Christmas cheer

I am still pretty behind with the present buying, wrapping and giving business.

I actually find Christmas pretty stressful, so I'll be glad when it's all over. I also just get the bank holidays off this year so that sucks.

I have a pretty strict budget of £300 and I've been doing a fairly good job of sticking to it.

I still have quite a few gifts left to get, but they should all be fairly cheap so hopefully my bank balance won't suffer too badly this year.

Hope everyone else is on track for a happy and peaceful day :)

Job security

I work for a large company and a lot of people in Business Improvement are basically being reshuffled and eventually some of them will be given redundancy or early retirement. This is just the start of it.

It made me think that my career aspirations to move up within the business may be misplaced. I want to move on to more challenging things but maybe I'm better off just sticking with being a low level employee. We have so much more job security in comparison. The higher up you go the more exposed you are.

Who knows what will happen...

Loan Overpayment and Isa Tracker

It's time for another quick end-of-month update:

Loan overpayment: £21.00
Total OPs made to date: £71.00
Months left until loan is cleared aprox: 22

I will continue to overpay a minimum of £ 20.00 and keep chipping away at it.

In other news, as of tomorrow I will have £2880 in my Isa, and I'm still on target for my 3k goal by April. I'm pretty sure I'll achieve this by March but we'll see.

Drinking shame

I went out with a friend during the week for a belated birthday drink, which turned into an obscene amount of cocktails. On a school night. Oh the shame!

So I had a sobre head on me at last weekend's Halloween party, which wasn't actually too bad. It meant we at least had the freedom to leave when we wanted. But there was no way I was risking having another hangover in the space of three days.

Hangovers are no fun, I'm seriously considering giving it up. Maybe not forever, but who knows.

Pensions

I finally increased my pension payments by 2% today.

This has been in the pipeline for months and now it's finally happened.

I knew in advance I'd get a pay rise in October, which is why I decided months ago to use some of this extra cash for my pension. I now pay a grand total of 18% of my salary into a pension, which includes my employer's contributions of 9%.

The overall plan is to pay a total of 25%, which I hope to achieve by May 2016. This isn't a figure I plucked out of thin air, I've done a lot of research to try and figure out how much I'd need to save up for the kind of retirement I want, and 25% appears to be the magic number for me. It is something that I will reassess every so often though, so the final amount may change. I also have other ideas up my sleeve, but that's for another time.

And now my dilemma. My pay rise is actually a lot more than what I thought I'd get (7% as opposed to 5%), and so I had initially planned to increase my pension by only 2%. Now that I'll have more spare cash than initially thought, I could increase the payments further or use the extra cash for other things, e.g. overpaying my loan, but looking at the long term it may not be the best option for me.

I will probably wait until Christmas/January  are over and revisit this then.

In the meantime, I am very pleased with having finally achieved my goal of 9%!

Sober weekend

A few of us went to a friend's leaving party on Saturday night (he got a job in a different country and is leaving next week).

I was the designated driver (it's ok, I volunteered. Honest) so I was the clear-minded witness to everyone's journey across the blurry line from tipsy and jolly to completely and utterly hammered.

Video evidence was also gathered.

Mwahahahaha!!!

I surprised myself as I honestly didn't miss drinking at all, despite everyone around me turning into a caricature of themselves and occasionally flashing the odd butt cheek at everyone. It was actually quite entertaining and it was especially nice to wake up this morning hangover-free and fairly fresh-faced. [Who am I trying to kid here? I am never fresh-faced.]

The night was bittersweet as moods were high but so were our emotions. It's sad when a friend leaves the country for work... who knows if this will be a permanent move for him.

Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves though, and whilst a few tears and an excessive amount of hugs were shared, we were all happy to be part of such a good evening.

As a way of explaining how everyone got so drunk, here's a photo from the night.

Date night

My husband and I have never really had a set date night, or indeed made a point of regularly having one every week.

But now, still basking in the afterglow of  honeymoon fever, we decided we really should make an effort to do something nice together more often.

Tonight we went out for dinner at a local restaurant, the service was awful but the food was great. Mr Geek in Progress has a very short fuse for poor customer service so we'll not be going back in a hurry, that's for sure. 

