Newly motivated debt free diary

Rumpleteazer_2

Hi all,

I posted my first thread on this board a week or so ago when we hit crisis point and realised that our money going out was substantially more than was coming in and could see no way forward. Thanks to some good advice from people here and the lady on the end of the phone at CCCS I have stopped panicking and feel more positive.

Anyway - just a bit about me. Myself and my wife and our two boys live in a house in the country with chickens, two pygmy goats, 6 cats and one guinea pig!

How we got into our present mess is that we had some work done on our house a couple of years ago. Because there were costs that we just hadn't even thought about (and the builder neglected to tell us) and that there were complications - like the house needed completely re-wiring and lots of the plumbing needed to be replaced - costs got well and truly out of control. So we ended up taking out a secured loan and ran up the credit cards to a truly scary £34k to get the project finished.

Things all came to a head this month due to the fact that my wife gave up her job as teacher due to the fact that she could not cope with the attitude of the headteacher towards her and the truly ridiculous amount of work she was being given. So the plan was to do some supply teaching and to supplement this with teaching some craft workshops at a friend's shop. Unfortunately, the supply teaching has been very slow to get going.

Anyway, hence the crisis!

So, I thought I would start this as a way of keeping motivated and staying positive.

Stage one of the plan is to act on what CCCS advised me to do and write to each of the credit card companies to see if they will accept token payments. This is only a temporary solution, so I am hoping to give it 3 months or so by which time we should a better idea of what my wife's typical income will be from one month to the next and can plan from there - DMP if need be, but will need to do some calculations when we reach that point.

In the meantime we need to explore all options for increasing income and/or decreasing spending.

So I wrote the first letter today (to Egg), but then ran out of paper and stamps. My carefully worked out budget doesn't include either of those things!

Some good news today though - I had a cheque for £27.33 for my first payout from Global Test Market surveys :j .


Anyway, that will do for now. Any more suggestions for increasing income gratefully received!!!:D Thanks to all who given tips on my previous thread and helped me feel more positive.

tealady

Hi there is a Make £10 a day thread, you might find some ideas on there. Do you have a local supermarket where one of you could do some weekend working or twilight shifts? I know the pay will be nothing like teaching but as Mr T says every little helps.
Also if you put up your SOA then the really clever peeps will be ably to make other suggestions as to where you can make more/cut back.