3rd time lucky?

IWantToBeFree_2

Counted up my lose change today as my copper box was rather full - got £51 to put in the savings account tomorrow

IWantToBeFree_2

My cousin has finally given me some money she owes me, it was for something bought on my credit card which has already been paid off so transferred it straight to my savings account. Also got the money from my auntie for the Wii so thats gone in the savings too.

Got a few things listed on Amazon at the minute, mainly stuff I have won so that is a steady stream of income, albeit very small.

Started using Dooyoo again, want to get up to £50 so I can request a cheque, but not far off £20 now and hoping that I will be able to resist the temptation of an Amazon voucher to buy some books!

Got my DFW hat on at the minute, we were going to go to cinema (cineworld passes) and for something to eat on Friday, but I've now said if we go cinema I would rather eat at home first to save some money, as we would have ended up in Nando's and spent around £25. Seems like my head is finally in this, a few months ago I wouldn't have given it a second thought.

IWantToBeFree_2

Just seen that our BT phone bill has arrived - we are now £55 in credit, and they have put on the bill that they are giving us a 3 month payment break, so that is good, I was only moaning about it the other day!

The downside is that they are then putting the DD up by a £1 to £17.50 a month which means we will be paying around £5 a month in excess of the line rental. Over the last quarter we have only used the phone 15 times, costing a whopping 95p, so I don't know how they can justify putting it up - I will certainly be speaking to them about it once the 3 month break is up and asking for it to be reduced.

Will be putting the £16.50 directly into the savings instead of paying it them for 3 months, and for the first 2 months, this will be accompanied by £85 a month from our council tax break.

IWantToBeFree_2

Made £72.75 on Amazon over the last couple of days (before deducting postage costs). Really happy with that as it was all stuff that I had won so no initial outlay.

IWantToBeFree_2

Well, my student loan is finally all paid off and my January wage was £102 higher, its nice to have a payrise without actually having one!

Downside is that my February wage is going to be just about back down to 'normal' level as my car repairs will come out of it (I have a company car and had to claim on insurance as someone stole my wing mirror cover, gits!), but I guess the otherside to that is that had my student loan not stopped it would be even lower.

Not had a great few MSE days, was my hubbys birthday at the weekend, and we went to Dublin during the week which was soooo expensive, we spent £125 in a day, with nearly half of that on food and drink! We also went to Masham for a brewery trip and then he went to Manchester and out the day after spending nearly £100. It was all budgetted for, but it just means that less will be going in the savings/debt pot.

The savings/debt pot now stands at just over £3,000 with around £70 to go in tomorrow, really pleased with how its going. I have a spreadsheet which tracks pretty much the whole of my financial affairs and shows where the savings money has come from, and its pleasing to see how little amounts over the past month are really building up - we have put £800 in since end of Dec without really realizing it.

My SOA now shows that we have just under £1,500 left over every month after financial commitments - I am hoping that every month we can save at least £750 of this with the remainder being spent on food/fuel etc.

IWantToBeFree_2

Checked my bank this morning and Cineworld have took a payment despite saying that they had canceled the direct debits. The letter they sent said we could use the cards til 4th Feb - so we have paid a whole month for 3 days it seems. Not great, will be ringing them later to see if that is definitely the case, if it is, I should have canceled at the end of Jan, then at least we would have been entitled to the month we paid for.

IWantToBeFree_2

Given that our income and financial commitments have changed since the start of this thread, I have done a new SOA showing where our money is currently going.

My Income: £1,771.12
OH Income: £1,390.08

Total Income: £3,161.20

Barclays loan: £274.37
Halifax loan: £192.23
CC's (minimum): £213
Mortgage: 520.29
Council Tax: £85.00
Home Insurance: £38.70
Life insurance: £11.39
Sofas: £54.77
Sky: £39.00
Internet: £7.50
Mobile phones: £75.00
Water rates: £23.00
TV licence: £11.95
Gas: £22.00
Electric: £23.00
BT Phone bill: £17.50
Garage rent: £26.02
Weight Watchers: £17.95
Littlewoods: £24.64
Creditexpert: £6.99

Total outgoings: £1,678.78

Surplus after standing orders/direct debits of £1,482.42

At the minute, the surplus is spent on several things, food, fuel, football, entertainment, parking, etc - I don't have a set budget for where this goes, but the plan has always been that we will spend £100 a week and then the rest goes into the savings ready for servicing the debt when it is no longer interest free. I realised that £100 isn't much once we have done the food shop (around £40 a week) and filled the car up (around £30 a week) and paid for parking (around £15 a week) - the new plan is to restrict this to £125 - If I base this on a 4 week month it leaves just under £1,000 a month to be transferred to our savings account. I am getting more and more strict on frivolous spends, but not quite there yet, although I see small steps as a positive thing and don't want to totally cut out everything non essential and put strain on myself and my husband.