Regardless, the company was good (lol) and so was the food, so  here's to all the newlyweds out there, and all the couples out there that love each other. Cheers!

[This was my attempt at an artsy photo. Did it work? Don't answer that... The truth hurts!]

Emergency funds

I'm going to have a tracker and update it every few months. Here is how things stand as of 01/11/2013.

My emergency fund wishlist (one-offs, in no particular order):

1) Three months' worth of expenses: 2830/£3000 (on track, I want this completed by April 2014).

2) Electrical equipment, i.e.:
- Fridge;
- Washing machine;
- Vacuum;
- Microwave/kettle/smaller items;
Total: 160/£2000

3) Car:
- Car repairs = 520/£1000
- New car fund = 10/£5000 (not saving anything substantial until car loan is paid off).

4) Non-essential equipment, i.e.:
- TV;
- Laptop;
- Tablet;
- Playstation, other frivolities;
Total: 0/2000 (this isn't a priority at the moment).

5) Wiggle room: 120/200 [→ NOTE: this section exists to give us "breathing room" if we ever under budget for something. Hopefully we'll never need it but I like having an extra-cushion for short-term things. ].

There are other short-to-mid-term things I'm currently saving up for, but I think the above are the main ones. I may add more as I go along.

Thanks for reading :)

Saturn

I never tire of photos of Saturn.

Check out @TitanSaturnMoon's tweet.

I'm using my mobile so I can only copy the image as a screen shot (see my phone's battery is about to die :) )

Voluntary euthanasia - Belgium

I came across this article earlier this week.

I know it's a controversial topic and I like to see myself very open-minded, but this article made me think twice about my ideals.

I am pro-euthanasia. If you're terminally ill, or suffer from a degenerative disease, I believe you have the right to end your life if that is what you categorically wish to do.

It goes without saying that there need to be stringent tests, assessments and whatever other measures are available to make sure the person in question is making an informed choice, and has thought long and hard about making such a final decision.

I was however shocked to read the following article:

Belgian transsexual helped to die

The article doesn't go into much depth, but I can't believe this person was allowed to be euthanised on the grounds of (presumably) depression due to the way he looked.

I cannot imagine what it's like to be born transsexual and I have no idea what hardships he faced. I am trying really hard to see it from his point of view, and he must have been severely depressed following the botched operations that were supposed to turn his life around.

But die?

And being legally allowed to do so?

I just don't know how I feel about that.

Yahoo! News at its best

I hate Yahoo! News.

It reeks of the same drivel The Sun and the Mirror come out with.

But here's a screen shot of yesterday's web page. It made me laugh.

One panel is about praising an actress for taking a "refreshing" approach to her pregnancy and put her baby before getting fit after he/she is born. Wonderful. Like the rest of us then.

The one right next to it is about how to get a tight stomach.

The ironing is delicious.

And the exercise article is full of derivative unoriginal rubbish, like most of the stuff they publish.

Back to school

My first day back to work (yesterday) felt like a first day back at school.

I was going back after being off for a whole month to a new manager and a new team, and couldn't help feeling apprehensive. That, and generally not wanting to start work again!

The team changes happened on the first day of my holidays and were announced about a week beforehand so I knew before I left what was happening. And it's not like I don't know this new manager and my new team mates well. In fact, some of my previous team members have moved across, and my ex-manager and his team are literally right next to us. So it's not a massive upheaval. And my actual day-to-day job is exactly the same.

But still.

I liked my manager. And my team. And the people I sat next to. And my desk.

So it wasn't hard to feel the pang of uneasiness for not knowing exactly what was ahead of me, when I walked through the doors of my office.

Day 2 is now behind me. It's actually quite nice to be back, I'm trying to get back into routine.

I've been doing my job for a year now so they are expecting to see results. Today I had a meeting about it. I basically need to justify my paycheck because no one really knows what it is that I do. Lol.

Welcome back!

I better drink to that.

Viber rant

RANT ALERT!

I have a Samsung Galaxy S3, and amongst other things I have an app for Viber.

Viber is like WhatsApp, it lets you send text and picture messages for free over the Internet.

