Reach for the stars...

Butti

Sometimes a good cry is really good. It really is a release.

Take care,

B x

psychopathbabble

Nic, sending a big huge hug. Was thinking of you the other day looking at my elephant pics wondering how you were x

niccatw

Thanks you.

Sid, that makes me smile. Last night I watched a programme on elephants. It made me laugh and cry. Which is what I need to do! Baby elephants are so funny, careening all over the place!

psychopathbabble

niccatw wrote: »

Thanks you.

Sid, that makes me smile. Last night I watched a programme on elephants. It made me laugh and cry. Which is what I need to do! Baby elephants are so funny, careening all over the place!

In that case, I'll post my photos of the elephant on fb soon... heard her laughing and had a water fight with her! Think her name was Foomoo!

MatyMoo

Sorry Nic, don't know how I missed your post.

I hope your friend is improving day by day, sending you and then hugs.

niccatw

Thank you Maty.

It's hardly surprising you missed my post; I haven't been posting, and hardly even lurking these days, for many reasons.

My friend is not good. They think the damage is worse than they originally thought and he is still in a coma. They won't know for sure until, if, he wakes up.

It all feels very surreal and waiting is so very hard.

But life goes on around you and you have to get on with it or you would drive yourself mad! And so the glazier is coming to fix the window that has been smashed for two months tomorrow morning at quarter to eight! I have bought the feature wall paint for the empty room, fixed the broken toilet seat but not the broken light fitting (electrics scare me), found the flooring I think I'll buy. None of which is hugely great for debt-busting! But I will get there.

I probably won't be around much either here or fb. Don't worry. I am spending as much time with our friends as I can as we all try to get our heads around what is happening.

Keep smiling - and keep plugging away at those debts. Here's hoping we all get there.

Take care x

niccatw

I have re-calculated my current debts and I currently have £4,094.90 left to pay, broken into:
Student loan 2 £916.45
HFC £496.45
Barclaycard £597.00 (on 4th Sept when the D/D comes off)
Friend £1000.00
Family 1 £835.00
Family 2 £250.00

That's a far cry from £34k+!!! Even though there's now a lot less left to pay, it is taking me longer. This is because I have gutted my spare room after my lodger moved out and have paid £700 for plastering the hall and spare room, including covering over the hideous artex, £100 for electrics in the room, £100 for the smashed window, £100 to move the radiator and I have just over £500 saved to get a new floor.

I really wanted bamboo becuase it's eco friendly and gorgeous but I have compromised becasue it is so expensive. My flat is an ex council house flat and many of the houses around me are still social housing properties, so I am trying to be realisitic between what I want for my wee flat and how much difference that is likely to make if I ever want to sell it in future. So I have found a nice laminate from a well know DIY store... now I just need to grab a pensioner so I can get a 10% discount... (Dad has a trade card, but whether you actually get a discount with it can be variable, so we decided a granny would be better... though my granny and the nearest DIY store to her are well over 100 miles from me...)

Though I will be doggy sitting there soon, so we shall see. I may get to play sectretary and contact said store with said tradecard to check whether there's a discount on the particular product I want! Posh phone voice alert!

Yesterday I sat around in my painting gear all day. I managed to sand down the plastered walls in the hall which still haven't been painted and paint white over the tester patches on the white walls in the spare room.

I have a teal paint for the fire breast wall. But I haven't decided on the rest. I suspect the white will be rather harsh but I'm concerned that grey will be a bit dark...

Oh and, the spare room has been re-christened as "the library"

niccatw

I figured I should look at my past loans for PPI stuff... hmmm, I reckon I might get a couple of hundred for my RBS loan I had the year before I refinanced it to the RBS loan that was my nemesis. I sent them a letter cancelling the policy about 6 months in. After that, I said no to it. That was 2007.

Not so sure about my credit cards, but I applied for most of them online and I think by 2007 they weren't allowed to set the PPI tick box to automatically ticked... though I guess a couple of hundred for me is better than RBS keeping hold of it. I do remember it not being easy to cancel!

Much like trying to cancel the charge on my co-op bank account. Every time I write to them asking to just give me a normal account because I don't use any of the "benefits" of a £9.50 pm account, I get some waffling letter as to why they can't do that...

