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As with my recent look back at my mortgage overpayments, now that we're in 2023 (well into it, it's February!) I can look back at my spread sheets and see what the impact last years side hustling was.

This is the first year that I've properly tracked my side hustle money. Most of it tended to go into my Paypal and then just sit there until I bought something off eBay. But with more of a focus on FIRE in the past few years I realised I needed to be a bit more sensible about this as well.

And I'm very glad I did, as I can now see the impact of all those little sums from various sources, that just come drifting in throughout the year.

Mortgage overpayments 2022

Now that we've waved goodbye to 2022 and can look forward to 2023, it's time to reflect on some of the finances over the past year.

To start with I've had a look back at our mortgage overpayments for 2022! I know there's some debate among personal finance bloggers over whether it's best to overpay the mortgage or invest the money instead. For me and my husband overpaying works for us, but I'm very aware that it's not for everyone.

Last year our total was just over £900. My target had been £1000 a year. And this year we managed it!

Birthday freebies

I recently celebrated my *whisper* 37th birthday! And naturally that meant that I could load up a few apps and loyalty cards and get a few freebies and money off vouchers.

This might be one of my favourite rewards in recent years. Birthday rewards for loyalty cards and apps only started up a few years ago, but they do seem to be a slowly growing trend. I don't like things to go to waste so I've only signed up to things I know I want, there are more offers beyond the four I've listed here.

Paperchase - £5 off with Treat Me card

If you're signed up to the Paperchase "Treat Me" card and you've given them your date of birth, then around your birthday you'll get an email saying you have a £5 voucher ready to spend. They give you a code to use online or if you're in the shop just hand over the card and it will be assigned to your purchase.

I used it to reduce the cost of my 2023 diary. For the past few years I've been keeping a daily hand written diary and I generally purchase them from Paperchase as I'm left handed and find their diaries are quite easy to write on both sides of the page.

Although the code is emailed to you close to your birthday, it generally has an expiry date set 30 days later. If you time it well you could combine it with a sale to get a real bargain!

Greggs app - Free sweet treat

If you download the Greggs app and add your date of birth then you'll find it automatically gives you a free sweet treat voucher on the app! I got this delicious sprinkle doughnut but other options include yumyums, gingerbread biscuits, and chocolate chip cookies.

The offer was added to my app on my birthday itself and was valid for 7 days, if you don't have a huge amount of time to use it. In my case though I was going into town to do some Christmas shopping so I just made sure I stopped by Greggs on my way back to the car. If you don't have a Greggs nearby then you might want to decide if it's worth the cost of a trip.

You also need to have had the Greggs app for a few weeks before your birthday, if you download it on the day then I don't think it will work.

Hotel Chocolat - £5 off with VIP Me card

Like Paperchase, if you have the Hotel Chocolat VIP Me card then you'll get an email confirming you have a £5 voucher on your VIP Me card, or a code to use online.

Back when you could get three selectors for £10 this was a fantastic bargain, as you could get great chocolate for half off. Sadly though inflation now means that it's £12 for three selectors and it doesn't feel like quite as good a deal (to me at least, but I understand why the prices went up).

Instead I got one selector and one milk chocolate "tiddly pot", with the voucher I paid less than £2 for the pair of them. It's still a really nice offer though and if your birthday falls just after a holiday like Halloween, Christmas, or Valentines, then you can use the voucher to get some already discounted chocolate.

My birthday falls in the middle of November and the email normally arrives in my inbox right at the end of October, valid until the end of November, so I think it mostly covers your birthday month.

Costa Coffee - Free cake with the app

If you have downloaded the Costa Coffee app and filled in your details, including your birthday, then you can get a free cake for your birthday. Like the Greggs app this is automatically added to the app on your birthday, and you need to use it within the week.

I chose the millionaire slice but I don’t think it limits what you can buy. I was very tempted by the lemon muffin as I really like them, and they had also released their festive menu so there were also Toblerone muffins, large mince pies, and a cake with a reindeer face.

If you want to download the Costa app then you can use my referral code (8XQ6D), and we will both get 5 free beans, which will put you halfway towards a free drink.

