Money Monday

Well its around again, Monday, Monday, money round up Monday, its the start of the month, so it is a round up on last month so apart from the little hick up when the baby was in hospital and the spending went a little awry, we had a pretty good month only slightly over budget which is a good start as we only started monitoring the situation recently, so with a few tweeks here and there we should be pretty ok this month.

heres hoping !!

Money Monday - small steps

~ Every journey starts with a single step ~

so despite our little blip when Owen was in hospital our spending this month hasnt been to over the top, although this went awol when we had to pay for tunnel fees, hospital food, petrol, but trust me this was a small price to pay, but we have dusted ourselves off and onwards and upwards, small changes we are going to implement this month.

1. Try and meet all direct debit payments, saving bank charges @ £20 per item

2. Stopped our bank account with an overdraft/debit card and changed to bank account with no overdraft facility and one of the new O2 money manager visa cards, a visa card that you load up as and when and can only use what is available, no cross over transactions and text notifications when money is added or debited.

3. Keeping our spending to a limit, our proposed spend on food for October is £200 which averages out at about £50 per month, £50 will be loaded onto the O2 money manager card and kept specifically for food shopping, if we use less then this is carried over to the following week, and any overspend will be saved up for Christmas, which I have always started buying little bits for in September when the kids go back to school

4. Cook properly, I always try to whenever possible cook from scratch, but sometimes I find that it isn't always the most economical way with all the supermarkets competing at the moment, especially when the recipies ask for 1 of and you have to buy a whole packet of, so what I have tried to do is to cook double the quantities of easily freezable stuff (like stews, sauces, cassaroles etc) which I find cheaper and also means that we still have home cooked food on the two days that I do work ( because bless him my hubby still thinks that his version of home cooked is to read the oven instructions !)

5. I am also going to try and eke out meat as much as I can, again working out to be more economical, for example yesterday I cooked a medium chicken for Sunday Lunch, instead of putting loads of meat on the plate I put a little less on and padded the meal out with Vegetables, I took the rest of the meat off the carcass and then boiled the carcass to make a good stock along with whatever meat came off the bones, I can then make a chicken and bacon stew out of the stock and then we can have a chicken omlette with the rest of the meat so out of 1 medium sized chicken we would have made 3 meals

Chicken £ 4.00

Sunday Roast Veg £ 2.00

Stew veg and Bacon £ 1.50

Eggs for omlette £ 1.00

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Total £8.50

For 3 meals for a family of 5 - not bad eh !!

see you next time x

Money Monday

For this post I thought honesty would be the best policy. Now that the kids have gone back to school I have had a mid year recap on what we set out to do in our resolutions. Financially we are still pretty much in the same situation, but has now come to a head and needs to be addressed - not because it is getting worse but just because I am fed up of the money situation dragging on.

So anyway after going to the bookshop to try and find a book to help us in our situation, there isnt one definitive book that I could find that deals only on tips to get out of debt, sure they all contain a chapter on getting out of debt, but then the remaining 3/4 of the book is not relevant to me, why would I need chapters on savings and investments???? give me that when I am OUT of debt, plus all of them held some information but not all, and then I thought, surely the first step in saving money.... is to not spend money on a book telling me how to save money !!

After an indepth look at our finances we are just under £17,000 in debt, (this doesnt include the mortgage) included in this is a £12,000 loan which we took out over 20 years in order to keep the payments down to a minimum but looking at the small print it totals (when you add the interest)that we would owe £35,000 !!!!!!!!!. since looking at our finances I have figured a way that all debt can be paid off within 7 years - without it being too much upheaval or cutbacks.

I also chose to share this information with you at the START of my journey so that we can all live it together if you choose to join me on being debt free rather than sounding all preachy at the end of it, yes it will be tough, yes there will be times im sure I would rather throw the towel in and buy something pretty and blow the budget, but all I can hold onto is that light at the end of 7 years (if not sooner)

We have already had a kick start to our budgeting by default - the second car (which has always been needed for Mark to get to work at 5.30am) failed its MOT and needed to much work to put through so that was scrapped, profit (£80) but on top of this we do not need to pay £120 p/yr Tax, £40 p/yr MOT, £300 p/yr Insurance, £65 p/mth Petrol. so in all it will save us £1240 p/yr

So in order for Mark to get to work now we are in the process of trying to find a small 50cc scooter/moped for him to ride(its too far for a bicyle)which on average will cost us £500 to buy, £15 p/year tax, MOT £15 p/yr, £100 p/yr insurance and £8 p/mth petrol Saving us (without including actual purchase price of scooter) £1014 p/yr.

I have picked up some other tips frugal living, budgeting, saving tips whatever you want to call them, so over the next days, weeks, months, years I will share them with you along the way.