Interest, Inflation, houses, housemates, moving and lots and lots of paint.

Redundancy money paid.  Its in the bank, a considerable amount of tax deducted along the way however because of course HMRC believe that I will be earning approximately £4000 a month for the rest of the financial year! Well yes that would be nice, but not very realistic. 
Little phone call to HMRC to claim said tax back, only to be told that because I am still in work (3.5 hours a week at private school job) then they won't send it back, but it will be paid back little by little as they realise that my wage is more like £400 than £4000.  Thats nice, but what do they expect me to live on?
So I need to figure out the best thing to do with my meagre payout which just to be clear only included £556 worth of actual non-taxable redundancy pay for my four years of hard slog at the hell hole.  The rest was holiday pay, a weeks wages and 4 months pay in lieu of notice.  Obviously thats all at 0.33 of what I was on before Christmas.
Anyhow enough of the complaining, its a lump sum of money that I would never be given again and along with my savings from exam marking etc.  I have a half decent little nest egg sat in my ISA.  The problem with it sitting in an ISA though is that while interest rates range from 0.05% to 3%, inflation is still around 2.8% so even with the interest my nest egg is gradually becoming worth less.  What I could buy for £4000 today is not the same as what I could buy for £4000 next year.  Remember when a fiver used to be able to buy a couple of drinks on a night out or a least down the local pub? Now we're lucky if we get one drink!

My plan B (one day maybe) has been to buy a few properties and its something I like doing, so I thought I might put my money down as a deposit on a buy to let. 
Houses in this neck of the woods are definitely cheaper than most places in the UK and with the college now being a university centre and attracting more and more students because of the lower fees there is definite potential in the area.  House prices are still on a downward trend too which hopefully means sellers are open to negotiation, although my attempts so far to buy a repossession property for only slightly less than the asking price have not gone well.  The estate agent told me himself that they had advised the asking price be reduced to less than I offered and that any other offers made had been considerably less.  The house needs a little work to say the least. 
The agent that called me back to inform me that my offer had been refused spoke encouragingly of how excited the sellers were (a bank) that I might offer and extra £2000 on top of what I had!  Hubby said I should have expressed my own excitement at the possibility of them accepting an offer of £2000 less than I had put forward :-)
I'll wait it out on this one and in the mean time continue the search.

In the meantime I have a couple of pieces of good news! :-)

A friend asked me if this was my new car when he saw it in the holiday pics and he wasn't too far wrong........






we went for the updated version :-)

Yes I know I'm redundant and only working very part time and no I am not using my redundacy pay to buy it!   This is hubby and I's first joint purchase, we traded in Tiglet (my 7 year old Tigra) which was doing about 35mpg, needed a new engine and only had two seats for this little baby.
She is tax free as she only has a 0.9litre engine, which also means she is very fuel efficient, so far its costing us £25 less to do about 350 miles, she has 4 seats so room for the boy and she's a convertible, the red roof is a soft top :-)

And how are hubby and I going to pay for it?  Well as I mentioned before hubby has a fulltime job (Housemaster at the private school) starting in September and my teaching hours at the school have been quadrupled! Thats sounds like loads, but 3.5hours X 4 isn't that huge, huge enough to live on though, especially as all our accommodation and food and bills are paid by the school :-)

We've known about the housemaster job for a while now and we were eager to get involved so offered to redecorate the boarding house (it was in desperate need!)
We have been knee deep in paint, literally at times, for a week now.  The place is huge and along with the painting there are a multitude of maintenance and cleaning jobs that we have found along the way so its been a slow slog and there's much more to do.  We also more or less live at the local B&Q and I am driving hubby mad again with paint colours and charts.  It does mean that since Itlay we haven't had much time to go out spending which is a bonus as the next 2 months, until we get paid a real wage in September, are going to be tight.
Even though its not our money filling B&Q's pocket we still have a budget to stick to and we are genuine scrimpers at heart.  So we have scrimped our way through redecorating a common room (lounge), 5 bedrooms and stairs, hall and landing in the boarding house, the lounge in our flat and hopefully a little more before we run out of the paint that cost us approximately £200.  This is in an old Victorian building where there is no such thing as a small room or a low ceiling so a little has gone an awfully long way.  The trade card that allows 10% off and the Dulux offer of 2 for £20 that is on at the moment have also helped, but it was mainly the decision to buy 10 litre tubs of white emulsion and the little 1 litre pots of posh colour and mix our own that saved us the most, halving the price of the ready mixed stuff.
Of course it is the school that has got the biggest bargain by having hubby and I working for free!

Hubby has taken me out for a couple of meals though, I think to thank me for my painting skills (he hates painting) and we managed to squeeze in a trip to York yesterday via the designer outlet which tempted me into a couple of purchases (at considerable discounts of course) and a mystery visit at my favourite York restaurant.

And so the situation so far:
Employment: Part time, but earning a decent wage with no bills to pay as long as I can find lodgers for my house.
Lodgers: 2 (1 to shortly depart and 5 potentials waiting for viewings)
Eating out: Hubby's treats and one mystery visit.
Hubby: 1 and we made it passed a year!
Dog: 1 (a little confused about where we disappear to every day and why we return covered in paint)
Stepson: 1
No Spend Days: Going well except the little trip to the designer outlet, DIY is keeping me away from any shops other than B&Q.

Not over yet.....

