Back in the black before baby

LittleMissKitty

DH faxed over our info on Friday lunchtime and I called up to ensure it arrived. I actually told the woman to call me back once she'd been to the fax machine to confirm - can you say 'paranoid'? Anyway, true to her word the lady processed it as soon as she got in on Monday and I got my letter today saying the money would arrive in my account tomorrow Time to get decorating! woohoo!

At the weekend I finally decided enough was enough and put the car and bike on ebay. I figured we'd start the bike at £25 in the hope someone may want it as spares and take it away. So far it has 41 watchers and has been bid to £77 with 3 days left to go. I'm shocked! The car I cleaned and covered in t-cut and hopefully we should (at the very least) cover the tax and ebay fees with the proceeds. I'm secretly hoping they both go for a bit more than the starting price and maybe we can treat ourselves to something for the camera or maybe a new computer monitor before ours completely dies. Failling that we have our anniversary and DH's birthday coming up so it could be handy cash for those too, without eating into the monthly budget.

Also FINALLY got the tax credits renewal pack through on Monday. I called up this 'specialist team' to discover they can't access my file! I had to tell them why (I'm an employee!) and they had no idea what to do. I called the normal employee line and after talking to Mr Patronising 2010 I renewed. Prompted by the thread on the Benefits board I called back today to just 'check up' on my claim to be told that it's already gone through :shocked: Now to wait the fortnight before calling again to chase the paperwork.......

LittleMissKitty

Debt number 2 gone . Tax Credits is officially paid in full as of yesterday :j The thing that amused me was I was waiting for this months CTC to make up the balance I owed so I could phone up and give it straight back to them.

The car has also gone and left us with £260 to put towards various 'one off' requirements for baby, household and so on and the bike is being collected at lunchtime today in return for another £160. All looking good on the financial front at the moment

I've also done something quite scarey - DH is always moaning about how he can never treat me on anniversaries etc because I have full control of the money. So for this month I checked to make sure all the bills were gone, set aside what I needed for food and then gave DH financial control _pale_. I've decided to relax this month in regards to saving every last penny as it's our anniversary and baby's due next month so we're going to treat ourselves. DH's promised to be as 'tight as possible' (as he puts it) but is going to surprise me on Monday which will be lovely as we've not celebrated our anniversary in at least 3 years. This year we've managed to convince my parents to babysit ALL DAY! I have no idea how but it's all agreed and I'm going to take full advantage! Wish me luck.

Pinky15

Well done on clearing the debt yey:j
Good luck for Monday - bet he plans something lovely - you lucky thing!!

LittleMissKitty

Can't believe how long it's been since I posted. I'm just no good with diaries it seems.

Well, new year, new start. I cleared over £4.5k last year which I'm quite proud of but this year I plan to beat that and then some. Our income is about to drop by £500 a month as my maternity pay stops at the end of this month, and we've been really quite loose with the money over the last little while (always happens to me just after a baby!) so now is the time to reel it back in and sort the debts out.

I'm doing the Grocery challenge. £4k for a family of 6 for the year. Pretty sureI can manage it if DH gets on board. I'd also love to pay another £10k off the mortgage but that could be a bit over-ambitious......

LittleMissKitty

Blimey, it's all gone fairly horribly wrong. We're back in the overdraft in a BIG way. Currently £1084 and it's the 4th of the month with only £200 more coming in before June. Serves me right, I got far too comfortable on maternity pay and now that's gone AND tax credits has reduced.

We tried to 'speculate to accumulate' with an art fair stall in March. We stumped up over £500 and it turned out to be a farce. No advertising, hidden away in a little hole no-one knew about and an entry fee! On the plus side we do have 'stock' so we could try to find other opportunities but it really kicked us in the nuts financially. After that we got a bit lax and just kept spending

After realising that with the combined force of every piece of spare overdraft we had we were pennies away from not being able to eat at the end of April I decided it was seriously time to regroup. I'm kinda stumbling through though. I wanted to go in all guns blazing but DH needs a new chain and sprocket set for his bike (which is kinda neccessary for him to get to work!) so that's already £200 I don't want to spend but it does save on petrol if we can get the bike fixed rather than have him take the car to work every day.

