Starting to worry...

lostonej

Anyone have any advice?

savingholmes

I presume your parents are feeding you for free as there doesn't appear to be any groceries listed? Look at the Make £10 a day Challenge for ideas on how to increase your income and the Up your income section of the forum.... See my signature - it works for me!

Good luck

Thriftyknickers

Personally I'd see the mobile phone and satellite TV as luxuries - particularly as you have a land line too. Could one or both of these go? It depends how worried you are I guess - and how tied in you are to the contracts!

tealady

Sorry to hijack. Thriftyknickers I love your user name! Makes me wonder just what are thrifty knickers. I have a vision of Old Style ones with seams round the waist with elastic you can remove and replace!

poorandindenial

lostonej wrote: »

I will do my SOA when I get home tonight.

I usually pay all my minimum payments when I get paid but this seems to put me in a muddle. Any one got any suggestions/tips on how to resolve this?

It's looking like I'm not going to be able consolidate or anything....or be getting a pay rise anytime soon :S

You could set up a separate bank account, establish direct debits to go from there and transfer money into there when you get paid, let the direct debits go out and then you can use any money left to pay off a chunk of one of your debts.

BUt for this to work you need to be sure you can service your entire SOA with your wages each month as otherwise you could find yourself in a difficult situation come the end of the month

lostonej

Cheers I think I'll look into that, with the bank accounts. I will look into sky etc contracts and see if I can cancel them.

Cheers for the ideas

daily_2

Ask you parents for a repayment holiday, until you have paid off the virgin and capital one credit cards? - If they don't need the money now, you may as well pay them upto 30% apr, rather than the CC company.

Use your lower apr cards for any expenditure, and use every spare penny to get rid of the high apr debt. eg buy fuel on your tesco credit card for the next few months, maintain min payments, and use the money to pay off the virgin card, moves £250 @ 30% debt to 7.5% debt - saving nearly £5/month in interest, then use the barclaycard in the same way


and/or

Live without a car for a while

laura2481

Hi lostonej :hello:

Here's what I would do:

First- here's the bad news- this will take quite a bit off effort and self discipline. This won't happen overnight (I wish it did though!) - and it will be hard work. Sorry

Don't worry too much about consolidation/increase overdraft/another CC just yet. By the looks of the number of loans and credit cards you have you are not too good at clearing credit cards etc (no judgement here- I was exactly the same!) Consolidating, or extending overdraft to clear one thing off will potentially leave you able to run up the card again/ put more on overdraft and actually leave you in more debt.

Ask your parents for a loan holiday- but give them a time limit. Say for 6 months and no longer. Explain why you are doing (this may not be fun- I personally would hate to tell my parents how much debt I'm in) but I'm sure if you explain the situation sensibly to them, and how it will cost you more in the long run they will get on board.

Then I would concentrate on getting rid of the Virgin credit card ASAP. I would do this for 2 reasons:

1. It has the highest apr so is costing you the most in interest
2. It has the lowest balance so you should be able to clear it relatively quickly and once one debt is gone I found it really gives you a big boost to get rid of the others

To get rid of this asap you must put as much as possible towards it on top of the minimum payment- but don't leave yourself without money for everyday things. You still need to live! See if you can arrange for your brother to pay you back- even if he pays you in small installments rather than a big lum sum if you send that money straight away to the CC it will get it down quite quickly. Also- seriously check out selling your unwanted text books. I sold a couple on amazon for some decent money. They do take quite a big chunk- but they take their cut after you sell the book so you're not paying any fees if they don't sell.

Once a card is cleared CANCEL IT. Don't leave it lying around to tempt you to spend on it again. Once it is completely cancelled you will then have the opportunity to take out a card with that company again at a later date and take advantage of any new customer deals..

Once the Virgin card is gone you should then concentrate on overpaying your capital one card as that has the next highest interest rate.. and so on. Once you have cleared off a couple of cards your credit rating will look a lot more cheerful and you can apply for 0% deals from other card companies, which will help you clear them off more quickly.

Phew- I think this is one of my longer posts ever! :rotfl:

Good luck anyway with whatever you do