From one challenge...

Tracking my spending reveals almost exactly where the money goes, so I am glad that I do it quite strictly.  A glance at June's spreadsheet would reveal a high level of spending on toiletries, but I know that there was an offer on some feminine items that three of us get through quite a few of in a month, so I stocked up - that total will be lower for a month or three.

Then there is the washing powder mountain I accumulated in June too.  With Persil on half price at £6 for 50 washes, I'd have been daft not to since I had the money available.  I know it meant spending £36, but it is good quality washing powder which works very well, and the advertised 50 washes comes in at just 12p a wash, but I know that I get far more washes out of a box than that.  I reckon I have got more than enough to see me through Christmas, if not into 2014....

(image from britstore.co.uk)

Keeping track also reveals my weaknesses, which I do try to combat, but obviously not terribly well.  Magazines.  "Free from" cakes.  Books. With a combined spend of over £100 in June on those three sections of the budget, I am going cold turkey on them all in July.  I have heaps of magazines in the house which I could easily re-read, and there are books aplenty here, as well as other things to occupy my time - crochet, knitting, weeding and gardening, the tax return, Faith& worship - I do not need new books in June.
I may not record each time I walk past a magazine I fancy, and it will be a struggle, I know, but I need to do this.  £100 in the savings account would be a bonus.

We have spent just about £80 on clothes for the girls' holiday - and half of that was supporting charity shops, so we got more for our money than we would have done otherwise.

Yes, the poor savings account.  The £500 I thought I had managed to save in June has gone - it had to be moved back into the current spends in order to pay the bills.....and there have been SOME bills in June, so I am not entirely surprised!  We start July from scratch, and hope that we can do better this month!

July Challenge

Having started a new hobby for the June challenge and achieved the target, I am going to try something more personal this month - reducing the size of my backside!!  I had managed to get down to 10 and a half stone and been there for nearly a year, but over the last few months, my weight has crept up again, and I am at 10.12 and 3/4 this morning, so this has to stop before it goes any further upwards!   The size 16 jeans that I bought are still OK but the black trousers are uncomfortable, and the size 14 jeans are rather tight....given my wardrobe restrictions, they need to be wearable, and soon!

(image from which.co.uk)

The target for the month will be to lose 6 or 7lbs, half a stone would be good, through a variety of means - moving more energetically and watching what I eat more carefully.  I shall keep a daily diary of my food intake and exercise [although I won't bore you all with it!] and I will report weight losses on Mondays - that will help to keep the weekends on the straight and narrow!  

Garden glory

After a morning at chapel and a barbecue-style lunch, I had to get my hands dirty in the garden!  The weeds are rampant and the recent rain has really made them grow......You couldn't see this beetroot for all the fat hen seedlings coming up between the rows, so I had to rescue that again.

The courgettes seem to attract nettles, so clearing those was a job for the rubber gloves.

The first little mange touts are on the pea plants, and will be harvested for supper tomorrow - can't wait!

These poor runner beans were becoming entangled in all sorts of weeds, so they have emerged again and can start to scramble up the poles of the old swing.

And the chicks are enjoying their time on the grass, sunbathing, preening themselves and having the odd argument amongst themselves - they are entertaining to watch when I had a tea break!

Hope you have had a great Sunday too xx

Re-purposed unit

This unit which the FH made and I shared with you this week has taken up residence in the family bathroom as a storage unit, sitting on top of an old bedside cabinet.

So it looks like this now:

I haven't painted it yet, as I want to see whether it works in here before I commit to the colour.  The girls use this bathroom mostly, and if they can put the stuff away in the drawers, it might just keep the room tidier.  We'll give it a try for a while, and then I may paint the unit and the cabinet underneath all the same colour to match.  The spare loo rolls and big bottles of Tesco Value Shampoo and conditioner are in the cabinet at the bottom, flannels you can see and then all their bits and pieces are in the drawers.  I am so fed up of clutter around the bath and on the floor, so fingers crossed that this works!

Six month review

I can't believe that we are half way through the year already.  It feels like time is passing so quickly, and I haven't done half of what I had hoped to achieve by now, certainly with regards to the Faith&Worship course!

What I am astounded to find this morning is that my annual savings target is remarkably well on track....my aim was for £9000 to be saved this year, and that seemed pretty steep at the beginning of the year, with a target of £750 a month needing to be stashed away.  BUT, in the first five months of the year, with luck and a good wind behind us, we have achieved £4126, and that doesn't include June's savings, because I still have to sort out June!  What I thought we had managed to save in June may well be wiped out, so I will have to re-look and report back later on this month.

The best news of all is that the FH is in far better shape now than he was in January, and that is worth more than gold!  I said to him last night how pleased I was at how well he coped with the day yesterday - he spent the morning pottering in the workshop, putting a bed back together for me, and then he came to Ely with us and must have walked nearly a mile and a half, albeit at his own speed, and then he stood last night and did the washing up.  I think he slept very well last night after all that exercise, but the fact that he plodded through the day was an exceedingly good thing and just shows how much better he has been lately.  I have noticed an improvement since the cardioversion and he isn't getting the dizzy spells hardly at all now.

