Had a post lightbulb moment and a dawning realisation that...

starlite_2

hooray for you donnalove...know what you mean, it annoys me when I'm paying for something and they 'invite' me to open a card with them, liek its gret deal or something...

System

black-saturn wrote:

When it your dent free day likely to be?

Hiya, that depends on if Barclays stump up my cash for my overcharges. If they do, next month I will only have 2 small debts left, ie I should be well free by my birthday in July

alyth

I hada trust deed which finished in December (which I think is like an IVA) and was paying £200 a month to that for 3 years. What I now do is pay that money into an ISA, and in September, I'm going to go and work with pandas in China for 2 weeks! Whilst I struggled at times with the trust deed, what it's instilled in me now is "tightness" - I am so scared of spending money - every time I go to perhaps buy a treat for myself, I can't - I remember the time when I couldn't afford to perhaps buy a present for someone because the money was needed for my trust deed, and I'm becoming worse in that after finding this site, I ask myself whether I really need anything - right down to an extra can of pepsi at work - that's an extra 50p that could go into pandafund! I will never ever go into debt again, and there's a kind of perverse pleasure in trying to save as much as you can - whilst I still "treat" myself at times, that's from amazon or ebay money, and it's usually something exciting as a pair of trousers from ebay for the panda trip!

It pains me to think how much money I squandered over the years, and it scares me when I see people I work with coming back at lunchtime with bags of stuff, and knowing that it's been bought on credit and it has to be paid for somehow.

my tip would be to still put away the money, or at least some of it, that was going towards debt - fine for me to say, but I've been there, my debt was £35K based on 6 years of the high life in London, then moved to rural Scotland where my income dropped by more than half, my lightbulb moment came after my trust deed finished and I thought I had the extra money, but realised I'd become used to living on a certain amount of money, and that money hadn't been mine for 3 years, and I'd survived without it, so what on earth was I going to do with it now I had it - more clothes, sold them all of ebay, and managed perfectly well without Hobbs suits, designer makeup and the latest LV handbag, which to my shame I queued up outside the shop to get the latest model - although it was sold on ebay for more than I paid for it!