We're on a roll......
These past few weeks has seen us sorting out our finance, but we've also started to get rid of all the clutter in the house. I love, love, love this. I am super untidy and Mr H is a massive hoarder so I'll leave the state of our house to your imagination! Having less stuff in the house though certainly helps me - apart from the obvious that there's less to keep tidy, it's also that sense of calm that comes from having less stuff around. We've done this in a number of ways and we're still going!
After watching this TED talk I was inspired to get up the next day and spend half an hour clearing out 3 huge bags of stuff from the bedroom that I hadn't touched since we moved into our place a year ago. Without a word of encouragement* Mr H joined in and filled a few more bags and loaded the car up and off we went to the charity shop and the recycling center. It felt great. We'd actually achieved something. I hate they way us humans feel the need to have so much stuff. I think we could easily get rid of half the stuff in our house and still be just as happy, if not happier.
The other thing that has helped massively is Mr H decided to sell some of his 'might be worth a bit in the future' toys that were filling the loft and that made a few pennies on ebay. If you struggle with this type of thing try and get a family member or friend to help you. Maybe you can offer to help with something that they're not so good at in exchange for them selling some of your things that you no longer want.
Its all a process
Whilst this is just the beginning of the process I feel really positive about what we've been doing. Some of you guys are probably doing bigger and better things but I'm happy with where we're at. I've tried to tackle our clutter before but always felt so overwhelmed that I've let it slip very quickly, or in some cases not even known where to start. Little and often is the key. Don't see these things as huge jobs that need doing right away, see them as a process of changing the way you do things. Break each task down into small manageable tasks and only when you've achieved one do you go on to the next.
I'd love to hear if any of you are de-cluttering? How do you tackle big overwhelming tasks?
Claire x
(*come on guys we all know I mean nagging)
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 August 2015
Sunday, 23 August 2015
Taking control of your finances
Money, money, money
If you're anything like me you won't be the best with money. I've tried time and time again to 'be good' when it comes to controlling my spending and to try and get something into savings. Having started a job in the debt advice sector it's made me really analyse our spending habits as a family and basically has been a huge wake up call about how bad we are with money. Not only did we have no savings we'd also been overspending each month and piling it on credit cards. So after a mooch around the net and stumbling across Mr Money Mustache (seriously love this guy!) I'd found my latest obsession - sorting out our money situation.
So we've gone all guns blazing on trying to pay off this debt we've got hanging around like a bad smell. Looking at our spending habits over a couple of months was a SHOCKER! I recommend you all go do this (but be prepared to be horrified!). We certainly were when we realised aside from our mortgage our biggest outgoing was on food and eating out, spending a few hundred pounds each month on restaurants and coffee. Ouch. The easiest way I found to do this was to split our spending into main headings such as food, transport, eating out, clothes.... and working through our bank statements total up the spending for each category.
Time for a kick up the bum
The first logical step was to start out by doing a budget that included all the essentials that we have to pay for:
Essentials:
Mortgage
Building & contents insurance
Landline & internet
Food
Mobile phones
Pet insurance
TV licence
Council tax
Car insurance
Fuel
Car Insurance
Mr H's car HP - this ones a bummer, it's not something I wanted him to get in the first place but he's tied into it now so we just got to suck it up and pay it
Little H's sports clubs - most of these double us a childcare now that I'm working
Then we added in a couple of things that although we're essential, we really didn;t want to get rid of completely:
Non essential:
£50 a month allowance for social/entertainment costs
Little H's pocket money - he has to do jobs for this and only gets it on the agreement he puts half into his savings account
Clothing - we haven't set an amount for this but realistically things need replacing now and again like little H needing new school shoes this month. All non essential clothing costs have gone though, we're making do with what we have.
Next up I opened us a joint bank account that we have all our bills going out of and then use a 0% cashback credit card to do all the food shopping which we then pay off in full on payday.
So on pay day I transfer most of our wages from our accounts into the joint account. The only money we leave in our single accounts is fuel money Mr H, and a little in my account to cover pocket money and sports clubs. Anything left over after this goes on paying the debts off and some goes into our savings account for things we know we have coming up like birthdays, Christmas, & school trips.
Our first steps to being debt free
It's been a couple of months and so far things are going great. We've paid off nearly £3,000 in debt and saved just over £1,000 (this may seem strange but we're off to New York next month as we'd already booked and paid for it before deciding to go on a spending freeze).
At this rate we're hoping to be debt free in the next 6-8 months and then we can really ramp up the saving. I'll keep you posted.
Are you good with money or do you find it hard to control your spending?