I also wonder about my oroginal Bank of Scotland account that pre-dated the RBS loan. That was the cause of the largest chunk of my debt. It was originally a professional studies loan and when they stopped doing that, they refinanced it to, essentially, a massive overdraft. I don't know that it was even classed as a loan so I don't know that there would be PPI on it. All I remember was some bank man taking me out for a coffee and talking at me and, given I was young and stupid, I'm sure I probably thought I had to do what he said... whether I can claim PPI or not, I should probably complain at the way in which they did that!

I'm not too hot on complaining though.

Anyhoo, I've been doggiy-sitting for my folks this week. Doggy sitting is great for money saving. I have spent £6 today on my statutory credit reports (it's been a while since I last looked and I was trying to sort out the PPI). That's the only money I have spent since Saturday. NSDs and I wasn't even paying too much attention. They still feel good!

Hope every-one is well

niccatw

*Creeps in furtively*

Ee, it a bit dusty round here! Uhm, sorry for going MIA! Real life got hectic and priorities changed.

But it's that time of year again. No, no, no. I'm not doing resolutions! I only set myself up to feel like a failure! I'm doing my yearly round up because, if any-one has been around from the beginning, it was January/February 3 years ago that I began my diary! :eek: Really! Not my debt-free journey, I'd been hobbling along with that. But my diary, which gave me the boost I needed to focus. Ocassionally anyway! There are various points over the last three years where I have gone MIA! Usually this was because I fell off the wagon...

And probably hardcore debt-busters will say that's what happened last year. And perhaps they are right for them. I could easily have been debt free last year if I had remained as focused as I was in 2011. But the reality is I no longer had a lodger, I no longer had as much debt and I have enjoyed beginning to live a little and pottering about sorting out the flat (Don't understand that last sentence to mean the flat is how I want it!!! :rotfl: I'm not sure anyone has ever taken over a year to do up one room and is still needing a fair bit done to it!).

Yes I have been spending money when as I have it. But I have still been paying off debts too, so let's see where I am at...

SLC2 £449.28 This should have stopped coming off my payslip by now and the final months were to come off via D/D, but that's not happened, so waiting to see what this month's payslips says before calling again.
HFC £270.85 The never-ending one!
Barclaycard £197.60 Next £100 due off on 5th Feb. :j
Friend £1000 I'm less than £100 away from having this saved up to hand over! :j:j
Grandparent £835 Maintaining a guilty silence on this one!
Parents £235 Another guilty silence!!!

But the light is very much at the end of the tunnel with my total debt now sitting at under £3k!!! :T Who'd thunk it 3 years ago! Certainly not me!

It's never a safe place to be though as I need electrics done on the house, and to finish off the spare room. And my list of other things I want to to with the flat is massive. As is the list of things I need to spend money on. Let's not even getting started on the things I want to spend money on! :rotfl:

Once the debt is paid it will be much harder to focus on getting together an emergency fund which I very much need! My car needs work done and at the moment that's not an issue as it's still a leased car via work but I don't intend this to be the case by the end of the year and so I need to focus and keeping tiptoeing towards where I think I want to be.

And stop making excuses like, "well I need the spare room to be sorted and I need a desk in it before I can concentrate on that"... :rotfl:

Hello, my name is niccatw and I am a procrastinator to the core!

This is 2013 and who knows what it may bring, but I'll be ready to take it in my stride. I can't promise I'll keep popping in because we all know that procrastination will take over!!! But I might! And I might even start that blog I've been threatening!

If you are still reading - thank you for sticking with me! I would never have gone from oweing over £35k to under £3k without you!!! And if you're are a newbie - YES! It can be done. But it's not easy and it does hurt. Let DFW support you; it does make it easier to stay focused when all you can do is stare at the numbers and wonder if you'll make it. Yes - you will! (If you're not bloody-minded already, it won't hurt to become so now though!)

Here's to what all that we do acheive in the next year! :T

Edited to add: Even though I said I'd not been focused on paying debt, I've just updated the numbers on my signature and I still managed to pay off £4,694.85 in 2012. And that's not including the regular (albeit small) overpayments to my mortgage since I paid of the Northern Rock loan. I have always kept my mortgage payment the same as it was on the fixed rate when I first bought the flat and had a lot more debt and a little less pay coming in.

MatyMoo

Brilliant progress Nicca, it must get harder the closer you get to the end though.