The debts currently stand as follows:

BT card - £3,822.39
Egg card 1 - £2,812.64
Egg card 2 - £5,499.50

Total: £12,134.53

This has increased since July due to balance transfer fees and stoozing - we currently have around £1,500 from the cards in our mortgage offset account to be paid back once the 0% period comes to an end in December (for all 3 cards). Making the minimum payments until December means that we will have approx £10k to pay back - I want to be able to pay at least £5k of this from our savings pot and then transfer the other £5k to a 0% card to be rid of by the following December.

The loan balances are as follows:

Halifax: £2,307.00
Barclays: £5,535.00

Total: £7,842

The loan figure is not 100% accurate as the figures come from our credit reports, and there hasn't been an update in respect of Barclays for a few months and Halifax for a month, so I expect the balance will be closer to £7,000. The Halifax loan finishes in November 2010 and the Barclays loan finishes in November 2011 so the aim is to be completely debt free (aside from Mortgage) once the Barclays loan has finished.
Others

Sofa: £985.23
Littlewoods: £131.65
Littlewoods (sister): £239.74

Total: £1,329.62

Total debt: 21,306.15

The total debt has increased since I last totalled it up, mainly due to the credit cards - but given that all but the loans are at 0%, I am only making minimum payments.

My savings balance currently stands at £3,106.73 with another £927 to be added to this from what my sister owes me. I am making some form of payment into the savings almost every day - My work expenses go straight into there (normally just for fuel) as do amazon payments - I have also been transferring my Council tax and phone bill money whilst I have payment breaks on those. This is helping save interest on our mortgage which is important given that we are in negative equity and want to move within the next couple of years at most. Last year our offset saved us £127 interest, and whilst its not massive, every little helps! We've already saved £14.04 interest in January and I expect this amount to increase every month.

IWantToBeFree_2

My OH has always been on board when it comes to money saving, thankfully he is a tight Yorkshire man so he doesn't spend much on non essentials anyway - I have also now got him on board in doing a daily spending diary, even for small amounts. We can track easily what we spend on our cashback card, but cash taken out of the bank is an issue because it soon disappears, so he is going to make note of anything he spends cash on, and so am I, and then hopefully we cant really start to find area's where we can cut back even further.

My financial month starts on 20th of each month as that is when OH gets paid and our statement date for cashback credit card - since 20th Jan I have kept track of what we have spent on the cashback card in more detail as normal and the results are as follows:

Shopping 106.37
Eating out 123.44
Gifts 33.08
Football 31.00
Parking 26.15
Fuel 71.94
Leisure 115.85
Medical 75.00
Weight watchers 17.95
Post office 3.99
Rings resized 52.00
Train fares 8.50
iTunes 0.99
Credit expert 6.99

As you can see, the eating out figure, when compared to our shopping bill is horrendous, clearly an area where we can cut down on straight away! Quite a few one off costs in there like leisure (we did stuff for OHs birthday) and medical which aren't there every month so its hard to compare it to a normal month.

IWantToBeFree_2

My shopping bill came to a mammoth £71 today - we tend to have to do one big shop a month, hopefully the next few will be little ones as we have plenty of non perishable stuff in now.

Was quite good today, nearly bought a new jacket as it had 30% off, but it would still have been £25, I had picked it up to buy it, then ended up putting it back - just wasn't comfortable with spending that kind of money when I had 2 coats on my back which cost £190 between them! Sensible decision in the end, and one I wouldn't have made a few months ago.

Having a sorting out day tomorrow, got loads of stuff around the house that I could do with putting on ebay, or throwing in the bin! I am toying with the idea of selling some of my signed football stuff to raise some cash, I need to think about what I need more - those or money!

chevalier

My comments are in blue

IWantToBeFree wrote: »

Given that our income and financial commitments have changed since the start of this thread, I have done a new SOA showing where our money is currently going.