The atmosphere at work is strange, despite the upbeat conversation and cheery greetings of my colleagues who are looking forward to leaving next week (they are mostly optimistic that voluntary redundancy will be granted) there is still a depressing air of emptiness and lost hope.  My students left on Thursday after their final exam, as usual I was more nervous than they were! They left me with a gift bag of chocolate and Tia Maria (they know me so well!) which nearly made me cry and definitely made me want to hug them all (not appropriate for teachers and therefore my professionalism stopped me) although a couple of the lads gave me bear hugs anyway. 
I have taught these students for the past two years and yes they would have been leaving for uni or work even if the department hadn't been closing, but it feels like more of an end to things than the usual end of term. I will miss their familiar faces and quirks, one thing I have never had trouble with is taking responsibility for my students and my course.  As soon as they enrol, they become mine, and I take that very seriously, this is why it is so hard to let them out into the big wide world and accept that for the majority I will never see them again. 
I do hope that, as promised, they will keep me updated via facebook, some of my first ever students from 7 years ago still add the odd comment on my profile which always makes me smile.
So the college seems very empty and quiet, with students gone and many of the staff only popping it to show their faces, there is after all no work to do, no preparations to make for next year, no potential students to speak to, but stupidly I still feel obligated to turn up, sit at my desk and show my presence for the hours I am paid, even if I am only using the time to get some marking done (it classes as continuous professional development - why am I justifying myself!)
By Friday this week I should know whether I am redundant or not, potentially being told to pack my desk up on the same day!  It might be this hanging over me thats getting me down, or our typical British weather that means we have rain rather than summer, or my lack of a social life while the marking continues and I live at the end of a very long, boring motorway on the way to nowhere which keeps the visitors firmly away.  Whatever it is I keep trying to shoo it away with thoughts of the fast approaching holiday to Italy, the promising weather forecasts in that part of the world and all the lovely things hubby and I are going to see and do (clean minds please people).

In complete contrast, a meeting with a lady I will be working with from September at my other part time job (private school teaching) couldn't have been more motivating.  Finding some one that has the passion and enthusiasm for their job and is on the same wave length as me is an incredibly rare event, so I left after a quick meeting, that ended up lasting over an hour, with ideas and hope for next year.  Maybe everything will turn out for the best, yes I still don't have a fulltime (proper) job, but a few hours in a place that hopefully I will be able to have an impact and be appreciated is an opportunity the rest of my colleagues haven't been given, so right now I am thinking myself very lucky and hoping that I will have the pleasure of many more enjoyable meetings like this one.  We are opening a pop up smoothie bar next week for the students, I'll let you know how it goes as the kids range from 7 years old to 18 and there will be sharp knifes, and sticky fruit involved!

Other good news (one for the girls) is that I found a nail varnish that doesn't chip! Yes I know simple things, but seriously this has had me smiling all week and waving my hands frantically in front of the hubby on a daily basis insisting he admire the lovely metallic green colour that after a week has only just started to go at the very tips of the nail.  I know there is a possibility you will think I am crazy at this point, but being the kind of girl that refuses to pay a fortune for maincures or indeed nail varnish, I tend to paint my own nails and find that after having done the washing up once they have already chipped even though I spent an hour letting each coat dry before applying the next, and I never use the cheapest make its either Rimmel or Boots No.7 so you're talking around the £5-£8 mark.  Anyway I received a voucher from Boots when buying my lotions and potions for the holiday (very excited!!) that gave me £5 off No.7 products.  These vouchers are responsible for the majority of items in my make up bag.  So I treated myself to a nail varnish that as a result of the voucher only cost £2! Its called 'Dollar' and after my original concerns of looking like something out of Wicked the musical, I love it.  So impressed am I with the lack of chipping I bought it in silver, at full price, using my advantage card points so technically free :-)

The exam marking continues, at a slightly faster pace I think for this batch, not sure if thats from practice or the students answers are a better quality as its an A2 exam paper.  I am looking forward to the extra money coming in to replenish the savings account that paid for our holiday to Sorrento, I start to worry if I don't have a back-up.
The lodgers continue to drive me crazy, to the point that every door closing makes me flinch and I struggle to raise a smile when they try to engage me in conversation.  I am counting the days to the hoiday and then the move to our new accomodation.  We are also chomping a the bit to get into the boarding house and start the refurb.  We have a month between moving in and the boarders returning from summer holidays and we plan a complete decorative overhaul. We are not being paid for the months work, but we feel the need to make and impact and take ownership, plus we will be living for free, as long as I can find another lodger for my house. 

I'm trying not to hold my breath until Friday (redundancy decision) but I definitely feel out of sorts this week and I am constantly checking my work email in the hope there will be some news, yes I know its highly unlikely that they will put us out of our misery early, but they are dragging it on for a punishing amount of time.  Some of us still believe that come Friday they will suggest redeployment into other jobs.  My colleagues have been told in individual meetings that they could perhaps retrain as a maths teacher (this was to the sociology teacher) or that we are teachers so can teach anything (to the law teacher).  There is certainly no value for our skills or appreciation that at A-level or even GCSE teachers are specialised.
There has been not consultation during the 90 days consultation period, this period ended on 23rd June and there has been no decisions made.  Perhaps they will continue to pay us indefinitely and we will all sit in the office playing on the internet for the foreseeable future. 
So you see, not over yet......but keep your figures crossed that it is soon.