Hypno's cheaper than therapy debt diary.

Hellooo :hello:

Welcome to the next phase of my debt free journey. For those of you who are new to my DFW life, you can read my old diary somewhere (will try to work out how to do a link to it in due course) but today is December 1st, and it is almost exactly a year since I began my DFW journey on this site.

In that year I have come a long way, have reduced our debt by £10000 and embarked on a mad hairbrained scheme to get my kids skiing for the winter season.

The figures quoted in the last diary were rather substantial.....they ended that period at a little over £42,000. However, they didn't tell the whole story, and now that I have "matured" a little in this getting debt free malarky, I think it is time to bare all and include absolutely everything that we owe, barring the mortgage.

This makes it simple - we always know what we need to find in order to be left with just the mortgage rather than having one figure we are working to, with others lurking in the background that will have to be dealt with sooner or later, and having a separate target for the ski fund, which is preventing the debt total from reducing etc etc etc.

So, the new figure includes all money owed on unsecured loans and credit cards, as before. However, it now also includes the secured loan that we have (previously I counted it as part of the mortgage, but of course it is not), all overdrafts (there are 4 of them ), money borrowed from parents in years gone by that they keep quiet about, but that we want to pay back, warts and all.

In addition, I have calculated the exit fees where they apply for early loan redemption as we would obviously have to have these in cash before we could pay off some things, so it makes sense to include them in the over all figure.

I have not included the interest - these are pure and simple "settlement figures" as at today.

Finally, the ski fund target has gone - I have been lucky enough today to borrow £3000 at 0% from a family member which more or less covers the balance that I need in the short term, but of course this £3000 now forms part of my total repayment figure.

So.....bottom line.....at this moment in time, we need £66428.01 (don't forget the penny) to become free of all debt except the mortgage _pale_ . for those of you that are interested, the mortgage is £174140.87 and is currently interest only, so we really do need to hammer down the debt in order that we can start paying the capital off.

The good news is........firstly, the house is worth more than the total debt, so if the worst ever came to the worst, we could sell up and start again. This really would be the very very last resort, and is really not an option in my opinion.

Secondly.......I am quite good at this debt busting malarky......I always like a debt related challenge........and I am a stubborn so and so. This means that I WILL GET THERE!!

I have pledged to pay off £20,000 of this amount by Christmas 2008. This brings my total figure down to about the same level that my signature shows at the moment (if that makes sense!) so if I can achieve this I will be more than happy.

Right.......here goes, off to amend my signature