We need to be Debt Free...?

I can't seem to access JW's blog at We Need to be Debt Free.... anyone having similar issues? Did something happen? I hope everything is alright.

On another note, unfortunately the Netherlands is turning out to be quite expensive. Well, it would be expensive if I was spending money, which I am not. The exchange rate between the Euro and the Pound is a close 1 to 1.07, which makes things here very expensive to buy. If I were to buy a coat at H&M, for example, it would cost me 30 pounds, but 40 euros. Usually, given the exchange rate, this would mean spending the same amount of money, however, right now it makes Europe very expensive. Too bad - there are some nice things here.

Anyways... back to being a social being and not hogging my friends' computer.

25 Things

Well, while I don't have my spreadsheet around I can't exactly comment on much that is money related, so I thought i'd do my version of 25 Things! Everyone else seems to be doing it, and since no one has tagged me, I'm going to do it myself. So here goes, 25 things you didn't know about me:

1. I have an obsession with organizational stores - I once spent 3 hours in "The Container Store" in Seattle agonizing over what I should/should not buy.
2. I really hope Windows 7 is good, because otherwise I'm going to buy a Mac when I go home.
3. I no longer have any of my wisdom teeth.
4. I only sleep best when I am surrounded by at least 4 pillows - two under my head, and one on each side.
5. I can't stand it when my fingernails are short - I can't pick anything up!
6. I HAVE to multitask.... all the time. I can't just watch a movie, I have to be doing something else at the same time, even if it's doodling.
7. I wonder what YOU think I look like. (And I wish I knew what YOU looked like!)
8. I can type really, really fast. I believe that came from playing a lot of text-based games in my youth.
9. I also can't wait for the release of Diablo 3.
10. I love airports. There is an excitement in the air - people rushing, people meeting other people, jetting off to exciting places.
11. I can't take care of a plant to save my life. I just kill them.
12. I will visit outer space one day, even if it costs me my life savings.
13. I still worry that people think I'm a tourist when I'm in London.
14. As a child, I fell down in our living room and put my top front teeth through my tongue. You can still see the scars.
15. I have my conch peirced. And yes, it hurt like a bitch.
16. I have never broken a bone.
17. I would love to learn to speak many languages, including German, Spanish, Punjabi and Afrikaans, but I lack the devotion to seriously master any.
18. I do everything left-handed, except write.
19. I like the way I write.
20. When I was a child my sister, dad and I used to spend every Saturday having a movie-fest. We'd watch horrible old movies like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and the Godzillas all day. I now have a love of crappy-old horror movies.
21. I hate modern horror movies, though. Can't stand the anxiety.
22. I want a tattoo. I have a design in mind but can't think of a good place to put it.
23. I made cookies from scratch for the first time 3 days ago, and they were good!
24. One of my biggest fears is losing everything. I don't think I am one of those people who could sell everything I own and bugger off. I enjoy 'things' too much.
25. I'm really good at putting IKEA furniture together.

Well, that was an odd combination of things. I hope you enjoy this little peek into my life. I enjoy reading all your 25 Things.

Amsterdam!

I guess I never really mentionned this, but I flew out of London Saturday morning to visit my friends in Leiden, The Netherlands (close to Amsterdam). I'll be here eating Dutch food and taking pictures of windmills until February 9th, so don't expect a whole lot of posts between now and then, although, I will state the following:

• The exchange rate between the Euro and the Pound sucks! It's basically 1-1, which sucks for me.
• Leiden is a lovely little city - it's got all the best parts of Amsterdam without the drugs and sex.
• I'm trying my best not to spend a lot of money, and have been really successful so far, wandering around and taking pictures is much much easier than visiting museums, unless, of course....
• It's miserable and cold outside here. Very very cold. Colder than London (although, today London got a huge dump of snow and none of the trains are working! Ha!)

Anyways, I'm out to take some pictures. I'll try and post here and there during the week.

Twitter

Okay, I'm trying to give this Twitter thing a go. I like the idea, because I'm always thinking random things during the day that I would enjoy sharing, however, the concept of logging onto this website to add them in seems to ruin the idea, and I'm not sure if they accept overseas mobile numbers on their website.

Either way, if you want to know what I'm thinking, just look to your left. Hope you enjoy it!

January in review...

Well, even though it's a couple of days before the end of the month, I have a couple things that have affected my decision to do my end-of-the-month tallies today!

First of all, it's my birthday tomorrow! (Whee!), and as such.... I won't be blogging. Well, that's a lie. I might be blogging since I have no plans for my birthday since no one here in London is aware that it's my birthday, and I'm not about to go blabbing it to everyone in the hopes that they will buy me something. Heh. Plus, I'll be at work most of the day. I might buy a cupcake or something fancy for dinner - who knows. I'll be turning the big 2-4! Whooo.