Claire x
If you're anything like me you won't be the best with money. I've tried time and time again to 'be good' when it comes to controlling my spending and to try and get something into savings. Having started a job in the debt advice sector it's made me really analyse our spending habits as a family and basically has been a huge wake up call about how bad we are with money. Not only did we have no savings we'd also been overspending each month and piling it on credit cards. So after a mooch around the net and stumbling across Mr Money Mustache (seriously love this guy!) I'd found my latest obsession - sorting out our money situation.
So we've gone all guns blazing on trying to pay off this debt we've got hanging around like a bad smell. Looking at our spending habits over a couple of months was a SHOCKER! I recommend you all go do this (but be prepared to be horrified!). We certainly were when we realised aside from our mortgage our biggest outgoing was on food and eating out, spending a few hundred pounds each month on restaurants and coffee. Ouch. The easiest way I found to do this was to split our spending into main headings such as food, transport, eating out, clothes.... and working through our bank statements total up the spending for each category.
Time for a kick up the bum
The first logical step was to start out by doing a budget that included all the essentials that we have to pay for:
Essentials:
Mortgage
Building & contents insurance
Landline & internet
Food
Mobile phones
Pet insurance
TV licence
Council tax
Car insurance
Fuel
Car Insurance
Mr H's car HP - this ones a bummer, it's not something I wanted him to get in the first place but he's tied into it now so we just got to suck it up and pay it
Little H's sports clubs - most of these double us a childcare now that I'm working
Then we added in a couple of things that although we're essential, we really didn;t want to get rid of completely:
Non essential:
£50 a month allowance for social/entertainment costs
Little H's pocket money - he has to do jobs for this and only gets it on the agreement he puts half into his savings account
Clothing - we haven't set an amount for this but realistically things need replacing now and again like little H needing new school shoes this month. All non essential clothing costs have gone though, we're making do with what we have.
Next up I opened us a joint bank account that we have all our bills going out of and then use a 0% cashback credit card to do all the food shopping which we then pay off in full on payday.
So on pay day I transfer most of our wages from our accounts into the joint account. The only money we leave in our single accounts is fuel money Mr H, and a little in my account to cover pocket money and sports clubs. Anything left over after this goes on paying the debts off and some goes into our savings account for things we know we have coming up like birthdays, Christmas, & school trips.
Our first steps to being debt free
It's been a couple of months and so far things are going great. We've paid off nearly £3,000 in debt and saved just over £1,000 (this may seem strange but we're off to New York next month as we'd already booked and paid for it before deciding to go on a spending freeze).
At this rate we're hoping to be debt free in the next 6-8 months and then we can really ramp up the saving. I'll keep you posted.
Are you good with money or do you find it hard to control your spending?
Claire x
Sunday, 14 December 2014
Magical family time at Chester Zoo's Lantern Magic
We spent so many weekends visiting the animals and having picnics there that when our subscription ran out a few months back and we didn't have the spare cash to renew (boo to the cost of buying a house in the UK!) we've kinda been having withdrawal symptoms from the place.
Each Christmas we usually treat ourselves to a family outing so when we saw that the zoo was holding 'Latern Magic' we booked our tickets right away and we're so glad we did.
All of the kids got to 'make' their own lantern (pour some sand in a paper cup and stick some stickers on it) which even at the age of 10 our little man enjoyed.
The big kids got given a big lantern on a stick to carry around. It was really cool seeing all the different colours all lit up in the dark bobbing around the zoo.
This was right before we went into the bat cave. Whilst most of the animals were tucked away all snug in their beds the bat cave was kept open (which we were excited about as it's one of our favourite bits of the zoo). They'd just been fed them so they were going pretty crazy in there. By the time we came out it was pretty dark and a whole lot colder.
We all got given these awesome glasses that looked like those paper 3D glasses you get but instead they turned all the lights into bats! I love bats!
Right before we got to see the main man we followed a trail of animal lanterns. This is only a small selection of what was there as my camera just wasn't playing ball with the low light.
There was an elf flying this guy around so I'm pretty pleased to have got this picture!
We had an amazing time and it was a new experience to have my photo taken with Santa listening to a lion roaring only a few feet away! On the way round we were given hot chocolate and we paid extra when we booked the tickets to get the hot supper (we found you could also just buy this on the night). There were a few options to choose from but we went for the pork and stuffing bap which was pretty darn tasty and it was as big as my face!
All in all this was money well spent and I'd highly recommend it if you have kids and live locally. The little man said it was epic and I'm so grateful to make some more amazing Christmas memories with my boys.
xxx
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)