Category: trEAsury

all to do with money

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dear diary ~ resurfacing in February

Saying goodbye to January and a welcome to February.

After a day or two of feeling considerably yuck, and just when I thought I had shaken off the worst, the virus decided it would linger a little longer. So I had to linger a little longer with it, sometimes on the sofa and sometimes I just gave in went back to bed and slept…the clock round in one instance.

I fully expect this was a reaction to not eating properly or getting to bed at a decent hour for a number of weeks on and off. My body was not going to wait any longer and decided an enforced rest was necessary.

I was disappointed though. At the start of the week, I had planned to embrace my patiently waiting task list, and suddenly and abruptly my plans were cut short as the cold rapidly took hold. At least I managed to go for my blood tests on Friday morning, so not all was lost.

The weather is pretty dismal here; blanket grey skies with an enveloping fog that is always lurking in the background. Drizzle competing with snow, and cold – always cold, so anything bright really stands out like the little red berries on our cotoneaster horizontalis outside the window.

There are other small flashes of colour too – the pretty pale yellow petals of the primulas poking over the tops of the terracotta pots dotted about the garden.

Still I have nothing against January, or February. I welcome the slowing down after Christmas, and like a crab scurrying away into its shell (I am a Cancerian), I love to retreat into my snug, warm home for a few weeks getting ready to emerge when the brighter weather beckons.

In my more lucid moments I have been reading and watching. Reading the Persephone book DH bought me for Christmas‘They were sisters’ by Dorothy Whipple – an engaging read but never expect an absolute happy or conclusive ending with her books, they often leave you with hope that situations might improve for the characters, but nothing more. She tells a good story though.

There is a film too from (1945) I might browse the Talking Pictures channel just in case they have it listed. We are not sufficiently in this century to have a paid TV subscription like Netflix – it would not be a good use of our money. We never had a TV at the cottage in Scotland and I actually preferred not to have one. On our earlier visits we didn’t have a phone or the internet either and were sufficiently cut off from the world to just absorb the peace and quiet. But then the longest we stayed there was only 3 weeks and most often it was only a week or weekend.

I will soon be starting the epic ‘How to End a Story‘ the collected diaries of Helen Garner but not before I have a browse through some of my recent library requests, ‘Unprocess Your Life’ by Rob Hobson, ‘Just One Thing’ by Michael Mosley and ‘The Doctor’s Kitchen’ by Rupy Aujla all in preparation to begin my next project of restoring our diet and health this month.

On the watching side, we have been viewing The Great Pottery Throwdown, Landscape Artist of the Year and the Agatha Christie adaptations on BBC iPlayer. I am also a fan of Art of the Garden on the Freeview Sky channel. I suppose anything with art in the title will always catch my attention.

We are pondering another art workshop, this one being held at a cheese and wine tasting venue in a neighbouring small town of Brighouse. An odd place for a painting and craft workshop (and there is no wine or cheese included) but they are making use of their room whilst it is not been used for tasting sessions. There is a social session and an artist led session to choose from.

Our idea is to jump in the car one day soon and check the place out before committing….and I will sneak in a visit to one of my favourite places – the large independent Boyes department store for a mooch around. You can always count on them to have something that you never knew you wanted and all at affordable prices. And yes, I do keep telling myself I shouldn’t even cross the threshold to avoid any temptation.

So how did my financial review last month go?

I spent as much time as I could in January addressing our financial position and fashioning a new budget for the year using last years figures, increasing them by a 10 or 20% margin to allow for the continually rising prices.

Once all the interest payments from our ISA savings have been accounted for we will be a few pounds richer. It always feels good to see the pounds increase when normally, all we experience, is the monthly decrease of our pension income.

I received the Vinted sales report for last year – a tidy £171 acquired on clothing items sold. Most of this is actually going to my daughter for the clothes she had accumulated but didn’t have time to sell herself. It is unfortunate she has not yet regained her pre-pregnancy size and these lovely clothes were languishing unworn in her wardrobe. Not all the clothes were advertised on Vinted as I took a lot to the charity shop as well so they didn’t miss out.

