Countdown to Christmas 2022: The January sales edition (AKA, 'Where the bloody hell have I put that?' come next Christmas!) Thread 1

[ThatsMySantaHisBeardIsSoFluffy]

365

Here we go, roll up, roll up!

I can barely move; I'm full of cheese and Bailey's. 🐷

Here's our new thread for the new countdown! 🎄🎅🏻🎄🎅🏻

Morning :-) (just)

Joining you all on the zombie bench. I struggled to get to sleep last night and then couldn't wake up this morning.

I slept like a log (after an hour nap on the sofa)
Been to Sains and saw an "altercation" think Jeremy Kyle fishwife v 2 pensioners in the car park. Told the girls on the "returns" desk and they grabbed their hi-vis and shot out - I suspect it had been a quiet morning.
There's a chicken casserole in the oven for later. DH is washing up - he doesn't know yet

We had another night of DS disrupting our sleep so after school we are sitting down as a family and discussing new family rules about nighttime.

I suggest; 'Go the fuck to sleep and stay the fuck asleep. In the alternative, stay quietly in your room!' 🤣🤣

If ds wakes in the night (very rare, usually because his duvet has fallen off the bed) I pretend to be asleep and make dh deal with it

Ah I'm flagging now. I took a break to walk the dog early today just so the fresh air could wake me up.
Just under an hour of work to go 😴

On the plus side, my cross stitch Christmas card kits arrived today. Last ones I'm being this year .
I stashed them on the spare bed and the dog promptly fell asleep on them

Is your nighttime financial planning for anything specific Fluffy?

Woolly running through lists relaxes you? I get stressed and end up awake scribbling things down and feeling anxious that I'm forgetting things.

HeyUp how's your day going now?

Vasectomy any idea why he's getting up in the night?

He has always done it crazy. Has been a bad sleeper from the day he was born. He is old enough now though to understand that DH and I need to sleep.

Just debt payment, Crazy. Working the snowball scheme out in my head! Not the ideal time to do it, frankly! 🤣

My niece and nephew are poor sleepers. We get a lot of referrals in for sleep at work, some of it is parenting and routine etc but more often than not some children are just awful sleepers and there really isn't anything you can do until, as Vasectomy says, they're old enough to understand that even if they wake up they need to stay in bed or at least not wake everyone up.

DS was godawful til he was 4. Thankfully he's grown out of it now.

We spent the first 3 years of his life trying everything. We paid for a sleep consultant, had a strict bedtime routine and refused to let him into our bed. We were on our knees with exhaustion as we were up for hours every night. Finally a colleague of DH's with adult children just told us to do whatever we had to get sleep. So we allowed DS into our bed and it did make a big difference.

Now however he has got really cheeky about it and takes it for granted. Comes down multiple times in the evening and won't give us any space when in our bed.

My dsis and her DP are working on sleep etc with my niece at the mo (she's 3). They're doing a star chart with her which is working quite well except that when she wakes up she shouts "I'm awake but I'm staying in my big bed" so they're woken up anyway.
They were offering a prize / treat for spending 5 nights in her own bed but she doesn't care about that, she just wants the stars and to tell everyone she's a big girl 😂

4yo nephew has always been a good sleeper but I remember dsis crying with exhaustion when eldest nephew (now 12) was in reception because he woke up several times a night.

We did the snowball method with a few small adjustments Fluffy (we had a few big and medium debts but also some random small ones so on top of the snowball method we budgeted to pay off a small one every so often rather than leaving them until last).
Do you have a year / month you're aiming to have paid it off by?

No, I've not got that far yet! Thankfully I went to sleep! 🤣 I know where I'm starting though, so that's the main thing. Then I'll have more money to throw at it when I finish my student loan next year (just over £200pm, so I'll do £100 to debt, £50 to savings and £50 spending per month, just to make things more comfortable). Maybe 3 years.

Oh fluffy that student loan payment. Ouch. (Is that how much they all are?).

I don't know! Mine is the first loan they offered, where you have to be earning national average wage before you start to pay it back, and once you start (unless you qualify to defer again), you pay it back over 5 years, then it's done! Unfortunately, it's a tight 5 years (which has then led to other debt to sometimes balance the books!). So I'll be glad to see the bloody back of it!

My student loan wasn't that much! There are a few repayment plans dependent on when you took the loan out, where you're based and if it was for an undergrad degree or post grad.
Mine was charged based on earnings ones you hit the threshold (which is around £20k ish I think) so the more you earned the more you paid. I think I was paying around £40/50 per month.

I'm giving in and going to bed. I've been looking forward to it all day.

Yeah, my repayment threshold was higher (it's apparently £36k deferment level this year), but the payments are called 'mortgage style', so basically it's a fixed term with fixed payments, whether you earn a penny over the deferment amount or thousands.

I think the newer ones are better in a way, but with tuition fees you'd never be able to afford a 5 year repayment plan!

347

Morning!

I'm trying to get myself out of bed so I can start work. Hopefully it's the last day of overtime, but I'm not sure...most people seem to be up the wall, so it's not just me.

It's getting a little colder again from today. Our brief stint of almost-double figures temps hasn't lasted long! 🥶🥶

It's 4° here but meant to get colder. Two deer, a rabbit and a giant fox this morning. My lft is still positive but really faint, still not allowed into work. I'm missing so much. I'e been off since 17th December really.

Are you working from home? I thought that tests beyond 10 days were generally pointless, given you can test positive for up to 90 days? Why is your Trust so daft?

It's not my trust it's government guidelines for health and social care workers 🙄 i am technically wfh but there's nothing I can actually do. I can't even make phone calls as my signal is too crap at home

Does your network do wifi calling? We've had some networks here - Three was particularly bad - where we couldn't use phones at home.

My friend is a midwife and is clear to go to work after the 10 days. So clearly different Trusts are working differently! 🤷‍♀️

I didn't realise they were allowed to go against the government guidance but I suppose it is just 'guidance'.

We can but my wifi isn't good enough to do it and no one can hear me

Fluffy both DH and I logged on to the student finance website yesterday out of curiosity. When I went to uni in early 00's my tuition fees were approx £3k per year and most of that was funded directly with the loan to live on (Wales did that then). So my student loans amounted to £10k ish.
DH went in 2011 and his fees were £6k per year (for a 4 year degree), to get paid via student loan so his is nearer £35k!

Wreck can you use work time to study if you can't actually wfh at the mo? Although it seems mad that they're keeping you home. DHs LFTs stayed positive for a week after his isolation period in October but he went back to work.

Bloody freezing here (literally - the cars are all iced over). It's actually nice and fresh so I've got all the windows open except the room I'm working in 🥶

We have to wait till lateral flow tests are negative before going back into work as well Wreck. I think NHS trusts differ though as ours had a huge meeting last week about it to discuss what would be the plan going forward. NHS does work differently to public guidelines though, because if we have a contact at home we have to isolate no matter how many jabs we have had, but we can go out according to government rules which feels odd but there you go.