Category: Home

I did enjoy my vacation to the Gold Coast very much. It was wonderful spending so much time together as a family. But I was reminded of a few things about living in a city.

First there is constant noise. Even during the night you can hear the drone of air-conditioning units and cars on the road (18 floors below). It never stops, is never peaceful – even with the doors/windows all shut (not that we did that very often). I guess if you’ve always lived in the city you are used to it but we’re used to waking up to the sounds of birds, and even distant cows. It’s actually so quiet at our house I nearly always hear the newspaper thump on the driveway at Mum’s next door when it gets delivered around 6am (it took me a LONG time to work out what the noise was).

Secondly, there is little privacy. From every verandah and most windows you can see other apartments. It’s okay for a short time but I know it would really get to me after a while. We like having windows, curtains open and are already dreading when the house next door us gets built and we’ll have to use our blinds at the front of the house way more than we do now. A HUGE part of the reason we chose the block of land we have was no back neighbours. We then designed the house to have the most privacy possible to other neighbours. The house yet to be built it the only one that will really affect us.

Thirdly, crowds and traffic. Anyone who knows me well knows I don’t like crowds and traffic. Luckily we’re up here at a time of year that isn’t too busy but a few days at the parks (on the weekends) have been a bit too much for me. Surprising the resort complex is never too crowded – considering there are 3 towers of around 180 apartments each. While some are lived in, I think most are vacation homes and not being used at this time. I’m sure I wouldn’t like to be here in the Christmas/Summer holidays.

There are a few good things about city living I guess. We love being able to duck downstairs to the grocery store and bakery. We don’t eat out but if you liked dining out there are plenty of restaurants/take-away places to chose from. It’s close to the beach – but we prefer our almost private walks at the lake. There are lots of “things” to do – lucky really cause I think you’d want to leave your home as much as possible.

I think it’s fair to say I won’t be moving to the city any time soon. Even the city in Wollongong would probably be too busy for me (though it would be nothing compared to Surfers).  The Gold Coast is a beautiful place and the weather pretty glorious but it’s not for me. If/when we move again it’ll no doubt be somewhere even quieter than we are now as we would really like to have more land.

Anyway, wonderful as our holiday was it’s nice to be back home, surrounded by all our things, our animals and the peace and quiet of our home and lives. I enjoy vactions for the break from real life they provide but they always make me appreciate my real life and my home at the same time :-).

I’ve mentioned a few times about how we’ve moved over to a cash budget and one of my readers asked for some more details.

I’ve being using the Simply Budgets program for a number of years now and love it (if you need to change any amount it does all the work for you and you can see your cash flow for the coming year). Any budget program will do but you do NEED a budget. However, having a budget and sticking to it is another thing. In fact, we were not able to EVER stick to our budget while putting most purchases on credit card. Yes, we did pay off our credit card every month but I was continually having to rework the budget to be able to do this.

During the year I started watching Till Debt to us Part and the first thing Gail does is put her “clients” on a cash budget. Eventually getting sick of continually running out of money (the crunch came when Kevin had a $1000 dental bill and we had no SAVINGS), I decided we’d try the cash budget.

I bought seven little containers for our main categories – Beauty (covers skin care/makeup, hairdressers, beauticians), kids, entertainment, clothing, household, pets and Libby (personal spending money – mainly for magazines and books). I also have a small purse for groceries and gifts – these stay in my handbag.

I added up how much money I needed to withdraw each week and once a week I’ll get my money and divide it up. Some categories – like food – get used up weekly, but most accumulate so I can buy things when needed. Our bills, like water, electricity, etc are still paid on credit card and paid off monthly.

The first few months were a little tough and I had to shift “cash” around from one container to another. This was mainly becuase I had to accumulation to start with. Now as you can see there is quite a bit of money in some containers – I’ve been especially working on the entertainment one so I’ve got spending money for the school holidays.

Now that Christmas is over I expect things to really settle down. I don’t like parting with my cash now so I really do think about my purchases. Just the other day I told Christy I’d look for a new Christmas book (to replace one that was damaged). The one I liked was $32 so I quickly put it back on the shelf. A few months ago I would just have bought it on credit card.

The best part is not only do I no longer have to rework the budget to accomodate my overspending but in the 4-5 months we’ve been doing to cash budget we have managed to save $5,000!!!!! Some is in my travel account, some in long term savings and some will pay for my new kitchen table.

Honestly, if you have trouble sticking to budget I suggest you try a cash budget. I was a doubter for many, many years but this is only thing that has worked for me. And you know the crazy part? Even though we have had to say no to buying things we really haven’t done without. I don’t feel like I’ve been deprived. I’m not wanting. Which just shows that that $5,000 we’ve saved would have been spent on stuff we really don’t need !!!