How would you go about this debt repayment?

Jacks_xxx

Hiya my lovely, :hello:

I am just on my way out, but I had a quick look at your SOA and it is my opinion that you could be entirely debt free in about 18 months if you shave £150 off your grocery bill and renegotiate your mobile phone deal and throw that money plus the surplus at the debts.

This will still leave you about a grand to live on every month after all the bills are paid.

Punch all the debt details into the snowball.
www.whatsthecost.com/snowball.aspx
We are almost finished paying off debts of £97600 on a joint take home of £2644 with two teenagers and a grumpy cat to support and the snowball is how we did it.

We also cut our grocery spend from £650+ per month to about £350 just by doing a bit more planning (See G. C in sig - that's the Grocery Challenge over on the Moneysaving Old Style Board)

There's no need to screw up your credit rating for the next six years by doing an IVA when you can make some fairly painless lifestyle changes and be free and clear in 18 months.

Or that's what i think anyway!

Love Jacks xxx

Numpty_Monkey

Definatley agree with poor, get on the snowball calculator
use the link in her post
Without any changes or savings from your SOA you can pay £2131.50 and be debt free in 18 months

With the suggestions from the other posters and the extra savings you could make and they are easy savings ,
Mobile - PAYG, or negotiate a better tarrif and contract save £40 to £80
Groceries - you can get this down to £200 save £300
Clothing - if you spend £100 per month you must have enough to last years
and sell some on ebay. save £100
Entertainment Thats more than i spend a year give yourself £100 save £200

With the saving you make, and your surplus and what you allready pay
you'll be debt free in just over a year:T

DoWhatULove-LoveWhatUDo

The way I see this is that you have two problems:

1) You don't have an effective debt repayment strategy. (Doing what the lenders tell you to do is designed to keep you in debt as long as possible. If this is not what you want then do something else!)

2) You don't really have a debt problem per se; you have a spending problem. If you focus on what you're spending you'll probably be astonished at where your money is actually going every month.

My solution is this (with all credit to Jacks because this is a butchered cut and paste of what she told me to do when I was struggling and too afraid to post about it.)

You have worked out that you have a £731.50 surplus every month even after all the bills are paid and you have allowed yourselves a fairly generous amount for food, clothing, mobiles and entertainment (I agree with the others that significant reductions could be made in these by the way.)

So next payday pay off CC4 in full. It's only £800 which is hardly much more than your surplus so it shouldn't be too painful. That's one debt gone. (Pay all your other debts as usual.)

The pay day after that throw your surplus, the £50 you used to pay to CC4 and any other savings you have made in your budget at CC3. Do this twice and CC3 should be done and dusted as well. (Pay all your other debts as usual.)

That's two of your debts gone in three months.

Next throw the £731.50 surplus, any savings you have made in the budget, and the £50 you used to pay CC4 plus the £100 you used to pay CC3 at CC2.

By now it should only take 4 or 5 paydays to obliterate this so that will be £7550 paid off in about seven months. (Pay all your other debts as usual.)

If you can move anything over onto a 0% deal or make cuts in your budget then then it will be even faster.

Experiment with the amount you tell the Snowball calculator you have available for debt repayment. It is sobering.

ChrisFilter

Wow. Thank you so much for your replies, both humbling and inspiring. £97k repayment with two teemagers to feed? That's just incredible.

I will take onboard all you have said and set my sights on being debt free within two years!

All the best,

Chris

PS. Re: the mobiles, I stupidly have two 18 months contracts. T-Mobile is due in 6 months, 3 is due in 9 months. I fancied the free Nintendo Wii and Nokia N95 that came with the Three contract - muppet. I've tried reducing and renegotiating but no luck.

hat187

hello, can anyone please help me. T MOBILE has just wrote to me asking for £112 which was over 5 years ago i ignored as i was not happy with there service, all of the 5 years they never wrote to me to ask for that money or anything and now i am living at a new address for 4 years. now they have sent me a letter asking me to pay them or tthey will be sending people round to get the money some how ( well they dint say that on letter but they still asking me to pay them) one of my friend told me that, if the debt is for over 3 years and they have not try to get that money off me in that time, then i dont have to pay them nothing.
please could someone email me and let me know what i can do as £112 is something i dont have and wont like to pay them.

hat187@msn.com

please someone help me
thank you for reading

GeorgeUK

hat - it would be better if you started a new thread for this.
Admin may be able to move these for you.

If you are in Scotland, it is 5 years before a debt is statute barred - in England it's 6. You will need to know the exact date, but you may be able to stall them for a while if you request proof of the debt. They need to prove the debt is yours - you don't need to supply them with any thing. I'll try to find a letter and possibly another link later on. Have a search for airtime agreements