..on all the stuff you have been clearing? Mine is currently stacked up waiting for decisions to be made. Sell on eBay or Gumtree? Give away on Freecycle? Donate to the charity shops and let them make the money? If and when they are open of course.

I am better at spending it than making it lately, though not on fun things - chimney repairs, chimney sweep, decorating, fence repairs, shed repairs. A new bird table and bird feeder were fun buys though...

I am putting three small collages into a local exhibition  - a few sales would be very welcome! I love the poster by Brian Phillips.

Sorry - photos would have been more fun with birds in them!

..at your comments on yesterday's post! (Especially Lotta's.)

However I had an idea...

I made my own version with things I already had.

I could have used a much bigger bag (this is the duvet ready to go to the laundry) but since I plan to just write things on bits of paper I decided the small version would do.

I am dealing with money matters right now.

It makes me anxious.

What is the emotional baggage that is keeping me back?

It's the fact that my Dad became bankrupt when I was about 12 years old.

I am going to write that fact on a piece of paper, put in the bag, hang it on a hook and see what it's like to do the necessary financial business without it!

What will you put in your bag? (No need to go into full confessional mode here if you don't want to - though feel free...)

..there's peace of mind.

I think that writing a will is such a loving and considerate thing to do, and it can be simple.

Ours cost £2.99 from the stationers. If your affairs are simple, writing your own will is perfectly legal here in uk, cheap and easy to do (we had a lawyer glance over ours and she did not charge for that). Of course charities often offer free will-making with a lawyer/solicitor and ask for a donation from your estate in return, so at the time of making it it is virtually free.

At the stressful time of a death it can be one less difficulty for those left behind if there is a will filed where it is easy to find. Knowing what the person who died wanted is a comfort worth having, and since it comes to us all......maybe we should talk about it, be kind and caring, and write our will.

(We wrote a covering letter to our children with ours saying that just because we loved all our stuff didn't mean that they had to love it too, and that they must feel free to dispose of it entirely as they wished!)

I've been re-reading my own posts about money (see sidebar). There aren't very many posts and they are full of photos of flowers and things - both of these facts probably tell you something about my attitude to the subject!

In my first post on the subject I said I had enough - and that still stands really.  I have beautiful food and plenty of it, a safe home, warm clothing, and some to spare.

Changed circumstances bring new issues around the subject.

You have written a will haven't you?

This made me think....that I should think a bit more about it!

After lots of patient filing and shredding, lots of research, lots of frustration, hours online and on the phone....we have saved all of £31.98 (by paying our broadband package online).
 
Wow.

We plod on.

Big rewards will come!

A slightly different take on the subject of personal finance comes from Carl Richards author of The Behaviour Gap. He writes for the New York Times. Browse his blog for thoughtful advice about teaching your children about money matters, and I particularly liked this article.

But I liked the sunshine on the early morning poppies even more -

And is there any more peaceful occupation than collecting seed? Pink campion today, destined for Coronation Wood.

To automate or not, that is the question. Whether 'tis wiser to use cash (pain) and consider every purchase or to use a card (pleasure) for the convenience and mindlessness of it....See the programme The Men Who Made Us Spend on BBC2 iPlayer here in UK. Amazing. Makes me think I'm living in a parallel universe!

One area to automate I think is savings. I make the decision once and the money is set aside every month (and ideally reviewed, and increased if possible even by a tiny bit, every year).

But direct debits are a bit 'out of sight, out of mind' aren't they? There are incentives for using them and they can help save us money by ensuring that we are never late for any payments which incur penalties, and they are indeed convenient and efficient,  but they don't make for mindfulness about money.

What do you think?

For more arguments in favour of un-automating see this guest post on Zen Habits.

This is the elctricity meter and vase cupboard! I am certainly not minimalist when it comes to jugs, vases, jam jars and bottles and anything else which will hold flowers.
And these are only the ones which are not in use right now....

Up in the city for the first time in weeks I browsed the Personal Finance section in Waterstones....

I decided to pass on Beat the Banks and Money Fight Club - The Smart Way to Save Money One Punch at a Time. Too adversarial. (I'm looking for a peaceful relationship with my money you may remember. See here.)