It looks like another fine and sunny day here today, which is just as well, as I have a load of washing ready to go out.  We will be at church this morning, then I have some gardening to do, and some books from school which I have brought home to catalogue - three boxes done last night and three more to do before I take them back in the morning...and we may have to cook some tea on the BBQ tonight just so we can say we have used it once this year - who knows when the next nice day will be?!

Have a lovely day xx

Charity Shopping spree

After a busy morning at the gym, we went into town to find the YFG some wellies for the trenches in Belgium this week.  A shop is closing down, and when we went in, there were only four pairs of wellies on a high shelf, so I asked the assistant if any of them were the appropriate size, hoping that the £28 pair weren't going to be the ones, but you can just guess that they were!  Luckily, as it is closing, the shop is offering 70% off the marked prices, so we paid just over £9 for them - quite a bargain as they are very good wellies!

We came home after that and had some lunch.  We readied ourselves and the FH put on his "going out" clothes, so we all went off to Ely, where I think the charity shops have a slightly better selection of donations than our local ones.  

(image from en.wikipedia.org)

We struck gold in the very first one, for the BHF, where the YFG found a strapless black evening dress which is quite decent [however I have described it - sorry!] and which will be perfect for the black tie evenings on the cruise.  The EFG also found a top in there.

(image from mirror.co.uk)

Oxfam sadly didn't furnish us with any further bargains, but another charity shop further along the street was well worth a good rummage, and we found a couple more items in there - a cardigan for the YFG and another top for the EFG, I think.

After that, we had a look in a shop called "Select" which yielded three dresses - two similar ones in different colours for the YFG and one for the EFG in a floral fabric, which she and I both loved.  We need to find some accessories for it, but it is really nice - and they were all in the sale!

If we can go back and look over the various charity shops and the "cheaper" shops in the area over the next two months, I think we will be able to supplement their existing wardrobes with enough items that they will be respectable on the holiday.  We also want to take advantage of the Tesco Double Up voucher offer, but we have only days left to do that!

A friend did suggest that I should crochet them some clothes but somehow I don't think I am up to that just yet!  I have enjoyed doing more squares on Thursday afternoon and Friday morning at chapel, and the ladies there have been very encouraging!  

Spending like crazy!

It feels like the money is flowing from the household uncontrollably this month, which is quite scary.  Lots of things have conspired to come together to make June a spend, spend, spend month, and I can't say that I like it much!

I have yet to finalise the month's spending and saving totals completely, but I will do that at the weekend.  Looking ahead to July, I can see that the spending will continue a little.

So what are we spending on?  Apart from stocking up the cupboards, which I will post on at the end of the month when I have rounded up all the figures, it is things like travel and trips in particular.

The YFG has had two school trips which I have paid for this month - one to Kew Gardens this week [£16] and one as a reward for her hard work and achievements this year, which is a bowling/cinema trip with the school [£17.50], and then there is her trip to France this week coming - I have paid for the trip itself but now she needs wellies for walking about the battlefields and trenches apparently, as well as euros [blagged from Grandad!] and some cash for a meal on the way home.

York Minster

(image from en.wikipedia.org)

Within June, I took the EFG to Lincoln [£30+ trainfare] and then to Norwich to UEA [diesel costs] but on 3rd July we need to go to York for the day.  Given that we have not booked the train tickets months in advance, and we have no railcards that we can use on the day [because the YFG isn't coming] it is going to cost me £192 for two of us to go for a day return.  £192!  You read that right.  Yes, I could drive, but it would be about 3.5 hours there, and the same back, as well as a full day on my feet walking about the university, and we need to be there by 9.30am.....and I can't do that to myself - I would be exhausted for days afterwards.  Staying the night beforehand would be tricky and inconvenient, and we certainly can't stay the night afterwards to spread the driving because the next morning, Thursday, is when the YFG is off to France and I need to be here to wave her off!  We will be catching a train at about 6am though, so it will still be a very long and tiring day, but I can hope for a snooze on the train between Peterborough and York.

I have thought about getting the EFG a Young Person's Railcard, but at £30, funnily enough, it will save just £31 off the cost of this journey.  We are not great train-travellers, so it doesn't seem worth it at the moment. Once she is at university in the Autumn of 2014, depending on where she goes, it will be a worthwhile investment, I do agree. I am just hoping we are able to go to Aberystwyth on a Saturday Open day so that we can drive over there on the Friday afternoon and then have the Sunday to recover!

This trip will see the third university, and with the Welsh trip coming up in the autumn, and UEA now off the list for sure, we may have two more trips to make - on the other hand, she may have to do as I did and apply to some that she hasn't visited!  I only visited two of the five that I applied to back in the day, and I was very lucky to get a place at one of those I had seen and loved.

St Mary's College, St Andrews where I studied

(image from st-andrews.ac.uk)

I am spending the money for my own sake, and because the EFG thinks that York might be a serious contender in her list of places to apply for Biochemistry.  I am counting my blessings indeed that I have the funds available, and that the only thing going short will be the savings account again.  This is the kind of spending that I save towards, if you see what I mean - I know that my saving has a purpose in that I will be able to do those things which the family needs to do, without bunging it on a credit card and skimping for months to pay it back.

Don't get me started on the clothes/shoes we are worrying about for the cruise - we are going to be scouring the charity shops for some evening clothes on a fairly regular basis between now and the end of August!