My Income: £1,771.12
OH Income: £1,390.08does this include any benefits? does this include your surveys etc? can both of you do mystery shopping? do either of you feel up to learning about matched betting?

Total Income: £3,161.20

Barclays loan: £274.37Can you overpay either of these loans? this might be a better use of your savings if you can. Or you could put your surveys to this to overpay?
Halifax loan: £192.23
CC's (minimum): £213
Mortgage: 520.29
Council Tax: £85.00
Home Insurance: £38.70 Ouch this is really high. Is it buildings and contents? Have a look at eg beatthequote.com for a better deal, and then look at cash back sites like quid.com to see if you can get money back on the deal.
Life insurance: £11.39
Sofas: £54.77
Sky: £39.00
Internet: £7.50
Mobile phones: £94.66This is mega mega high, why is this? If you are consistently going over your allowance then I suggest that you contact your provider and get a different plan.
Water rates: £23.00
TV licence: £11.95
Gas: £22.00
Electric: £223 I know that you have said that you don't want to worry about energy saving etc. But this is over £2000 a year I have 2 children to look after and I don't spend more than £1500. The whole point about DFW is that it is not JUST about debt busting but also making sure that big business gets as little of our hard earned money as possible...
BT Phone bill: £17.50
Garage rent: £26.02
Weight Watchers: £17.95
Littlewoods: £24.64
Creditexpert: £6.99

Total outgoings: £1,678.78

Surplus after standing orders/direct debits of £1,482.42

At the minute, the surplus is spent on several things, food, fuel, football, entertainment, parking, etc - I don't have a set budget for where this goes, but the plan has always been that we will spend £100 a week and then the rest goes into the savings ready for servicing the debt when it is no longer interest free. I realised that £100 isn't much once we have done the food shop (around £40 a week) and filled the car up (around £30 a week) and paid for parking (around £15 a week) - the new plan is to restrict this to £125 - If I base this on a 4 week month it leaves just under £1,000 a month to be transferred to our savings account. I am getting more and more strict on frivolous spends, but not quite there yet, although I see small steps as a positive thing and don't want to totally cut out everything non essential and put strain on myself and my husband. I think that as a first step this might be a bit harsh, you have seen below just how much you spend as cash. Perhaps start with a more generous allowance EACH, and then cut it down as you save in other areas...

The debts currently stand as follows:

BT card - £3,822.39
Egg card 1 - £2,812.64
Egg card 2 - £5,499.50

Total: £12,134.53

This has increased since July due to balance transfer fees and stoozing - we currently have around £1,500 from the cards in our mortgage offset account to be paid back once the 0% period comes to an end in December (for all 3 cards). Making the minimum payments until December means that we will have approx £10k to pay back - I want to be able to pay at least £5k of this from our savings pot and then transfer the other £5k to a 0% card to be rid of by the following December.

The loan balances are as follows:

Halifax: £2,307.00
Barclays: £5,535.00

Total: £7,842

The loan figure is not 100% accurate as the figures come from our credit reports, and there hasn't been an update in respect of Barclays for a few months and Halifax for a month, so I expect the balance will be closer to £7,000. The Halifax loan finishes in November 2010 and the Barclays loan finishes in November 2011 so the aim is to be completely debt free (aside from Mortgage) once the Barclays loan has finished.
Others

Sofa: £985.23
Littlewoods: £131.65
Littlewoods (sister): £239.74

Total: £1,329.62

Total debt: 21,306.15

The total debt has increased since I last totalled it up, mainly due to the credit cards - but given that all but the loans are at 0%, I am only making minimum payments.

My savings balance currently stands at £3,106.73 with another £927 to be added to this from what my sister owes me. I am making some form of payment into the savings almost every day - My work expenses go straight into there (normally just for fuel) as do amazon payments - I have also been transferring my Council tax and phone bill money whilst I have payment breaks on those. This is helping save interest on our mortgage which is important given that we are in negative equity and want to move within the next couple of years at most. Last year our offset saved us £127 interest, and whilst its not massive, every little helps! We've already saved £14.04 interest in January and I expect this amount to increase every month.


Good luck with going forward with this. You have to change your thinking and your behaviour and you seem to be well on your way to doing this

chev