Sowing Seed or Planting
Sowing: Beans, tomato, rockmelon, pumpkin, lettuce, capsicum
Planting: Strawberry
Transplanting: Luffah and Rosella
Harvesting: Tomatoes, zucchini
General Garden News: Finished mulching. Liquid fertilised (Seaweed based stuff) and applied wetting agent to all pots and garden beds. Weeded and removed some snails.....need to use snail bait but I feel so bad killing them....
Planning for the Future
Ordered some more seeds. Collecting lettuce and parsley seeds. I have stuck to a spendings diary all week. It looks scary! However it is the week before Christmas (not really a good excuse) and I did pay the mortgage and service the car so the amount spent looks worse than it is. I did buy a NO JUNK MAIL sticker which I think is a wise investment. I have felt so overwhelmed with Xmas spend spend spend pressure that I needed to do something pro-active. I can't really reduce the pressure from friends and family, but I can eliminate the junk mail/advertising pressure. And as an added bonus it will reduce paper waste, and the junk mail lady still gets paid regardless. Sweet.
I have also set aside time between Dec 26th and Jan 1st to really attack the household budget. I'm continuing the spending diary, but I haven't made any deliberate changes. However, I have started questioning the worth of my purchases, if I really need it and could I do without? I find budgeting very challenging as my husband's income is up and down all over the place (he's self-employed). Any tips?
Working for the Future
Nothing t o report
Building Community
I have been making an effort to connect with the great blogs I read via the comments.
The biggie for this week though was I DISCONNECTED THE FOXTEL, without discussing with my husband I might add too. Now the reason I put this piece of news here is because this one act has really connected us with our community and with each other. We have done more stuff together as a family this week than we have done in the past 6 months. We have gone for walks, attended Christmas Carols, visited friends, worked together in the garden, laughed, went to the movies (never have we done this as a family) and generally spent time together. The kids are also getting along better and are amusing themselves with normal kid activities like cubby house building and crafty pursuits.
New Skill
Nothing to report
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2 comments:
Hi Lela,
I sympathize with the problems of the uneven income of the self employed - we have been self employed for over 20 years. The way we cope is to pay ourselves a regular income into a personal account. The 'leftovers' remain in the business account and we use these funds to keep our income even when we have a 'bad' month. Does that make sense? I'm not sure I explained it very well.
We had FoxTel for two months, the first was free and the second month I paid for because of pressure from the kids. I found the kids spent much longer in front of the TV, we were watching lots of rubbish and life revolved around the TV schedule. I canceled it, there was whinging for a week or so and then life returned to normal. Much better.
Good luck with your budgeting,
Lynda
Thanks Lynda.
I think the 'pay yourself a wage' is the best option. We tried to do that a while ago, but found business expenses were mixed up with personal expenses and that on the whole we were living far beyond our means :p So, stupidly I gave in....
But on the bright side we now have no creidt/store card debt and I have been seriously looking at our budget and cutting off things like Foxtel etc I do need to get us more organised and keep business and personal stuff seperate, and be strict on paying ourselves a wage and not dipping into the leftovers.
Thanks for your comments!
Lela
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