Has anyone got an EASY way to keep record of everything?

SinkingFast

Life is tough - really hard at the moment. It has been for around 18 months and we recently made the decision not to go bankrupt and to repay all our debt whilst trying to hold onto our home. If we had to sell we would have real difficult getting another mortgage due to our lovely credit file spattered in defaults and late payments. No amount of letter writing will get those erased! (We did previously had an excellent credit record but hey ho. Our own fault.)

Anyway we have paid off a large chunk of our £42k unsecured debt and and currently fighting with First Plus on a secured loan, our mortgage is in arrears but we have a repayment schedule in place and are adhering to it.

I just wanted to know if anyone has an easy way of keeping track of all of this? We have approximately 30 payments to be made each month to creditors and I often lose track, get frustrated and end up spending hours trying to get my records back in a tip top condition!! I am sure this is hindering my mental attitude towards the stress of it all.

Does anyone have any good tips?

lesalanos

would a spreadsheet work?

SinkingFast

I am rubbish at spreadsheet work and have no idea how to use Excel really.

I am good at Word.

I just seem to always have pages and pages of paper everywhere!

lesalanos

do you have a copy of excel that you can use? doing a basic spreadsheet should be fairly straightforward if you can use word

SinkingFast

I have an equivalent type of software that I could use.............I will have a look. It never occurred to me to get it all on the pc. I am forever writing things down, scribbling them out, rewriting over the top of things!

thanks for the tip - will go and give that a bash!

Blahah

SinkingFast you can download OpenOffice for free (it's very similar to MS Office) from https://www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice Calc is the spreadsheet part of the program.

Spreadsheets were invented and designed for use with financial information - they are by far the best tool. If you post what sort of things you want to keep track of, I and others will help you design a spreadsheet to do the job. Don't worry, once you get the hang of it it makes life much easier - even complicated things become easy to work out.

lesalanos

just shout up if you ned any help.. there are loads of people to help