Hello dear friends,
One of my favourite things to do in the world is to visit beautiful places. I haven't been to many places since having the children mainly because wow does it add to the cost. But I still like to look online at the places I would like to visit one day when the children are older. The picture above is Washington State and definitely somewhere I would love to see (isn't it stunning, although I do wonder if there is a bear lurking somewhere amongst those trees).
Whilst travelling and experiencing different cultures is still high on my list of things to do, the longer I am blogging and catching up with the wonderful people that are frugal and save, the more it makes me want to make cut backs and have savings in our accounts.
I would love to have enough savings in our account so that if either of us are made redundant or became ill we would be able to manage for at least a couple of months. We are not in that position at the moment, in fact over the last four to five months we have only just managed to pay our bills. This month I set up two spreadsheets one for our groceries and one for our budget. Doing this has already started to make a small difference as I have noticed an insurance policy for a computer that my son sold a couple of months ago so I cancelled that direct debit. Also I have changed a direct debit to our pay day that previously came out two days before payday, now it won't get forgotten.
Also for the first time ever I have put things into our budget like birthdays and Christmas, a clothing fund and a haircut budget so that we never get caught out in the future. Once we are starting to see money go into the birthdays/Christmas fund I will add an emergency fund so that we can start building up a cushion for our future. Won't that be nice!
Today has been another no spend day. (That's two in a row)
I walked six miles
I haven't weighed myself this week but I did avoid eating chocolate today even though I had the biggest craving for it I had a kiwi instead! Yay me!
Well I still have that awful chocolate craving so now I am going to have a coffee and head off to bed.
Have a good evening and take care xx
I've got two spreadsheets set up, a monthly one which has wages in and gas/elec/food/petrol/car ins/house ins etc and that also shows money transferred to another bank account which the direct debits go out of, the spreadsheet for that goes from January-June so I can see at a glance if there is enough money in each month, we have managed without credit cards for ten years and only been overdrawn once on the DD account and that was because BT took the wrong amount out on the wrong date, I argued it and got them to pay back the charge for being overdrawn!
ReplyDeleteOh that sounds like it works well for you Jo, we don't have any credit cards but we do have an overdraft and just recently we seem to be going into it every month which I hate. I like to know the bills are paid and we don't have to worry. I think we just don't earn enough or were just not thrifty enough. But its not like we go out or drink or smoke. Ben has four beers added to the shopping once a week but I don't drink at all. I guess I just need to keep cutting back. By the way I'm not a BT fan they did that to us loads when we were with them, annoying xx
ReplyDeleteYay for you, indeed, on all fronts! It's so great that you recognized that there was a problem and that you're acting on finding a solution. Keeping track of every penny spent can be painful and depressing but it's incredibly helpful in determining what your budget should look like. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteThank you Nathalie, I do find it a bit depressing but if it works out in the end it will be worth it.xx
Deletewe are the same, don't drink or smoke, but we go out when we save up the reward points with Tesco and exchange them for pizza express or cinema tickets or double up and get clothes.
ReplyDeleteWe are still with BT but after did that to us I cancelled the DD which they were not happy about insisting I HAD to pay by DD but I just contacted our bank and cancelled it and now we just put money aside each week and pay the bill every three months, we used to be with PlusNet but when we moved house ten years ago, they did not reconnect the phone/internet and still charged us for it so when I cancelled the DD they had the cheek to send us to a debt collection agency!! but luckily the debt agency agreed with us that we should not pay for a service we did not have, no phone/internet for two months, nightmare thats how we ended up going to BT
Its nice sometimes to just go out and have a cheap meal isn't it. The cinema for us is very expensive so we only go in the summer holidays to the cheap early morning shows.
DeleteI don't blame you for cancelling the BT direct debit, it does sound like plusnet were worse. That's worrying because I think that is who my mum is with! We are with Sky and they are good but not the cheapest xxx