Flexible benefits = win

As part of my salary from my main job, I get just under £2,200 per year in "flexible benefits". Basically you then choose to take this extra in a bunch of different ways, including things like insurance, pension and childcare vouchers, and (the biggie) shopping vouchers. The choices for vouchers are "Love2Shop" which is a variety of high street stores - Woolies, Wilkos, HMV, etc - or Sainsburys, Asda, M&S or John Lewis/Waitrose.

Alas, no Tesco or Morrisons option.

So I plumped for Sainsburys because a) my Mum likes shopping there and we buy several things there that we can't get elsewhere, b) nectar points, and c) you can use them for petrol.

If I was living on my own, I am confident that my vouchers would cover almost all of my monthly food/household spend. However, since my Mum is a bloody-minded spendthrift who refuses to buy own-brand stuff*, we've retained our Mum-buys-the-monthly-groceries-and-I-pay-for-everything-else agreement. My initial plan was that I'd give Mum the Sainsburys vouchers, and she'd give me the cash; but since qualifying for flexible bens last month, I've been doing so much overtime that we've done all the shopping online.

Therefore, my current plan is to buy ALL of the Xmas shopping with my vouchers, or at least as much as possible. That's presents AND food. I will also be checking out the distribution of Sainsburys petrol stations on my route to pickup littl'un from his dad's at Xmas (it's a round trip of 800 miles so I can't do one leg on one tank; I usually can only get 350 miles out of one tank. My car isn't particularly economical.)

So, if all goes to plan (ha ha) my Xmas spending will be tightly controlled. It's fairly tightly-controlled anyway since we've agreed between me, Mum and my sis that we won't be spending more than a tenner on each others' pressies, but it's buying littl'un's gifts that has previously got me in trouble...

*When and if my Mum eventually moves out in about 2 years' time, I'm going to have to acclimatise myself to own-label stuff again. Kind of annoying since I've already gone through it once. I still buy own-label stuff for myown use as often as I can in the hope that I won't give in to the luxuriousness of quilted toilet roll and whatnot.