I am sure there is some technical reason for it, but annoyingly if I get a text message from someone, and they have Viber, and I'm connected to the Internet, their message will come through both as an SMS (as intended) and as a Viber message.

If I read the SMS on my mobile, I still need to go into Viber and mark the same message as read.

HOW ANNOYING!

And I can't find a way to stop it.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

/rantover

LOAN OVERPAYMENT TRACKER - OCTOBER 2013

It's time for a quick end-of-month update:

Loan overpayment: £50
Months left until loan is cleared aprox: 23

I may do this every month, if anything it'll keep me accountable. I'll see.

I did post previously that I'd overpay a minimum of £20.00, which in real terms means it will take me about a year to shave off one month from the loan term (I haven't exactly worked this out as I haven't fully taken into consideration what I'll be saving in terms of interest). How gross. This won't do, I will definitely need to step it up somehow!

More on this to follow.

Loans

Bear with me, I'm working this out as I write, so it's convoluted. We took out a loan about 6 months ago, so we could buy a new car.

Today for the first time I have started thinking seriously about overpaying it. I like to think I'm quite savvy when it comes to money, so why have I not been thinking about this sooner?? Well, I need to remind myself that we did have the small matter of our wedding taking up our resources...

Our loan is at quite a good rate (5.9%), and my best savings rate at the moment is  an (excellent) interest rate of 4.8% after tax (6% before tax), so it's really a no brainer. I need to start OPing! (OP= overpayment). Both of these are with the Nationwide by the way.

We have 23 months left before the loan is cleared. That is just under two years away! Isn't that disgusting? I'll be going on 29 by then. Not cool, loan. Not cool.

So, it's CONVOLUTED PoA TIME!
Each month all of my money is pretty much accounted for, but I will need to make some adjustments. I don't want this loan hanging over my head for the next two years.

By the way, this is a joint loan with my husband. I'm sure he'll help out but I'm the main earner so it's easier and more fun if I don't count his potential contributions.

I'm a great believer of squirrelling away small amounts of money each month for various things, and watch my little pile of money grow. I'm therefore going to apply the same train of thought with the loan.

I'm going to try and overpay a minimum of £20 each month. This is the bare minimum. I can't see myself being able to pay any more until after Christmas, but it's a start.

If I can do this for 12 months I'll have shortened the overall loan term by about one month, give or take.

...
...
...

One month isn't great, is it...

...
...

Well doesn't this go to show how difficult it is to get rid of debt?

At the moment £20.00 is probably all I can afford so I'm not going to cry about it. Better than not overpaying at all.

I'll track my progress on this blog, let's see how it goes!

Pre-work blues!

The title of my posts seem to have a bit of a reoccurring theme, don't they?

In two days' time I'll be back at work, after a whole month off. And despite my best efforts, I'm starting to feel down about the end of my holidays.

In an attempt to prevent this, I decided I'd book us a weekend away somewhere so we'd have something else to look forward to, but the fact of the matter is, I'm broke!

I mean, not really, but we're obviously just back from our honeymoon and don't exactly have a couple hundred pounds to spend on going away somewhere. Sigh...

So we're stuck at home, going back to work very soon, and I am not happy about it!

I love my job, I really do (I work in customer service and social media), but in a match of "work VS holidays", we know which one I'd want to win!

I have one more day of freedom, I better stop moping and just enjoy it I guess. Easier said than done.

/whingeover

To cheer us up, here's a sunrise.

Post-wedding blues

Well, it's certainly been a while, hasn't it?

A lot has changed since my last post. I am now married (just by a few weeks!), I went somewhere far and amazing for our honeymoon, and our wedding day was the best day ever. A cliché, but it's 100% true.

Having all your friends and family, all gathered together in the one place, just for you, was both humbling and somewhat exhilarating. It was a great day, if I could I'd do it all over again! (Well, with the same husband ovb ;) )

I have also learnt that long haul flights are actually fine, so it's definitely something we'll do again in the future. Unfortunately not the too near future, my purse has taken enough of a battering for now!

Now that such a big event is behind us, we can start planning our future together properly.

I have a lot of various things I want to achieve, both financially and otherwise, but that will be for another (probably longwinded) post, to be submitted soon.

Cheerio until then!