Overall a nice little haul that just required me to pop into a few shops, I had a week off work anyway so I was going to a few places with the relevant shops. It's a nice way to get a few treats for free or very reduced.

Side Hustle Total - January to April 2022

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I don't have a huge number of side hustles, especially compared to others in the FIRE world. I tend to fall in and out of them as my attention waxes and wanes. And some of them (such as YouGov) have a high total to reach before payout so there are quite a few that are slow burners.

Despite that, this year I decided to finally start tracking my side hustles and the amount I'm earning from them. When it's a slow drip of £2 here and £5 there it can feel like you're not getting much out of it. But totalling it all up makes you more aware of how much you've actually earned over 12 months and can help with motivation. 

Total mortgage overpayments in 2021

Back in July I looked at the mortgage overpayments me and my husband had made in the first half of the year. 

In that post I mentioned that our aim was to overpay £1000 a year. In the past few years we have missed this target.

How much will maternity leave cost you?

A couple of years ago I sat down and worked out how much money I would need to save to cover a period of maternity leave.

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!

Halfway there! Mortgage overpayments for 2021

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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.

How I managed to skip Amazon for Christmas

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For the past couple of years I've told myself that I would cut back on my use of Amazon for my Christmas shopping. Bezos has more than enough money, the staff are overworked and underpaid, and there are plenty of small businesses that could use my money and will pay UK taxes with it.

Every year I end up inevitably failing. I will get some things from places like Waterstones, but eventually I'll resort to Amazon as it's cheaper and thus I can "buy more" for family and friends. And then over the course of the next year I read more about the poor treatment of Amazon warehouse staff and feel guilty and resolve to not do it again.

Charity shop haul - October 2017

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October ended up being a bumper month for my charity shop purchases. I've made it a little easier on myself to remember what I bought, but leaving my new books on a specific shelf in the living room until the time comes to write this post! My biggest problem was remembering what books I'd bought, since they tend to be the most common purchase. Having a shelf spot has definitely helped, but it does mean they remain disorganised for a few weeks.

This month I managed to secure a triple hit, with clothes, books and a DVD all purchased from charity shops in October!

Clothes

I'm super pleased about my October clothing hunt, as I managed to get two lovely tops. The first is a Seasalt one in green and cream hoops, with lovely long sleeves. Seasalt clothing is lovely quality, with good thick cotton that keeps you nice and toasty. This was only £5, not quite as cheap as my last Seasalt charity buy, but still a good bargain.

The second top was a Gap one in navy blue, again with long sleeves. It was only £3 and fits perfectly, so it's quickly becoming my new favourite top. The problem I have now is that I can replace some of my older, worn out shirts that are starting to develop holes. However I still love them so parting from them is proving difficult. I need to have a bit of a clear out anyway, so one Saturday I'll just have to go through the wardrobe and be ruthless!

Books

It was also a good month for books. The first one I picked up was a Dorling Kindersley publication on preserving food, mainly jams and pickles. I've never made jam in my life before, but at some point I'll want to give it a try. At only £3 for this lovely thick book I feel happy knowing I can have a guide sitting on my shelf, for when I'm ready to give it a go.

I also purchased another women in history book - Alison Weir's biography on Isabella of France. Isabella was Queen of England as the wife of King Edward II, and led the rebellion against him and Hugh Le Despenser. I really like Alison Weir's work, I also have her books on Elizabeth of York, Katherine Swynford, and Margaret Douglas, and this is proving to be a really good read. I've been struggling through my non-fiction books a bit recently, but I'm getting through this one with no problems.

DVDs

Finally my other top bargain for October was getting hold of the new Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond. We'd only just watched it the week before after I borrowed the DVD from my work library, so imagine my surprise when I found a copy for sale in the charity shop's bargain box for a mere fifty pence! This charity shop has a DVD shelf hidden towards the back of the shop, right in front of the door to the staff area. There's no where particularly prominent that they can put them, but it does mean they have to have regular clear outs and put lots of stuff in a box at the front. I'm really pleased with getting it so cheaply, I enjoyed the film but preferred Into Darkness, so getting it cheaply was really good.

