My sister Annabel is back! Following her Galt Toys review she’s now talking stainless steel soap and chalkboard walls…

It first needs to be known that I am hideously indecisive. Just leaving the house takes me longer than the average human (much to the exasperation of friends and family) as I dither. About. Everything. Size of decision is not an issue, should we move house/have more children or do I eat cereal/yoghurt/both for breakfast. It does not matter, I agonise for longer than is healthy about what is the best option.

This indecision has not been useful during the recent renovation of our house. As diligent readers of Joey’s will be aware, I now live in my grandparents former home and our major structural changes to the kitchen brought her to tears. So, she very kindly passed me some items for said kitchen from Red Candy. View Post

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I was having a disagreement with Boyfriend the other day.

It all started because I have been taking part this month in the Great British Budget challenge and have been using Money Hub in the new YourWealth app to get my finances in order. If you are the sort of person that likes lists and charts then you’ll love Money Hub. You can test out all sorts of different scenarios to see the impact of certain financial decisions on your future wealth, as well as budgeting for the day to day stuff.

For example, based on my current earnings and level of spending it is projecting my net worth at retirement to be -£173,962.

*whistles casually* View Post

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Smiggle stationery new shopThey say that if you want to discover your true vocation in life, you should think back to the things you enjoyed doing when you were ten years old. Think about it now – how did you like to spend your Sunday afternoons?

Of course this won’t really work for our children, as they will all have just been playing ‘design your own cake’ games on phones, but if I think about my ten year old self I reckon she’d have been pretty happy with a job in the new Smiggle stationery store, opening in Stratford this week. Stationery was definitely my thing. (Developing when I was about 12 into a game called ‘estate agents’ where my sister and I would design our own property details and take pretend bookings for viewings. Let’s not think about that though.) View Post

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I get quite a lot of people on Twitter and via email asking for tips to help make their blog look professional and start making them money. Normally this is a Twitter DM that reads something like this:

‘Great to connect! I’ve started blogging but not sure where to start – any tips?’

Hmmm, let’s see, I have 140 characters, what exactly are people expecting here?!

Because clearly 140 characters is not enough to share all my massive blogging knowledge and experience, I’ve put together an online course that I’m offering through my media training company, Inside Scoop. It’s about 80,000 characters long, which is definitely more than you can fit in a tweet.

If you know of anyone who might enjoy this course then please do share this information with them. Cheers!

Go pro and make money from your WordPress blog

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As you know, Belle and I are off on a ski adventure in a few weeks with family run ski company Snowbizz. 

Snowbizz prides themself on being welcoming and friendly, especially for families, and the Snowbizz team are always at the end of the phone happy to answer any questions, to make sure that everyone has a fantastic time on their ski holiday. To prove this point, I wanted to share with you a letter sent from Wendy, founder of Snowbizz, to Belle. Belle likes to know the details about things, and so Wendy took the time to let Belle know exactly what was going to happen on the trip. Wendy didn’t just write this because she wanted to impress us – this level of personal care is absolutely genuine and is what keeps people coming back to Snowbizz for their family ski holiday year after year.

Snowbizz family ski holiday

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Have you ever thought about how being in a relationship can save you money?

I’ve been taking part in the Great British Budget challenge this month, so have been forced to think a lot about cashflow, and it has struck me how unfair life can be to single people sometimes, especially single parents.

When you’re young and child free it’s a bit different; you can simply share a house with friends, split the cost of all the beer and takeaway and generally have lots of fun. (I’ve never been an adult without children, but I’ve been led to believe this is how it works.) As a single parent though, it’s not as easy as simply finding a room mate – you need the same space and privacy as any two parent family, and yet somehow you have to find the money to pay for all the bills, toys and gin yourself. There is always the option of sending the kids up chimneys, but this does tend to be frowned upon nowadays.

Of course you could argue that a partner often just adds to your costs, insisting on meat with every meal rather than cereals and making you feel like you should do things in the evening other than just watch back-to-back Jonathan Creek, but overall surely the financial impact of a partner should be a positive one? (I say this with an air of hopeful optimism, having been in a relationship in the past that somehow always left me with less money than when I started.)

What are your top tips for saving money as a single parent? Are there any things that you find are actually cheaper when you’re single?

