My Diary

thecornflake

So I posted my SOA yesterday and got some good advice.

I intend to call Payplan at the weekend and see what they can do.

In the meantime I thought it would be helpful to me and others to post a diary on here, as I'm trying out as many money saving ideas as I can find!

Current situation is I'm £91 worse off each month, and have £1375 of outstanding bills to pay by the end of the month. So my first priority is to raise the xtra money and second is to get a positive monthly figure!

Reading around the forum and site here for the past week or so here is the status so far -

One-off cash raising -

Selling old mobile phones - £35 on Envirophone and mopay
Refund from Royal Mail (undelivered Amazon purchase) - £28
Spare change in the spare change pot - Not yet counted but estimated £15
Ciao survey payments £7.02

Total so far - £85.02
Target - £1375
Left - £1289.98

Monthly saving (amounts are money saved each month) -

Changing car insurance and breakdown cover - 17.92
Change Sky package and go onto direct debit - 10
Change bank account - 10
Change Electric and Gas - 11
Change Phone calls - 15 plus 2/month back in loyalty bonus
Use different provider for daytime mobile calls - 20

Total - £85.92

Savings -

£2 coin savings - £2 (I only started last month!)

I also intend to get a mortgage piggy type thing after reading the excellent post about them!

Will set up my sig with debt amounts soon.

EDIT: Being a bit of a programmer I started writing a piece of debt management software a few months ago when I had loads of letters to keep track of. It was mainly to let me keep track of letters recieved, phone calls made, etc and I started to build in a budget thing to it.
I might pick this up again and see if I can get some time to do some more work on it. If i ever get it to a fairly usable state I may well give it away to some people.
NOTE: Mertin if you're readinfg this I'm not trying to outdo your excellent spreadsheet! I found it very useful.

thecornflake

Thought I'd tell you about my weekend.

Saturday - Called Mint to pay off my arrears and found out that my account is actually up to date which is £112 I thought I'd have to pay.

Sunday - Shower broke so I need to buy a new one. Plus the false wall and plumbing I did means only the same model will fit so I can't even buy a cheaper one

Monday - Did shopping. Target was £150 total. Normally we spend about £150 in Asda and then get all our frozen food from Iceland which is about £40 (monthly figures). Took in all of our saved up loose change and ran it through the machine that gives you back vouchers. Yes I know they take 7p per pound but it does go to charity. Added up to £18 which got taken off the shopping. Asda total after this was £120 which is great. Iceland shopping ended up being £77 though but we have completely filled two freezers and should have about 2 months worth of frozen food.

Started working on my own software to help me keep track of everything.

Spoke to parents and found out they are selling their house due to the big garden getting to be too much work and buying a cheaper house nearby. And giving the profit to us to help us move to a 2-bed house. This is great news as we (family of three) currently have a 1-bed flat in an area that has got really bad recently (someone got stabbed recently and the police refused to come out) and got to the point where we were going to sell up and rent for a while. I'm not trying to make anyone jealous here but show how sometimes at the last minute great things can come out of nowhere.

Yesterday (Tuesday) - Martin's book arrived courtesy of play.com. Started reading it last night - very good so far.

So quite an up and down weekend, but definitely more up than down!

thecornflake

Today I'm trying to work out if I should try and go for a DMP with Payplan or stick it out. Technically with all the savings I have made so far, if I had nothing outstanding I would be ok each month.

However, that isn't the case and I owe at least two month's mortgage payments (although one was missed due to an error on their part so I should be able to negotiate a payment plan).

I really want to do it myself but I'm thinking if I don't get the ball rolling now on the DMP I could end up owing loads more in fees etc. I've applied for loans at the last minute before only for them to take 3 months to come through and all the extra money accounted for was swallowed up in fees and arrears.

It's so annoying only being one month's pay away from being able to work at it myself!

Anyway, any comments/suggestions would be great! I'm advertising lots of past purchases on Amazon and plan to list some stuff on Ebay this weekend but it still won't make up the shortfall.

tesuhoha

Good luck with your move. I am moving soon because of the area. We have yobs outside all of the time and I have been told from a very reliable source that they all have knives. My 17 year old son cannot walk outside in the evening. The yobs damage cars and property. I shall be sorry to leave my lovely house but dont feel safe here so know how you feel.

