March To Do List

Nice and simple. What I would like to accomplish in March.

Health
1. Lose 7lbs; continuing with my one main goal focus this year I want to lose another 7lbs in March. I've lost 8lbs since Christmas so it's heading the right way. I'm not calorie counting I'm just concentrating on the food I'm eating, no crap.
2. Make 6 a day a habit; this ties in with the above; I'm concentrating more on my fruit and vegetables intake than anything else. In February this went quite well; in March I want it to become a habit.
3. Walk for one hour three times a week; enough said

Personal
1. Get a {good} haircut; after getting random dry cuts at the salon over the last few years {to save money} I'm going to get a proper haircut using some birthday money I received. {thanks Mum}
2. Find a CV {resume} template I like and complete it. This is a difficult one for me as it's been so long since I did this; probably 16 years! eek.
3. Re-do my bucket list using this great template provided by LobotoME via SeeJaneFly. I can't say enough how important it is to have a list like this. After wasting 20 years spending and aquiring it's pretty sobering to realise just how many experiences you could of had with that wasted money. I'm not dwelling on that though I'm just focusing on what I do from now on :-)

Finances
1. Make £200 in extra income by selling at least ten items on eBay and doing a car boot sale. Hopefully the weather will improve this month and I can get out in a field and sell my stuff.
2. Purchase flights to Portugal in July. We're going to Lisbon in July and I want to find the cheapest flights I can for me, hubby and youngest daughter.
3. Stick to grocery budget by continuing to menu plan and cook as much as possible from scratch.
4. Save £350 even after paying for flights. This means I need to make some extra money and keep my grocery budget down

:: Subscribe to this site here

Cash only system, my solution

Thank you for all your recommendations on cash only systems. After thinking about it for a while I decided to stick to using my debit card, but use my spending excel sheet columns like cash envelopes. I've attached a copy of how it looks below.

Each spending category, which falls into cash spending, has its own column/s with the budgeted amount at the bottom; when you put any spending in the sheet, its set up to take the money off the budget figure and leave the amount left to spend. This solves my problem of not wanting cash lying around the house.
{click on the picture}

My next big goal

Can you attack two major goals at the same time? I know I can't. For the last five years, alongside the debt payoff, I've been trying to lose [lots of} weight, and it just hasn't happened; for whatever reason it seems I could only tackle one big goal at a time.

Anyways now the debt has actually gone {I still struggle to believe it sometimes} I'm moving on to my next major goal; losing the fat.

I wasn't always overweight. Eight years ago I weighed a happy, for me, 140lbs. I felt great at this weight and I want to get back there. In theory it should take me until the end of the year, which in the scheme of things, compared to paying off debt, is a lot less time. But, for some reason I find cutting out spending a lot easier than cutting out cake!

I'm not going to post the amount of pounds I need to lose just yet { it seems too personal at the moment} but I probably will in time. Wish me luck!

Mini Goals Progress; The Procrastination Edition

It's the last few days of the month and so far I've not completed one of my mini goals for February! There are no excuses as I've had the time to complete them all, just no inclination. Why? I have no idea.

Extra Money Earned: January £206.16

Overall from different sources my goal is to generate at least £2,010 of extra income in 2010. This money can either be passive or alternative.

I had quite a good month in January; I received payment from a sponsor of one of my sites and got cashback for recycling two old mobile phones and a broken mp3 player. The breakdown is below.

January Earnings:

£10.05 Amazon
£34.66 Interest
£44.20 Phone & MP3
£117.25 Site sponsor

Did you make any extra income in January?

:: Get free updates from this site to your inbox here

The Cash Envelope System - HELP!

I'm looking for help as I cannot find a way that works for me. I want to use a cash and only cash for everything outside of our automatic payments. But, and it's a big BUT, I don't like having money in different places and I don't like having lots of different cash in my handbag. {I also have this thought that once money is out of the bank it stays out and never goes back!}

So if you use a cash envelope system, or a variety of it, and it works for you, please let me know how you do it. I so want to make this work.

:: Get free updates from this site to your inbox here

Weekend Link Loving

Posts that I've enjoyed this week:

• The March 2010 'Manage Your Money' Challenge: Featuring Pocketsmith at Enemy of Debt- Have you joined yet?
• How to Increase Your Alexa Rank at Money Funk-Another challenge started by Financial Samurai ; all great advice if you're looking to increase your blogs exposure
• Is Credit Card Debt Ever Acceptable? at Ultimate Money Blog-Join in the debate
• The Top 10 Ways to Woo on a Budget {or perhaps ever) at Budgets are Sexy-J's top ten romantic secrets :-)

Links from my other site this week:

• Porridge - The Ultimate in Healthy and Frugal - How do you like yours?
• New Windows and a Step Closer to Renting - A post that raised the debate about whether we should rent out our house or sell it when we eventually come to move. What would you do?