But we have yet to have the boiler service (next week), a probably large dental bill (postponed for 2 weeks), and we have a holiday upon us for a week on the North Yorkshire coast. A whole week looking out over the sea…I can’t wait.

Having a quick review of the housekeeping we managed to keep it down to just over £290 for the month, so I am pleased with that. It would be amazing to keep it at that figure every month, but I have to be realistic and I was starting January with a lot of stock in the pantry. Ideally, I would prefer to keep only ‘one in hand’, or ‘replace one as I use one’ but I have to be realistic and being ill, together with the bad weather, I realise I do need to keep the pantry well stocked for the first 3 months of the year at least as it gave us something to fall back on when we couldn’t get to town.

But yes, the coffers are definitely looking good so far this year.

Not being well enough for a trip to town, I did as maybe we should all do (and I know many of you already do) shop local. But really, a tin of non-organic Heinz baked beans £1.77 from the Co-op (I had to read the price label twice), I didn’t even look at the price of the loaf, courgettes and mushrooms, just offered them up at the till and paid by card.

I desparately needed a small present for my friend’s birthday too. The present box is currently empty, so after leaving the doctor’s surgery on Friday I had to find something in the village amongst the beauty parlours, dog parlours and turkish barbers (like everywhere we are short on proper shops now).

I completely forgot about the gift shop along the main street and had decided on a cyclamen from our lovely florist. But when we got there the cyclamens were on display outside and decidedly limp from the drizzle. It is the tiniest shop but she has one or two gifts inside and I spotted just the thing, these tiny mice. I bought an extra one while I was there to keep in the present box. I know my friend will love it as it is the sort of thing she would gift to me.

I delivered it to her doorstep and declined to go inside – so as not to spread my germs.

Of course just lying down not being able to participate in real life for a few days left time for thinking and daydreaming….. and thinking and daydreaming of organising and running our home. Some readers will know that I am very much a fan of Lean and using Lean methods to run my house. It is a system developed by Toyota in Japan many moons ago, and in my mind there are many good things practiced by the Japanese and Lean is one of them. It is a system I used at work with my team to good effect, but it works just as well for running an efficient home.

There are many strands to the whole concept. I will briefly explain:

Streaming, the idea that everything is progressed as a stream that is followed through from beginning to end – cooking, laundry, shopping;

Kaizen or continuous improvement where you look for ways to be more efficient and create solutions to any problem areas;

Muda, meaning waste and this encompasses anything from money, time or ingredients and especially the environment. Reducing this waste is particularly beneficial;

Seiri and 5S; Sort, set in order, shine or clean, standardise and sustain. This speaks for itself – wouldn’t we all love a home that ran itself efficiently by just following a few simple rules;

And lastly, you manage all this with the help of a simple Kanban board a home’s central dashboard if you like.

It is a while since I have really used these principles and I am eager to get back to streaming the management of our home again. Last year and 2024 were ususual years for us with a lot of coming and going with plenty of house selling and buying within the family and, as is quite the case, things move on and my systems and streams need an overhaul.

I have a few more areas of our finances to improve on and streamline before I move onto this months topic – our diet. You cannot have missed the number of TV programs, magazine articles and books all talking about the disadvantages of eating ultra-processed foods and the many advantages of eating well. It is something I researched last year and also signed up to the Zoe programme, started a few years ago by Tim Spector (who is also running the TV programme What Not to Eat). So no doubt I might have a few posts talking about my health journey.

But that is another day another post.

Have a good week everyone, back soon x

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treasury ~ miss moneythrift

I hadn’t intended to have a blog break, but I have been busy and haven’t really wanted to stop the momentum by blogging about it. So the days have been a flurry of activity, but the long, cold evenings have been a welcome rest and snuggled under my throw I have taken to watching Bleak House and marvelling at Charles Dickens, such a wonderful story teller, inspired by real life, and in particular the names he gives to his characters – Guppy of Kenge and Carboy (you couldn’t make it up so well as Dickens did), Miss Flite, Lady Dedlock, Krook and Smallweed; all their names suit their characters.

