Debt Free by 40 Debt Diary

jas135

oakdale_minx ,

hey , Im 40 in may 2010 .... ( 13th) . This is also my personal goal and also to clear my mortgage .
If we do it .... big party ??

hypno06

And i will be 40 in Nov 2010 and would dearly love to be debt free by then although my current snowball says it will be the end of the following year.

Maybe we should have our own Debt free by 40 challenge!!!

oakdale_minx

I feel a party coming on!!!!! Jas135, you are only 6 days older than me!



Phew, just sigend off AQA for the month. Did £528 this month, plus I think I will get about an extra £10 or so for the extra on Christmas and Boxing Day.

right, off to get a shower. Triv is set up on the table and the nibbles are in the fridge.

HAVE A GREAT ONE EVERYONE!

oakdale_minx

okey dokey...............this is 2007 then!!!!!!

Well, the sun is shining, which is a definite improvement on how 2006 ended!

Got £15 on an ebay sale, another plus!

AQA earnings set back at zero - always a bit deflating to see it back at 0.00 but its another chance to earn more to clear the debts!

Did lots of fiddling with the figures on the MFI site and I've realised that if I don't get the bed I was going to get and just get a headboard (the bed was new when I moved anyway), I can get a fridge freezer! I have £1,150 in MFI vouchers from my Tesco points and all in it comes to £1,250. I reckon I can get 5% knocked off by bartering and if I barter hard, I might get 10% off. Might go and spend them tomorrow as I know exactly what I want from which range etc. (Milan Walnut if anyone wants to know my tastes!)

lulu650

very impressed with the amount of Tesco vouchers oakdale! I've got £650 and that's swopping around 4 family cards and, of course, the correspondingly higher bill for a family of 4 (since summer)

Just haven't got quite enough for the bed I've been looking at....sob..

oakdale_minx

It took me exactly a year. I became obsessed with checking for and using codes on the Codes board on MSE. I used the spend £50 get 1000 points codes as often as possible, as well any codes that I could use with other purchases (ie had to send some flowers, there was a code for 500 points)

I love the Chocolate Truffle bed in MFI, but if I have that (and I already have a divan, if headboard-less at the moment) then I can't have the fridge freezer. My fridge freezer was £35 second hand when I moved here two and a half years ago. It is still working but is on its last legs and the motor/generator thing is NOISY!!!! Have to have the bedroom door shut at night as it drives me mad!! (I live in a bungalow in case anyone is thinking the noise is travelling upstairs!)

beanielou

Hi OM
Why dont you try freecycle for a fridge freezer & get the bed of your dreams?
The name alone makes it sound fab!

oakdale_minx

Hi beanielou

i'm a member of my local freecycle and have kept an eye out over the last few weeks, but none have come up I might well put out a Wanted though. Good idea!

oakdale_minx

Gave AQA quite a hammering yesterday, which I'm pleased about. Did £50, nice start to the month.

Got a magazine from my union today and nearly threw it out without reading. Glad I did now. It seems I'm now covered under a new redunancy arrangement where I would get 1 months tax free salary per year of service if this re-shuffle meant I eventually lost my job. That is much better than the old scheme and if the worst came to the worst, I'd walk away with over £14,000 and it would rise to over £16,000 if I hung on until September. For a weird reason that I can't put my finger on, the option of being made redundant doesn't scare me. Almost £16,000 plus AQA each month (I could double what i'm earning if I did it full time) would keep me going for a while until I got a new job, and, I know that I would be able to cut back even further on the outgoings if it was really necessary. Let Cruella do her worst!

Feel quite positive about it all really! 2007 has been good so far!!!

kiwigirl

HI OM,

Glad you're feeling positive about 2007, keep chin up about Cruella, I stayed with a bully for 2 years and in the end got enough not to need to work for a while with 2 payouts (didn't need to work until about 3 weeks time but have had FT employment for the last 5 months and patchy before that - so most of my payout has gone to a higher rate account) did go via solicitor as Union were worse than a chocolate tea pot in the end and had plenty of evidence against my bully. Yes it's hard but just do anything to stop her managing your life, start looking for other work - even look at her job when they advertise, I had a good interview just before Christmas and my current employer (fixed contract) had no objections releasing me for the interview - even had 1/2 of dept asking me how it went today :eek:. Would mean a relocation but money's double what I'm on and way to get onto housing ladder and experience would be brilliant - just got to get the final interview with them now! Really nice people to work with too (of whom I saw anyway! just as they were leaving to go to pub!)

You sound versatile enough to try and jobs going so don't worry about being made redundant, if I hadn't been bullied I wouldn't have started looking for some of the jobs I've applied for and got some good interview and made some good friends on the way from other jobs. Even the experience of attending interview has been great and if they give you a bit of money for that too it's even better! All I'll suggest is you do and update your CV and see how many accomplishments you've got on yours and that will make you feel even more positive about yourself.

KG