Should I go bankrupt? What would you do?

Burlesque_Babe

moonklash wrote: »

Morning
Bagels £1.20 Cheese £2.00 Eggs £1.60 Buy Value cereal and milk and ditch the bagels - they are a luxury item!

Afternoon/Day
Crisps - stop buying, or get own brand ones on offer in a multipack
£1.20 Water (For the two hour drives and the gym) - put tap water in an empty bottle, or buy squash
£3.00 Fizzy drinks at work - again, drink water, or buy a bottle of squash
£5.00 Some choccy snacks in the week they all add up - that's £260 a year on chocolate snacks in the afternoon/day. Check out Twinks Hobnobs recipe for a huge tin of biscuits for around a £1
£3.00 Pasta buy Value pasta
£1.00 Something to go in the pasta £3.00 You have £1 and £3 for pasta fillings. Use onions, peppers, reduced vegetables and tins of Value tomatoes to make cheap sauces.

Evening
Chips/Waffles £2.00 buy potatoes and make chips

Veg £2.00 Switch to Value/Smartprice if you haven't already done so
Fruit £2.00
Mains £7.00
The odd desert £3.00 Pop over to the Old Style board. They have huge lists of deserts you can make from scatch. A bag of Value apples,sugar, butter and flour and you have crumble for a week for £3

TOTAL £37.00
- Although the amount I spend varies.

hi - some suggestions to reduce this in red above. There are ways to reduce the amount you spend by swapping the snacks and fast food. Old Style are great - someone over there is feeding herself and husband for 50p a day at the moment. :T

mrcow

shinyhead wrote: »

I realise another poster here on this thread is possibly a troll but he/she has a point about your food spending.

If this is supposed to be a snided backhanded reference to me then I absolutely take exception your your remark and you should apologise for it.

KellyWelly

With all due respect to the OP, I think your attitude of entitlement to luxurious and comfortable living is the reason why you are in so much debt and I think you will always be in debt until you realise that you have to live within your means and if you can't afford something you can't have it. You can't afford to spend almost £40 a week on food to feed just yourself. It is possible (and frankly easy) to spend £15 or even less to feed one person, especially if that person is a vegetarian.

You're in a fantastic position to pay off your debts really quickly - you have quite a good income for a single person and you are living with your parents who you say are financially propping you up, so I assume you don't pay rent and utilities, you have a huge % of disposable income that you could start chucking at your debts.

Why do you drive to work, that's over £300, could you get on a bus or train or get a lift and go halves on the costs?

moonklash

mrcow wrote: »

If this is supposed to be a snided backhanded reference to me then I absolutely take exception your your remark and you should apologise for it.

There's no indication that this comment was aimed at you, come on, you've both been of great help, no need for this to descend into a flame war....

moonklash

KellyWelly wrote: »

With all due respect to the OP, I think your attitude of entitlement to luxurious and comfortable living is the reason why you are in so much debt and I think you will always be in debt until you realise that you have to live within your means and if you can't afford something you can't have it. You can't afford to spend almost £40 a week on food to feed just yourself. It is possible (and frankly easy) to spend £15 or even less to feed one person, especially if that person is a vegetarian.

You're in a fantastic position to pay off your debts really quickly - you have quite a good income for a single person and you are living with your parents who you say are financially propping you up, so I assume you don't pay rent and utilities, you have a huge % of disposable income that you could start chucking at your debts.

Why do you drive to work, that's over £300, could you get on a bus or train or get a lift and go halves on the costs?

Hiya, Just popping back on here quickly before I nip out, not had a chance to look into everything yet but I'm going to follow everyone's advice and read up on everything when I get a moment.

It's not possible for me to use public transport due to whee I'm located. - I live a long way from work, there's no train station in the area. In addition it's an hours drive, so you can treble that if taking public transport and I don't fancy 6 hours on buses.

I used to take the bus to my last place, I had to use two different companies so that was two bus passes, it took two hours each way and the bus service was limited i.e. once an hour, finishing at 7pm. Sometimes I don't leave Southampton until 7pm so that's definitely a no go...

The problem with food is that because I don't get home till late I don't have the time (seriously) to cook from scratch. I save where I can by cooking pasta for lunches but it simply isn't possible for me to spend an age cooking if I don't get in until 9pm or 10pm.

