Kirstle99's Debt Free Diary

kirstle99

Hi guys, I made a post a long time ago on this forum and was so thankful for the help I recieved about changing DMP provider. Me & My Partner are with Payplan now, and are really looking positive towards becoming debt-free. We know it will be a struggle, but we are in it together 100%.

Firstly let me introduce myself. I am 25 years old and I live with my partner who is 29 years old, and our 12 month old little boy. When we were younger (I was still @ uni) and we got our 1st flat together was the time when our debt started to pile up. We bought all the new furniture on the credit cards. I bought my 1st ever car so I could get to uni faster, and had a run of about 4 dreadful cars which ended up costing a fortune. We both used to be heavy smokers (now given up 2 years!) so that didn't help with the situation.

My lightbulb moment was June 2006. We had not long moved into my mother's house, we cover her mortgage payments in rent as she has moved away to live in her dream location. At that point I added up our debts to be being between £18,000-£19,000. A lot. Me & my partner were both shocked.

Most of the debt was in either my name or joint names as I had the better credit rating so was able to get credit easier. However, my partner accepted the debt was ours to deal with together, and we subsequently closed our bank accounts, and made one, new, joint account together to signal our commitment to a fresh start on the road to becoming debt-free.

I just wanted to start my own debt-free diary as a motivation to myself (and hopefully others) that even if you have a bigger sum of debt you can still do it!

Below is what we still owe on everything, just for reference really. All the interest has been stopped on this credit so nothing to worry about there.


Barclaycard (student acc) £381.88 Pay £5.01 / month
Barclaycard £2,119.88 Pay £9.06 / month
Barclays Overdraft £1,510.24 Pay £8.24 / month
Capital One £1,429.04 Pay £7.80 / month
Black Horse Loan £2,235.85 Pay £12.20 / month
Alliance & Leicester (1) £319.48 Pay £1.74 / month
Alliance & Leicester (2) £763.21 Pay £4.16 / month
Halifax (1) £243.83 Pay £1.33 / month
Halifax (2) £2663.91 Pay £14.53 / month
AIC £4865.46 Pay £26.54 / month
EGG £2052.16 Pay £11.19 / month

Total Debt = £18,584.94

Wow, its still hard to write that final figure isn't it? The problem we had was our interest stoppage wasn't instant when we went into a DMP and when we changed to Payplan some of our creditors started to charge us interest again, even though they ended up getting 2 payments in the changeover month, oh well. Anyway, enough of my waffling for now, just wanted to say hi & start my diary, and that I hope all you wonderful people on here will join me on my journey to a debt free life.

tealady

Hi Kirstle. Can i suggest that you put up your SOA (you don't have to if you dont want to) If you do the really clever peeps on here may be able to help you tweak your budget a bit more.

doodledo_2

Hi Kirstle, good luck with your new diary, look forward to reading

kirstle99

(I will post an post an SOA probably over the weekend, I don't have so much time to do it right now)

I spend £50 a week on food shopping (but if i'm honest most of the time it's £40-£45). Any extra money goes in baby's money jar for his christmas presents.
I go onto Tesco online and make my shopping list there, I can view all the offers and stuff from home that way too, and then I print off the list & take it with me. It stops me from getting stuff I don't need.

Every month I make a chart of incomings and outgoings. The only treat we have is I give my partner £20 a month for his cinema trip with the lads. Thats it.

I have also started to buy UHT whole milk instead of fresh because we weren't using enough, so now its handy to have the milk in the cupboard for when we need it.

Also, I am looking forward to 2011 because we will have finished paying off the car then, and that will be an extra £188 a month to throw at the debt, making us debt-free about 8 years from now if all goes well.

kirstle99

The only thing that now bothers me is....I am wondering what to do with any extra income (for example today my partner got £100 extra pay from his back-pay pay rise). Hmmm. Might give it to my mum to hold on for me. I dont know

kirstle99

Have just recieved confirmation from the FOS today that EGG will refund my charges of £87 to my EGG account, so thats some money gone towards the debt! Woohooo!
And we have made the decision to put the baby on cow's milk now he is 12 months old, saving us £6 a week in baby milk. Plus we will be feeding him weetabix £1.15 for 24 (Tesco's own) rather than £2 a packet of the baby cereal!

tealady

Hi I would suggest that you make minimum payments to all except the debt with the highest APR. Then throw every penny that you have spare at that debt. When its cleared start on the next one.
Even if you just send pennies as Mr T says "Every little helps"

kirstle99

Hey, I dont have any interest or charges on any accounts its all been stopped thats why i was wondering what to do.

kirstle99

Well, just as I thought all was going so well, last week my partner got ill. This week me & the baby are ill. We were on a very tight buget this month anyway due to the way my partner gets paid. However, he did recieve some back pay which I mentioned earlier, guess this came at the right time as I will have to put this back into the bank account just so we can scrape by this month. Ah well, it could be much worse I guess.

tealady

Hi If the interest is frozen on your debts then I would put any savings into an ISA (tax free), that can be used for rainy days or emergencies.

kirstle99

Thanks for that, might actually ask my mum to hold on to it, then its out of my way hehe.