If you ever needed another reason to join your local library and haven’t done so already, this is surely it:
Free Magazines!!!
Yes that’s right, apparently you can now download free magazines to your laptop, PC, tablet, phone or other device and read away till your hearts content.
The current contents of my wallet!
Someone reminded me the other day that I run a blog about personal finance, so I thought why not push the boat out and write a short post about how my finances are doing right now. You can’t get much more personal than that can you? If anything, it make a nice change from constantly harping on about how my garden is doing 🙂
It’s nothing major but since we decided to stick about £9,200 into a SIPP at the end of the last tax year our cash buffer has been lower than it has been for about 2 years. We still have plenty in the bank to cover any short term unforeseen events, but it is still a little worrying having been used to seeing a five figure amount in there for quite a while!
It’s brought it down so much that we had to move some money from our 5% paying TSB accounts into our Santander, which is the one we pay pills from (read more about how we organise our finances here). So right now we are not maxing out our £2K allowance in the TSB accounts! Waaaah! 🙂
I hope you’ll forgive me for banging on about gardening related activities for the third post in a row but given my experiences with tidying up the garden, I thought it was worth us all meditating once more about the classic Mr Money Mustache post Muscle Over Motor.
A nice summary of the article is:
You should always choose human muscle power over motorized power where it makes sense to do so
The key point for me is the “where it makes sense to do so” part (that is why I put it in bold, see?). Some quick examples of the top of my head:
For example 1 it clearly makes sense to use Motor, as there really is no other way to get to Aberdeen unless you have days or weeks to spare. Hopefully you will choose a Train or Bus to reduce the carbon footprint further, or are at least not travelling alone in the car!
For example 2 however we have to question whether the Leaf Vacuum is really worth the extra money (and therefore time spent at work to earn money to buy that blower) and also the energy usage, that has most likely come from millions of years of carbon deposit build up. It would probably make sense to use the broom and manual bagging option here!
I love making a mess when I’m building things! 🙂
Hello! As you may know from my last Green Fingered goals update we’ve been doing a bit of work in the garden recently. Part of that was building a compost heap out of materials I found laying around the garden that would otherwise be thrown away. I thought I’d show you roughly how I went about building it to show you how easy it is to build something like this! You may not have the exact same materials laying around your garden, but the idea is just to be creative and use what you have! I am sure you can grab some old junk from friends or neighbours if you are lacking your own as well!
First things first though, why on Earth would you want to spend time building something that, let’s face it, looks a bit shabby, when you can buy a nice brand new composter like this
↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Notes:
, each one is brought to your attention with the cryptic denotation ‘(affiliate link)’. You know what one of those is right!? No…!?! OK well it’s fairly basic… If you click through and then subsequently buy anything (not just the originally linked product) on amazon I may receive a small fee, which will help to support theFIREstarter blog. The key thing is that it will not cost you anything extra to use these links, although don’t go clicking on them willy nilly just because it may help me! If you think you will find the product/service useful and do click through, then a sincere “thank you” for your support. ↩
Yes. Believe it or not it’s a composter!
Hi guys! After a pretty manic March which culminated in a stag do to Berlin (yes I made it back alive!) it’s time to weigh up if I found any time to hit any of my goals. For brevity I will only comment on goals that I’ve either made progress on or think I should have made progress on but haven’t. If you want to read the full list of goals you can do so here.
I’m going to use a Win/Lose/Draw to denotation how well I think I’ve done on each goal, should be fairly self explanatory!
Let’s get stuck straight in shall we?
Keeping The Cauldron (UK)
Financially Free By Forty (UK)
Quietly Saving (UK)
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