Mortgage Overpayment - August and September 2017

Anyone with an eagle eye would have spotted that I missed my regular post on my mortgage overpayment for August. That was because August became a very expensive month after I needed to get some work on my car, so my overpaying was on the small side. So small in fact that the blog post would have been about 100 words XD

I decided to combine it in with September, which had fewer emergency expenses and therefore let me sweep up some extra pennies when I reviewed my accounts. I also had a bigger expenses claim in September, which helped bump up the payment.

So without further ado - in August I managed to overpay £45.41, which was a lot less than my target of £60 a month :( As I mentioned my car needed some work, and I was loathed to move too much money out of my savings to cover it as I'm trying my best to keep money in my savings account than constantly move more out of it.

But on the plus side in September I overpaid £70.96! I ended up with a £25 expenses claim due to a bunch of things we needed for the office at work, and I was so careful with my money during the month that I was able to do a large sweep at the end of September which added an extra £12 on to my payment.

I haven't been very good about listing things on eBay and Facebook selling pages the past two months as work has been getting very busy. I'm hoping I'll be able to find some time in October and November to get back to listing things and go for some bigger payments towards the end of the year!

Charity shop haul: August 2017

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Originally it looked like this was going to be a miniscule post. The charity shops in Cambridge, my usual haunt, have been very thin on the ground for good items recently. The students have all left by July and by August the place is swamped with tourists, so donations are thin on the ground (from what I can tell anyway). 

But as I had another week off it meant that I could take some time to stroll around Colchester, and me and my husband had a day out in Maldon with the in-laws so I had a little look around the charity shops there too.

Sadly there were no clothes this month, one or two things caught my eye but I just couldn't picture myself wearing them. There's no point buying clothes you like if you don't wear them, so I put both things back and moved on.

Books

My collection of works about women in history has expanded again this month! My main purchase was a biography on Cecily Neville, the mother of King Edward IV and King Richard III. She's one of those medieval women that used to only exist on the periphery of history, but recent works have really helped make people more aware of her. 

I've already sat down and read the whole thing and really enjoyed it, I liked the way Amy Licence really tried to focus on Cecily. I find that with many books about women there's a greater emphasis on the men in their lives, in order to bulk out the text as there's often very few resources about the women themselves. This book is a little short, but only because Licence doesn't fall in to that trap, and what information she does have on Cecily is really interesting!

DVDs

My aim to refill my DVD collection with stuff I'm missing from home continues apace! This month I bulked out my collection with the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie (I mistakenly thought I already had the second one, so now I need to keep an eye out for that too), Sense and Sensibility (which I always enjoy watching on a lazy afternoon).

I also bought one of the Family Guy "Star Wars" specials. I've never seen the Star Wars movies, to my husband's everlasting horror, but I'll happily watch this parody of them, even if a lot of the jokes go over my head.

I then went in to Colchester for a during in my week off, and what else did I find in a charity shop? The second Family Guy Star Wars parody DVD! So now I own both of them for the princely sum of £2, I wouldn't buy them at full price but I'll happily have them in the animation drawer to watch when the fancy takes me.

Charity Shop Haul: July 2017

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July started off slow for charity shop visits, but then I had a week off work and spent the first afternoon of it wandering around the huge number of charity shops outside the Grafton Centre in Cambridge! This was then followed by a morning strolling around Colchester, so in one week I managed to visit a lot of shops, and get some lovely bargains!

Clothes

I love White Stuff, but I find some of their collections a bit hit-and-miss, so I haven't bought anything from their shops recently. I did however find this gorgeous blue top in one charity shop, and quickly snapped it up as it was only £5!

I've actually got quite a few of their tops, but some of them were bought three years ago and are starting to get holes (I wear them every week as they're suitable for work), so my plan is to use charity shops to replace the four most damaged tops!

Books

This month was quite poor for book purchases, possibly because I have quite a few from the past couple of months that I need to catch up on, so I was quite discerning this month. I also just didn't find a huge amount that I needed or wanted to buy, it was a better month for DVDs (as you'll see below). That said I did find two decent books to add to my shelf.

The first is "Nella Last's War", which I've actually read in the past and really enjoyed. This book is an edited version of a set of diaries which were kept during the Second World War by Mrs Nella Last. She lived in Lancashire in Barrow-in-Furness and spent the war actively helping charities, running her house, and worrying about her sons.

