant (so far) that I go out for one drink and then I feel so bad about spending money that I bail on everyone.

This isn't to say that I will go wild and get into more debt - that isn't the plan. I will just stop feeling quite so guilty on spending any money on drinks, tickets, experiences with my friends. It's making me dull to be around and I hate that.

My plan is to allocate a bit more money to my monthly entertainment budget, spend less on food (the worst culprit!) and perhaps stop saving or overpaying so aggressively. I'll carry on paying back my debt £250 a month to my parents, and save £100 a month in an overpayment pot for them which works out logistically better than paying them extra every month.

In this vein, in the spur of the moment I have booked a short trip abroad to celebrate my upcoming birthday which has cost me £90 and will cost me an additional approx £100 in spending money.

I have also decided to be a bit more consistent with splitting costs with my OH. He earns less than me but because he has a car he usually is the one to come to me. I often give him petrol money but not always, and I feel this is a bit unfair of me so I'm going to make more of an effort to give him his fair share of money.

In less emotional and more usual moneysavingness, here's my mid month balances, which I still haven't worked out a consistent format for -

Owed
£10,500 to parents
£332.66 outstanding on my Amex (I pay this off every month in full - next payment is due in early May)

Bank Accounts
Nationwide - £128.94
First Direct Current - £354.12
First Direct savings - £50
Help to Buy - £167.58

Other
OH owes me £835 which he is paying off monthly.