Subscribe here to get free updates from No More Spending

Our zero based budget

Budget, budget, budget; the key to your financial plans? Only if you stick to it. I've been struggling to stick to ours, but I'm not going to anymore. Less planning and more action is required.

We're using a zero based budget, where every penny is allocated to something. This is the current one for the joint account. We put £1,850 in the account and this is where is all goes {if I stick to the plan!} You may notice that the food costs have gone up; my son has moved back home for a while.

I budget from the 18th -17th monthly; this month it starts on the 18th February and ends on the 17th March.

Click on the image to view :-)

Savings Goals Part 3: Monthly Target

It's savings week on No More Spending!

It's {so} great to be consumer debt free but there's still lots of work to be done; we need still to build our cash savings.

To achieve our goal of £30k in cash by the end of December 2011 we need to save another £15,501.32. This works out at £673.97 a month {23 months}. Currently we are able to save approximately £350 a month, so there's a deficit of £323.97; as before when I was paying off debt, I need to think of ways to make some extra money to meet our targets.

One of the ways we could meet our targets is if I go back to work {this may be an option in a couple of months} but at the moment I'll be looking to further reduce our bills, make some side income, and stick to our budget.

What are you doing at the moment to earn some extra income?

Savings Goals Part 2: Targets and Snowballs

It's savings week on No More Spending!

Now that I'm debt free the next step is to build our cash savings for emergencies and experiences {I no longer want to rely on credit to pay for anything}

Our goal is £30k in cash savings before December 2011. We have £14k towards the total already so in the next 22 months we need to save another £16k. I think the best way to do this is to go into spending lock down and adopt the same snowball and snowflake method I used to pay off my debt; a little bit of 'gazelle like' focus will help us to achieve this.

Below are the specific amounts we're working towards and the accounts we hold them in,

Emergency Fund £18k
-12 months of expenses, kept in a long term savings account

Mini Emergency Fund £1k
-New washing machines etc, kept in a savings account linked to checking account

Big Trip Fund £5k
-2012 travel plans, kept in an ING account

Travel Fund £3k
-Holidays, kept in an ING account

Renovation £3k
-Windows and a new back door, kept in an ING account

Next post: how we are allocating our available money to save.

Savings Goals Part 1: Going into attack mode!

Next week is all about savings goals on No More Spending :-)

After our financial meeting this week we decided to move some money around and change some of our savings goals; a result of our new circumstances, paying for some new windows and re assessing our priorities.
We're moving abroad in 2012 {Portugal} and we have some specific saving targets we want to reach before we go - before my husband changes his job {we also have some house renovations to complete}

So after spending too much money in January, which might have been was a reaction to being debt free I'm now going into lock down. I need to adopt the same attitude I had when I had a debt mountain, attack mode, and channel it towards reaching our savings targets.

More on the specific goals and how we're saving towards them next week.

Subscribe here for free updates

Keeping it {non} frugal

I've just finished off my spending diary inputs for January and it's not pretty. For some reason I've stopped earning money and started spending it instead. Please bear in mind that my strict £100 personal budget didn't start until the 18th so some of this was left over money from my last wage packet/bonus but it looks on paper like I was trying to wear out my debit card {which by the way is perhaps going in the freezer}

Some of the highlights:

£31.00 Train fares -London to visit my daughter
£21.91 Lunch Out - treat for daughter
£1.50 Newspaper - forgot my book for train journey
£6.04 Postage - Amazon sales
£9.25 Gifts ?
£6.89 Coffee
£14.99 Clothes - jumper from Gap on sale
£11.00 2 DVD's - 1 sold on Amazon after
£6.00 DVD rental
£6.99 New laptop cable for daughter
£15.40 Movies - Up in the Air (joint account)
£10.00 Mobile phone

There is good to come of this, at least I kept a spending diary, because now I can see where it's going wrong.

February will be about making money, not spending it.

Get free updates from No More Spending by subscribing here. You can also follow me on Twitter here.

Our Monthly Finance Meeting

We run our family finances like a business. I'm the treasurer and my husband the chairman, but with equal ranking! Every month I do a {funny} presentation to him detailing where we're at with our budget, savings etc; doing it this way keeps the communication going on our finances and makes it fun at the same time.

The change in my work situation has bought about some major changes to our budget, {and some major changes, for the better, to our daily life} but it's still business as usual; we still have goals to work towards and it's important to us that we keep focused on them..

At our finance meeting we:

• Agree next months zero based budget {every penny is allocated to something}
• Detail where the money went last month {my confession time!}
• Review our account balances {including mortgage}
• Discuss any rate changes etc
• Plan for any big expenses
• Review our goals progress

At these meetings we don't discuss our personal spending money {we each have a set amount} this is to use for whatever we want - my husbands normally goes on golf related things, mine on allsorts, as you'll see in tomorrows post!

Do you have a similar meeting with your spouse, or do you do things completely differently?

To subscribe to free updates from No More Spending every time I post please click here.