Second of all, I'll be leaving first thing Saturday for the Netherlands! I've got some friends there and I'll be spending until the 9th visiting Leiden, Amsterdam and the Netherlands. I'm really looking forward to getting out and seeing a different city. Now, I still love London, but after a while, all these old English buildings look the same! The Netherlands is a very different-looking city, and I am looking forward to that. 

In the meantime, it's been an alright month. I stuck (just barely) within my new, tighter, £700 budget. I am reasonably proud as this is the cheapest month I've had whilst in London - and I enjoyed myself, too. Now given that I spend 1 week looking for roommates and several other days working, but I had several days in London where the only money I spent was getting too and from the capital. I will definitely use this as a lesson for future months. 

So, onto the actual stats!

So, as you can see, I'm just barely £1.58 inside my budget. I'm pleased with the numbers - I never really felt 'deprived', and still managed to buy a couple things for myself this month. Now, of course, it helps that my aunt sent me £20 as a birthday gift, which helped to buy a new camera bag. *grin*. My mom also sent me $125, which I will put towards paying the plane ticket (which I will count under February) - and possibly buy me a birthday cupcake tomorrow. 

And here's a quick glance at my stats. If all goes well, I will still be able to make it to September on my current savings. I'm very very pleased with this, especially as now most of the people that are visiting me are doing so in the spring - so by mid-July, I'll be job hunting again and should have at least a month or two buffer. 

Of course... winning the lottery would always help.... heh. 

So that's January. Nothing too exciting. I spent all day today cleaning and doing laundry, since tomorrow I'll be at work and Saturday I've got to be up at the ungodly hour of 4-something to get to Heathrow by 6 a.m. Blah. But, I've never flown such a short distance before and it'll be exciting. It's also nice that my friends are comming to the Amsterdam airport to pick me up and therefore have relieved me of having to do any thinking of my own. 

I've got some more ideas kicking around the back of my head regarding blog posts so stay tuned!

A New Project..

So... I've finally started a new project that I've had in the back of my mind since I arrived here in London. I've started a grocery book!

It's not so much a book as it is a spreadsheet, but still. Here's how it works:

I've got a spread sheet set up with the following categories: Date, Store, Brand, Total Cost, Cost per unit (gram, egg, etc), and if it was on sale. I've only barely started, but here's a glimpse of my 'soup' category:

As of yet its not a perfect science. For each type of food, I have a seperate page, which will eventually get very very full. But, I am looking forward to finally knowing what a 'good' price is for food.

I can never remember what a good price is when I go shopping and buy things, especially in bulk. Sometimes I worry that when stores put things on sale (eg. 2 jars of pasta sauce for a fiver), and I'm just getting ripped off since the original price could've only been 2.40 each. You know? And here I am stocking up since I think its on sale. I need to be a more educated consumer, especially when it comes to food, since my food consumption uses up about 33% of my non-rent spending. That's a lot of money to be spending irresponsably.

I'm doing a big grocery store shop tomorrow so hopefully I will get the chance to add to it a little bit more extensively. Hopefully within a month or two I will have a really good idea of what is and isn't a good deal when I go grocery shopping. Woo hoo!

London!

Miss FB over at Fabulously Broke in the City made a good comment on my last post! She asked for some photos of London life. I had not even realized that I haven't posted any photos! Yikes! I have a blog reserved for family and friends which I post daily photos and thoughts, but since that blog posts personal information (like my address, etc), I won't link there.

However, I will offer you some of my favorite pictures from London, and, I promise many more photos to come!

(We'll start with London, I'll post some nice photos of Cambridge, St. Alban's, Dover and Paris later!)

Here is the photo I took over Trafalgar Square during Christmastime. The tree this year wasn't as impressive as some I've seen (in pictures!) in the past, but it was still lovely and festive.
This is a picture I took when I rolled over in bed one morning. This is the radiator beside my bed (it was off, so don't worry - I won't start any fires!), and I thought it looked so peaceful with the books and my tree stickers. I bought the stickers at Ikea before I left home, and although they are crappy quality (I had to put all of them up individually with sticky-tac), I like the way they look.

Here's another shot over Trafalgar Square at Christmastime. I like the way the light looked from behind Nelson's column, illuminating the fountains and all.

This it the view looking west over the Thames from the top of London Bridge (officially known as Tower Bridge... but its that big blue one that you recognize...). You can see the top of St. Paul's cathedral in the middle-ish, as well as the H.M.S. Belfast on the Thames.

