No spend September

[Kaloobear]

Right, I'm going to nick a little bit of space on this board to do a money diary like on MSE. Just for me really but if anyone fancies reading and throwing the odd encouraging comment my way that'd be lovely Likewise anyone who wants to join me is very welcome!

So, here are my rules:

Money spent on bills, insurance and pre-planned food shops is fine.
Everything else is not.

NO...
Coffees (especially not as an excuse to sit down somewhere in town)
Sandwiches
Magazines
Books (even on kindle, I have at least 10 on there I haven't read yet)
Music
Kitbag peanut butter chunkies (sob)
Meals out
Takeaways
Spontaneous 'presents' for DD (11mo) who is far too young to even realise or care, including clothes-she has plenty!
Clothes (even tights, which I have a weird compulsion to buy every time I see them )
Shoes
Unnecessary household goods-we have enough loo roll and bleach to last until 2020
Toiletries-I MUST use up the lovely things I've already got and stop buying more
Make up, under any circumstances
Alcohol (we don't drink much though so that's pretty easy)
Putting anything on the credit card except groceries (always pay it off and like to use it so we get the air miles-the problem is using it for little things, forgetting and then being surprised by the bill!)

YES...
Packed lunches for work
Walking or cycling to work-if I drive that's fine but I'm not allowed any more petrol so the half tank in there has got to last till October!
Reminding myself that we are lucky, we live well, and we do not need any more STUFF
Reminding myself that having bought a house we need to SAVE because our emergency pot is gone

Today and yesterday don't count because I only thought of doing this this afternoon, but for full disclosure...

Saturday 1st September
Cheese, crackers, beer and wine for friends having a BBQ, Tesco, about £15

Sunday 2nd September
2 snickers, 2 diet cokes, magazine , stupidly expensive corner shop, £4.86
Diary for work, Waterstones, £12.99
Big food shop, Waitrose, £86.94

Tomorrow I'm back at work for the first time in a year (sob, bye bye maternity leave) so the upside is that I shouldn't need to spend any money, and the same on Tuesday. On Wednesday I'm meeting my NCT group so I need to remember to take a packed lunch for DD and resist eating lunch in a cafe myself-I can wait till I get home! (I'd take a packed lunch for me but I don't think Starbucks would like it.) On Thursday I'm at work in the morning and then off in the afternoon, so think DD and I will go to the library and make sure we eat at home. Friday is a very long work day with lunch provided. Saturday I'm going to the theatre and do have to buy train tickets to get there, so I'm going to do that in advance and hopefully get them a bit cheaper. The theatre tickets were bought ages ago. Sunday we shall go to church and the park if it's nice weather, we will not go and spend money needlessly.

Fingers crossed.

I'm definitely doing October too, and hopefully November. We're still budgeting to have a few treats just cutting out on the small bits of crap that add up
I don't feel like we're missing out at all.

NSD yesterday and today will be too. The longer I do this the easier it gets I find!

Have spent ages playing with spreadsheets. Where we always go wrong is leave the expensive things to put on our credit cards to be paid off the following month-when it happens every month it just means we're always catching up. Eg. This month is car insurance, next month RAC etc. So I've added everything like that up and divided by 12 and we're going to put £400 odd into a special account every month to cover those sorts of things. It includes all bills except mobiles, presents, clothes, council tax, tv license, car expenses (except petrol) etc. Hopefully that way we'll never be in an 'oh crap we need a grand to pay the council tax' situation again!

I've also done lots of number crunching and reckon if we're very careful we can overpay the mortgage by the max allowed (£123 a month) and save £400 a month too. That should fill one ISA before the end of the tax year, as it will also have the contents of the regular saver once it matures. We're going to use the 2 year fixed part of our mortgage, while the overpayments are so limited, to build up our emergency fund in ISAs, and then either remortgage or go onto the variable rate depending on the economy and plough any extra cash each month into overpayments rather than savings. A year and a half to build up emergency pots is long enough I think to then not feel scared about locking money into the mortgage instead.

I have worked out that even making the overpayment of £123 a month, if we did that forever, would save us 10 years and £35,000.

£35,000!!!!!

And once we can up the overpayments we will be looking at saving approximately £60,000 in interest and about 18 years. Which is enough to send DD to private school for sixth form, and make us mortgage free, maybe, fingers crossed, before we're 40...

kaloo thats one hell of an incentive! I'm up gor doing October.

Paid window cleaner £6.50 today, won't be spending anything else as it's pouring with rain so me and ds are having a play day. Have friends coming over for coffee later but have managed to get the ingredients for shortbread together from what I have so won't need to buy cakes.

£28 in primark, £9 in sainsburys, but that is it until Saturdays grocery shop.

NSD today apart from our regular veg box delivery. I found out my (new, part time) salary will be about £100 more a month than I thought it would be, so I'm chuffed about that!

£17.30 this morning in Aldi. It wasn't a full shop by any means, mainly lots of cheese and bits for this weekend when we have friends staying. But still, I reckon the equivalent in Waitrose would have been about £35, so I'm pleased! Will go back on Sunday to do a proper week's shop and see how that compares.

Ok, just checked on mysupermarket and apparently the same shop in Waitrose would have been £24.31, so not as much of a saving as I thought-but still, a saving! It would have been £20.67 even in Asda so I'm quite impressed.

NSD yesterday. Just done online shop £185

how long will that last EnglishGirl?

It's a months worth of meat , groceries, cleaning stuff and toiletries and a weeks worth of fresh stuff. I get everything for my meal planner except for perishables at the beginning of the month so I'll spend about another £60 on top of that. It's usually about £25 less but every spice and condiment seems to have run out at once!

Well that's pretty good then-£240 for a whole month :) In fact that's close to what I'm aiming for! Do you have a chest freezer? We don't have the space for a month's worth of food in one go I don't think.

No chest freezer just a normal size undercounter. I have to take the meat out of its packaging and into freezer bags to get it in! Would love a chest freezer in the garage but we have no power in there and I keep forgetting to get a quote to have it fitted. I like being able to buy multibuys and my local Nisa store always has loads of reduced bread, crumpets etc. so if I have space I buy loads.

I think I need to get clever with removing packaging!

Just done a full week's shop at Aldi for the frankly astonishing price of...

£39.83!!

Mysupermarket tells me the same shop would have been...

£61.79 at Tesco (saving of £21.96)
£63.92 at Asda (saving of £24.09)
£68.76 at Sainsbury's (saving of £28.93)
£74.89 at Waitrose (saving of £35.06)

I am officially and forever an Aldi convert!

First overpayment made . Our budget includes very little room for error, so fingers crossed we'll be able to stick to it. We should have a total of £15.01 left at the end of the month, possibly more if we underspend on groceries... We have budgeted £100 a month for 'fun' though so hopefully we won't be totally bored and money-obsessed!