So at present, I am thinking of myself as Miss Moneythrift as it is that time of year to overhaul the financial situation here.

Many moons ago, I decided to plan each month of the year around one aspect of my life and it went something like this – January Finances, February Health and so on…. as I remember it worked very well for the first few months but fizzled out towards the second half of the year, but the more important things were covered. A whole year is a lot to plan for at once so, after a lot of thought recently, I decided I would split the year into 4 quarters so that my plans only stretch to cover the first 3 months and I would combine this with focussing on one aspect.

The first being finances.

I have at last documented all the receipts for December that didn’t get done before Christmas, balanced the statements and paid any outstanding bills – there are few of those now as most things are on direct debit. Thankfully, I am left with a healthy balance and as the advice of Mr Micawber in Dickens David Copperfield – “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [shillings] and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”.

Once all the savings interest is updated I shall be able to run the year end reports that will tell me exactly where we spent our money and what our passive income is. I can then adjust our budget for this year, although I will probably break some of this down into 3 month periods too.

I can already see that we managed to get through Christmas without breaking the bank, but…and there is always a but, this is a heavy month for us with the cars – insurance, car tax, MOT and servicing all to be done in January. To cope with this I save a little towards it each month in our bill account throughout the previous year.

As January is also a long month for the housekeeping money I have been grocery shopping at home (rather than going for our weekly shop at the supermarket). The pantry is well stocked since before Christmas with dry, canned and packet foods, so a plentiful supply of ready cooked lentils and beans, coconut cream, passata, pasta and the like. We have been using these up together with the vegetables in the fridge. The freezer is also well stocked with bread and rolls to last us until our next shop so all we had to do this past week, to keep us going, was buy a few extra veg and some fruit for breakfast.

We were snowed in on Friday and had a treacherous walk to the village for milk, potatoes, carrots, broccoli and a courgette to top up. I also bought 2 bananas and a pack of raspberries – altogether it came to just under £10 but it will keep us going until Tuesday, our usual shopping day, and it means we have saved around £80 this week already.

As readers may know, we have for a long time always bought organic food and although it is much more expensive, we still prefer to do this and save money in other places.

There have been a few programs on TV last week about the food we eat. One of them comparing how much of our income is spent of food now to in the 70’s. I was quite shocked to find it is substantially less. In the seventies it would be on average 30% of our income and now only around 11%, this isn’t a reflection on the price of food either but the choice of food – low quality, highly and ultra processed with cheap ingredients, or even no recognisable ingredients like in Pot Noodles and strawberry smoothie.

I decided a long time ago that I would only buy quality food, those that have the least processing and without lethal preservatives or pesticides and grown in naturally fertilised soil – it made sense to me as it is something we are eating 3 or more times a day and should be a pleasureable part of life. So if you were reading my blog for any frugal tips around food, then it will not be about skimping on quality.

Where I do save money is by only buying groceries when on offer and stocking up with them if the dates are suitable. If there are vegetables on offer we buy extra and make soup and stews and alter the weekly menu to suit. We minimise waste by cooking only what we can eat to ensure an empty plate and keeping any of the tougher parts of a vegetable, like broccoli stalks, to add to the soups we make, so nothing is wasted.

In and amongst the adding up and balancing bank statements I have been doing a bit of house clearing whilst it has been too cold to go for any long walks, and now there is a nice little pile to leave our house – bags for the charity shop, recycle and a few items to return to friends and daughters.

I spent a whole day in our craft room cum office sorting out paper. It mounts up quickly and every so often I need to tame the pile. I think this year I have not used very many of the craft papers for cards, but aquirred more from somewhere (though I think it breeds secretly when I am in bed!). I really need to get down to some crafting and sewing, but I know it will not be this week as we have mum’s celebration party next weekend and Master Freddie’s party the weekend after. There is also the cost of mum’s celebration to take into account as well as two major presents….could be bread and jam for the rest of the month!!

