Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-04

Holiday pic

Originally uploaded by iccleanne

I created this to send to people, and decided I might as well just blog it as well, to save me some time detailing what our holiday was like.

If you click on the picture you can see a larger version of it.

I’ve started writing to some new pen pals, but annoyingly the stamps that I currently have at home are the wrong amounts to send letters abroad, because the postage rates have gone up. I have 56p and 81p stamps, but I need 60p or 88p stamps for sending to Europe.

Wow I’ve just looked at the prices for the “rest of world” (i.e. outside Europe) and it’s expensive. 67p for 10g (so 1-2 sheets of airmail-super thin-paper!), 97p for 20g (2xA4 sheets) or £1.46 for 40g! Wow I’m going to have to think about which paper I use to write to people in the states!

Our main post office in town has set up a new ticket system at the moment, to try to make it easier than there being a large queue for the counters, but for those just wanting some stamps it’s more complicated. It used to be possible to just buy stamps from the till where they sold the stationary, but that’s all changed. I popped in there today to see how busy it was, took one look at the queue and walked straight back out! I don’t have an hour to wait for a few stamps! It’s sad that there are so few post offices in the UK now, we used to have one just down the road from me, which was really nice, but it was decided to close that one and keep the smelly one near to the primary school. I don’t know why it smells in there, but it does! It’s not a direction I normally walk, so I have to make an effort to go there.

To solve my postage problem (well for the time being), I bought my postage online. The Royal Mail allows you to put credit onto an account and print out postage which you stick on the letter/parcel/package. It doesn’t look as nice (esp since I couldn’t figure out how to get my printer to print directly onto the envelope (it wanted a sheet of paper too) because you don’t get the fun pictures on the stamps!

I’ve been looking forwards in life quite a lot recently, in terms of career, starting a family, our home… I haven’t come up with any answers, but have found lots of questions and choices!

I currently earn a bit less than my husband, for a few less hours a week (although those hours are more random hours than his. We live in a lovely little two bedroom flat, which I love, and is ideal for the two of us, but when (God willing) we start a family and we need to find room a third lil person we might find it more of a squeeze. Now a baby is very small, but all the stuff associated with having one takes up a lot of room! Will that work in our lil flat or do we need to move first?! If we need to move that throws up many more questions: where do we move to, what can we afford, will we need to move out of the city or to an area of the city we’re less keen on.

At the moment we’re ticking along quite nicely on two wages, with a mortgage worth much less than our property, but with one wage that would be harder, and if we had a bigger mortgage we might struggle. It makes me wonder how people do it. We’re not on high paid jobs, but we’re not on the minimum wage either.

I’m not the sort of person whose “organised” with money, I’m just careful. If I don’t have it I can’t spend it, if I’m getting short of money I become very careful about what I spend money on. I’m not generally an expensive consumer, I prefer charity shops to high street shops, I buy things on offer or on sale and try to go for the most cost-effective. I’m happy to buy own named brands on many things. I’ve learnt through my job, how to buy a weeks worth of meals with VERY little!

Anyway, back to my reason for starting this post… I started thinking the other day about whether I should consider further my career or not. It was actually after visiting my friends in Kent, as one of them is a social worker, and a comment was passed about how their finances were doing, and it made me realise that I’d earn more as a social worker. I’d never really thought about being a social worker before, even though I’m a social care worker. In the past the only thing that I had really looked into was a degree about working with people with learning disabilities, and there was one random place that did it – I wasn’t THAT interested!

Well today I’ve done a bit of research, and found out that there are undergraduate degrees about that I could do in Plymouth or Bristol, that I could get into thanks to my NVQ3 and experience, BUT it’s 3 years, and I’m not sure I want to study for 3 years!

My jobs are pretty secure, and I could get more or less hours as I wish – if one job packed in I could do the other full time (although I’m not sure I want to). Andy’s plodding along in his job, he’s seeking something a bit more forfilling really, but there doesn’t seem to be much about that is right. When we start a family I’ll need to rely on Andys wage, and I’ll only get maternity pay on my contracted job – so that won’t be much! Andy’s even pondered the idea of a shared work/parenting role (when practical), but I’m not sure how successful that would be – maybe I should ask other parents about it.

Wow head spin. All these ponderings make me feel happier just being a married couple with any children in a lil flat with an affordable mortgage! I blame age, and that silly ticking clock – I may not look 29, but I am. I worry about starting a family too late, and the implications that could have, but I’m so torn as to when is the right time!