Here's a rainbow that I spotted in the skies one afternoon after some rain. This is also the view over my porch.

Here's a photo I took looking up from under the London Eye one lovely blue afternoon. I've only ridden the London Eye twice, and probably won't ever do it again - it's very expensive.

Although it's a lot of fun to photograph.

There's the a-fore-mentionned bridge, as well as the Tower of London on the right side.

This is the Albert memorial. I saw this view just as I was leaving Hyde Park the other day and loved the sillloutette of the statue against the dusk.

Here's another photo I snapped walking in Hyde Park. I liked that I caught the silllouette of the bird against the sun-reflections in the water.

I snapped this photo while at Hampton Court Palace - all the little seagulls were staring at me while I stepped closer and closer to them.

This is a fountain at Hampton Court Palace.

These are the fireworks that they set off in Wimbledon Park for Guy Fawkes Day. Fortunately I also took these photos from my balcony.

And here's my postcard London shot. Red Telephone booth? Check! Big Ben? Check!

I hope you enjoyed these photos! I promise that I will start adding more photos as I go!

Mid-month check-in

Hiya everyone! It's been a couple days now since I've posted and seing as it's mid-(late) January, I thought I'd do a mini-post regarding my finances.

I'm finding my £700-a-month budget a lot more reasonable than I imagined. I don't think I'll have any problems sticking to it this month.

Here's where I am standing so far:
I've still got £20 left in my food-fund, which I will probably use up tomorrow. If I do my shopping right, that will last me no problem until the end of the month. I still have several chicken breasts and I think a couple thighs in the freezer, not including tons of bags of rice and such.

The £18.90 in Bills where I went over was a bit of a complicated situation. When the old tennants moved out, they never returned their keys. So I had keys cut for them, and then rather than pay the landlady £412 this month for rent, I paid her £412 minus the £17.90 it cost for the keys. That's why the rent category still has £20 left in it while I'm £20 in the hole for bills.

I also haven't spend any money on transportation yet this month. I actually bought a fully topped up (£90) Oyster Card on Ebay last month (for a cool £65) and have been using that card since then. It's only got about £10 on it, so I will probably have to top it up again soon. I also want to buy a 16-25 Railcard soon, which will cost me £24. I figure I will definitely get my moneys worth in the next year, plus I can get the discount from my Railcard loaded onto my Oystercard, which will save me approximately 1/3 off my off-peak daily capping. Woo hoo!

I also got the hours-owed thing from work sorted out, so I will be expecting another £75 ish on my next paycheque! Yay!

I have also sorted out another section of my budget:

Because I have several groups visiting in both May and July, I had upped my estimated budget to £1500 for those two months. This is to accomodate any travelling, accomodation while away, extra food, etc. I don't know yet if I will spend that much, but, it's nice to budget for it. So, I have added another level to my stats box. This shows me how many months I have left (including spending the extra £1500 for May and July). This is nice, because I know that even if I go crazy over those two months that I'll still make it to mid-September before running out of cash.

This is, of course, assuming I can stick to my £700 a month budget. If I up it to £800 a month, then those numbers dwindle down, leaving me with 10 months (without bonus) or 8.5 with. If I were to stick to my original budget of £1000 a month, that leaves me with just 8 months (without bonus) or 6.75 months (with bonus), which would leave me a bit stranded.

It's nice to keep these things in perspective. There are so many free things I can enjoy in the city, that I shouldn't feel the need to spend money to enjoy myself. The only time I really do spend the cash is on travel, which nowadays (with TFL upping the prices), costs me over £5 to get in and out of London for the day. Ouch.

In the meantime, I'm still working off and on for my work. They have a week in February where I'd be picking up 4 shifts - which is nice. Other than that I may not work again seriously until late July or August - depending. I'd like to continue working with them, and I hope they will want me.

Here's to a good start to 2009!

Birthday

Here's a question... my birthday is comming up at the end of the month and I was wondering if any of you Londoners (or UKers) knew of any restaurants that offer deals or discounts on birthday meals? It would be nice to go out but I'd rather not spend any money and google searches have been fruitless.

I'd rather not have to sit at home with a candle in a cupcake all alone.... although I may end up doing that as well! :)

Paycheque

I just got my paycheque via direct deposit to my account, and they've forgotten 7.5 of work. Boo urns. I'll have to chat with them when I'm in on Friday. It was much easier at my last job when I actually 'punched in' on a computer, rather than just 'showed up'. I'm not too bothered - I'm sure it'll be no problem to get the hours paid to me.