The other book was "The Times Obituaries of Notable Women", which is a collection of obituaries about various women who died in the 20th century. It should be good source material for some upcoming ebooks so I'm looking forward to sitting down properly with it at some point and making a few notes.

DVDs

Now that I've moved out of my parents place I'm finding that I need to buy DVDs that I've had easy access to for years. So imagine how chuffed I was to get the first two Bridget Jones movies for £1 each. They're nice easy watching that you can have on as noise in the background without dedicating lots of time to watching, so having my own copies at last is great.

I also got "Made in Dagenham", which I've wanted to watch for years and never got round to!

Mortgage Overpayment - July 2017

If you'd like to find out more about why we're overpaying our mortgage, the post is here!

July turned out to be a fantastic month for overpaying. It wasn't a record breaking month, that's still held by April. But it was still very good and it's all thanks to my expenses claim, my train ticket to a work conference gave an enormous boost to the payment pot!

So without further ado our overpayment for July was £129.27!!

That was made up of our standard £30, which we budget every month. I received £5.39 from Quidco, which was cashback from buying some house items a few months ago, and then £78.66 was my work expenses claim. I also did a couple of account sweeps, rounding my bank balance down to end in a 5 or a 0, and that netted me an extra £5.56, and then I finally rounded down the mortgage balance at the end of the month to pay off an extra £7.66. 

Since we're now just over halfway through the year, I thought I'd take a little look at the impact our mortgage payments, and the overpayments, have had on some of the numbers!

When we started the mortgage we were having £12.01 added in interest per day! It's now down to £11.82 a day. We were due to go under £11 a day in August 2020, but we've now brought that up to June 2020, and of course that will go down as we continue to overpay. We were due to drop under £155k owed in May 2018, that's now fallen to March 2018. I really want to do it before January, but playing with numbers suggests that that might be a little tricky. I'm really happy with how close we're getting though, it's good motivation for the future.

I have a terramundi pot, which I started to save in when I was living in London. I only add £2 and 50 pence coins to it, and it's starting to get a little heavy. But it's certainly nowhere near full ,so I'm now debating if I want to crack it open in December and use whatever's in it to make one last huge overpayment for the New Year. But on the other hand I'd like to know how much it can hold when it's full, so I should hold out.

We'll see what the coming months bring, and see how many more £2 coins I can stuff in to it in the meantime XD

Charity Shop Haul - June 2017

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Last month I did a post on a new blog post series that I'm doing, highlighting my finds from charity shops. I got a bit addicted to them after using them to source the china for my wedding, and now that we've had the wedding I'm new enjoying using them for cheap books, DVDs and clothes!

This month my buys are a little thin on the ground. The really hot weather at the start of the month kept me in the office a lot as I really don't like heatwaves and prefer to lurk indoors, and towards the end of the month my time was taken up by a large work event and so running out to charity shops was the last thing on my mind. But I still managed to get a few bargains during my few trips out!

Clothes

The first buy this month was a gorgeous purple top from Phase Eight, found in the local hospice charity shop. I saw it originally and wasn't certain if I liked it, as I thought the detail around the neck was a bit fussy (it has a pattern neckline).

But it was still there when I went back two days later, and since it will make a nice smart work top I decided to buy it. The material is lovely and soft, and I really like the shade of purple it's in, it'll look very nice with my black work trousers when autumn comes around.

Books

As always, I went straight for the history books. I'm particularly happy with the biography of Josephine Butler, she's been one of my favourite women in history ever since I wrote my eBook series, so getting hold of a proper biography of her is a great find.

I'm currently working my way through the "Unnatural Murder" one, which is a little heavy going due to the necessary explanations around English law at the time, but once I've got through it I'll be able to move on to "The Unruly Queen", which is about Caroline of Brunswick, the wife of King George IV.

DVDs

Yes this month I managed to get a DVD! I popped in to Colchester one weekend for a little stroll and found the DVD of Despicable Me for a mere 99p!

