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Thanks to the Christmas break and a concerted effort to get through my extensive To Be Read list before Christmas books inevitably added to it, I managed to get through several books in December 2021.
Last Friday I decided to indulge in a bit of self-care. I'd been struggling through a work project and felt wrung out like a wet cloth by the time Thursday rolled around.
So Friday, and the start of the weekend, felt like a good time to wind down and hopefully be in a better frame of mind when Monday rolled around.
As we get closer to the festive season people start to look more towards doing something for charity. That might involve buying Christmas cards where money raised is donated to a charity, volunteering at a shelter to help cook on Christmas day, or completing a "reverse advent calendar" for a local foodbank.
I spent September doing a walking challenge - 300,000 steps in the month to raise money for Tommy's and the Miscarriage Association.
One of the benefits of all this walking was finding quite a few yellowstick bargains in my local Co-Op and the much closer but smaller One Stop.
The result was...depressing would only just start to describe it. If I hadn't done my calculations then I would have had a hell of a shock and upset further down the line!
In my recent post about my mortgage overpayments I mentioned a few of my side-hustles that I use to earn a few extra pennies to go towards the mortgage.
One of my other side-hustles, although not dedicated to becoming mortgage free (it goes to my Lifetime ISA instead) is Zazzle. This print-on-demand company allows you to upload your original works, set them up to print on various products, and then list them for sale. Zazzle handles the printing and dispatch, so you only get a small amount of the money, but you can bump up your percentage (this does bump up the cost of the product though) to earn a bit more.
This post contains some referral links. Referral links do not cost you anything if you sign up through them, they simply mean that I get credited with some money back from the companies.
When we bought our first home back in 2016 I knew I wanted to try and overpay the mortgage. Me and my husband had had a good deposit, but it was our first home and it needed plenty of work after years of neglect. The previous owners were landlords and they had done very little to keep the place nice.
This meant that we had a longer mortgage term so that we could have affordable monthly repayments and focus more on doing the place up. We wanted the option of not overpaying in some months if we needed to, rather than having to pay higher monthly payments and being unable to change that.
One of the side effects of the pandemic has been the number of chain restaurants that have licensed some of their menu for supermarket shelves. Unable to welcome customers to their own outlets they have managed to save their businesses by getting their good to us for home consumption.
Pizza Express has been doing this for years with their pizzas and their garlic doughballs. But in the past few months they have expanded their line to include pasta, side dishes, and a few of their desserts. I've seen salted caramel tarts, and recently I spotted their new vanilla cheesecake slices on the reduced shelf at Tesco! Since it was only £1.50 I decided to give them a try. I love cheesecake and I'm always happy to try a new brand when it comes out.
We originally booked a trip to Elveden Forest back in September 2020, when you could still be optimistic about Covid rates remaining low. The date was for mid-November, a week after my birthday, so I felt like I was booking a little birthday trip.
Sadly in early November England went back into lockdown, so our holiday had to be postponed. After thinking about it and trying to work out when Covid rates were likely to be safer, we opted for the week of our wedding anniversary in April!
When the UK went in to the first lockdown in March 2020, many people saw an opportunity to focus on improving their home. While some DIY shops were flooded with people buying paint and wallpaper or new lighting fixtures, the real issue came in May and June, when lockdown started to be relaxed. At this point many charity shops were inundated with donations, as people had spent some of their furlough or their weekends at home having a clearout.
