My first post after lurking and reading many other peoples diaries, so here goes....

Married with 2 dd's aged 3 and 7. Both of us work and are in what I would consider reasonably paid jobs (which may be well paid to some but not to others).

We currently sit at approx £48k in debt, excluding the mortgage. Our total debt including the mortgage sits at approx 2 times our gross income.

I have started the journey, had the lightbulb moment and entered all my debts in to the snowball calculator. Looks as though this is likely to be a 2.5 year journey but possibly 2 with some good luck behind us if we get a similar non-guaranteed annual bonus to what we received this year.

Having our youngest starting school this September is going to massively help by putting £800 back in our pockets each month.

Starting with the smallest debt which happens to also be the highest interest rate with Next. That will be paid off this month with approx £230 on that.

We have also transferred the 2nd highest interest paying debt from our tesco credit card to a barclaycard which had space on it to get a 0% offer for 9months. We have set up a fixed amount on this which is above the min payment.

Full overpayment capability will not start until September but doing what we can now.

As a reminder to myself when I update and look back on this.. Why am I doing this?

- To be able to promote a debt free life to my children
- To be able to pay for a holiday of a lifetime for my 2 children in 3-4 years time where we can go to Disneyland as a family and not be worried about what it has cost.
- To be able to not worry about one of us losing our jobs and it meaning we are in the deep brown smelly stuff.

We have wills, life cover, private health cover, critical illness etc but yet I keep kicking myself for getting in to debt.

I never think about what happens if I find myself needing any of the things we have put in place to protect our family.

However it worries me now more than ever that we are one job loss/redundancy away from our worlds potentially becoming a nightmare.

Having removed my credit card from paypal, amazon, asda etc, Im now working on the basis that any overpayment made to my debts wont just offset my additional spending.

Anyway here is to the future of being debt free.