Inbetween, we have hair and dental appointments (more expense) and the car is booked in today for the MOT and service…and of course it is the bigger of the two services (they alternate yearly) this year, which is always an extra £100 on top – lets hope they don’t find any fault to remedy as well.

I will leave you now as I continue my hunt for a suitable birthday card with 100 on it.

Have a good week,

Back soon x

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treasury >> financial times part 1

There is always a lot of sorting out and straightening out to do after the Christmas festivities are over and one of those is going through last year’s spending and planning this year’s budget. I expect most people are feeling the pinch now and tightening their belts and here in our little abode we are doing just that. For those that don’t know both myself and DH are living on getting by on the state pension and a modest private pension. Like many bloggers we find our income stretched to the limit at times and are always looking to put cost saving measures in place – some more successfully than others.

I haven’t done a financial tally post for ages – in fact looking at my spending over the year I think Mr Frugal has occasionally sneaked out the back door here. That is not to say I haven’t been careful with the spending.

Almost everything I buy now I wait until it is on offer unless I am desperate for something. This collection is a few of the items I found reduced this week.

All last year I collected Nectar points which then went towards my big Christmas shop which came to £100 and I still have £60 in value left to spend – I will use this on groceries towards the end of January as the monthly allowance runs down. I used any money off coupons that came my way and continually searched out discounts and reductions from any shop on products that I normally bought. I used the Sainsbury’s Scanshop on both our Nectar cards for the offers which are more tailored to what we usually buy and have big reductions (even though I hate the scanshopping, DH does that bit for me) – but for all that we have still had some large food bills due to the extreme rise in prices.

Ever since I married in 1976 I have documented our spending and made plans for the year ahead – I used to have a good old paper accounts book but in 2002 switched to using the online Microsoft Money program that I installed on my laptop. Every receipt each week is entered and categorised and then I can run off any number of reports which then help me to plan and budget for the coming year.

These reports give a frighteningly accurate picture, that require nerves of steel to read but are so enlightening and help me to see in what areas I need to reduce my spending. Of course some of our bills are fixed like the council tax and TV license and we always look at our suppliers prices for insurances, telephone and broadband to get a good deal on renewal but some things like water, gas and electricity we just need to use less of. I find it is the other day to day spending that we buy in dribs and drabs and the impulse buys that so often run away with the pennies. This is just a few of my observations:-

I dabble in crafty items as time allows but it is often the case that in my mind I think I have spent very little on some things like craft items – but my report says differently and although I had limited visits to places like Hobbycraft or fabric and wool shops because I have concentrated on using up a lot of old craft items I have amassed over the years it was a shock when the total figure for this category came to a staggering £240 Ouch!!

Analysing further I found I had managed to spend, without realising, a whopping £51 just on card blanks to make my own cards. I did pick a lot up in a garden centre in Northallerton when they had a closing down sale in their craft department – they were the lovely coloured and pearlised ones I like to use…and I have bought quite a few of the more expensive trifold aperture ones which are good for dried flowers. In my defence, given that many birthday cards are £2 and £3 each to buy I will soon recover the outlay by making my own.

I was pleased to see I had managed to curtail my spending on magazines which came to £56.14 for the year, although this does not include the subscription to Country Living magazine that DH renews for my Christmas present each year. For the £56 I bought the special edition of Country Life with Kate’s lovely photograph on the cover of the new Queen Consort Camilla, the May edition of Gardener’s World to get the 2 for 1 entry ticket to certain gardens and free seeds, two Christmas magazines, three Country Homes to read at the cottage and the Good Housekeeping Garden Collection (one of their specials) for a little inspiration.