Find out more about cheap electricity suppliers.

Disclosure: this is a sponsored post.

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As you know, last September I started running.

At first it was really tough. I was following a ‘couch to 5k’ app on my phone and it began with running for one minute, walking for a minute and a half, and repeating this eight times. After running for a whole minute I felt like I really might actually die, right there on the street.

I persevered though, to the point where I could run for 25 minutes without stopping. I say run, it was more of a bouncy walk, me just ricocheting off the pavement between steps, and in this 25 minutes we only managed to cover just under 3k. Not exactly a land speed record. I had stopped turning quite as beetroot red as in the early days though. You would think that by this point, after four months of practising, that I would have reached a point at which I got some tiny bit of pleasure out of it.

I did not. View Post

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Before Christmas I had dinner with a group of bloggers and some of the team from Voucher Codes. We were talking about children and family finances as Voucher Codes were doing some research to put together a white paper. It was an interesting discussion, but what I thought would be more interesting than just me telling you about it would be to get Bee to read the report and give her opinion from a grown up child perspective. I told her she could be as honest as she liked, I wouldn’t stop her pocket money.

Over to Bee…

Recently Voucher Codes put together a white paper on the relationship between children and family finances. The paper combines data, expert opinion and the informed judgements of parents to form a view of how children feel about family finances. After a survey of 1000 parents and 1000 5-16 year olds, some statistics came to light on the subject.

“So what if kids worry about money? It’s nothing to do with them.”  View Post

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Did you know that we are now in the Chinese year of the horse? People born in the year of the horse are meant to share characteristics with the animal – things like high energy levels, independence and a love of being in a group rather than massive teeth and a fondness for polo mints.

I was actually born in the Chinese year of the horse, so decided I should probably look into it a bit more.

“Energetic, good with money and very fond of travel,” I read, “Horses are the nomads of the Chinese Zodiac, roaming from one place or project to the next. All of this Sign’s incessant activity and searching may be to satisfy a deep-rooted desire to fit in. Paradoxically, Horses feel a simultaneous yearning for independence and freedom. Horses crave love and intimacy, which is a double-edged sword since it often leads them to feel trapped. Love connections tend to come easily to Horses, since they exude the kind of raw sex appeal that is a magnet to others.”

I do exude a raw sex appeal, that’s very true. Especially in these slippers. View Post

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Morning everyone! Today I have a Galt toys guest review from my sister Annabel. Please do read it and say nice things!

“I’ve got a surprise for you.”

These are some of my four year old son’s favourite words. He is starting to treat them with caution though, having overplayed the ‘surprise’ approach many a time – “I’ve got a surprise if you brush your teeth/eat dinner/stop sitting on my head at 6am.” The excitement is swiftly followed by crushing disappointment when the surprise is revealed to be a kiss from me/an apple/an invisible pet.

We were walking back from school and his interest was piqued by further description of the surprise. “It’s in a box.” I say. “It arrived today.”

This is good news to him, he mentally ticks of the apple/kiss options. He picks up his pace and breaks into a run, “What is it Mummy?”

It was this from Galt toys*: View Post

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Sometimes I worry that I’m not very cool.

OK, that’s a lie. I know I’m not very cool. Just reading that sentence out loud, hearing the way I say the word ‘cool’, you can tell that I am not it. I sound like a really old woman telling a teenager they are ‘spunky’ and imagining myself to be down with the kids.

My complete lack of coolness was highlighted recently by a trip to a local independent cinema. The expression ‘local independent cinema’ should really have been a red flag – the very notion of a film being not really suitable for mainstream cinema implies that it is far too cool for the likes of me with my leather handbag full of Tesco vouchers and Smints. View Post

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There are lots of things that I find frustrating about being a parent; the long hours, terrible pay, complete lack of positive feedback or gratitude to name a few. There is one thing though that drives me absolutely mad. The kind of mad that I can actually feel in my shoulders and neck – a fury that fizzles in the back of my head and makes me want to hit something or someone.

(I don’t obviously, I just let the resentment simmer internally.)

The thing that makes me mad is my children’s complete inability to find anything, even when presented with very clear instructions.

“Where are the matches?” Belle asks me this morning. View Post

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