Living the (non) simple life

Well, just because I don't like a simple life, I'm going to the party in London, and will then be attempting the epic marathon of a 10 hour (minimum) drive up North with a hangover on Sunday. Nice.

I'm also in the extreme last stages (think dying fish, gasping it's last) of poverty, given that I don't get paid til Monday, and I tells ya, it's a massive pain in the ass.

Given that it's now Thursday, and I'm meant to be leaving Saturday, I'm guessing you'll be not at all surprised that I have in no way, shape or form, started the packing yet! Haven't even started the washing. Nothing like good ol' procrastination, leaving it all til the last moment!

I'm also probably going to get in to trouble on Sat, as in theory the party is a jungle theme, but given time, money, and pride constraints I'm opting to not go full on dressed up, and to instead actually attempt to look sex-ay. Mostly because I know from previous experience that there are bound to be quite a few good-looking men at the party. Me? Shallow? Like a puddle.

So in between then and now, I shall be washing, making lists, throwing stuff around my room in an attempt to find shit, packing, unpacking because I've got too much shit in my bag, unpacking again because I can't remember whether I already put x in, and just generally having a massive panic right up til the last minute. I effing hate packing, hence the delaying tactics!

Also, to be quite honest, my bedroom is the biggest pigsty you've ever seen. Perhaps I should post a photo, to shame myself into action to tidy it??

I haven't been up to much this week, apart from going to the gym, and being lured out on a spontaneous pub visit last with Bridget and the boys, but somehow that's left me with very little time left over. Which would probably explain the state of my room, since I'm usually in and out just to get a change of clothes and then shoot off out again.

Watch this space to see how much chaos unfolds in my attempts to get ready for holiday! :o)

Limping along

I'm still here - just somewhat in pain, after I popped my back out again on Sunday afternoon. The legacy of an old horse-riding injury, made worse during a snowboarding fall in January, I'm completely bummed that this has happened as I'd been thinking that between doing so much exercise and all the physio treatment and losing weight, it wouldn't happen again. Or at least it wouldn't happen with no cause, which is what did happen this time.

It seems to have improved quicker than it would usually, but I'm still really stiff, especially after any time spent just sitting still. Once I get up and move around, it quickly loosens up, but the first minute or 2 are horrible as I can barely stand straight. I'm gutted really, as the weather's gone nice again and I can't get out and run, or even walk. I'm going to head to spinning tomorrow night though and take it real easy and hope that that might help me a little bit.

Other than that, I had a gloriously lazy, sunny weekend at home this week. I didn't arrange anything social, I went to bed early because I was knackered, I finally got a chance to catch up on all the stupid domestic stuff that gets left on one side normally, and I found a couple of things whose disappearance has really been stressing me out (my cheque book being one of them!). All the tidying and pottering was pretty cathartic, and I just felt a lot more centred by the end of the weekend.

Not being able to move around much at the moment means I'm also finally taking some chill out time to just sit back and watch some of my stock-piled, recorded tv too. Finally got round to starting Dirty Sexy Money (so funny) and 90210 (so trashy!), and then just been getting early nights, so at least I'm feeling rested at the moment.

Got a bit of a crunch time, financially speaking, coming up over the next couple of months. It's time I paid for the laptop I bought on interest-free credit 6 months ago, and what a surprise that I never got around to putting aside as much money for it as I said I would. Still, I can just about manage it, but I'm back to zero savings. What with holidays coming up that need to be paid for (Croatia), I'm going to have to be careful to try and replenish my savings a bit - one step forward, two steps back. Again.

Looks like I'll be spending a few more nice cheap weekends at home chilling then!

Money worries

I have rising feelings of panic at the moment - I've just been doing one of my weekly catch ups on the expenditure and bank balances, and it's not a pretty picture. I'd be ok for this month if it weren't for the fact that I'm going away to Norway for 5 days on Thursday, which is certainly not going to be the cheapest of trips, and I'm already slightly over my budget for the month, even before I've paid for that. That in turn means that any surplus at the end of the month to make extra repayments to my credit cards is shot.

In addition to that, my credit card took a hit yesterday as I did a run to Snow and Rock to get kit - partly for the Norway trip (a new waterproof) and partly for my running and biking (new water bottle, bike shorts, helmet and spare inner tubes / puncture patches). None of that is absolutely, strictly, 100% essential in the most puritan of terms, although it will all be well used, and is stuff I've been umming and ahhhing over getting for a while now, but I'm still suffering the inevitable feelings of guily and "did I really need that?" now.