Emmzi

cornflake,

good weather for carboots- I'm going to try one a week on saturday if weather holds (200 videos to sell at 50p!!)

overtime?

second job?

thecornflake

Emmzi wrote:

cornflake,

good weather for carboots- I'm going to try one a week on saturday if weather holds (200 videos to sell at 50p!!)

overtime?

second job?

Possible, but the temptation to spend my earnings would be huge! However, possibly cheaper than Ebay listing fees and a lot less hassle.

Overtime - Has to be justified at my job plus reason below

Second job - Not possible due to looking after my daughter when my wife works on Saturdays and if I worked in the evenings I would never see my family.

Tesuhoha - Thanks, I've found a good site - nfh.org.uk - They have very good advice and a forum full of kind and helpful people. The trouble we have is we could go to the Environmental health but then we would have to state this when selling our place.

Anyway, I don't want to go off topic too much but I recommend that site to anyone with trouble with neighbours.

thecornflake

So I went up to visit my parents yesterday and they took us on the second viewing of a house they've found. They put an offer in there and then which is quite scary because it means we have to go on the market right away. We already ried to sell last year and only recently had a valuation but I wasn't prepared for it all to happen so fast! Now I'm trying to work out how I'm going to move all my stuff.

Still not sure what to do r.e. DMP - obviously i have to wait until the move has happened bu that could take up to 3 months by which time we could in serious trouble. My parents are only helping us out because they think we are doing well at paying our debts off and they paid off some for us before so I can't ask them.

We have a mortgage and secured loan to move over to the new house (once we find one which won't be difficult!) so hopefully this will go ok - we still have 2 months arrears on our mortgage although one is due to be arranged on a short repaymentplan. The other one is this months payment - it will fail as our bank account is already empty.

As soon as we've moved I don't mind going ahead with the DMP but it's just juggling until it happens...

In the meantime have put some things on Ebay etc so should get the odd bit of cash coming in to buy food, petrol etc.

thecornflake

It's been a while (I hadn't realised how long!) since I updated this diary, but I've been very busy as you'll see.

I want to start keeping this up to date again as we're not in the clear just yet.

In May we finally managed to sell our flat, after the original sale fell through. We've moved into a rented 2-bed house which is very nice, just down the road. Rent is £675 and we had been paying around £800 on secured debts which are now all paid off, plus we used the profit from the sale to reduce some credit cards and other loans.

A good bonus from work helped as well, renting through an agent incurs so many fees!:mad:

We're still struggling but managing to just about break even every month now. Will post a new SOA when I get a chance to see if anyone has any ideas on how to improve it as we still have a lot of unsecured stuff to pay off.

thecornflake

Ok, here is my new SOA. Looking back it's quite nice to see the difference from my first post!

For some things I don't have the interest rates to hand, the Mint card is on a low (5.9%?) rate as it's a balance transfer. All cards are on payment only currently. The car loan is 0% because my parents lent me the money interest free. However I am still treating it as any other debt.

I think the GE loans are at about 9%, they seem to leap up at the slightest interest rate change.

I plan to apply for a M&S card to BT the Egg balance on to, 5.8% for the lifetime of the balance and no BT fee.

Even though this shows £125 left each month, as most of you know it never quite works out like this. Plus my wife earns around £200/month but sometimes uses the main account as well and it's proving difficult to allow for this. She probably accounts for an extra £100/month going out in addition to the stuff below.

Anything not paid monthly has been shown as its monthly equivalent.

I know, I haven't allowed for birthdays either.:rolleyes:

Emergency fund - £100

Income

Salary - 2000

Outgoings

Electric - 20
Gas - 30
Water - 14
Council Tax - 103
BT Line Rental - 12.60
Broadband - 12.99
Primus (Calls provider) - 2.99 (but with £3 cashback each month)
Telephone Calls - 20
TV License - 11.37

Car Insurance - 55
Sky - 21

Debt -

Egg Card - 50 (2381 at 16.9%)
Mint Card - 85 (3800)
Northern Rock - 123 (10000 at 6.5%)
GE Money - 70 (3000)
GE Money - 50 (3500)
Car - 100 (5100 at 0%)

Rent - 675

Petrol - 140
Food - 200
Tobacco - 40

Car Tax - 17
MOT - 3.75
Xmas - 20

Monthly total - +125

Total debt - 27781