6 months on from 'lightbulb' my DFW journey so far

6 months ago I wrote my first entry on here having just had my lightbulb moment. Our debts were astronomical and far higher than I thought infact 12k more at nearly £37k. I never put my SAO on here and I don't know why not maybe because I was ashamed at what we spent out at and I knew spending £300 a month on clothes was wrong and our £500 food budget had to go. Money was haemorraging from our accounts like water and we went to the cashpoint for money every time with a lump in our throats wondering if we were going to be able to take money out of our account. It had got to a point after xmas and we had been to the sales and I realised we had yet again bought everything on our creditcards. I don't know why but it was a real turning point, we also wanted to move house and I knew we would not get the mortgage we wanted unless we cleared some of our debts. So I found this website and this forum. This forum has been a godsend in giving me tips on how to budget and the snowballing thing has been a great find.

Since my/our lightbulb moment, my OH has been fully on board and in fact is now more MSE than I am, questioning every purchase we make. We earn a decent wage together so we have been in the fortunate position of paying more than the minimum payments and as we have stopped spending on them this has had a dramatic effect on lowering our debt. In the last 6 months we have paid off:
2 storecards
2 credit cards
1 loan
and have reduced our other debts by switching cards to lower interest ones. Our food budget has gone down to around £250 (for 5 of us) and our clothing budget has also halved although £150 is still a lot. We pay nearly £1400 per month towards our debt but on some months have managed to pay off over £2000. SKY has gone and we have a digibox with top up TV, we have changed providers for telephone, mobiles though our electricity and gas suppliers need to be changed. We also set a strict budget of £150 per week and out of this we pay for food, petrol, clothing, treats, pocket money, basically anything that is not debt or utilities/insurance/mortgage etc. We have a whiteboard in the kitchen and we use that as our spending diary writing down anything we spend so we can see it in big bold letters everytime we walk into the kitchen!
It's not been easy though and there have been times when I have relapsed and gone out for a spend in town. However I end up taking most of the things back but I did feel guilty about not letting the kids do activities. Early on in our debtbusting plan I was doing loads of extra shifts and overtime at work to pay more off our debt but we have come to the decision now that our snowball date is fine and knowing we can pay this debt off in just over 18 months is what we feel comfortable with. So I still do my extra shifts and overtime occasionally but this money is for us as a family and pays for holidays, DD's horseriding, DS1 guitar lessons and my haircuts at my favourite salon.
So that's it really I don't have a magic formula, it's hard work gets you depressed at times and the thought of all this money going on our debt when it could be going into our savings account makes me weep! We have several big expenses on the horizon - purchasing a piece of land next to our house to extend the garden (£2800 though have £1200 saved towards this), DS1 school trip to South America next year (£2400 :eek: have £200 saved towards this though DS is working hard to earn money towards this). So there is no let up here in the saving money business and although we have now paid off nearly £10K off our debt:j our debt busting journey has only really started.