£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

Week 17: Day 5

Yay, Thursday! I like Thursdays, because DC3 gets 3 hours at preschool (as opposed to just 2 on a Monday), so I get a chance to get stuck into some work. The downside today is that DH is away until late on some work thing, so I have the children alone until bedtime. Boo.

A glorious forecast of nonstop rain today. A good week to be a duck.

After all that effort listing the chair it has precisely no bids. I suspect I've put it in a bad category though, as I don't know the age of it. My mum knows, so I might ask her and then relist it for one more week if it doesn't sell.

to do today:
1. Tidy and declutter the utility room, which has become a bit of a dumping ground.
2. Knit a little more of the socks for my mum's birthday present - cheapest present ever, as they are using up loads of leftover scraps of yarn. They look bonkers, but my mum is v frugal and will appreciate the sentiment!
3. Plan budget Father's Day gift/activity.
4. Find the receipt for the silk shirt to return tomorrow.
5. Check whether we have any more homemade candles, and whether I need to order essential oils to make more if not.
6. Go through the DC's Lego Sainsbury's cards and attempt to swap with a friend to get them the few missing ones - I keep doing more of my shop than necessary at Sainsbury's (rather than Lidl) to get maximum Lego cards. Will be glad when this ends next week, I totally gave in to pester power on it.
7. Redo menu plan. In theory it runs out today, but we seem to have tons of food leftover, so I'm going to try to eke it out over the weekend with just a top up of milk and fruit.

to do this week:
1. finish painting the pickets for the front fence. have managed a few more, hoping to get another batch done tomorrow
2. plan June's working time (still haven't 'gone back' to work thanks to half term). Done!
3. roughly plan out summer working time (i.e. where I can squeeze in the odd hour while the DC are on holiday).
4. apply for new 0% balance transfer card. Done, accepted, DFD recalculated.
5. research utilities providers - I suspect we can move again and save a little bit. Done. No real saving, but have avoided a price rise.

warby68 wrote: »

Morning ToPM

Tell you what, cancel the architect for now, concentrate on just getting your spending and mindset thoroughly under control and building an emergency fund (lack of this really scares me for you as those Credit Cards with capacity will be waved about as soon as anything breaks etc) and...... wait for it.... l'll treat you to a new washing up bowl (anything up to £4 mind) and if you stay on budget for it you can have a matching, yes matching , pan scrub

You see, I'm very stern but know just how to incentivise

Now off to consider my own extravagance of owning both dishwasher AND washing up bowl

I need the crying laughing emoji from my phone! :rotfl: :rotfl:

Some of the comments on here over the past week have got me thinking about the nature of my LBM, and the debt free journey that is following. FYI, this post is basically a self indulgent all about me one. Consider yourself warned.

Despite everything, all the debt, all the stress, all the awareness of our situation, I still love shopping. Sorry. I still love browsing shops, admiring interesting designs, contemplating them in my house/wardrobe and buying and living with the things I choose, and to be honest the joy of owning those things year after year still far outweighs the joy of being frugal and paying off debt for me. We are paying off debt largely because (a) we probably couldn't actually have borrowed any more, so were forced to deal with our outgoings vs income (we hadn't even added up the debt pre-LBM), (b) I anticipate some moment in the future when I might want to be debt free, rather than having a burning desire for that moment right now, and (c) I want us to have more disposable income, rather than spending an ever increasing proportion on debt repayment.

Many on here would say, therefore, that I haven't actually had my Light Bulb Moment. It's a term that gets thrown around a lot on here as a positive and a negative: 'ooh, you've clearly had your LBM, well done,' or 'you've overspent this month, as you sure you've actually had your LBM?'

For me, it's not actually terribly relevant whether my (designer twirly wire hipster edison style) bulb is on, off, flickering or lost without trace. What matters to me personally - and this is 100% about me, not about anyone else on these boards - is that every month when I check my debt balance, it is lower than it was the same time a month ago.

Yes, that's not a perfect scenario. Ideally I would be finding joy in every frugal moment, enjoying a change in mentality, a shift in my expectations of how my life and house should look, a new appreciation of budget finds that do the job, albeit not as beautiful as the one I wanted. But none of that really applies. I still buy the (sometimes expensive) unique things I love, I just buy far fewer of them and appreciate them more because of it, knowing that the special clothes or house or practical things I bought years ago are still my favourites now. In fact, the thing that has dropped off my spending 'plan' (by which I mean 'non-plan') is often the cheap things; the top up clothing or household purchases to 'see us through' until we could find a better version - frequently I find I'd rather not bother with those purchases and make do until I can buy the prettier version that I want (NB WASHING UP BOWLS ARE EXCLUDED FROM THIS POINT :rotfl: ) - or things where we could afford the mid-range option but not the one we'd rather have - it's easier to do without entirely.

But I have decided that, for me (have I mentioned enough that this is all about me?), the important thing is that the debt goes down. Not the state of my lightbulb, not how I choose to spend what little spare money there is after all the important stuff is covered, but that every month that balance is lower than the one before. And that one day it is zero, and that when that happens we siphon off some of the money that was going on debt repayments and put it towards long term savings, house improvement and pensions etc. It doesn't matter what we choose to do with the rest.

I know some of you will be sat here shaking your heads in despair and thinking 'this woman is going to be in debt again as soon as she hits zero', but actually I don't think I will. I think I will continue to do the maths as I have done and will continue to do on this debt free journey. It won't bring me joy to limit my spending to what's in our account, but I will do it regardless, because I know that 'no joy' is better than 'huge debt stress', and as long as the debt is at zero, we can enjoy spending all our disposable income in the moment, rather than using it to pay back spending we enjoyed doing six or 12 months ago.

I think it's made me realise that for each and every one of us, the motivations might be entirely different, the mindset of how life will be at the end of the journey might be different (and indeed, the reality of the end of the journey might be totally different again), the methods we use to get there might be totally different and the state of the light bulb that set us on our way will definitely be totally different, but what matters is that debt going down, month on month, until it hits zero, and then keeping it that way.

Over and out (until I come up with something else hugely erudite and insightful and erudite in approx three hours time).