Littlestar1981's Debt Diary and help really needed

littlestar1981

I've been addicted to MSE for a month now, jumping on the bandwagon with regards to challenges about eBay and things, but this week I seem to have been gradually sinking deeper so thought if I could post an SOA maybe you guys could help me out??

I live at home with my parents, which is great as I pay minimal 'rent' and don't have to worry about food shopping and gas bills and the sort, but that's a good thing considering the amount of debt I have. Approximately half the debt is debt in my name but was money borrowed when I was with my ex, naively I took it out in my name only (he didn't want to work, so couldn't have got credit anyway and there were bills to be paid)

I've been selling stuff on eBay and Amazon this month, and got into mystery shopping, but opposite to this my wage ran out about the 10th of the month so ever since I've been borrowing from mum for postage of items, mystery shops etc. I know you do get that back... eventually!

This month has been worse also as nearly two weeks ago my boyfriend had his car stolen, so when we see each other at weekends and go to visit his family I've been doing the driving. Now that doesn't sound too bad until I tell you I'm in Manchester, my boyfriends in Leeds and we visit his parents in Staffordshire - since I have to collect him also it's a 300 mile round trip costing me about £25 in petrol! I can't complain, as he's been driving us 200 miles every week for months. But I thought I'd add that in since that's why my money problem looks so bad to me this month.

Okay, so here's my SOA, based on an average month:

Incoming: £1170 (This can vary due to overtime and evening allowances, so I've just put my lowest wage in the last 6 months)

Outgoing... the list seems endless!! :
1. Halifax Visa - current balance £7174.19, limit £7350, interest 22.9% minimum payment £120 tried to pay almost £200 as per snowball calculator.
2. Tesco Visa - current balance £2770.09, limit £3000, interest 14.9% minimum payment £75. tried to pay about £80/90 as per snowball calculator.
3. Student Loan - current balance £4964.02, 2.4% interest. This is debited from my wage automatically, and the income above is after the student loan has been debited.
4. Alliance & Leicester Loan - current balance £5155.08, interest 5.9% minimum payment £151.00. This is in my parents name (tut)
5. Toyota Loan - current balance £4374.77, interest 0%, minimum payment £208.41. This is in also my parents name (tut)
6. A&L Overdraft - £725.11, limit £750, interest ?. I am trying to pay this off £20 a month. Minimum payment none
7. Joint with ex Halifax Overdraft - £2486.48, limit £2500, interest ?. Minimum payment £40 to cover interest as he's gone into hiding and refuses to pay a thing. If I don't pay it we'll get bank charged and make things worse!! This also means a financial association is on my record, and he has poor credit (probably)
8. Parental Loan - £890, limit n/a, interest 0%. Again no minimum payment but trying to give them at least £20 a month as per snowball calculator.
9. Sofa payment - current balance £1000 approx, limit n/a, interest 0%, minimum payment £63.52
10. Mobile phone contract - £33.50 a month. Only just took this out but can reduce it by £7 next month, and a lot more in 5 months time.
11. 'Rent' to parents - £150 a month.
12. Petrol - varies. Normally about £25 a month but this month, wit driving round the country, it's been approximately £70. My car should not need any maintenance for a while as it was brand new in July!!
13. Things like birthdays and that I have not budgeted for as they are seem to collate in two areas (April and December!) and any extra pay I get will cover those.

If you can give me any advice on what to do this will be much appreciated, this is what I've done so far or need help on:

1. I need to get the Halifax Visa sorted but I don't know how to. I applied for a GE Transformation card about 6 weeks ago but was declined... was considering M&S LOB Card but not sure if safe to do so yet? I have got my equifax and experian reports and they all say 'good'.
2. I've started selling lots of old uni books on a couple of mobile phones on Amazon and eBay and have this month made about £200. But I don't have an endless supply!
3. This week I have started to save £2 coins and 20p's. For the last couple of month I've been saving 1p/2p/5p's and each time I got to £10 that has knocked a bit extra of the parental debt
4. I get reward points at work which convert into Argos vouchers. If I've needed something I've used those, or if parents need something I've done them a 'swap' for cash knocked off the debt!
5. I want to know if I can call Alliance & Leicester every time I managed to get my overdraft down by £50 and get them to reduce it so I can't go over it? Same with the Visa cards, although both have now been cut up so I cannot use them anyway.
6. Spending on food at work. I am TERRIBLE at this. I cannot seem to find the motivation to bring my lunch, so I end up spending a few pounds a day, equating to about £50 a month!! I need cups of tea to get me through the day, and that's 25p per large cup!!
7. I have registered for as many mystery shopping companies as I can find, done 4 but wont get paid and reimbursed til next month though. Wondering if would be wise to use an old savings account (balance £50) to have the pay/reimbursments put in, and use money from that account to pay for the mystery shops (til the reimbursement comes through) so that I don't feel like I'm 'short' all the time?
8. Joint overdraft. Ex did drop me a text about 3 months ago to say MAYBE he'll pay his half.... but in 18 months time! I'm worried about the effect the financial association this is having on my credit rating. Should I accept my parent's offer of another loan, intrest free, to pay it off?
9. I've applied to work for AQA since I (almost) have a degree. Sent my form and test back last Friday.

I know this is a HUGE opening thread but I'd really appreciate any advice!! I will be totally honest and POST everything I do on here moneywise, so I can get some great help from all you lovely people xx

xxx

ZTD

Hi, first thanks for posting. Second, thanks for posting such a detailed SOA

littlestar1981 wrote:

1. Halifax Visa - current balance £7174.19, limit £7350, interest 22.9% minimum payment £120 tried to pay almost £200 as per snowball calculator.
2. Tesco Visa - current balance £2770.09, limit £3000, interest 14.9% minimum payment £75. tried to pay about £80/90 as per snowball calculator.

If you're snowballing, then you need to pay the absolute minimum on every debt that you're not "focussing" on. Otherwise you'll squander your "firepower" as it were.

littlestar1981 wrote:

6. A&L Overdraft - £725.11, limit £750, interest ?. I am trying to pay this off £20 a month. Minimum payment none
7. Joint with ex Halifax Overdraft - £2486.48, limit £2500, interest ?. Minimum payment £40 to cover interest as he's gone into hiding and refuses to pay a thing. If I don't pay it we'll get bank charged and make things worse!! This also means a financial association is on my record, and he has poor credit (probably)

Try to find out what interest charges are on these. You may find you're paying off the wrong things... :eek:

littlestar1981 wrote:

6. Spending on food at work. I am TERRIBLE at this. I cannot seem to find the motivation to bring my lunch, so I end up spending a few pounds a day, equating to about £50 a month!! I need cups of tea to get me through the day, and that's 25p per large cup!!

Make your food the night before. If you really can't do it, ask your mum to do it for you (:o).

Put yourself a flask of hot water up, and take tea bags. Advantage: You can take those flavoured fruit infusions - and look posh. :rotfl:

littlestar1981 wrote:

8. Joint overdraft. Ex did drop me a text about 3 months ago to say MAYBE he'll pay his half.... but in 18 months time! I'm worried about the effect the financial association this is having on my credit rating. Should I accept my parent's offer of another loan, intrest free, to pay it off?

Worry about your credit rating later. Ask the OH that if you pay your half off, will he agree to have the outstanding put entirely into his name.

CLAPTON

a few things about budgetting

its really important to try to write down everything you earn and everything you spend, otherwise you dont really know what you actually have and can always say 'oh i'll use my extra income to pay for this' but how many times is this extra income used? etc

so for income put your average income over the (say) last 6 or 12 months

for spending put everything you spend and will spend over the next 12 months. so yes do put in how much for presents and xmas, also car tax/insurance/RAC/AA/servicing (divide by 12 to get a monthly figure)
are you likely to go on holidays over the next 12 months, do you spend anything going out, your work lunches and coffees, magazines anything on clothes, dental/medical/optical etc etc.

