Help! Is there anything we can do to get out of this mess?

lalli_pickle

Also, have you looked at the up your income board?

There are lots of things you can do at home on your computer that will earn you 100's if not 1,000's per year. Try Lightspeed, Crowdology and Onepoll for survey sites and get Eagerlearners daily clicks list to earn £3+ per day on cashback sites. It may not seem much but it all adds up.

I appreciate that with any kind of cancer you want to keep the heat up and provide good, healthy food (my mum was the same with my dad) and a lot of that will cost more than other peoples budgets so raising your income by even 100 per month really makes a difference.

Also, if your OH is being stubborn and refusing to admit anything is different, get him to sign up to all the sites you do, then you can double the income and he'll feel a bit more like he's contributing.

If he's anything like my dad he'll hate the idea that otehr people have to look after him so finding him something useful to do is definately a must

dktreesea

Moi_63 wrote: »

Hi dktreesea!

We tried to add to the mortgage to settle some unsecured debts, well, we tried to do it for all of them and extend the term but we were refused. I don't know if they took into consideration that it would be used to pay off the unsecured debts or not.

You feed a family of for for 200 a month. I'm impressed. We must be able to reassess our food bills. We don't do M&S or Sainsbury's BTW. It's Asda once a week, every week... unless we are chasing offers.

I suppose when we supermarket shop we are influenced by the loss leaders and buy accordingly. We do things like make a huge pot of bolognaise or lentils and freeze most of it into meal size packets. Or roast a leg of lamb then have lamb sandwiches for lunch with the left overs three days in a row. Recently I have cut out stuff like sweets, chocolate, crisps and fizzy drinks. I thought my children would notice, but they don't say anything - they just eat what's there.

I wouldn't usually advocate swapping unsecured debts for a secured debt, but the interest savings can be very good, always assuming you don't them go back into debt again, i.e. cut the credit cards up.

I know it is nice to be paying lots off the principal with mortgages, but at 4.99% a year, the interest portion would only be around £440 a month or so. Would your mortgage provider consider allowing you to go onto interest only for a couple of years while you used the £300 or so a month you are paying off the principal to get the other debt sorted?

Do you have anything you could sell? Ebay, which is now free to list for private sellers, up to 100 items a month, can be quite good for clothes. We go to car boots occasionally where, bizarrely imho, used (sometimes very used) shoes sell like hotcakes.

On the presents front, do you ever get to jumble sales? I know this sounds an odd suggestion, but I always like to look out for sealed (so brand new) French perfume, which we usually buy for £1 to £5 each. The really expensive ones we then sell on Ebay. Not just women's, but mens perfumes as well.

Moi_63

Hi Everyone!

Well, yesterday I had my telephone appointment with CCCS. We were recommended to go with an IVA because:

1) We have enough 'spare' to afford it (thanks to all the handy tips regarding our SoA) :money:

2) A DMP would take too long to settle all outstanding debts.

My husband and I had a long discussion about it and he seems keen on an IVA because it is a formal legally binding agreement (he doesn't trust banks) and it looks as though we can afford the monthly repayments.

We have been advised to make token payments to our creditors as a gesture of good will until the IVA has been processed. But how do you do that with personal loans?

It's all still very new to us.

Oops! One last thing. If in the 4-5th year of the IVA we are advised to release equity (which is only fair in our opinions) would we be paying the full amounts outstanding to our creditors or settlement figures? Does that make sense?

Hannah_10

Regarding DLA a lot of people don't get it because of the way the form is set out. I wrote a couple of replies to a thread about this the other day. I know the examples I used there are specific to the condion mentioned on that thread but hopefully the basic idea might still shine through... https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/2593165