DD's accountability thread

Woop - OH just contributed to the bills so that's the Barclaycard down to £3000 and the MBNA card down to £1800 once the DD's have gone out. :beer:

Next target to be confirmed; it's probably going to be more savings but probably in our joint account for cats vets bills. In theory I pay an extra £50 a month in there for that purpose, but it gets swallowed up on other bills. Luckily being indoor cats they're at a pretty low risk!

The direct debit for the Barclaycard has gone out and cleared so the balance is a nice round £3k. As the limit is £3.5k I still consider it maxxed out, but the limit increases to £5k in August. I have no intention of using it, however! I may even drop the MBNA limit down to £5k as well (from £8100) and then it should be fairly easy to balance transfer in the future.

No extra income over the weekend but no significant expenses either. We're going out for tea tomorrow (which is more expensive than I expected for a glorified chippy - sorry sea food restaurant :rotfl: ) for my sister's birthday, then we're out with friends on Saturday, so I want to keep other spends to a minimum if possible.

Otherwise just resisting the urge to have a fan plugged in next to me at all times; it's 31 f'ing degrees in here (sorry but I think that justifies a bit of swearing!) and I cannot cope, but I very much doubt the fan will help although I currently need it to sleep. Due to be a bit cooler tomorrow, and I'm working from home to take the Zooplus delivery, so I will be happier if the weather does as it's supposed to! If it's consistently going to be this hot, I'll find myself doing the drive to the office more in search of air conditioning, which means I lose free time and spend more on fuel!

My passport came back, so I've tried to order the replacement. Note the 'tried'. Last year, you filled out the form online and printed them, then sent them off with a physical passport photo and your old passport. This year, it wants a digital passport photo, which would be free except we can't get a decent one on a phone - too much light throwing shadows. This means a trip up to ASDA where they have an upgraded photo booth which can do a digital code and £6 for the privilege. I'll have to do that tomorrow as I'm beginning to cut it fine.

We did the food shop this morning and went into town. I picked up my engagement ring from the jewelers; I had it resized prior to getting married as it was too big, and the solder hasn't held up. It snapped a second time two weeks ago, but they've repaired it free of charge on both occasions. Third time lucky I hope! I also got some thread to darn a jumper I have (moth got it) so fingers crossed I can do a good job of that as it's one of my favourite jumpers.

The food shop itself was reasonable: £19 in the butchers including a beef joint, and £25 in Sainsburys off the reloadable card. It felt like we got a lot for £25, and we're having a cooked breakfast tomorrow which involves lots of 'bits' that we don't keep in normally. I'll try and do a cheaper meal plan for the week after, which will mean back to the pasta. :rotfl:

Tonight's outing is with friends to an escape room (already paid for, £18 each) and food. I've booked my train ticket already, OH has a monthly pass so he's sorted. I'm just looking at the menu to see what I fancy - both from a WeightWatchers angle and money-wise - and it's going to be the drinks that add up. I might just get a cider - I can't finish even one bottle in 3 hours so it's a cheap option.

Passport application in. The photo booth at ASDA was out of order (and it's the only one in the locality which does the digital code) but they also have a photo counter. They would do a photo on a USB and 4 printed for £10 (how much?!), but they only had one machine working and the family in front were doing a ridiculous amount of faffing so after 10 minutes waiting - and the store closing - we called it quits. Managed to get a reasonable photo at home, which has passed the automated checks, so fingers crossed it passes any manual ones too!

I may have sheared the front off part of a veneer, well I'm almost certain I have but whether it's a problem.. I started a thread in the Health & Beauty section here about not being able to get an appointment with my dentist, and looking at going private or on a plan instead, which I assume would mean sorting the veneer first if it is indeed in need of repair. Rather than stress over it, I have an appointment with the hygienist in a week and I'll see what it's like when she polishes it. In the mean time, no more eating those WeightWatchers bars straight out of the freezer!

We're starting to clean and tidy up properly now that we can vacuum up - we had to wait two weeks. I'm taking the opportunity to sort things out - just bought a new power supply and cable for our landline on eBay as the previous cables fell victim to the cats. We'll need a new extension too, as we have run out of sockets. The phone was on my husbands desk for weeks waiting for him to deal with it. Sorted now. :rotfl:

I did get the leggings in the end - £16.99 which I'm happy with as they're Under Armour and I know they'll last years. Not bothered with anything else though! I was chatting to a colleague and we were saying that you almost look for things to buy but that this year it's been quite disappointing.

I have however bought a couple of bits elsewhere. We have an area of bleached carpet thanks to the cats and had resigned ourselves to replacing it when we eventually move out (we're renting). However I thought sod it and bought some spray dye that I'm hoping can blend the area in. It was less than £10 so if it works we'll be laughing. I also finally worked out what the missing bit on a window was called - a cockspur wedge - so I've ordered a pack of those too. It's the thing that the window handle rests against to pull the window tight against the frame and create a seal, so without this there can be a draught. It's only taken 3 years to find that out!

Our electricity usage is very high. I can appreciate that we're on the ground floor with a car-port type car park underneath us, we have large windows front and back with no curtains downstairs, external-facing extractor fans in the downstairs loo and en suite (I guess the main bathroom one goes through the cavity), a long external wall on one side and a large open plan living area so the heating really kills us. Add in me working from home a lot with a computer based job, and OH being a gamer... Still we need to put some energy into reducing the bills.

Over winter I put draught exclusion tape around as much of the door as I could (too much and it wouldn't shut) and a cardboard wedge for the aforementioned window. We do have a smart meter it's just the reader thingy doesn't work very well because of where the meter is vs where we are. We only have electricity, and found out fairly recently that the timer on the boiler was wrong so it was heating water at weird times and although we're not on economy7, surely that was inefficient. I try to do virtually all our washing on the 30 min 30 degree wash, and only tumble dry bedding/towels (we have no outside space to dry anything) as we can't dry these well enough on the clothes horse. We probably could turn more gadgets off at the wall, and we could use the dishwasher a little less - but as there's only two of us at most we run it three times a week if we aren't washing up by hand. Most of our lightbulbs are energy efficient LED, I think the bathroom/ensuite ones are weird.

I am thinking of making our energy usage a project of mine to see if I can get the direct debits down!