writing it all down and adding it up may be a bit scary but necessary.
at the moment it looks like

income 1170 plus a bit?

spending 258 but surely more if everything is included

debt 515 minimum payments

so leaves 255 for snowballing your debt .. however this needs reviewing once you include your average salary and all your spending.

can you increase your income by say a parttime job.

if you can get rid of the joint bank account with your ex (make sure you can close it once its overdraft is zero) is a good idea but it would mean your parents now own about 13,000 of your debt...how would they feel if your circumstances changed and you could pay them the money , could they afford to pay this themselves.

littlestar1981

ZTD wrote:

Worry about your credit rating later. Ask the OH that if you pay your half off, will he agree to have the outstanding put entirely into his name.

I'm in the middle of making a complaint about that as the Halifax branch said we could do that and we signed all the forms and stuff, then we got letters to say we can't.

I just don't want my credit rating to go bad now, especially since I have such an awful Visa.

Thanks for the advice, I will find out the overdraft interest rates. The A&L is nothing or next to nothing as they're giving me a few pence credit each month in interest?

Verbatim

Hi Littlestar,

You seem to have a good idea of where you are with all the accounts and what you need to do.

But as ZTD said snowballing requires you to put ALL available income, (after paying all minimum payments), towards only one debt, the one with the highest APR.

It sounds rather worrying to have a joint account with an ex who's "in hiding". Once you've paid it off could
your ex still withdraw money from this joint account? As you say you have a financial association with him due to this account. I'm wondering if you've updated your credit file/record to state that you no longer live together. I know it can be hard to close a joint account if one person doesn't agree. And it sounds like you couldn't get an agreement if he's disappeared!!

littlestar1981

Clapton, my average income over the past 6 months has been 1392.65. Wow!!

Everything to do with my car is paid for for the next 12 months so I thought I'd leave that out for now?

I will try and put a more detailed outgoings on later, certain me and my OH go to the supermarket a fair bit at weekends! We don't really go out otherwise as both struggle with money, we just go on walks that are free. We have been doing mystery shops at restaurants to get a night out!

Holiday is in 2 weeks :j but thats paid for and my spending money has been put aside. But I'm challenging myself to bring back as much as possible!

Part time job? Not really. I work Mon - Thur 10 hours a day, and got to college on a Thursday night. My weekends are really precious as that's the only time I get with OH. I have been accepted to work for AQA though, so I was going to devote my entire Friday to that and mystery shopping.

They could pay this themselves if things went wrong, they're amazingly clever with money. They know I will pay them back every penny and fortunately that's without a timescale. I think they want the joint account with the ex closing quicker than I do!!

littlestar1981

Verbatim,

I just used a snowball calculator someone sent me via a link on here. I put in what I could afford to throw at my debt, what the minimum payments were and it generated me a lot of figures

It was basically telling me to make the minimum payments on everything except the Halifax visa AKA the Devil in disguise :mad:

I have updated my credit file to say we no longer live together, but he's still on my files because of this joint account. The account is barred, so if I pay it all off hopefully I can request to shut it down, they'll ring him to confirm he's weedled his way out of another debt and that'll be over with.

Oh, and while I haven't found out the Halifax overdraft interest rate, the A&L was 0% for 12 months.... meaning 5.9% interest charge from November :eek:

CLAPTON

good that your income is better than expected

ok so all the car costs are 12 months away..well in a months time they are only 11 months away...so yes they need including

and that holiday..ok all paid for ...and you're absolutely sure you wont have another holiday for at least 12 months?

and yes pay as much as possible to the highest APR debt.

littlestar1981

It is as an average over the last 6 months, but there were a couple of bBank Holiday overtime payments in there and a £400 one-off bonus.

Thanks, so I'll throw every spare penny I have to the Halifax visa and keep the rest minimal. Is it worth trying to apply for a BT?

Holidays - probably not. It's all dependent on my boyfriend really, he struggles as much as I do. But he's hoping to move back to his parents so then he'd free up money and want another holiday. But that relationship could go belly up in a fortnight, you don't know what's going to happen in this life!