I just feel a bit like I'm slowing slipping deeper when I'm meant to be trying to crawl out of this. Aside from yesterday's kit shop, my general spending has been getting a bit better, but I'm realising now the cost of my constant socialising, and weekend's away - even when I'm not drinking particularly. My petrol bill's getting fairly hammered, there's been a fair few meals out to pay for recently and it's the odds and ends of cash that seem to add up to one huge amount and just disappear when you're not looking.

Looking ahead in my diary, it doesn't seem to get any better. I'm grateful that I have so many friends who invite me to so much stuff, but I worry now that it's more than I can afford. I might need to think seriously about some social curtailment to save myself whilst I'm still just about afloat. I barely have a weekend at home at the moment between now and the end of July.

Why I'm so rubbish at budgeting.

I'm feeling rather disappointed in myself today. I'd been doing so well on a budgeting front this month, and successfully more or less hauled myself back from imminent poverty as the end of the month loomed, to the prospect of actually finishing the month with a bit of a surplus to go towards the credit cards.

Alas, it all went wrong yesterday. I had a really bad reaction to my contact lenses on Sunday night, and since I had an ulcer on my cornea last year, I thought I'd better go to the opticians to get it checked out. Turns out I've got a tear almost exactly where I had the ulcer (but a new one, completely unrelated to last year's episode - weird but coincidental apparently), so I spent most of yesterday in and out of the opticians for various appointments whilst they sorted it. Which left me with quite a bit of spare time on my hands to wander round the shops.

I am truly the shopping equivalent of the dieter who's faced with the smorgasbord buffet, and no where else to eat. Completely unprepared, and therefore lacking in willpower, I went shopping. I bought items shampoo, razor blades and medicated eye-drops from Boots. That's fine - they're essentials and they'll be used. A necklace from Fat Face - just about justifiable as I bought it before, wore it to death and promptly lost it, so at least I know it'll be worn regularly. Shoes. Oh dear - me and shoes. First up, flat black pumps for the office - cost £30. Fine - I need them, I'll wear them and they could have been a lot more expensive as I wanted leather ones. And then a pair of wedge sandals. For £55. Why?? Because I liked them. Are they practical? Not entirely. Did I use the 10 Second Rule? Yes. Did I listen to myself. Errrr - I think that's a resoundingly big no. And do I feel horribly guilty now? YES.

Buying things you want is meant to bring pleasure, not guilt. I don't seem to have got the hang of this yet. So there goes my surplus for the month, and the only reason I haven't hit my overdraft limit is that I thoughtfully transferred £100 from savings last week as I wasn't sure how much the weekend was going to cost. I'm a foolish, foolish girl.

It's back to the drawing board. I get paid tomorrow, and I've already jotted down the big things I know I've got to deal with this month. The £100 has to go back to my savings. I've got a wedding present to pay for, and I know I've got the balance of the hostel for Oslo to pay for, as well as spending money for the trip and probably airport parking. Ideally, I'd also like to somehow absorb the cost of the shoe splurge into this month's budget - I know this is a bit futile, as it's already spent, but at least it makes me feel like I have a bit of control - if it's in this month's budget, that's £55 I can't spend again, and hopefully will be part of whatever surplus is left at the end of the month.

This month is going to be expensive, but I must get on top of my spending - feeling this out of control the whole time is horrible.

The 10 Second Rule

As I've mentioned before, I'm not the best at handling my personal finances. Simply put, my outgoings regularly exceed my income, which leaves me with some interesting cashflow issues at the end of the month. I live paycheck to paycheck, I have next to nothing in my savings account, and at the current count I probably have about £8.5k of debt, not including my car loan. I don't own my own house, and since I have no deposit have no hope of doing so in the next couple of years unless I either win or inherit money. It's a sorry tale for a girl who's a qualified accountant.

I hate being in this situation, having no safety net, and what I really crave is financial security. By that I mean, covering my bills in the month, having enough in the bank growing for the future, having a nest egg of savings for more immediate use, and having enough left over that I can go on the holidays I want and buy the pretty things when I fall in love with them.

