Frugalleers Spending September Safeguarding our Shiny Shillings

[Wolfcub]

Welcome to mid September frugal folk

Just checking in. We have the house back to ourselves as the pil have gone home. They enjoyed it I think, but it was a bit mad as we were very busy. They took us out for a meal & paid for other bits so it was more frugal than expected.
I only saw bits of SWFL but what I did see, irritated me.
Study day tomorrow, need to get 1st assignment done. Submission day is Monday.

Cag I have trouble with that a lot and doctors always put it down to anxiety. Certainly it does get better if I do meditation-type stuff. Folding washing while listening to whale music on youtube is the nuclear option for that with me. Could it be a reaction to all the moving house stuff? If it goes away with ranitidine or antacids then that is a pretty good indication that that's what's going on.

I'm folding washing right now to recover from having done far too much rushing around today. Folding washing is good.

I hate folding washing

Sea poor ds

Cag yes but I don't always suffer it comes and goes.

Ds is desperate for a specific party this year but it's £250 for five children

Folding washing annoys me because I'm always thinking why does no one else do this but me so unfair because au pair does too

Cooking/Baking is my thing to help feel accomplished and like I'm a good mother

Sea that's so that your ds is anxious about his birthday but at least you've established the reason now & can reassure him in advance next year.

Payday
Paid €35 off cc3, need to get back into swing of this, want to repay it before 0% ends, also need to look at big balance cc & see if I can balance transfer anywhere
€11.75 towards Littlewoods balance (will be cleared in 4 more weeks)
Ynab personal spends ✅
Ynab joint account ✅ until H decides to do his transfer anyhow

Booked dc into Relax Kids workshop for sat

Wreck what were you doing up in middle of the night?

Hi crazy busy here. Just reading to catch up.

Morning all. It’s the city of steel for me today.
I am bloody knackered. Have booked a day off just so I can have a four day weekend and hopefully recover a bit
Niece’s christening present arrived. It’s lovely but smaller than o expected especially for £35
Sea I hope the cake pops go down well and ds has a day he enjoys. Happy birthday Ds

I hate folding washing too although I find I hate it less now mammy as I’m not seethin. At someone else for not doing it!

sea we talked about the childcare costs before I went back to work and it was partly this that made me feel guilty.

I don’t have To work. I choose to. We’d be ok on dh’s salary. Dh brings in around £70k gross on his own* but it wouldn’t be fair on him being the only one working. We wouldn’t have been able to have afforded the new house. Or any “fun” stuff. Holidays etc. And I didn’t want to stay home. ITs not for me.

*dh and I are both high earners. But please bear in mind things are so expensive here. Not a stealth boast. We’re paying almost £600k for a three bed end of terrace house. Just an average house which would sell for around £200k in some parts of the uk. Space is limited. 3 bed houses are at a premium. We are “punished” financially for living in such a beaut place, I pay 23% tax, 7% social security, food is more expensive than uk...But also rewarded financially because wages are higher for us being “finance worker wankers” like we are.

Anyhoo.

Payday tomorrow. Cannot wait. Account is down to £14. Eeek

Mammy ds woke me up because his duvet had fallen off at 2:30. He went straight back to sleep but I couldn't until about 5am 😭 😴

£15.71 this morning on presents on amazon (this seems to be a spending hotspot for me - both spending with one click and spending on gifts. I really need to review)

NOFILTER

I know what you need, a bean to cup machine. Even if you spend £500-600 and get a fancy one & buy a 2 kilo of really nice coffee beans from a specialist roaster every month you'll save about £1000 in your first year & you wont be producing plastic waste.

Happy Birthday Sea DS. I hope he has a nice normal day with no surprises. Birthdays should be what you want them to be.

Fluffy I would love a bean to cup machine! My parents have one and they get so much use out of it. Theirs retailed for a grand but because the only one left was the display one and it was being discontinued they got a £300 discount. I do love coffee.

Morning! Still struggling to post but I am reading/lurking to keep up

First day at college today. I had to take the day off work yesterday with this cold/virus, I'm like a little furnace at the moment. Feel too unwell to be nervous about going to college 😂 I'm hoping induction means it'll last a couple of hours and then I can go home to bed.

On the plus side we're now heading towards Friday

£135 spent already to become a student member of CIPD

Em nothing to feel guilty about. We are in a similar situation but in reverse. I am the higher earner (I gave up a comfortable 3-figure salary to take this time out with DS 😕) but DH earns half what I do. So I could go to work and he could stay at home. But he’d utterly HATE that and as a shy extrovert it would be hideous for his mental health as he’d be really isolated and bored. I’m also the one who wants to spend more time at home. We’ve already agreed that in our heirarchy of options for the future (with needing to give DS extra care /support) we’d be better off downsizing my career /our home than DH giving up work. We are also higher earners but in a stupidly expensive area (3-bed terraces are easily upwards of £700k here )

You lot are so lovely and understanding about DS. I am going to write him a social story (a short script with pictures) so he knows what to expect from his birthday. We are taking him to do something he has done before and loved because he’s much happier with familiar stuff.

