Jumping into July: Frugal Friends Financial Fun

[needastrongoneagain]

New 'Fred.

Very low spend couple of days.

£12 AdBlue but that's expenses.

Will be back to post fully later.

I love your tiles Girlie. Looks great.

Love the flooring girlie and the colour on the back wall 😍

LSD just £18 at coop with discount card.

Looks great girlie

€360 on car service & fixing stuff for nct retest
€11.60 on 5 chicken fillets & milk
Made curry last night 2 portions left & another chicken fillet.
I've just cleared out freezer of loads of portions of frozen stuff & given to dog & cats so I'm writing a list of what's there now on outside & going to use them within the month.
Two portions of meatballs & two chicken curries so far!

Afternoon all
Beautiful day here hope it has been good for you too !
Spends today Tv license £159
Aldi's £56
Seems never ending spends lately
Hope all ok

It has been a beautiful day here in the NE mrs

£26 Lidl
£5 for ice creams sitting outside a cricket club
Lunch was paid for by my friend.

@Girliefriendlikespuppies that is some gorgeous flooring!

Payday happened on Thursday, then on Friday my dad paid me for the work I’ll be doing for him while he’s away, so a double payday! I let it all sit there for a few hours in my account so I could just look at it and enjoy it. Then off some of it went to savings, Christmas fund, etc. And the following day off went some more in direct debits, it was nice while it lasted!

Weather across most of the uk is looking like a mini heatwave for the next week, so here’s to pegging out washing again finally.

Morning all.

Those floors are beautiful Girlie. I love the green as well.

I need to do the freezer thing too Happier. Enjoy freezer eating when I actually do it but it’s effort to work out what’s actually there.

Spendy and unpleasant last two days. Booked and paid for the Paris hotel. Got 22% off so happy with that and very glad I decided to tack an extra day on. Spent £10.75 in Marks and Spencer on lunch type things yesterday. Was meant to be having lunch with a friend but it didn’t end well so didn’t have any of it. 99p in Aldi.

Went to TK Maxx as I was passing and got some waterproof hiking trousers. They were £19.99 with a retail of £165. Looking at the company/shop website they are current season and I can’t see anything wrong with them so not sure why there were in TK Maxx. I like them so went back and bought the other pair they had so another £19.99. Still crossing my fingers about the travel authorisation.

Meant to be meeting flakey friend this afternoon. Not holding out much hope. Plan B is Lidl for Italian cheese for the freezer. And maybe TK Maxx to look at jackets. Currently trying to unwind while watching some television.

Thanks for the flooring love 💕 I have almost recovered from the shock of how much they cost and I am so pleased with the result.

I had a hysterscope Ystd which was horrible, they think I've got polyps but as it was they couldn't do what they wanted to and have said I'll need to have it done under a general anaesthetic ☹️ It meant that Ystd afternoon was a write off as I was really sore afterwards.

Did manage to get round Aldi before the appointment and spent £110 🙈 I had run everything right down though and not done a big shop for ages.

Girlie** I hope the pain has subsided a bit today, pity they couldn't sort it out immediately ☹️

Dd is trialling rowing & it means a gym session Tues night next to Aldi, might mean I'll kill two birds with the one stone going forward however I'll need to shop today as there's not enough fruit for ds's lunches until Tues & I don't want him to get out of habit of taking it.

€9 postbox for dm's knitting that she forgot & €35 half cost of my cut & colour the cash machines weren't working in her town so I'll owe it to her next time. Hairdresser is my aunt!

Today is a housework morning and hopefully head out somewhere with dc in afternoon if sun comes out. Might take dog to self service dog wash place

Dd bought a TGTG bag from a cafe she got two scones complete with butter & jam packs, two croissants & a slice of apple tart for €4.99.
We spent 30 mins jumping waves & are thoroughly invigorated after it

Spendy day but essentials today

£150 food shop and then £400 on school dinners 😱 but haven't got to think about it now until basically November!

Also made £9 on vinted today so pleased with that every little helps!

Tesco €9.04 on coleslaw, 2 packs of pads for dd & a roll on for me
Tesco €37.50 on two pairs of trackies for ds, he has stretched in last few weeks and there's inches between end of his trackies & his runners and jeans for me which had 25% off
€66.51 in Aldi including €10.97 on a face serum & day and night creams for me €55 shopping is two bags now

Chicken had 50% off and I would've been buying one anyhow, we love it from the ninja, I do because it's so much less work than a roast chicken usually is!

girlie your house always looks lovely in the pics you post. Sorry to hear your procedure was grim, hope you’re feeling better
Yay for the double payday curls
wave jumping sounds lovely happier
That’s a lot of costs recently decaff - back to school is a really expensive time with a few DC
All three DC are home now but just for a short time until DD goes to uni.
Managed a NSD today - went for an 8k run. I was absolutely dripping with sweat when I finished, not pretty!
Just realised that the cost of living pay rise I had recently has probably taken me over the 50k earnings threshold for child benefit. Does anyone know what I do about this? Is there an option to transfer the child benefit to DP who earns quite a lot less - or would that be seen as cheating?? DD’s will stop next month and DS1’s next year, so we will only have it for DS2 after that.

