Sunday 31 January 2016

January - An expensive month

I do hope we don't have too many months like this one or the savings won't last a year, let alone until pension time.The money has zoomed out of the bank in all directions
Car Tax
MOT
New Mattress
New shoes
Electric bill 
Dehumidifier
Frying pan
Flea stuff and wormer for the cat
Bird feed
not forgetting the £2.99 for a new washing up bowl!
as well as the normal things like council tax, water and diesel. On the plus side the food bill was well down and my personal spending amounted to £2 for a bunch of flowers and £3.49 for 3 books.

Thankfully we now have 2 months without Council Tax and water and then we'll have moved, although the Council Tax in Ipswich will be the same as here - crazy considering the difference in size. In fact all our bills will be more in Ipswich which makes me wonder why we are moving!

 But we wanted to leave the garden looking like this
Summer 2013
rather than the completely overgrown wreck that we found when we moved here. We wanted to leave a campsite that could be taken on as a going concern and a house that was in good decorative order. It would have been difficult, even impossible, with Col's illness for us to do all the things that need doing when you own 5 acres  - and there's no way I could keep everything going on my own.
So we will squeeze ourselves into the little bungalow, get Colin well again and then decide "what next?" 

February will be better month on the expenses front. I'm having another no spend month - except food and diesel - like I tried last November, to make up for January I need February to extra frugal.

The form I mentioned yesterday wasn't too bad at all because at question 4 it said "do you have cancer?" and then  " if yes, you do not need to fill in the rest of this form except the last page". Col said "Oh yes I remember the Macmillan lady on the phone saying that!" So we just need to take the form to hospital with us next week to get the back page filled in by the right person and it can be sent. Good.We have a special ticket for cheap parking at the hospital - £3 for 10 visits which is better than £1 an hour and Col will get free prescriptions although he had a pre-payment card anyway because of the heart medications. So that's all that sorted.

I've just tuned into Andy M in the Australian tennis final and Oh Dear he's just lost the first set 6-1. Fingers crossed for rapid improvement!

(Edited in to say - just heard the sad news that Sir Terry Wogan has died age 77. I listened to him in the mornings way, way back in the 80s, he had such a good relationship with his listeners.)

Back Tomorrow - Probably but not definitely
Sue

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