Put away your purse & become debt-averse

Have you noticed how many people I've replied to on here this morning? I like to acknowledge people's contributions, & it's nice to think anyone wants to read about my frugal ways or idiot years. It's also proved this morning to be excellent displacement activity avoiding the ironing. I really dislike ironing. 'Hate' is maybe too strong a word. I think 'hate needs saving more for things like racism, misogyny, war, poverty, etc.....applying it to the action of merely having to press a few clothes seems too extreme.
But I'm hard pressed to think which household tasks I dislike more than ironing.
Clearing up cat sick, definitely.
Yes, actually, that's the only household task over which I would willingly choose ironing.
I do need to do it though. My entire laundry system is based around only having one day a week on which I need to iron. Today IS that day. I am going to sign off & do it right now.
........actually, I think I may as well have my lunch, THEN I will go & sort the clean laundry pile in the hope that not too much will actually be all that wrinkly. And I always switch the iron off for pressing the very last garment. Years ago, someone on the Daily DFW Small Things thread suggested that, as an electricity saving which ought to add up to a very few quid over a year, & I've done it ever since.
OK, cheers all,
F x

That's a good method, Working Mum. It reminded me a bit of 'One song housework' which someone suggested years ago on the DFW daily small things thread. Choose a song, then spend the time it is playing madly racing around tidying things away. I suppose that picking a punk rock track.....very short, would kind of be cheating, whereas a progressive rock track would allow quite a lot of stuff to be put away!
I do laundry in the early hours with the washer set on timer, as we have the Economy 7 electricity dual tariff & it's noticeably a cheaper rate at night. So I put my first load of the week in on Sunday night to wash during the early hours & be ready for pegging out straight after breakfast. I repeat that on Monday night, & Tuesday if I need to do three washes that week, then ironing day will be Wednesday or Thursday & everything is ironed then. Unless there's some kind of laundry emergency, or I want to make use of a hot day to line-dry blankets or similar, I don't do any more laundry until Sunday night rolls around again. It works for me, as all the ironing is done in one session. The whole system is set up to facilitate only needing to do horrid ironing once a week.
F x

I feel like someone has crept in & superglued my backside to my desk chair today. I had breakfast & did a couple of small downstairs jobs, but for the rest of the day, I've been hard at it, as it's my monthly Big Budget Day. It's also mr f's day off, so he said he'd go & get the grocery shopping done, so I haven't had to think about that & have been able to concentrate on my major monthly budget session.
It's been a tricky one, this time, & rather than set an unrealistic budget full of targets we have little hope of achieving, I've borrowed some money from our emergency fund, to see us through this month with everything intact. I realise I'm lucky to be able to do this. It's because I know I am coming into some money later in the year & will thus be able to put a significant proportion of it in our Emergency Fund, that has enabled me to make this decision regarding May's budget. Without this knowledge, I would have had to work all sorts of magic tweaks & also impose harder targets than usual.
I wrote everything out on a sheet of paper to try & find out the cause. The encouraging thing was that it hasn't been an error in my accounting......that was my first thought. The tighter month is actually caused by what I shall describe as a 'bulge' - a whole array of factors including:
-May being one of the two most expensive months for regular bills
-Easter & birthday coming v close together - all budgeted for, but of course, if the money is budgeted there, it can't simultaneously be somewhere else!
-Ticket purchases for events between June this year & Feb 2020. No point in waiting, as tickets were selling well & will be gone if I wait until closer to the month of the event. This money will be recovered over the year by reducing monthly payments into our Leisure/Entertainment Piggy - I guess you could say we are borrowing from ourselves instead of putting the tickets for future events on a CC.
-No work expenses for mr f - he is owed some, but there has been a changeover to a new system so he will get 2 month's worth next time.
No need to go on, it turned out to be quite a list. I just thought I'd found everything when I spotted another......mr f owed £60 to the household budget for some stuff he'd ordered & he paid up bright & early at the end of last month, but the transactions didn't appear on his CC bill until this month, so that nice useful £60 cash actually went into April's budget instead of where it needed to go, which was May's!
Anyway, having discovered it was due to a range of things all coming together, rather than me having made some kind of totally numpty error, I felt a lot better about it & decided that setting an unrealistic budget was not going to be the way forward. Is it ever? You don't make the targets, then waste additional time beating yourself up!
So, having borrowed from ourselves, I decided really to go for it & budget to pay off everything I didn't want still to be sitting around this time next month.
I'm just having a bit of a break to expunge all the maths from my head, then I've got some filing to do & the monthly energy meter readings to upload, & then I think I shall deserve a little walk down to the greenhouse to talk to my plants, before tackling the huge envelope of legal contract documents which arrived yesterday for my attention. Then I intend to make a list of all the jobs I could usefully do in town tomorrow when we're popping in to do a bit of election campaigning. Car parking here is really expensive for just a small town, so I like to make best use of it once I've paid up!
Enjoy your Fridays all,
F xx