When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.

Debt_Free_Chick

ezmai wrote:

Good Evening all,
As accurately as I can, I have create my first SOA.

Wages 2,300.00
Rent 1,300.00
Income totals 3,600.00
Mortgage/rent EC1 553.00
Mortgage/rent N16 783.00
Life Insurance 71.00
Service Charges EC1 123.00
Service Charges N16 94.00
British Gas Service Care 17.00
Council Tax 94.00
Electricity 12.50
Mobile telephone (Orange) 100.00
Home telephone (BT) 50.00
Sky 42.00
BT Broadband 30.00
Water 16.67
Weekly Spend (inc food) 433.33
TV Licence 10.00
Car Insurance 33.33
Car Tax 10.00
Cleaner 42.00
MS MasterCard 200.00
Egg 200.00
RBS Loan 376.00
MS Loan 195.00
Overdraft 50.00
Total Expenses 3,577.83

Feedback most welcome.
Thank you ezmai

All of my comments depend on whether you want to change your lifestyle, or not.

For example .... phones/internet/Sky TV. I pay £10.50 per month for a BT landline, then 3p per call using www.18866.com Are you actually making £100 worth of calls every month on your mobile? If not, then change the plan to one which matches your useage .... and perhaps consider using your landline more, especially if you use 18866 as these calls only cost a connection charge of 3p (think it might be 4p now). You could downgrade your broadband package based on your actual requirements ... do you really need 30 quid's worth a month. Size isn't everything, when it comes to BB

Do you really, really need to spend £400 a WEEK on housekeeping/food? I go to the supermarket once every three months for tins/dry goods & cleaning stuff and spend about £150. Weekly, I buy meat (butcher) and veg (farm shop) and this costs about £15. We eat very, very well - meat is all free-range or organic; veg are "home grown" but don't come cleaned and packaged in plastic. What do you eat? Do you cook yourself or buy convenience/ready meals?

Even if this is a monthly amount, you should be able to halve this expenditure for two people.

If you can be a little less extravagant with these two areas, you should be able to free up £250-£300 per month. Use this to pay off the debt with the highest APR first using this snowballing technique.

Ignore your mortgages for now - just keep paying what you should on those! Ideally, you want the debts paid off as that will give you nearly £1,000 a month of surplus income.

HTH

*Sparkle*_3

Hello

Well done for posting and dont forget to keep visiting!

With regards to your property's that you are letting out, the income from your rent is £1300 and the actual mortgage your paying is £1336 so thats a shortfall of £36 a month, shouldnt you be earning money from these property's and not losing??
Edit: Plus i didn't even see the services charges!!! £222!!! out of pocket

Do the tenants pay the council tax?

Plus are you putting any money away for things like repairs on the two property's,etc?

Thefunkygibbons

Do the properties have a capital value?

You need to see whether the rental yield exceeds the cost of your loans at the moment, becuase if you have some equity in the properties, it may be best to realise this to clear the debts and start agin in a couple of years when the BTL market is in a better place

ezmai

Dear All
Thank you so much for your fantastic feedback.
Here are my responds:-
Hi moonbeam682,
433 is a monthly spend of around £100 per week per calendar month.
With this I manage to eat during the day, have dinner and socialise to a degree and eh… well I smoke, that is already 35 gone.
I live alone but have a partner and we have meals together sometimes however my 100 pound quota has taken that into account.
My orange mobile is a contract and have no idea have to reduce this further. Thought that 100 per month were not too bad.
APRs on the loans are as follow: RBS Loan is at 7.2 and MS Loan is at 9.6!

Hi debt_free_chick,
Yes you are right.
I shall look into reducing my mobile phone.
Nonetheless, I have discovered that if I move to NTL (inc BB, TV and LAN line) this will only cost 30 pounds saving me about 70 pounds. What do you think?
As far as food is concerned, admittedly I’m crap. Well, in terms of spending obviously; I do cook, but would tend to purchase a tuna steak, yes just the one from Fresh and wild for about 5 pounds. How on earth are you able to spend 150 every 3 months? I am amazed, really! Please share! Yes I do eat organics produce. I shop on a daily basis; this is because I fear that when I shop on a weekly or monthly basis I tend to waste food.
What’s HTH?

Hi spakie,
My mistake! I live in one property and rent out the other. With regards to the one that I rent out I receive 1300 and have a mortgage of 553.
Yes I pay service charges on both my properties, not really a lot I can do about that.
Yes the tenants pay council tax on one property and I pay the other.
As yet I have no savings, well very little. I have used my credit cards for repairs et cetera. It would be nice at find at least 50 pounds to save a month.

Hi the funckygibbons
My properties do have a capital value and good equity, however would rather not touch these as I feel theses are my only saving grace. Am I really in that much of a mess that it cannot be sorted in another way?

Thank you, from a very indebted, ezmai.