We didn’t go out this New Year’s Eve. The celebrations don’t actually kick off until midnight, after which time people go off for meals with family and friends before congregating later and partying to the (not so) early hours. We’ve been quite busy so a night of partying would result in a day of grogginess so we just locked the doors and went to bed! Ian has been doing some websites for a man in Malaga who is paying him in Euros which is great and I had some more articles to write for the UK company that I did work for in November, so we’ve had plenty to keep us busy!
We don’t normally make New Year Resolutions, however the new year has coincided with our aim to pay for the rest of the work for our earnings, so with the new year has come Project Austerity.
The first thing we did was write down all the things we could do to save money. Surprisingly this entailed the need to buy several things that are absolutely necessary to saving money – which totaled over a thousand pounds.
So I took a red pen to our list and struck off all the things that perhaps, on reflection, we didn’t need to buy and amazingly this resulted in us saving a thousand pounds – all before we even started!
This money management lark is easy when you really think about it. Think I might apply for a job as an economist.
The last time we were on a major austerity drive was when we were in Mineral House and we were living on 50p each a day (this is when we had the chickens so we ate a lot of eggs!). During this time I was making homemade wine which we made from all sorts of things and cost only the cost of a bag of sugar and lasted ages! Ian was moaning that one batch of wine was not alcoholic. This was about three minutes before he had to be put to bed. Later that night I heard him get up and he disappeared downstairs for about half an hour. A fact that he vehemently denied the next day. Until he looked at his computer and found an email from Microsoft, thanking him for his email to ‘Mr Gates’ and confirming that his suggestions had been noted. To this day Ian has no idea what he wrote to Bill Gates about and has treated homemade wine with a greater degree of respect.