Get a grip woman!

Right! Busy Mee1 has given me something to think about. I draw cash, and spend on my CC (and DH on his) without consciously keeping track. I just make sure I can pay it in full, but do not follow what is in it. So that must change! I will track this in May and report back.

I already know my CC (2 of them - one for euros) deductions from my CA will be about £550 in May but these are March-April spends. I will report on these, and the spends in the April-May statement, and the spend in May up to the end of the Calendar Month (and possibly beyond) so I am honest with this. I clearly need to see what I am spending on and then I can begin to track, monitor and plan better. I will just watch DH's without trying to change anything he does (which I hope are modest).

My first confessional purchase (planned) is those mattresses I want to buy. After some research - I checked out pocket sprung mattresses with a number of sources.

The number one on Amazon is full of false positive reviews and a quick search of them on Mr G identifies a plethora of miserable, stitched up customers, interspersed with several false positives, many from the same name - one review each, one letter difference in the spelling. Not exactly clever. It won't be them!

So then I searched on Silentnight as a well-known make. Argos look quite good for a mid-range economy pair. I can click and collect but the guarantee is relatively short.

So then I checked out Ikea - from whom we bought the bed, originally for DS's house but we swapped our 3'6" x 6'6" with the pull-out double so his 6'7" friend won't be miserable living there. About £4 cheaper including delivery and a 25 year warranty. I have stored them and I will consider. I could click and collect as they come in a roll. That needs to satisfy my purchasing criteria on another level - see below, and deliveries might come from a warehouse over the water (Vlissingen in NL has loads of storage much cheaper than UK, and certain German SM use this to keep costs down)

Here is my slightly obsessive approach to buying things... when I buy things, I try to do so from Companies with premises in the UK (I actually check their premises addresses, and on google maps, to make sure they are not just a brass plaque place) - who are employing British workers, paying UK taxes and NI, UK rates and so on. And I am mildly obsessive about whether they pay their taxes here, (VAT especially) which I check on the EU VIES tool, the Companies House web-check tool and DueDil (short for due diligence). If I am buying stuff I want it to help the UK economy as well as me.

Just back from a business trip...

"I've defrosted some chicken fillets", he said, on the way home from the Station (I've been working away all week). Lovely. Except they are pears, not chicken. Note to self, smile sweetly and bake a pear and ginger cake some time over the weekend.

Several people have asked me what I read in financial pages and blogs - just to say there is an interesting and accessible article to explain Investment Trusts in today's Saturday Money section of The Times. It then goes on to talk about the Fund Manager for one in particular - with Fidelity with whom I have my S&S ISA. I might have to buy some of that - Special Values (traded as though they are shares but a bundle and reputedly outpacing Unit Trusts, FTSE and Trackers for ROI)

Oh my. I have continued to track everything. My totals are currently:
[STRIKE]
£5601.34[/STRIKE] £5046.85 in total (this is last month's CC items that are being paid for this month too) but I just realised I had included the CC payments too - so double counted (phew!)

£487.20 Other things (I will look into this bucket, later)
£130.90 Food
£46.09 Drinks
£2886.59 payments
£111.49 Fuel
£875.32 Work-related
£509.26 TTs

Still got some money in both CA with only 3-4 payments left. I will keep updating this but I will need to look critically at what is where. Top of my :eek: eek-list is work-related. It does include my season ticket £713.50 until the end of May

:T:T Well done DH!

He's got the replacement printer cartridge. It arrived by post this morning. He just said,

"Don't worry, I checked out the company - they are UK based, with a valid VAT number, lodge annual accounts with Companies House and have proper premises in the UK (from where the goods are despatched by UK employees)"

They might not make them here but we can make sure that when we buy them, the taxes we all pay are sticking to the UK economy for our benefit and not that of a foreign country.