It's not like I buy expensive meals, the odd Quorn product..... Being a lactose intolerant vegetarian is a pain but it's who I am, fussy eaters brigade.... I'm not going for luxourious foods or anything like that some peppers and onions fried up in some Quorn "Chicken" is probably my most common meal.

shinyhead

Thanks moonklash,

mrcow, I've been away and looked up the definition of a troll. I think that troll therefore was a bit strong so I therefore apologise. I also apologise as it was a little sneaky not to simply address you by your username.

However, I think that your opinions were judgemental, in actual fact I agree with some of what you're saying. What I object to is the way you said it.
The OP wants support and help not judgement. My aim with the posts I've put on here is to guide moonklash to places where impartial advice and guidance to make up their own minds can be sought.

mrcow

shinyhead wrote: »

However, I think that your opinions were judgemental, in actual fact I agree with some of what you're saying. What I object to is the way you said it.
The OP wants support and help not judgement. My aim with the posts I've put on here is to guide moonklash to places where impartial advice and guidance to make up their own minds can be sought.

How you word your posts is your own business, just as mine are my own.....not yours. Thanks for your apology although it wasn't really needed -I've just been working all weekend and am very grouchy

The OP wants help with how they can pick themselves out of the abyss they are staring into. 5 years out of uni and not being able to account for over £700 of your disposable income each month is extremely worrying. So is considering going bankrupt when you've not even told your parents whom you're living with.

Bankruptcy is not the answer to your problems if you are not going to fix the problems you have with not being able to work to a basic budget. As many people are finding out, you can only paper over the cracks for so long.

£15/week is more than enough food to survive on as a lactose intolerant vegetarian.......I should know because I am one too. Even if you are sticking to a £37/week budget, there is still well over £650 unaccounted for. This should be used to put the brakes on the increasing overdraft.

Burlesque_Babe

moonklash wrote: »

The problem with food is that because I don't get home till late I don't have the time (seriously) to cook from scratch. I save where I can by cooking pasta for lunches but it simply isn't possible for me to spend an age cooking if I don't get in until 9pm or 10pm.

Consider investing in a slow cooker - join a freecycle group or have a look for one on special offer. They are fantastic - for example, I now work until 9 on a Tuesday and so stick stuff in it and leave it all day.

Maybe spend an afternoon batch cooking sauce and freeze individual portions in tubs so you can just pull out and use. Pop them in the fridge in the morning to be defrosted by the evening. A productive Sunday afternoon could fill the freezer with chilli, bolognaise etc made with quorn mince and Twink's hob nobs literally take 15 minutes to make and you get 2 huge tin loads full.

Can you eat cous cous (sorry, not up on the intolerance stuff, so apologies if you can't) - it takes literally 5 minutes in a bowl with hot water on it.

KellyWelly

I think the slow cooker is a fab idea.

One of my most favourite meals is pinto beans slow cooked served with spanish rice and salad. That can't take me more than 5 or 10 mins in preparation.

I use a bag of dry pinto beans (about 89p in Sainsbury but I a positive they're cheaper elsewhere tbh) with 6.5 cups of water and a heaped tablespoon or two of dry ground cumin, 1.5 tsp salt, 1 tablespoon of dry garlic or about 5 fresh cloves, a bit of chilli if you like. Then leave that on high all day. The spanish rice is a cup of rice with a large chopped bell pepper, a chopped red onion and a stock cube, cover with water and leave to cook while you have a shower or whatever to use the time up. Serve with a bit of salad, whatever you like, I like whatever lettuce is cheap when I'm shopping, some chopped tomatoes and red onion and avocado if I'm flush!

The pinto beans are in a lovely spicy gravy sauce and the one bag will serve my whole family of three adults and two children.

I know lots of people say to boil the beans on a rapid boil for 10 mins but I always cook pulses in my slow cooker and I have done for years and I've never boiled them. The only ones I wouldn't are kidney beans because I know they are poisonous if not boiled.

Burlesque_Babe

I've also done pulses in the SC and never had a problem - bags of lentils are incrediby cheap and you can create huge amounts of soup with some and some basic root vegetables.