The Get Rich Quick titles didn't appeal either. How To Be Rich, How To Get Rich, The Millionaire Next Door, and The One Minute Millionaire, on the basis of if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

There was Get Rich Blogging. Really? The author 'spends her life partying and writing about it'. Not really me..

Thankfully I could pass on all the Get Out of Debt titles (I'm not in debt).

The author of Rich Dad Poor Dad seems to have written seven books all saying pretty much the same thing.

I like the appeal to different people - there's The Money Diet for those with dieting on their minds, Money - A Love Story for those romantically inclined and How To Grow Your Own Money for the gardeners among us. Whatever 'speaks to your condition' to use the Quaker phrase.

I was tempted by Ouch which looks like an interesting and entertaining read (and can be bought on Amazon for £0.1 or used, in good condition, for £398.78! (Can anyone explain this to me?)

There is also the very quaint Orchids on Your Budget (1937). I loved the blurb:-
'Be very sure that your budget covers the orchids. The whole point of budgeting is that it simplifies life - and life, if it's worth living, is more than drudgery and bookeeping and practicalities.'

Hear Hear! This is probably why I passed too on all the How To Be Thrifty titles. I could write them myself.

Two new authors to me are Jasmine Butler and Dave Ramsey (thank you Gail) but I think I will maybe go for David Meakin's How to Grow Your Own Money - he says one of the problems is 'savings inertia'.

So true.

So true.

Here are some popular writers on personal finance you can read on Amazon (before buying second hand at £0.1 plus postage). if, like me, you are taking a fresh look at your finances. You can actually read quite a bit of some of them without any purchase at all...I've picked up some useful tips just by browsing, and most of these authors also have blogs and/or websites.

Martin Lewis, Suze Orman, Alvin Hall, Jean Chatzky, Vicki Robin, Robert Kiyosaki.

From Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad I learned how to make a balance sheet and that my house is not an asset, strictly speaking, but a liability....who knew? All very interesting stuff.

The sweet peas are doing well -

The weather has been wonderful for a while, though in the last few days there have been some useful showers. I say useful because they have been watering the sweet peas, and each time it rained I have come inside and done more financial paper sorting and have got through a mountain of it.

Feels good.

Space in the filing drawer and space in my head! Now I feel up to doing some of the things I've been meaning to do for ages - changing bank, switching energy supplier, getting a better deal on broadband, and more.....but, baby steps and one thing at a time for me!

..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.

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...

'Spend your time doing inexpensive and free things instead of shopping.' suggests minimalist Leo Babatua  (25 Mar).

This reminds me of 'poor week'.

We used to have what we called poor week at the end of some months when money was particularly tight. It sounds awful, but in fact it was often fun (we were never without the necessities - poor is a relative term!) But we'd announce 'OK it's poor week, what can we do that's fun and doesn't cost anything?' And the girls would come up with ideas - we'd go to the park and picnic and make things and plant seeds and fly kites or do jigsaws, go to the library and visit anything that was free, and put up a tent in the garden and....

We'd avoid the supermarket and dig deep in the back of cupboards and the freezer inventing meals and strange sandwiches from whatever was there. We'd make soup and bake bread and scones and, everyone's favourite, bramble and apple sponge pudding, and make popcorn, and homemade lemonade and (the girls like to remind me of this) we once picked nettles from the hedgerows, wearing rubber gloves, to put in nettle quiche - disappointingly, it didn't taste of anything, but I'm sure it was good for us! There was quite a bit of grumbling about that one (I think they were afraid their friends would see them) but on the whole we had a lot of fun on poor week, and ate rather well.

I think the Pick And Choose was invented one really poor week, the day before pay day - we just put everything that was left in the cupboard, fridge, vegetable basket and the fruit bowl onto the table - it was the oddest mix, but beautifully arranged on our best dishes, with napkins and a candle. We told the girls to help themselves to a 'Pick And Choose'. They thought it was really special and it became a favourite kind of meal! I really don't think they knew that it was created from sheer desperation....