Due April 2009: Episode 21 - RLT officials have stern words with the April mums after stocks plummet!!

[PuzzleRocks]

Thanks to Nutty for all the thread suggestions including this one. I hope no one minds but I picked this one in honour of the brilliant race commentary we had from Nuts and Frekkles the other night. Hopefully we will get some more.

Nutty, I really don't know. I've given up on aspiring to own nice things. It's not even like I can wear nice clothes or shoes at the moment, so I've just let it go. I'd rather spend money on doing things with DH before the baby comes, but it's just too expensive to go & eat out & things now.

The more I think about it, the more it's always been like this. Like the huge HD television we didn't need to replace the perfectly good television we already had. He insisted on getting it & refused to be persuaded otherwise. Which was mildly annoying, but not too bad at the time - we could just about stretch to it. Now, after the wedding & last-minute baby purchases, we're really struggling. He seems oblivious.

& Kali, I love the 'I'm a Scot & spent 10 years as a student' explanation I bet you can make a tin of beans & a loaf of bread feed a family of 6 for a month

I think we are married to the same man!

We got some Christmas money from my Aunt and Uncle, and in the end it went on him buying a jig saw, because he just wouldn't stop going on and on about getting one.

(Must stress Black and Decker as opposed to the puzzle kind!)

We don't have a flat screen TV . My DH says the other one still works.

I don't know anyone else who doesn't.

Remember that you will be getting the £190 HIP grant.

BB, I don't mind you ranting - your rant is perfectly valid! Cheeky boss. I've not been impressed with your bosses, I have to say - they seem very eager to exploit you!

Ju, I use moneysavingexpert quite a lot. I also spend my whole life, it seems, trawling the internet for discount codes for anything I ever buy (I saved £16.50 on my last Tesco shop! ) whereas it would just never occur to him.

He's not mean - if I went out & had my hair done in a posh salon & came home with armfuls of DVDs for myself (another of his weaknesses), he wouldn't complain. He just doesn't seem to understand that money is finite!

I'm not dressed either. & have only eaten a bowl of cereal so far. It's a day of slow progress...

BrettGirl, your DH is some kind of amazing miracle man!

So these discount codes of which you speak - where may they be found???

Brettgirl we don't have a flat screen TV - it would look odd in our house!!

brettgirl, things will briefly get easier. The HiP, we get the SureStart £500 & so on. But the main problem is that we'll get a lump of money at the end of April & then nothing until October. It should be enough to see us through, but not if DH keeps frittering it - & I don't see that he won't.

& by that time, the baby will be here & the opportunity to have some nice us time will have gone.

No, he's tightfisted!

Ok ignore that as I got confused between flatscreen and plasma.

I've just realised I have agreed for the MW to come tomorrow and I am in LONDON!!! grrr

what is the surestart???

Ju, this is always a good place to start.

Then googling for 'shop name + code' usually comes up with results for sites like this, where you might find something. Also the forums on moneysavingexpert are useful & often come up on the search.

Also worth looking at is Quidco - it's a cashback site. Before you buy things online, see if they're registered with Quidco. If you load the page through the Quidco site, you often get a percentage of what you spend back to your Quidco account as cashback

I think I might also be married to him!!!! My DH was given some money by his parents at Christmas to put towards baby things e.g. pram and he spent the whole lot on buying a video camera that was at least 200 euros over what I though was a reasonable price!! Ok, so it will be great to have so we can send films of the baby to his parents who don't have internet, but he could have bought a much cheaper one that would have done a perfectly good job . I end up paying all the boring stuff like rent and bills from my wages with not much left over and he just spends his (limited) money on boys toys! Grrr...(though he did buy me lunch today...).

It's amazing what being a scottish ex-student can achieve frugality-wise! I'm like Jesus with the loaves and fishes (apologies to any Christians!).

I think you need to sit down with him and set out a careful budget. In terms of his day to day spending money that if money is tight is the very biggest waste and problem. Is there any chance he would agree to go to the cashpoint once a week and withdraw what he thinks he should spend for the whole week? If you do so in one amount it makes it feel more real I think - then when he spends it in three days maybe the penny will start to drop?

If money is tight he should be taking sandwiches, buying snacks in supermarket rather than when out.

I don't have a TV....

It's for povvos - we get it because we have virtually no income. It's usually for people on job seeker's or income support, but we're students so we get it.

& I think being too far the other way would irritate me too, to be honest. I can see why brettgirl would be annoyed. Money is there for spending, but it's just useful to have some left for the essentials

Kali, that's exactly our situation - I pay for the groceries & all of the boring stuff, then he has 'spare' money to fling around.

bg, I was thinking about the cash from the cashpoint idea. The only problem is that then when I say 'where did that money go?' he won't have a clue. At least if it's on a bank statement I can get a rough idea.

I was going to suggest making him a packed lunch. I get narky when he asks me to do it (in a 'do it yourself' way), but if I do it off my own back, I feel very wifely!

I shall be checking out those discount code sites.

The MoneySavingExpert site just looks so messy and inaccessible - perhaps I will persevere.

Kali - someone did say to me the other day that no-one mentioned how large the loaves and the fishes were....

But if he is sticking to his spending money budget does it matter what it goes on? Perhaps in a strange kind of way it would give him more freedom.

Please someone drag me away from Most Haunted on YouTube - I watched 3 episodes yesterday and ended up giving myself nightmares last night!

I must admit that DH has had a sort of positive influence on my spending habits - he's encouraged me to be a bit less tight with my money than I used to be, which I think is a good thing really.

Mostly irrelevant and off on one, but my NCT teacher told us about a Church down in Canterbury, where whenever one of the congregation has a new baby, everybody else takes it in turns to take them round a meal each day for the first month, so they don't have to worry about cooking! Doesn't that sound brilliant?!

Oh and my DH isn't that bad, he'll spend money on me and others but never on himself IYSWIM. That does actually make him sound wonderful doesn't it?

Mind you, he did take me out for a buy one get one free lunch in Waterspoons last week (a branch which has a large wino element in its clientelle)

I don't usually check up on his spending, but I agree - if he sticks to it, it's no problem. It's if he doesn't, & then gets more money out, that it will be.

Haha, Jesus was obviously using this website

Kali - probably for the best tbh, theres never anything on, the only reason we have one is so dh can play xbox