I really like the film but normally have to wait until it's playing on Channel 5 over bank holiday weekends, so for a bargain price like that I'm more than happy to have a copy on my bookcase that I can watch whenever I want.

Mortgage Overpayment - May 2017

The end of the month means overpayment time for our mortgage! After April's bumper overpayment I knew that May was going to look measly in comparison, but I've really taken my eye off the ball this month, and haven't found other sources to replace the large Quidco payments that won't be coming in any more.

May's overpayment is £66.97, which although it's not as good as I would like, is still just over my target of overpaying £60 a month. I didn't have a great deal of success with eBay this month, but I did count up my 20p and copper penny jars, which gave me £12 in total.

I also got a tiny payment from Amazon for eBook sales back in March. I published two eBooks on women in history back in 2014, and every so often I get a few sales that give me a little trickle of pennies from Amazon. May's payout was £0.76, which I think mostly came from March as it was Women's History Month and there's always a little spike in activity then.

The rest of the money was made up of our basic overpayment (£30) and my expenses from April, which were paid in the middle of May.

So although it wasn't well over the odds, I'm still pleased that we're just over target, and hopefully in June I'll get back in to my money saving mojo and get a bit closer to the magical £100!

Charity Shop Haul - May 2017

I've been a devotee of charity shops for months now, as they were my primary source of crockery for our wedding. One thing I've said to my husband is that now we've had the wedding, I'm looking forward to it consuming less of my daily life. Even thought we were only having a small wedding, the need to find as much of our crockery in charity shops as possible, meant that I was just going in and out of them to look at the bric-a-brac shelves, before moving on to the next one. I was also trying to save as much money towards it as possible, so if I wasn't buying something for the wedding, I felt that it was wasted money.

But now I can go in to a charity shop and look for things that aren't teapots and cups! I'm also enjoying the loosening of the purse strings, although not too much since we still have to buy a lot of things for the house. May was my first month of being able to buy things, and I'm quite happy with my little haul for the month!

Clothes

I got a really lovely blue long-sleeved top from a Cancer Research UK shop. The material is super soft, and it's from Marks and Spencers so it's really good quality, although thankfully this top doesn't like like it's aimed at the over-sixties XD It'll be good for either work or home, but it's a little thin so I may not get away with it in the winter unless I layer it with both a vest underneath and a tunic over the top.

I also spotted a few skirts that I liked, but if I wasn't overawed with them then I didn't buy them. I've come to regret letting one of them go though as the material was lovely and soft, and I'm sure I would have found something to wear with it if I had tried, so I think I need to be a little bolder about buying such things when I see them!

Books

I've been struggling to get through my history reads recently, and I think it's because I need to wind my brain down a little bit. Sometimes when work is busy and life is hectic, you just need some easy-read to fiction to distract you from everything else.

I'm always a bit "meh" about historical fiction, as I tend to dislike the lack of proper context, or just all-out poor use of history (you can probably guess which author in particular I'm thinking of here). Nowadays I tend to by historical fiction set in the Georgian period as it's a point of history I know very little about, and so I find very little to annoy me in books XD So "How to Marry a Marquis" seemed to fit the bill perfectly, and I then added to it with "Mrs Fytton's Country Life" and "The Runaway Princess", neither of which are historical but both of which seem to come under the heading of "easy fiction". However I have yet to read any of these, as I also bought "What Would Mary Berry Do?" by Claire Sandy, and it was so good that I read it in two and a half days!

Despite aiming to get just fiction books I couldn't help but also purchase "Princesses: The Daughters of George III" as the hardback copy was only £5 in Oxfam. I read a really good biography of George III and his family last year, and I've wanted to read more on his daughters for a while now, so I'm hoping this will prove to be an equally interesting book.

Anything Else?
I was hoping to be able to buy a DVD or two that we could save to one side for a future date night, but despite lots of searching I couldn't find any that I wanted to buy. I'm a bit picky with films, and I tend to find that the ones in charity shops are not brilliant films anyway (otherwise people would keep the DVD to watch again!) I also kept my eye out for any kitchenwares (cake tins and storage pots being the two main ones) but again, nothing really caught my eye.

But that's okay, I don't want to go mad in my first month of buying, we'll see what June brings!