I've started today by listing my travel system on ebay! This is a big thing for me as it's the first ever baby thing we got and sellling it's a bit of an 'end of an era' thing. Plus they don't sell for much which is fairly depressing too. But beggars can't be choosers! So it's up and waiting to be listed tomorrow evening. Wish me luck. :eek:

LittleMissKitty

Just trying to get back into the swing of diary keeping

Today listed perfume and x-box on ebay.
Tonnes more to get listed but we have Saturday evening set aside for that Oooo, I've also not used my tumble drier in over a fortnight! Go me :rotfl:

LittleMissKitty

Ooooo, Mr Tax credits man left me a nice gift this morning For some reason I was still down as earning £4400 a year despite having no job and no working hours on the claim.... so after correcting that last week I now have more than a months spare cash do throw straight into the overdraft. If we don't get exciteable and go spend then I could, conceivably, pay the overdraft off this month. Oh how I wish I'd never spent all that bloody money in the first place - Still, lesson learned and back on even ground! Alleluia!

LittleMissKitty

Hmmmm, been pondering this afternoon and I'm considering taking a small risk. While it doesn't benefit us monetarily I think it may make my debt management easier and help my brain to get organised. We have some money in our offset which is my inlaws, but they're not gaining any interest on it so leant it to us to help offset the mortgage, so not our money to do with as we please but we are allowed to borrow from it if it's paid back. We currently have a bike loan for £1866.40 which will be paid off in August 2012 if we just let it run its course, it's 0% so we won't gain anything financially by paying it off earlier. Our debt to the inlaws (offset account) will obviously increase but it will consolidate all our debts just into what we owe our parents. I'd continue the monthly payments as they are only transfer them to the offset account rather than the bike loan.

I think I'll have a chat to DH tonight.

LittleMissKitty

Third time lucky they say? Here's hoping!

And even the title of the thread still applies! As of December we are expecting mini-5. This one was NOT planned. It will, however, be totally adored because, well, it's my baby! It's kinda a genetic pre-requisite

So, Christmas hurt, but we weren't doing TOO badly. Then the course that DH was due to start in February was altered and we ended up missing the financial aid deadline :eek: so by January 5th we were £1800 OD and I was about ready to totally give up.

I haven't altered my sig in a while (must do that in a minute) but last time I checked we're about £19k in the brown stuff. It IS an improvement from our LBM two years ago but I'm not pleased with how I've handled it at all. I've not gotten the balance yet so I'm doing a few months of MAJOR budgeting, living off beans on toast etc and then something happens and we just stop caring for a few months, then pull our trousers up again, then splurge, etc, etc. I'd be crap at dieting!

So this time I'm not cutting EVERYTHING. I've decided that I'm budgetting for treats this time, it just doesn't work if we don't. So I have some nice new clothes, and my 'monthly' treat will be getting my nails done. It's not a normal 'me' thing but after 8 years of just being someones Mum I need something to make me feel good, and I've decided I can look good on a budget and I will . DH does his club twice a week and will be having a budget for a studio session once a month (he's a hobbyist photographer). The kids all have a hobby (swimming/ballet) and that's included in the budget already.

So, today I shall be revisiting my budget with realistic spends, not a skeleton budget. It's lovely thinking we have £400 a month that we can put towards debts because it obviously reduces our DFD substantially but I'd rather have £300 and a house that isn't falling apart (which it really is!) and me and DH at each others throats. AND it's more likely we'll stick with it if we can actually have some sort of life at the same time. We're not about to lose the house or anything but I want to be debt free so we can work on being Mortgage free which is the final aim.

I'm not going to make any huge plans this time because I'll only disappoint myself. So, plan 1 is to be overdraft free by May 1st. I know I can at least do that. It's going to take some ebaying and a lot of self control but once we're OD free I'll plan the next move :T

LittleMissKitty

Well, I figured since I was going to throw everything at the overdraft anyway I may aswell 'consolidate' a little bit so I paid my brother the £250 I owed him from my parents anniversary break last year. Obviously that's made our overdraft worse but it would have just been ignored for ever if I hadn't and that seems unfair. DB wouldn't have minded at all but he's too generous for his own good so we are now down to 3 debts not including the mortgage. Od (first to get rid of) FIL and parent's. Long road ahead but we'll make it