..or Robert Frost!

Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.

I know that writing down everything you spend is often recommended but I'm just not going there right now! I might do it sometime, but not this week/month/year.

What I have done is filed every last paper - Yay! This meant making the decision to keep no more than two years worth of bank statements, utiltiy bills etc. In all the years I have filed and stored them not once have I needed them. (I know this might be tempting fate....) At the same time I am browsing web sites and books on personal finance. My favourite at the moment is Jean Chatzsky's Make Money Not Excuses (Good title?)  Wake Up, Take Charge and Overcome Your Financial Fears Forever. The page that sold it to me had the heading A woman embarassed that she hasn't paid attention before.

Hmm. That's me.

You can read a fair bit of it on Amazon to see if you think it would be right for you. Thank you for the interesting and useful comments on the last Simply Money post!

I've signed up for Jean Chatsky's free weekly newsletter (and unsubscribed from something else - don't want extra clutter!)

If you should be lucky enough to find yourself in Crail (see yesterday's post) you might like Crail Pottery. Cheerful ware, not too expensive, prettily displayed..

If I had a holiday house I'd have bought lots of it.

But I haven't, so I didn't.

For a little break from a month's intensive gardening and a change of scene we went across Scotland to the East Neuk Festival for the first time. The main attraction for us was Quatuor Ebene playing two of the late Beethoven quartets. Despite a late start (they missed their flight from Paris!) their performance was stunningly good. The next day they played Mozart and Ravel and gave as an encore their variation on a Beatles number - I hadn't realised quite how versatile these brilliant musicians are. For an introduction if you don't know them, see here.

This part of Fife with it's fishing villages and the lovely town of St Andrews is very picturesque....

Tee-hee, silly paper napkins (I know, I know a waste of money!)

I have only written two posts under Simply Money - see here, and here.

One of them says I have enough, and one of them is about how I managed when funds were low.

I do still have enough thankfully - the proof being I still give some away (to charities) and I'm still fairly frugal. I think it's in my DNA.

What I now want is to manage what I have more efficiently.

I also want to be peaceful about money!

Is this possible?

I'm starting simply (of course!) by getting ALL the paperwork in one place. (Even online stuff needs organised, but most of mine is still on paper.) I have a one drawer filing cabinet - bursting full! A box of receipts (bursting full) a cardboard file and a pretty  little letter rack thing which I thought would be useful but has turned out to be just another place to stuff things. Before anything else then, I am sifting through and throwing out. I will burn a pile in the garden incinerator, then file the rest. The secret, for me, in getting this job done is to do it in small increments of time - in other words I no longer work at something till I am sick of it and want to pack it in altogether! I have learned to be more focussed - I can now only file. I don't get distracted by reading any of it or trying to make decisions about any of it or become overwhelmed by the scale of it.

I just file it.

Simple.

And a good start.

Have you started yet? Perhaps you have even finished - there are people whom Fly Lady calls Born Organised! I'm not one of them. Fly Lady has a section on finance which is very basic, common sense, straight forward and useful. See it here.

From practical to magical in the click of a shutter. Our mini-meadow gives pleasure out of all proportion to its size. This was it in the afternoon light yesterday....I leave you with these images while I take a wee blog break.

'You don't have to be grand to open your garden for charity.' An article with this title has just been removed from Sarah Raven's website - sorry, I was going to link to it!
If you have been considering the idea I would encourage you to go ahead.
 
It's a win win win set up. We, the gardeners have our gardens looking wonderful with most of the work done and most of the summer still to come. The 188 visitors had a lovely and inexpensive day out. And the charities get £1560 they would not otherwise get!

We are delighted with the results. We are very rural - the nearest small town is 13 miles away, the nearest city 2 hours away, but people came from far and wide. If you are in a more populated area you could expect many more visitors and raise a lot more money too.

Hard work but fun! We will be having a celebratory garden party later in the summer.

I have to confess I did cheat!  I've not had much success growing the beautiful allium Christophii (too wet in winter). However I did manage to grow a few in some old pots. They were straggly and leaning every which way...

so I cut them, slid a very thin cane up inside the stem, and stuck them into the ground in the bit of the garden where I originally wanted them to grow!

Simply Money - do these two words go together? Can money be simple?  Is it the root of all evil, or does it make the world go around?

Earn your keep. Pay your way. Put some by for a rainy day. This old saying makes it seem simple enough.
 
So does Micawber's famous dictum from Dickens' David Copperfield - Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

It's time for a closer look...