I didn’t do as well with the stationery though as the total was much higher than expected ….often these are bits and pieces that I pick up whilst in Sainsbury’s or passing Rymans – a pen refill here and a roll of sellotape there but they add up alarmingly over the year and in my case the alarm was £77. The most expensive items were the sheets of blank address labels for the printer @ £9.99 and some plastic CD disc envelopes that I find useful to store all sorts of things in other than CD discs. It used to be that The Works sold a lot of basic stationery but like WH Smiths they seem to have switched more towards the novelty stationery and children’s crafts.

The garden was another high total, mainly because we had to have the large, unsafe cherry tree taken down and the stump removed and then improve the remaining hole in the ground with a few bags of manure and top soil.

We bought more bags of compost than I remember doing for sowing seeds and refilling planters – they are not cheap. We do make our own but still need to buy some in. I do intend to reduce the number of planters and pots in the garden next year; they don’t do well when it is hot and need far too much water than our two rain butts can supply in those heatwaves.

An area I will have to think carefully about is the increasing costs of sending Christmas cards – I usually make the cards but the postage this year for mainly 2nd class stamps and one parcel of £3.35 came to the hefty total of £49 and this allows for the fact I bought most of the stamps before the price increase. I do like to keep in touch with a Christmas card to family and friends that we do not get to see but maybe I will have to think again. I no longer send cards out to family in Australia but use email to send a newsletter instead so maybe this would be an option next year.

I make a lot of things for Christmas – my own cake, the cards, the crackers (with a bit of help from the children of course) and little gifts for each of my closest friends but my Christmas bill is slowly on the rise. Our family take part in a Not so Secret Santa where each adult spends £25 on the person they are buying for, and who provides a wish list of ideas and saves much tramping around crowded shops trying to think of things to buy for people that have a lot of stuff anyway. We buy for all the children in the wider family as normal and also make up a little stocking of bits and pieces for our two daughters and give them a substantial cheque to put towards something they need or even save it if they wish. With deaths, divorce, relocation and births our family has undergone changes over the last few years so that the balance is definitely weighted on the younger end with many more children now than we had a few years ago so our Christmas bill is definitely increasing.

There are many areas of my life where I can cut down on buying things and in turn spending less on unnecessary things I don’t need (easier said than done in my case) as well as trying to be sustainably responsible. Clothing is one of these.

I decided last year that I definitely did not need any more clothes, in fact, like my well edited linen cupboard, I embraced the idea of having a capsule wardrobe of fewer pieces that had a timeless quality, but I was a long way off this and of course there seemed little point in getting rid of a whole lot of my clothes if instead I could be wearing them. So this past year I have ‘worn my wardrobe’ and only bought three new tops, one for my holidays in the Sainsbury’s sale section for £7 which I lived in most of the summer as it was so comfy, one evening style top for a party also from Sainsbury’s for £12.00 and the other for the New Year’s Eve get together with the same friends and the dearest item at £30.

This year I will continue to wear out my wardrobe and only buy real necessities like some new boots (mine have sprung a leak) and underwear.

Having thought a lot about money since we both stopped earning a few years ago I have come to the conclusion that the best way to be frugal is not to buy anything in the first place. This has a double advantage as it means there is no decluttering to do a few years down the line either. As one of the great minimalists said in his book ‘not buying something is your future self letting go of something’. Perfect sustainability.

So taking note of where the money went last year I will set about creating a budget and challenging myself to spend less on those problem areas that could save me a few pounds that I could be putting into the savings pot. I will come back to this in another post with some of the ideas I want to put in place to have a year of spending less….much less.

Today my little car is booked in for the annual service and MOT and whilst over that side of town we will go and have our last two free drinks at Dobbies garden centre and pick up a pack of seed potatoes.

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dear diary >> a productive day

I love those days when a few insignificant jobs are ticked off the list that provide some quite significant improvements. Yesterday was one of those days.

I spent an hour in the pantry putting things straight and filling up containers. I only found the bread flour and a pot of Thai curry paste to be near to its best before date so I will search out one or two recipes to use these up. I haven’t made Thai curry before and when I bought the paste pot it seemed easier than buying all the special ingredients that make it Thai.