Morning.

Lovely floor @Girliefriendlikespuppies, and fabulous wall colour. So sorry re the procedure, they thought I had polyps a couple of years ago but thankfully it turned out to not be so.

Kids grow so quickly don't they @Happierwithouthim, especially boys at a certain age! I've given up a bit on TGTG bags. 🤣 self service dog wash.

You okay @RumBananaSundae re the friend?

The weather has improved because the schools are back @CurlsandCurves 🤣

Spendy time here too - hopefully way less this week, especially as I've been given more allotment veg than I can handle from Dsil!! Recipes for courgettes and runner beans anyone 🤣

£30 bottle of whiskey for a present (budget)
£20 Sainsbury's (mainly ingredients for a cheese cake and a few IPA beers for company we were having)
£46 butchers (meat for the month but also beef for family that came round Sunday - hoped to have leftovers for today but they ate everything 😳)
£18 window cleaner, although he didn't come last month
£170 Sainsbury's on a big 'for the month' shop re chicken and fish and staples etc but still ouch. Some bits for our holiday but still ouch again!
£21 recipe book

Definitely looking at eating what's in, given we go away back end of next week anyway.

In better frugal news my hybrid car is reaping dividends. Collected it a month ago, filled it up for £50. It's still full to the brim, I've used 12 miles of fuel and the rest electric. My budget for the month for fuel is £100, this month a little more for a long drive for holiday but going forward, I can't see us saving at least £80 from this, and the tax saving too.

Meal plan
Veggie tacos,
Fish pie (for two nights)
Gnocchi with roast veg
Beef casserole
Broccoli stem pasta
Lemon and courgette pasta.

'Can see us saving.

Well my jeans didn't fit, but they did have the next size up there so I'm hoping it'll still be there when I get into town tomorrow eve so I can just do a straight swap. I kind of thought they wouldn't, they close and look fine but breathing would probably be a struggle

need we didn't take dog to get washed after all, the machines look good, dog is up on a ledge so you're not bending to wash them and there's a drier too, it costs €10. That's amazing about your car too.

Yeah, it's good re the car. I've just put £20 diesel into the old one, as I'll sell it in the coming weeks and it was on empty.

@marthasmum re the child benefit. If one income exceeds the 50k, that’s it. So in theory you could both earn £49k and still receive it. Which is madness to me. So putting the claim in DHs name won’t make a difference. I know because we ended up in this situation about a year or so ago. It didn’t come to light until our tax returns had gone through and we just paid it back through that. Or I’d imagine if there’s any for you to pay back you could set up a repayment plan.

Hope you’re doing OK Girlie after the hospital. Sorry you have to go back.

Thank you Need. Feels like most things are unpleasant these days. Am ignoring it for now. I had a glut of courgettes from a colleague once and made lasagne. Goodo for the car.

Bit more spending from yesterday. A hiking skirt, matching the trousers, from TK Maxx yesterday (£14.99) and some cheese and odd things in Lidl for £11.45. Today has been £3.87 in Aldi on warm weather food for after the office on Wednesday and Thursday. Oh and the gas and electricity bills.

Good news about the car need

Sorry to hear about the unpleasant encounter rum best to ignore and focus on nicer things like TKMaxx 😎

martha curls is right. My friend takes unpaid leave to spend the hols with her DC but this also brings her back below the 50k mark for tax purposes. They don't claim CB though as he is on higher than her. Not sure if there's any legal jigging about you can do there or not.

Spends yesterday other than in weekly budget were £4.60 Morrisons and £33.95 material and tension rods to glass panels in the living room doors. Quite a frugal win as the doors were a bit of a mistake (wooden with large glass panels) but this is much cheaper than two new ones. Mil and DD made up one panel today, looks so much better.

NSD today, got to be the first in the summer and schools back in two days

Thank you curls that’s helpful! I’ve done a bit of Googling and realised I may still be exempt as I can take my pension contribution off my wage first. So need to work out what that is.

I’ve just lost a long ranty post which is probably fortunate for you all 😂 basically I’ve had to fork out £400 to secure DD’s uni tenancy which I wasn’t expecting to pay up front. And also found out that the plan I’d made for paying her rent won’t work. It relied on me using a credit card to make up the difference between her rent and her maintenance loan, and that won’t work because you can only use a credit card if you pay the whole whack (£6800!!) If you pay termly as I need to, you have to pay via a DD out of a current account. And that’s a problem because I don’t have enough money to pay the whole termly amount upfront. It means I would accrue an overdraft until I’ve managed to pay off the difference month by month. Which means I have to scrape around working out which of my savings pots to steal from. And I had literally just got straight and thought I had all the finances sorted 🙈
Still though at least I have places I can squeeze money from. What the hell do you do about this if you’re a family with nothing to spare? It makes me very angry that the system seems to assume all parents can fund their kids upfront. It’s just another way of making kids from poorer backgrounds feel like uni is not for them. Gives me new insight into what many of my students are dealing with.
and breathe…

Ah martha that is so annoying! Plus a bit of a curveball. A friend and I were chatting about this today, all the uneccessary financial hurdles. Rant away!