My Nightime Plans

Because this is a PF blog you might expect that I would spend quite a bit of time per week, budgeting, blogging about it and reading other PF bloggers good and bad stories. But last night I also spent most of the night lying awake and planning my next financial moves.
PLAN 1)
Now that I have turned sixty I qualify for a part UK aged pension, to be precise in January of next year. I left the UK in 1986 and as a result I don,t qualify for a full pension, I,m not actually sure but I,m imagining I would get around 40/50%. Because I am still working I will have to declare it on my taxes, so I was thinking that if I Salary Sacrifice the same amount of money as I would receive in a pension then I could put all of that amount straight into my Superannuation and not have to pay extra tax. I hope I have made that clear, it,s clear in my head but was,nt easy to put onto paper. This option will mean there will be quite a bit extra going into my retirement fund, and as I,m still working I won,t even notice the difference.

PLAN 2)
My Mother-in-Law is now needing a lot more care than she did when she first came to live with us, apart from the bad fall she had last year, there have been a lot of more subtle changes, which require us to have to be more aware of what her needs are on a daily basis. She also has to have weekly Pathology tests done as she is on Warfarin and frequent Doctors visits. My hubby and I take turns running her to these appointments and we are finding that our spare us time is getting less and less. So we are going to apply for a Carers Allowance to help us look after her better. This allowance is not taxed and I think it is around $140 a fortnight.
So these are a couple of ideas I had running around in my head while I was supposed to be sleeping. Plan 1 will help towards my retirement fund and Plan 2 will give me more money on a weekly basis. Now all I have to do is make some phone calls and start the ball rolling.

I have spent no money since Saturday, and I have a full freezer and Pantry.

Footnote
Today I watched the miners in Chile making there slow progress back into the world, and the arms of their loved ones. The hell those men must have gone through when they first realised that they were stuck underground. So today I became more aware of my freedom, freedom to walk in the Spring Sunshine, freedom to tell my loved ones how much I care, freedom to stop and smell the roses.