Eddie

Book a return ticket to somewhere familiar for a month. Having a date on the calendar took a surprising amount of pressure off me even before I flew.

At 14000km a year of motorway, run the numbers on a hybrid too. Hybrids do their best work in town, so on your usage the advantage narrows a lot, and a plain efficient petrol or a diesel can work out cheaper overall once you account for purchase price. Also budget for tyres: SUV sizes are usually 20 to 30 percent more expensive per corner.

Keep the 800 buffer intact while you do this, and if anything build it to a month of essentials first. The most common way this plan fails is not maths, it is a 400 bill in month three going straight back on the card you have been killing.

Also worth checking the clutch is actually the fault. A slipping feel on hills can come from a stretched or badly adjusted cable on some cars, or a hydraulic problem, and both are far cheaper. Any decent garage will have checked, but if the diagnosis was over the phone, get it on the lift first.

If a hold has not dropped off after about a week, ring the bank rather than the station. The station released it days ago; it is sitting on the bank's side.

Automate the transfer for the day after payday, not the end of the month. What is left at the end of the month is never the amount you planned, and the difference is not willpower, it is arithmetic.

Slightly against the grain: the mismatched tyres bother me more than the oil. Someone buying the cheapest available tyre four separate times is usually someone buying the cheapest available everything, and brakes and fluids are less visible than rubber.

Also worth some perspective: a 19 point wobble is noise unless you are applying for a mortgage within the next couple of months. Scores are a byproduct of behaviour, not a scoreboard to optimise. You removed a temptation you knew was a temptation, which is worth more than 19 points of a number that recovers by itself.

Since it is short, use it deliberately. Drive it properly in the first fortnight, motorway, hills, cold mornings, full lock in a car park, air conditioning on max, every electric window and the heated rear screen. Then have an independent garage look at it in week two while you still have recourse. Most people discover the fault in month five.

Before the iron comes out, try the board with a different cable and port. Rare, but partial power delivery has faked a dead row for me once.

Worth checking against your rent end date though. Saving three days of interest and paying an extra half month of rent is not a win.

Two things in your description are killing them, and neither is the cold.

First, living on the charger. Most tool chargers stop charging but keep the pack sitting at full, and lithium cells age fastest when they are held at full charge and warm. Second, light use means those packs sit at 100 percent for weeks between jobs. Store them at roughly half charge instead, take them off the charger once the light goes green, and top them up the night before you need them.

The unheated garage is fine, cold storage is actually good for calendar ageing. What you must not do is charge a pack that is below freezing, so bring them inside for an hour first. Do that and you should see three to five years instead of eighteen months.

Put your working hours in your calendar in their timezone so they can see the block, and set your chat status to something explicit. Half of the pressure to answer at 3am is imagined and disappears when the expectation is written down somewhere they can see.

Mine took five months, but I switched from a fixed amount to a percentage of every payment and that removed all the decision making. Eight percent, automatic, the day it lands. I have never once felt it and I stopped having the monthly negotiation with myself about whether this was a good month to save.

Wrote this out as a checklist for the weekend. The stop and restart warm one had not occurred to me at all.