The breakdown truck came mid morning and recovered the car to the garage whilst we followed on behind. The initial report from the nice garage man was that the escaping fluid is a leak from something that has worn through (I am so impressed Mary by your knowledge of cars) and the part required to fix it is relatively cheap, thank goodness, but we will have to wait a few days for him to get one (as they are imported) before the car can be made better, but at least it is now being dealt with.

Once back home DH pruned the berberis in the front garden, a bit of a spikey job, mended my little green birdhouse (which is only decorative) and put up the two pottery holders, grow and fresh, in the greenhouse that I found sorting out the garage. They are just the right size to keep bits and bobs in them.

Our afternoon walk took us round by the village so we could drop off the soft plastic bags for recycling at the Co-op. We have just gained a lovely little gift shop in the village called Nest. They have some delightful inexpensive gifts and cards and today I noticed the empty shop by the old post office has now opened as a hardware shop – I do wish them both luck – our village could do with a few shops that are not just charity shops, beauty parlours or dog grooming. We once had the most wonderful green grocers (in fact there were two) but they were forced to close when Safeways (now Morrisons) built a supermarket on the old railway station.

I did manage to put away more bits and pieces from the holiday and sorted the washing after which I needed a bit of time lying flat to ease my back so I watched the final episode of Downton. I do love to have a potter around the house once in a while especially after we have been away and there is no real urgency to get anything done, though I am on a bit of a mission to give it more attention than it has received in the last few months so it feels more loved and cared for.

I made the Courgette bake, but didn’t quite get round to mixing up a batch of pastry – that will have to be another day or maybe even today. I have to wait for the remaining courgettes in the garden to grow a little bigger before I can make the Veg lasagne (our Co-op doesn’t have anything quite as exotic as courgettes yet!), so nut roast is the next meal on the menu plan and maybe this time I will get those pastry cases made.

Today it will be a toss up between going in the garden or looking through the paperwork pile – I know which I would rather do, but maybe sorting out the finances is more important. Scottish Power have sent me an email to tell me about the £400 fuel rebate and we have just applied to the council for our £150. We will need to put this aside to pay for our fuel bills during the colder months – maybe I will buy a couple of very thick jumpers with some of it. DH is looking to add to the insulation in the loft – I always think it is so full of ‘stuff’ up there that more insulation is probably not required!

On a different note did anyone see the program about Woodstock the Festival on Sky Arts on Tuesday night? It took place in America in the summer of 1969 – I was a mere 15 year old teenager with long flowing skirts to match my long flowing hair and I had just bought my first Leonard Cohen album , Songs of Leonard Cohen and becoming very much a part of the flower power generation. We once knew someone who had actually been to the festival and like a lot of our friends we have the Woodstock album – it was an historic moment back then. A few things struck me watching the video movies that had been collated to make this documentary, firstly, the majority of the young people were so noticeably slim and the lads wandering around without t-shirts were very well toned despite the fact that there were no fitness gyms in those days, and secondly, the girls seemed so naturally pretty without any make up, false eyelashes, fake tans or lip and boob enhancements and such a marked lack of tattoos and piercings. Whatever happened to those carefree days of a generation that believed in people and preserving the environment – how did all that love and peace give way to the years that followed of Thatcher’s greed and capitalism?

We are certainly paying the price now as big business giants rake in excessive profits and council leaders are paid huge salaries whilst care for the elderly in their boroughs are cut to the bone and they have growing numbers of homeless people on our littered streets. Kate Josephs, leader of Sheffield council, has recently been reinstated in her job after being under investigation – she has a salary of around £200,000 and was paid more than £60,000 to stay at home until it was concluded. Just what does she do for this amount of money I wonder?

Meanwhile, I spend most of my days trying to think of ways to save a few pennies to eek out the meagre pension pot I spent a lifetime working for.