Back to money. Warning: I’m about to go into detail of how much money I have or don’t have and where it comes from. If this seems boring, that’s because it is, but I need to rant about my own stupidity.
Background setting of sorts:
As I’ve mentioned at some point already, I receive no bursaries or grants, the minimum student loan and I live in Beit. Complain complain my own fault for choosing expensive accomodatipon weep weep I know. My parents are also not super-rich; they just have a lot on paper and no-one in Student Finance cares how many people your dog eats for or how much debt you have. My dad and stepmum see me every Saturday and I tend to get a load of letters, random items of clothing that someone gave to someone else and I may like and hugs from my tiny sister human. They don’t give me a specific amount of money each anything, but they buy me food and other good things on a regular basis, so it’s hard to estimate what that is in numbers. NB: They also said to come crying to them just before financial crisis strikes so they can help me before it’s too late, so they do have my back, it’s all good. My mum lives further away and sees me less often, so she just gives me £100 a month. My accommodation is more expensive than my loan by £120 a month, so this gets swallowed up pretty fast and I tend not to see it.
Why I was earlier less of an idiot:
I made a budgeting spreadsheet, expecting to love it, give it a pet name and spend all day updating it. I knew that my first maintenance payment left me with -£700 ish. So, whenever I purchased useless crap, gig tickets or kayaking trips, I made sure to put cash I had been payed back into my account to bring it back to -£700.
Why I’m now an idiot:
I forgot about my beautiful spreadsheet after 2 days. This meant that I didn’t know exactly how many months my mum had given me money for and didn’t take it into account. *Internal scream* By now, I should have been returning to -£300. Not -£700. *External scream*
The biggest problem is that the next maintenance payment is going to leave me down another £800+. My overdraft is £1500 and I really really don’t want to anger it further. My mum has given me her January installment rather early and my dad will reinstall me for the money I spent to get home and eat food while dog-sitting. I should thus remain above -£1500 and I also get payed on the 9th of January, so I’ll be able to calm down a little.
Throwing salt on the wound:
In the summer, I want to go on the kayaking tour -£300, do the Le Mans 24-hour rollerblading race -£150 and visit Scandinavia with my boyfriend -£300. I’d also really love to visit the Motherland and see my elders, but I’ll need to push that back to September, so I’m allowing myself to ignore that for now. In order to eradicate my overdraft and have enough to do the above my summer, I need to be putting aside £45 a week i.e 3*food.
*More screams*
Pouring hydrofluoric acid directly into the wound:
My windows 8 kept insisting on a critical update that left my laptop in a stupor called error 0xc000021a, which sounds as fun as it is. After weeping to my dad and leaving my laptop with him for a few hours, he had magically fixed what the Imperial IT dudes couldn’t. Mainly because they were closing, but that’s beside the point. For a week, I couldn’t update windows, because simply restarting the laptop (necessary for an update) put it straight back into a seizure. After using the ‘restore system to a previous point’ feature so much I know it backwards, I was finally able to restore to a point far back enough that it had time to update to 8.1. Everything was perfect. Everything worked.
I then decided to take up the offer and try Windows 10. Unless you have at least 27 people telling you that upgrading was a good idea, DON’T DO IT. At first my files were moved somewhere funky (apparently this is normal, im just stoopid), but then something somewhere updated all my files were deleted. No, they wern’t hidden or moved; my laptop suddenly had more free space than it could dream of and my stuff was NOWHERE. DON’T DO IT. I now can’t go back because the magical ‘return to 8.1’ version in Recovery is simply not there. *Weep*
Luckily, I had engaged my singular brain cell earlier that day and I had backed up everything. I only lost a picture of Alea der Bescheidene that I saved for my background. Bearing in mind all the photos, music, films and work for Russian School I could have lost, I’m okay with that.
tl;dr- don’t be me, I’m dumb
– don’t update to Windows 10
– love Alea and go listen to Saltatio Mortis (they have bagpipes)
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