i've finally had it....

skint_as_trousers

tesuhoha wrote:

Your credit card.

the credit card is on 0% and the savings are getting interest on them.
At a 2% repayment the credit card minimum payment will start at £92 from £4600. If i pay the £2500 off it'll be £42 a month, i'll save £50 a month on payments but lose any savings i have.. i dunno if it's worth it for £50 a month.


Micheleen..
I'm going to list all the channels i watch regularly enough and see what package i can cut down to.. off the top of my head i must only watch a handful.

sophistica

Is that contents insurance. I got mine for £8 per month. My advice is that every tiny bit helps - you need to go back through every expense and cancel or negotiate it all. Start from what they call zero accounting. You may be able to go to the gym on a pay by visit basis. etc.

skint_as_trousers

yep it's contents insurance. It was the cheapest i could find with accidental damage.
I'm going to cancel the gym i've decided. A girl friend from work keeps telling me she can get me free passes to hers (lad who works there fancies her) so i can save that £25 a month till i start going regularly.
I've got weights at home and can jog with the dog. Also hoping to start playing football again after work.

Hope that £19 a month isn't insurance as i told them not to renew that.. must dig out documents and check it.

tesuhoha

Yes I've got ccs at 0% and from these we are paying off debt, I dont have the cards for them. But we dont have any savings, I'd rather see the debts go down and we have a card we use for emergencies (a cashback card). Hopefully, we wont have too many of these emergencies. The 0% cards wont stay that way for long so it might be an idea to use your savings to pay them off when the introductory rate comes to an end. Otherwise your interest on your savings will be pointless if you are paying a high APR on your credit cards.

lynzpower

My OH changed to PAYG with O2 after 4 months into a contract

Just phone them up, say you cant afford the contract anymore competing priorities blah blah ,but you MUCH prefer their network over others, could you negotiate a deal in thier PAYG. really, it has to be worth a try, massive savings to be made here

mintymoneysaver

your sky is totally excessive for one person.Why do you need multi room? If you cut down on that and got rid of the gym that would be at least another £50 to throw at your debts each month...

Thriftylady

hi there

I would cut back just about anything but still try to pay into the sharesave scheme. I was paying into a scheme like this a few years back which would have matured this year, but cancelled it when my husband was made redundant and money was tight. With hindsight (and isn't that a wonderful thing?!) I should never have done this, as the shares went up so much in value that I would now be sitting here debt free and the profits made (thousands, in my case) would have cancelled out the interest I paid on the debts in the meantime. I actually felt sick the day all my colleagues got their certificates telling them how many shares they now owned......

Obviously theres no guarantee with shares, but you can't lose with sharesave either, with them being tax efficient etc

tyllwyd

I'd agree with Thriftylady about the sharesaves - if they are on course to make a good profit, it would be a shame to cash them in now.

You need to sort out your phones because that is throwing money down the drain, but you know that already.

My general comment is that when I read your initial post there were lots of things like I'm paying them £4.99 a month but I don't know what for and I don't know how much I'm spending on food. I get the impression that if you tightened up on your finances and found out exactly where all this money was going, you'd be able to claw back some cash just by making sure that nothing was wasted on things you don't use. That's the whole point of Martin's MoneySaving philosophy about pain free savings.

skint_as_trousers

Sky multiroom is in my bedroom. I'm going to knock the packages down just looking at them now.

Gym is going to go tomorrow. I've weights, sit up bench and an alsatian i can take jogging. Hopefully i can get free passes to my mates gym off her till i can afford to go regularly again and i'm motivated enough to go.

Sharesave is staying put. My debt free date is 2013 and i'm putting 3 years in at £50 a month (£5 shares) ending in 2008 and £50 in a month (£9) shares.. So i'm getting back £3600 whatever happens over the space of 12 months. Although it should 'hopefully' be 3 times that amount and clear my debts by 2009.

tyllwyd..
When i did my SOA i was reading through a bank statement so i didn't have the full facts. I'll need to look at my bank account and the direct debits (although i'm a tad scared to look).
Hopefully the £19 is contents insurance and they forgot to stop the DD even though i cancelled and i can get some cashback.
With the food issue i go shopping at the beginning of the month usually and spend around £80 including about 20 tins of dog food. Then throughout the month if i need anything i'll pop to Asda so until i start taking a note of everything i honestly can't say how much i spend on food.

One of my main problems is i try not to carry change, i just dump anything under £1 in a bucket and £1 and £2 coins in a tin that can't be opened so i go to the cashpoint more often than i should (stops me snacking at the vending machine at work though).

I've also decided to cancel the phone contracts (apart from the Orange one) and pay up till the end of the contract on 0% purchases CC. I've worked out roughly that it'll cost £8 a month on CC payments compared to £60 on line rental saving £52 a month.

MadWelshWoman

Just wanted to say Citymain Administrator are a mobile phone insurance company

HTH

Mads x