Just got to quickly mend a hole in my jeans before I can decently do the school run ... ahem.

Curves I'd have one if I drank more coffee but I only have one a day so grinding beans and using the espresso pump is no biggie.

Em we all have different circumstances no one here is judging anyone else on income or expenditure. H and I would have been on a decent joint income following my last promotion. Now i consider myself lucky I earn enough to cover the bills. We bought a little end terrace at the top of the property boom. It’s now worth a lot less than we paid for it so moving is not an option

wolf that’s what I love about this thread. Different circumstances but still supportive.

I’m starting a spreadsheet budget. I have all of dh’s numbers now so can start to populate it.

Christmas I think your ds may be a man after my own heart, in the birthday department. It's been decades since anyone tried to buy me a surprise for my birthday or do anything in the celebration department.

We have a standing arrangement that people give me money to spend on my current project and then for extra niceness they all pretend to be really impressed at whatever it is that I do with the money. Sometimes the things are really very obscure and they have to work quite hard to understand, let alone be impressed. For example once I asked for a timer that would fire my camera shutter one thousand times on a 1 second interval between each fire. The reason was very obscure indeed.

We don't go anywhere, or have special food and definitely not anything that smells like perfume or bath soap or flowers (ye gads!).

I like that too Em. My dh earns a good salary but I'd be worth about 8p a week on my own.

Morning all,

My physio appointment got cancelled today which I'm upset about, now have to wait over a week for another one. Feeling a bit fed up generally and think it's being at home so much, I miss the social interaction of work. That said my arm has started playing up again which is annoying as it had started to feel better.

Anyway to keep my mind occupied (and avoid spending too long on mn and fb) my plan today is to do some baking and cleaning. It's a grey wet day here.

I get a lot of nausea cag and if I'm tired or stressed I can easily be sick. I find avoiding sugar and caffeine really helps, I also did a mindfulness thing off YouTube that helped a lot.

Cag could it be your gallbladder that's playing up again? Some people don't always get the intense pain but have nausea instead. That's probably not something you want to hear...

Sea I have always hated the expectations of birthdays, both for myself and my ds. I always breathe a sigh of relief when they are over and things can go back to normal. My ds are older now so they don't have parties or anything and we all enjoy them more #unsociable.

Nausea can be a stomach ulcer. I got one after moving house.

Oh how frustrating girlie that sucks :( days are longer when you’re in pain!

I am virtually never sick, even when the kids get bugs I tend not to. When I’m nervous I tend to get crampy lower down/IBS type symptoms TBH. So I don’t think it is stress related. I’m fine today though. Seems to come and go. I am trying to reduce sugar though (don’t have much caffeine at all).

I’ve been progressing with the Japanese planning lately which included adding it to my iPad keyboards. こんにちは!

Finally withdrew some of my ISA. We had kept it aside for moving costs, but with careful planning and some very generous help from my mum and grandma, we had lasted until now before needing it! But now the Caglets’ bus passes need renewing (we let them lapse over summer anyway as not travelling so much), ballet and tap need paying, and we still have lots of house things to get. We’ve done pretty well I think, the old me would be rushing out to buy anything as soon as I thought of it, but instead I’ve got a rolling “stuff we need” master list so I can brain dump it all on there and actually consider it all carefully.

Definitely need to get food spends under control though as they’ve been ridiculous since we moved, I have zero impulse control! That and our trip to Winchester has all but cleaned us out, hence having to transfer a bit. We forgot to get another Tesco shop for today and can’t do tomorrow as we only have a midweek delivery saver. So will go through fridge and freezer before deciding what to do.

Hmmm I did wonder about gallbladder actually as I had a bit of pain there the other day but not an attack, just a brief weird feeling. Stomach ulcer... eek! I did once have a weird illness that the doctor said could turn into one if untreated, I remember having medication and having to avoid any food that was too acidic or too alkaline 🤔

I should probably see a doctor shouldn’t I. Nap first though, I’m so tired 😖😴☠️

Hey cag, hope you start to improve. I'm the same with stress re the cramp-like IBS type symptoms. Maybe a couple of easy days (easier said than done with your life!) and reassess whether a doctors appointment is appropriate.

That's crap girlie, really disappointing, you build up mentally to these visits and look to them for pain relief iyswim.

em, it wasn't so long ago that we were struggling. The business is a good earner now and we are financially very lucky, but no judgement here, I still can't quite forget those times and am mindful when shopping and with finances. Not sure that ever leaves you.

I think that's why I find SWFL irritating, although I know they are playing to a market obviously. I can't quite understand why, if you've lost your house, then you'd still buy top end everything and have no savings. Their 12 years olds hair product was about £8!!. Is it only me that gives off the incorrect message to your DC anyway?

DH buys me flowers every week, I'd rather he didn't. It's a waste of money and packaging. I let it slide though, it gives him pleasure. I'd personally rather he'd pick his dirty socks up from the bedroom floor

I've bought a footstool for our bedroom, it wasn't cheap but I've saved up the EBay sales and waited for a discount code so net cost was about £50. It's taken ages as stuff isn't really selling.