Saturday Savers 2023 Progress Report Week 17

It's that day again ! Time for my weekly #SaturdaySavers update....

If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.

Image by S. Nagel from Pixabay

Let's start with this week's progress table;

I realised that my previous format, of going through line by line, was getting formulaic and boring. I feel like it was staking the lazy, easy way out.

So I will probably use that format very occasionally, perhaps to give a quarterly detailed update or something. But in the meantime, I'll post the table, and then move on to what will (hopefully !) be more interesting topics.

May HPUD

It's come round again already ! Are you ready for May's power up day ? My plan is to power up somewhere between 100 and 200 of my liquid HIVE, and get a middle-sixed bee in my Hivebuzz dashboard.

I'd love to power up enough to get a 500-size bee, but I just haven't got that much right now. But what I might do is keep enough back that I can power up at least a HIVE a day for a month and get the monthly power-up badge. Since my life is normally a highly chaotic thing filled with unpredictable surprises, doing this could be a massive challenge to my self discipline and focus !

Weekly / Monthly Poster Badge

Something else I'm going to try for is the weekly poster badge. I was able to do it a couple of weeks ago, but this week was a total fail. Just too much real life stuff going on, combined with a major outage by Virgin Media (our ISP) meaning that we had no internet at all for more than a day.

We're looking into whether it's possible to break the contract with them without too much of a penalty, and what alternatives exist. Most other ISP's in the UK rely on BT Openreach cables, and the cabling in our road appears to be made of old damp string, so we've got a choice between Virgin Media nominally 200 MB internet but very unreliable and frequently throttled, or any other provider at maybe 5-10 MB.

Another factor is that Virgin Media knows they've got an effective monopoly in our road, and charge us about £40 a month more than someone 100 yards away with a choice of providers. Crazily, if we can afford the initial equipment cost, Starlink actually works out cheaper. It's tempting !

SBI's for SaturdaySavers Posts

Okay, I've got to hold my hands up here. This is a thing I've been utterly disorganised about. Totally my own fault, I think it's because when it comes to Sunday, instead of reading all the posts deciding which is my favourite and sending an SBI, my brain has moved onto other things. I either totally forget or read the posts and can't make my mind up which I like the most.

So I'll try something different. Each week, I'll look at the previous week's "Author of the Week" results (thank you for doing such a great job with it @hoosie !) and send an SBI to whoever came in second. A kind of runners' up prize, if you like.

I think this week is week three of the Top Authors initiative, so I've just sent SBI's to the runners-up for the first two weeks - well done @jfang003 and @fantagira7 !

So what do you think of the new format ?

I know I need to "prettify" it a bit, so it'll be fun learning how to colour text and do pretty things in Markup !

In the meantime, keep SaturdaySaving everyone, and if you're one of my friends reading this who isn't a SaturdaySaver yet.... give it a try, it's fun 😀

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