I've been trying to scrabble out of this money pit for years, but somehow I just end up back where I started, or even deeper in the mire. I've still got my student overdraft but it ran out of it's interest free period a couple of years ago. I have 4 different credit cards. Well, technically I have 5, but one's empty and has been given to my friend for safe-keeping. 2 of the remaining 4 are just carrying balance transfers - 1 interest free at some long distant point, but never fully paid off, and 1 big one that's currently interest free for another 12 months or so. And 2 credit cards for day to day use with balances of a couple of hundred each.

On top of that I have a bank loan to pay for my car (my old one got destroyed in the floods a couple of years ago) which will still be going for another 18 months.

I have probably paid off those credit cards about 3 times over, with various windfalls of money, but each time they're emptied, they just climb right back to where they were. The only good news in this whole sorry tale is that my dad paid off the remainder of my student loan a couple of years ago, so at least that's one less burden.

I feel sick though when I look at the mess I've got myself in and the amount that I owe. Don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly able to cover the repayments I make, but I'm like a hamster stuck in its exercise wheel - whilst I'm running away on the treadmill of life, I'm not actually going forwards. Every time I make a plan to pay off the debt I get overwhelmed by how long it will take, even if I scrimp and save every last penny I have.

What makes me feel a bit sicker is that over the years my Dad has given me lump sums of money to help me out and I've just burned through them and they've gone. What a goddamn waste. And I look at what I spend it on - I am the ultimate consumer machine. I buy stuff I do not need, for a multitude of reasons but none of them the right ones. I've been losing weight recently, and as I weed out the clothes from my wardrobe that are now too big, I'm horrified at how many either still have the tags on them and have never been worn, or have only been worn once or twice. And my wardrobe is still full to bursting even though the pile on the floor is a couple of feet high.

In another example of wanton wastefulness, I bought a new laptop at Christmas. Why? Because my old computer was broken? Because it couldn't do something I needed it to? Not really. I persuaded myself that that was the case, but truthfully it's fine - a bit old, and a bit slow by current standards, but nothing worse than that. Yet another amazing waste of my money. And I bought in on 6 month interest free credit, which means I've got to pay for it sometime at the end of this month. Nearly £600 worth.

So here I am, wading through the bog of frivolous spending I created for myself, and no idea how to stop. I earn more than I've ever earned in my life and I'm still in a mess.

******

I stumbled across a website earlier in the week called The Simple Dollar. It's written by a guy, just an ordinary guy, who had a complete financial meltdown, and then dug himself out of it. He's not a financial expert (well not a qualified one as far as I know), but he's astute, intelligent and he looks at things a different way.

Reading his bio, I was frightened how close it sounded to my own - parents hard up during childhood, always just about scraping through, but being overly generous when the money did unexpectedly arise. An allowance that I didn't have to earn, although I was supposed to. And in my case, parents inherit some money just as I'm hitting adulthood - I get a new car handed to me on a platter, extra funding at uni, and every time I hit trouble and pluck up the courage to ask for help, a hand-out, usually a generous one, wings its away into my account.

On top of that, I've picked some massively unhealthy spending habits up since my teenage years. As a scholarship student at my rather expensive private secondary school, I've spent my teens being surrounded by friends who come from very wealthy families. So I quickly learned to camouflage the fact that my family don't have anything like that level of wealth.

I had a gap year where I worked, but spent everything I earned - revelling in the fact that for the first time ever I had a private income. My friends all went travelling, but I didn't because I was seemingly incapable of saving any money. I excused myself by saying that they all had savings given to them by their parents so they could afford to go, and it wasn't my fault I didn't have the money. Oh poor little me. The bank also gave me my first credit card, because I was working, and it's the start of the bad things to come.

Then I went to a uni notorious for the wealthy background of the average student. There was a running joke that it was 5 VW Golfs per student house, because all the students have nice cars. Yet again, I was surrounded by kids from more privileged backgrounds than me, and the pressure is on to keep up and conform - to never let on that you're different. By the time I left uni I'd run up over £3k on my credit card. I didn't even know how bad it was until the card got rejected one day in a shop because it was maxed, and I can still remember the heart-stopping feeling of panic when it happened. I'd also maxed my overdraft.

