My Turn for a SOA

andystev

lynzpower wrote:

do check out the CIS for your insurance

CIS website seems to be having issues this morning. I’ll try later.

chivers1977 wrote:

Have you tried Barclays for your insurance as I believe they are still matching your cover or giving you £50 and reducing your premium by £1!

Just got off the phone with them. Offer only available if they quote within £100.00 of your renewal initially. Initial quote for me was £130.00 more than Direct Line’s renewal.

andystev

Morning all,

Progress report, both to let you all know how it's going & in an effort to keep me on track.

Overall the news is good; see the updated sig. Debt down by £183.09 from last month. We actually spent £4.74 more than we earned last month, but £175.00 of that was the car tax, which I already had waiting, so we actually came in under budget by £170.00 or so. Which is nice...

The news budget wise is somewhat mixed however.

Good points:
Grocery spend down to £260.00.
Spent nothing on tobacco, did have to buy some filters ‘tho.

Bad points:
Herself still hasn’t got round to ringing NTL, despite persistent nagging.
The boys have been sneaking the odd day time dishwasher run, severe beatings have been threatened
Not yet managed to drag herself into the bank to sort out the account that we’re still paying a fee on.

As far as reducing the interest on the debts goes most of the credit card debt is now on an Intelligent Finance Life of Balance card at 4.95% I aim to have what’s left on the Mint & CITI cards paid off by the end of July. The RBS has £720 sitting at 0% until August, unfortunately it seems IF is underwritten by RBS, so I can’t BT it to the IF card. The next best I have is Barclaycard BT rate of 6.9% that currently has a nil balance and £800.00 limit.

£600.00 of the overdraft is now sitting in an A&L 0% for a year account, with direct debits set up to move £500.00 through the account each month. At the end of this month the four (count ‘em) overdrafts stand at:

RBS1 @ 10.6%, limit £1000.00, balance -£262.19
RBS2 @ 13.9%, limit £1500.00, balance -£1156.03
Abbey @ 9.9%, limit £1500.00, balance -£422.37
A&L @ 0%, limit £600.00, balance -£600.00

At the beginning of each month, i.e. today, I shuffle the balances round to max out the lowest interest rate overdrafts. Essentially so that there’s as much money as possible in RBS2, we use that account to live from. RBS1 is used solely for direct debits & direct payments (child benefit, maintenance, eldest’s rent etc.) so needs to have sufficient leeway to deal with the ups & downs, don’t you just love spreadsheets?

IF gave me a healthy limit, £4300.00. And I’ve recently had Capital one send me some credit card cheques for a card I no longer use, these cheques state that they’re at the purchase interest rate (30% ish, cough, splutter!) with no fee. The limit on this card is £1800.00, haven’t used it for ages, but never got round to cancelling it. Now, I don’t see why I can’t write myself a credit card cheque for £1800.00, wait for it to appear on the Capital One card & balance transfer it to the IF card. Hey presto! £1800.00 of overdraft at only 4.95%. But... I’m a little nervous that I’ll get half way through this, find I can’t do the balance transfer for some reason & end up stuck with an £1800.00 CC debt at 30%! Knowing my luck, herself will choose such a moment to “forget” we have no money, see a healthy balance in the bank for a change & spend the lot! Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

I’m still looking into the possibility of switching the RBS loan. It seems feasible, I could shorten the term, bringing forward my DFD by 7 months, increasing the payments by £5.00 a month or take a loan for the same term (7 years), putting the DFD back by 4 months but reducing the monthly payments by £20.00. Tempting either way, not sure yet.

Crikey! Didn’t realise I’d done so much Thanks for listening.

ZTD

Just a general tip - if you have a server type PC (constantly on), turn off the heating to that room. The PC acts as a little electric heater and you get the computing power for free.

See, thermodynamics does sometime work in your favour...

Also if you "need" more than one server, take a look at VMWare to virtualise them.