New face!

doodledo_2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

You have had some good advice already and on paper you have a surplus each month which is good.

It might be worth doing yourself a spending diary to see where your surplus goes each month as this may give you an area to tackle and some more money for paying back your debts.

Have you got anything you could sell on Ebay/Amazon etc to bring some more cash in to throw at your debts.

Good luck with your journey

Numpty_Monkey

With regards to elec and gas
Give your OH one of theseget them to turn lights off, not leave anything on standby, change light bulbs, get some good draft excluders, turn the heating down, wear jumpers, turn off/down radiators in unused/ infreqantly used roms

Try calling Virgin again, Sky have packages available and some good cashback deals

Have you heard of cashback sites?Ebay?Daily clicks?
The £10 a day challange is full of ideas on things like that

savingholmes

Moneylover wrote: »

Thanks everyone...
I will look into switching phone/internet/cable etc. Only last year i called Virgin threatning to go to Sky and they cut my bills but i will try again. The mobile bill is for 2 phones so i didnt think that was too bad but will be cut back on. Our mobiles for 2 are £15-25 between us

The grocery bill is for 4 people... me, my partner, our 6 and 2 year old. Im quite good at cutting down on this when i need to... so will be putting in some extra effort. To be honest that's better than mine - but you may still be able to do more - I know I need to!

Travel - its not possible for me to use public transport for work. I stay 25 mins drive from my work and i also drop my son off at his childminders first and that at 6.15 in the morning. The other travel is my partner train ticket/buses/taxis... our public transport is shockingly bad here!! Try advance fares?

Other child expenses are my daughters dancing which is £9 a week and her Girls Brigade which is just £1 a week. This also includes £10 a month for each childs trust funds. If you are managing and not in trouble with any of your debtors fair enough - but if your apr on your cards is higher than the apr on the trust fund you might be better paying off your cards and then putting a lump sum in the child trust fund later when you can afford it

My home insurance is building and contents!! Good same as mine altho others have told me I could get it cheaper!

I have no way of getting free childcare. I will look into the choldcare vouchers this weekend though. I do get them at work but when i did enquire about it, it didnt seem worth the hassle and i was lead to believe i wouldnt gain because my children are not in full time childcare. Will check it out though. It can save you approx £1100 a year because it is taken from your gross not your net. You can both have £243 in vouchers straight from salary. I think it is worth even more if you are on higher rate tax band.

What kind of things can i do for the £10 a day challenge?? That sounds intersesting and i love a chanllenge!!

The £10 a day challenge is try and save money eg on multibuys, printable vouchers via this site, getting freebies, doing surveys, doing reviews, mystery shops, cashbacksites like quidco my personal favourite, pigsback, cashbackkings - there are plenty of others. Some pay referral - you may want to bless one of us on this site if you want to do some of them. Quidco don't pay referral fees. People also claim money found on the street, vouchers etc as part of their money. You can also sell stuff on Amazon, car boots, ebay etc as a way of getting money.

I've done things like change my hours - saving 1 night a week childcare by finishing 2.5 hours earlier and do 30 minute lunches... That saved me between £50-75 per month. I've also let my oldest become a latch key kid on a phased basis - he is 10... saving me £7.75 each per night...

I'm into big money solutions - so I also asked for a payrise and got a back dated one:j My next big money challenge is to try and get some compensation for how long my mortgage took :money: to arrange and try and claim some tax back from 2005:rolleyes: Changing to talk talk saved me £29 per month, quidco have £175 to pay out to me just since July, I've won money on bingo sites - went there through cash back sites so my stake was never lost;) http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1184639 Hope that gives you some useful ideas.

For Christmas you or your partner may want to look at the finished baskets thread for how to make low cost pressies look great! http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?p=15078399&posted=1#post15078399

Have a great weekend!:wave: