Dodgy debts - is my debt a MAJOR problem?

slig

pelirocco wrote: »

What meals did you eat? all i can see are sausages , burgers and fingers

I have to admit I look at what some people spend on food , and wonder what on earth they eat .

MrCow will probably tell you what they eat, but from that shopping list I can see plenty of meals: pizza, jacket potato with cheese or mushroom topping, sandwiches and fruit for lunch, omelette with cheese or mushroom, all that frozen stuff will make a large number of meals, plus I expect they've got lots of store cupboard essentials in the cupboards and stuff in the freezer already.

mrcow

pelirocco wrote: »

What meals did you eat? all i can see are sausages , burgers and fingers

I have to admit I look at what some people spend on food , and wonder what on earth they eat .

lol That's because all you're looking at are the "ready meals".

Most of our food is home made......so if you're looking for ready made food, you're not going to find it in my shopping trolley!

Last night for dinner we had cheese and onion quiche and veggies.
Night before we had macaroni cheese and veggies.
Night before that we had a roast dinner.
Night before we had home made pizza & h/m grlic bread.
Night before that (Saturday) we had pancakes and fruit.

Tonight we're having vegetable pasta bake and roast potatoes.

mrcow

slig wrote: »

MrCow will probably tell you what they eat, but from that shopping list I can see plenty of meals: pizza, jacket potato with cheese or mushroom topping, sandwiches and fruit for lunch, omelette with cheese or mushroom, all that frozen stuff will make a large number of meals, plus I expect they've got lots of store cupboard essentials in the cupboards and stuff in the freezer already.

When I go to Costco I also get 24 x tins of tomatoes and 24 x beans, 6kg pasta etc. My larder is usually pretty stocked with flour, herbs, porridge etc. and I bulk buy onions/ potatoes etc. Sorry, didn't want to take the thread off topic.......just didn't want people to think that I'm starving my chidlren! lol :eek:

Paulgonnabedebtfree

[quote=[Deleted User];21137389]Whoa. Almost £50K I see. Good luck with it.

If you dont mind me asking, how did it get that large?[/QUOTE]

I don't mind you asking at all. Hopefully being open about my experiences will help others to avoid them.
About 14 years ago, I had a small, new mortgage and next to no debt. House prices were very deflated and I bought a flat at the bottom end of the trough. It was a cheap flat but it also needed a lot of money spent on it by the freeholder - of which I would have to pay my share as a leaseholder. I've no problem about that. I knew there would be big repair and improvement bills coming to me over the years. I started saving for those and figured that I could re-mortgage if I needed to make up a shortfall. A re-mortgage would not be an issue as the local authority was the freeholder and at that time, they were legally obliged to provide one irrespective of any LTV issues. I lived alone and was reasonably happy with my situation.
Then I met her and the brown stuff really hit the fan. Trust me, if she ever discovered how to use the internet and found her way here, forum members would regard her as the antichrist, the devil incarnate, Martin Lewis's nemesis, the Satanic spendthrift from hell (I think you get my drift ). I went to live with her after a while before I discovered more fully what she was like. I'm afraid that my income just could not keep up with her spending. Now don't misunderstand me here. I do take rsponsibility for my part in this stuff. If I had had more self esteem, I would have been able to say no. However, I thought I was in a relationship for life so started to view my life differently. I started to regard my flat as a source of rental income and a source of borrowing. I figured that if ever it became a problem, I could always sell it.
Now I don't want to go into all the heavy details here but suffice to say that when I did eventually start saying no (when I had reached the point of having two part-time jobs in addition to trying to run my one man business), she didn't like it. I just felt more and more resentful aboiut the way I was being treated so I left her. I had a bigger mortgage, a fair bit of unsecured debt, and nowhere to live as my flat was on a rental contract. Fortunately, my lovely sister let me sleep in her spare room for a few weeks while I sorted out renting a room somewhere till I could get my flat back. I thought my sister was going to have a go at me anmd give me the "I told you so stuff". Credit to her that she never even hesitated to let me stay in her house and never once brought up my big mistake.
Eventually the dust started to settle somewhat, the rental contract ended, and I moved back to my flat from the lodgings that I found. I then had enough wits about me to examine my finances and discover that
i needed to earn a fair bit more or reduce my outgoings a fair bit. After examining the options, I decided to remortgage (again) to bring my outgoings down by several hundred a month (though obviously over a longer time frame).
And there it would have stayed with me quite a bit poorer but managing reasonably OK.
However, life slung me a curve ball. When I did that remortgage, I decided to up my insurance too in order to match it. The medical revealed the presence of an illness that I had hitherto been unaware of and had been symptomless. Although I wasn't about to keel over, it would probably have shortened my life by some years and would certainly have impaired the quality of my life severely for some years before death. Fortunately, there is a treatment for the problem I had and I was pleased to discover that the particular strain of the disease I had was easier to treat than most. The unfortunate part is that the treatment was 6 months long and the side effects were often seriously debilitating. I could have postponed the treatment a few years I suppose but I felt very messed up about carrying such a disease around inside me - bearing in mind that there could be a chance of infecting others if there was an accident involving blood to blood contact.. So I opted to treat when it was offered to me.
When I started the treatment, I had a one man business with a full workload and two part-time jobs. By the time I finished it, I had quit the part-time jobs (one quite nastily as the side effects can trigger a lot of irrational anger) and I had lost about a third of my business. I was able to work on my better days though more often than not it would be a part day with frequent rest periods.
Anyway, I decided early on that even if I went hungry and got evicted from my home, my life was of more value. Life is precious. The bonuses that come with it are precisly that - bonuses. Everything is on loan even if there is no money owing on it. All anyone has, well or sick, is the moment in time that we are living right now. Being sick was good for me in some ways because it re-inforced the things that are important to me.

Anyway, I recovered and slowly started to build up my workload again. I was struggling to keep up with the credit cards again because when I was ill, I needed credit to supplement my income.
It was then that I was faced with a stark dose of realism. I clean windows for a living. I had been shinning up ladders for many years. I wasn't getting any younger. Some years before I had been made aware of another way of cleaning windows which involved using extendable poles and purifying water. I needed to increase my income drastically so I investigated this a bit more closely. Obviously it would cost me money to set up and the running costs would be higher. But the earning potential was vastly more than I had been earning up to that point. I went out working a day here and there for nothing with others who already had such tools to gain the experience and check the viability. A day for nothing cost me nothing because I had gaps in my work anyway. It meant a big potential outlay that I would need to borrow so I did my sums. It's very easy to think "all that money owing" and not look any further. But I saw it differently. I calculated how much I would need to set it up and how much the monthly payments would be. I then did as honest a projection as I could of how much extra profit could be made. I looked at the numbers and it was a no brainer. I was like Mr Toad just after he saw his first car .
So I borrowed a lot more money. Later, I needed to re mortgage yet again because I wasn't able to get the extra work in fast enough to pay it all. To give you an idea of how much faster I was working with new tools, the work circuit that had previously been a moderately had 6 weekly cycle was now taking me threee and a half weeks. And with more energy to spare I might have done it even faster. In fact my turnover has nearly doubled in three years and there's room to spare as I've passed on some of the poorer paid work.
However, there was a gap year between borrowing for my business and getting the work in to cover it. This wasn't helped by the fact that a good friend was dying and I took a lot of time out to spend with him. If you could see a graph of my turnover around that time you would see a big outlay on equipment, a year of plateau income, then from a month after my friend's death, the monthly income starts shooting up.

I have to acknowledge that I used to be a frivolous spender but the money I spent in new equipment (about 16 grand including the larger van I needed) was the best bit of business I've ever done.
Money is tight for me even with the higher income but I now have the tools and knowhow to get past this. Learning to live more tightly (and to cook properly) was the final piece of the jigsaw for me. I'm not saying I've got this sussed yet. My self discipline does go awry at times. But I have the components in place to start putting this financial nightmare behind me - slowly.
So far, for the most part, the recession has passed me by - though I'm not complacent about it. This is because I have always ensured that I have a wide spread of types of work. Because I invested well in tools, I am now getting work that was far too high for me at one time. I can clean windows that are 50 or 60 feet high with my feet safely on terra firma. I don't want to make this sound easy. It isn't. It's hard graft at times and ideally, you do need some grounding in H and S - particularly for larger commercial jobs. While I would never pretend that it's highly skilled, it would not be advisable just to walk into something like this without gaining some experience first - possibly as an employee.

Anyway, that's the story of my debt. Some of it because I wouldn't say no to a frivolous woman, some because I didn't want hepatitis-c to finish off my liver, and some because I invested wisely in my business to get out of the mess.
The second chapter of "War and Peace" follows shortly

EDITED TO SAY: In January and February this year, I had a setback as the freeze-ups stopped me working for a few weeks. With some additional outlay that was needed (pumps froze and cracked) my debt actually nudged 53 grand briefly. So in some ways, I've done a lot better with my repaying than is revealed on my signature.

Paulgonnabedebtfree

mrcow wrote: »

When I go to Costco I also get 24 x tins of tomatoes and 24 x beans, 6kg pasta etc. My larder is usually pretty stocked with flour, herbs, porridge etc. and I bulk buy onions/ potatoes etc. Sorry, didn't want to take the thread off topic.......just didn't want people to think that I'm starving my chidlren! lol :eek:

I have visions in my head of that immortal "more" scene from Oliver Twist

badkitti

Hmmm, My husband and i lived on a budget of 200 or less a month and that included takeaways and shopping at a farmer's market

Visit Money saving old style here for hints.

I used to batch bake -for instance made a massive lasagna and froze most of it - instant dinners homemade style.

Keep a diary of what you spend on food in a week/month and post it here or on old style - see the hints and tips come rolling in. Also maybe keep a list of what you chuck out.

Fire_Fox

We (two adults) budget £180 a month for food, and we don't cook everything from scratch like the Old Stylers. I shop at Asda every two weeks, a mix of Smartprice (fruit and veg), eggs, cheese, whole chickens, fresh fish, lean mince, own brand wholegrain carbs (pasta, rice, bread) and own brand tinned stuff. We still have a fair bit of brand name stuff - cereals, crisps/ snacks, condiments - but I do try to only buy when on offer. Working hard to throw less away by, for example, making soups and desserts with suspect fruit and veg.

[Deleted User]

Appreciate what most of you are saying that it is cheaper to cook proper food rather than relying of pre-packed food.

Trouble is I work full-time, my wife works part-time and looks after our son, and we just dont have the time/energy to do this....

Anyone in our situation who still finds time to cook - I take my hat off to you !!!! :A

tallyhoh

I think you will find its sometimes actually quicker to cook from scratch. For example a chicken stir fry with fresh veg takes minutes.
If I dont have much time I just bung a casserole in the slow cooker or oven, its done by the time I get home.
Have a look at the old style board, its brill.

slig

[quote=[Deleted User];21168711]Appreciate what most of you are saying that it is cheaper to cook proper food rather than relying of pre-packed food.

Trouble is I work full-time, my wife works part-time and looks after our son, and we just dont have the time/energy to do this....

Anyone in our situation who still finds time to cook - I take my hat off to you !!!! :A[/QUOTE]

I'm not an :A as I only have me to cook for (I do work full time and cook from scratch though), but I honestly think it doesn't take much longer to cook from scratch than to cook ready meals, and it's so worth it, both financially and nutritionally. It will take a bit more effort to start with until you know the recipes by heart and get used to cooking, but after a few weeks I think you wouldn't go back.

If you literally don't have a spare moment to cook on weekdays (which I find quite hard to comprehend, as there are plenty of meals than take less than ten minutes preparation time [and I'm a bit naughty and do my prep in front of the tv ]), then you could batch cook on Sundays and freeze yourself homemade ready meals to put in the freezer to eat during the week. As for effort, I know some people just want to veg out when they get in from work, but I find now I'm in the habit of it, cooking is a nice comforting way to wind down in the evening.

Did you watch the Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food program? If not, you could see if your local library has the cookbook.