After uni I moved straight to London, and my snobby ways saw me taking flats I couldn't afford the rent on because I wanted nice surroundings. In the spend, spend, spend culture of London endless shopping trips and hedonistic nights out crushed my graduate salary and I got another credit card. Occasionally they'd get paid off by a bonus, but usually they just built up. My dad gave me two big lump sums in this time to help me set up in London, and then an ISA he'd set up in my name from the inheritance a couple of years previously. They were soon whittled to nothing.

After a couple of years, the charms of London faded and I came home. Although I took a big salary cut, I moved back into my Dad's and in theory my debts should have been paid back over the next year or so because my costs were so much lower. It worked for a bit, but I soon started spending all my salary every month, and then a bit more. Fast forward a couple of years and here I am - same old Sue. A little bit older and a little bit wearier, but still just as broke. I've moved jobs a couple of times since then, more than doubling my post-London salary, and I moved into a rented flat, but I'm still a disaster financially.

So back to The Simple Dollar. The author talks about how he looked at his spending and realised that none of it tied to his goals in life. As soon as he realised that and defined his goals, and then based his budget around them, his spending fell into line. So I followed his advice and defined the things that matter to me, and associated goals.

• Fun / Adventure - I want to travel and take the opportunities to do amazing things as they arise
• Family / Friends - I just want to nurture my relationships and enjoy the time I have with them
• Security - I explained that above - to be debt free, have savings, have enough money for the day to day, and own my house.
• Success - I want to be running my own business profitably and wake up in the morning excited about it.
• Health / happiness - I want to be fit and healthy, a decent weight that I feel comfortable about, happy with what I've achieved in life and not too stressed.

Nowhere in those goals does the spending of endless money on clothes, electronic gadgets, DVDs, books, stuff and other pointless things feature.

My spending doesn't make me particularly happy, unless it's on things like holidays and spending time having fun with friends, which I can't regret. The material stuff really doesn't matter so much though, and now I realise it never really has. Buying a ticket to go to the ball this weekend with my friends makes me happy, as will mountain-biking with them afterwards on Saturday - buying the new dress that's currently hanging on my wardrobe to wear hasn't, it's just made me feel guilty (it's going back by the way).

So here's the deal with the 10 Second Rule, now I've acknowledged these revelations. Whenever you buy something, stop and think for 10 seconds about whether you need this thing and how it fits into your goals. I can't count the number of times I ummmmed and ahhhed on the way to tills, not sure whether to splash and buy something. If I'd known to think about it terms of my goals, I wonder how many things I would never have bought. How much debt I'd have saved myself.

So over the next couple of months, I'm going to keep cash-tracking the way I have been, and I'm going to start using the 10 Second Rule. Let's see how much money I can save to put towards my debts next month, huh?

Money, money, money

I feel happier today, like the clouds have lifted. I don't know if it's the sunshine, the imminent long weekend, or just a bit of positive thinking, but life doesn't seem such a mountain to slog up today.

I was thinking about money last night, and how I always seem to end up in a mess with it, and I thought if I can use positive thinking to help with my weight loss and fitness regime, why can't I apply the same principles to my budgeting and get that debt sorted? And I think I can, I just need to approach it in the same logical way and have some patience, and not get discouraged when it takes a long time, or there's little set-backs.

The main thing to keep in mind is the end goal - when I'm debt-free I'll be able to seriously consider what I want to do with my career and my life, and take advantage of opportunities as they arise. So the first task is just to get to the end of this month in one piece. I don't know how I manage it, but all my money seems to disappear in the first week of the month, like I sit there and honestly think anything I spend that week won't make a difference. Well, I've worked out my budget for the rest of the month (in fact I did so a couple of days ago) and I know what I'm expecting to spend this weekend, so that's a start.

I'm looking forward to the theatre tonight - it's been ages since I've done something cultured, and it's one of my favourite Shakespeare plays - yay!! Hopefully, I'll have time to head out for a walk this afternoon before dinner, and B and I will meet her boyfriend Tim for a drink at the pub after the theatre as he'll have just arrived for the weekend. Might see who else is around and drag some other folks out too - I've been a bit of a social hermit this week so it's time to do some catching up.

I also must call my Dad for a catch-up - it's been nearly 2 weeks and that's far too long. We have a complicated relationship these days, which saddens me, but more on that another time.

Enjoy the sunshine!