Around £4k in debt and getting worse

jcr16

the internet does seem hihg.

i know what u mean about not giving it up. i couldn't. we got 2mb getting up graded to 8mb soon and we pay £21.99 a month. with unlimited downloading. i know we could prob still get it cheaper, but we have found the company fantastic and to us worth paying a bit more for the service we get.

mandy4

Hi,

I agree about reducing your internet. I don't really think you need 10MB either...I use about this amount myself at work per month and this is when I'm spending most of my time (up to 12 hrs a day) on the net and downloading articles to read for work.

I also agree with starting a spending diary and meal planning. The spending diary is great to indicate what your money goes on. You may think one coffee a day or whatever is nothing, but everything adds up. This also helps you to be frugal and spend less in a way because you know you have to write it down once you've spent it. It stops the automatic spending habit. Meal planning has greatly reduced my groceries spending, as well as having the added benefit that it also reduced my spending on takeaway because I know what I have in my pantry and I buy only groceries that I can use to make specific meals, so it made it alot easier to know what to cook at night vs taking the easy way out and getting takeaway all the time.

I saw you said in your first post that you didn't want to reduce your loan repayments even if you could because you didn't want to 'prolong the pain'. If this loan has the lowest interest rate of all your debts, I would definately consider reducing this to the minimum along with all your other debts, and only paying more than the maximum on the highest interest debt...have your heard of the 'snowballing' debt effect? See the link below. Even though you may not like reducing your repayments, it's better to do this than to put yourself in higher interest credit card debt from not being able to afford day to day expenses...

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1102335753,51771,