the maccas Debt Free Diary - 20K to pay in 18 months

MUSTBEFUNNY_2

You must get the school photos....my kids are big now and we all love looking at them - defo worth getting into debt for...priceless:happyhear

taxi73

Hi the Maccas..glad to hear about the savings account...if you do owe tax credits offer them £10 p/m this is what I did...glad to see you are back on track though I never doubted you would be as you've always done excellently!!

piglet6

Hi, theMaccas - nice to see you back!

I have a favour to ask, please. Way back on about page 3 of this thread, I mentioned wanting to go to New York (as a result of you talking about it:rolleyes:) and you suggested making my 20ps my savings for it and "going for it" if I really wanted it...

Well, time has moved on, and the urge to visit the Big Apple hasn't gone away:p, so Mr P and I (admittedly, mainly "I"!:rotfl:) are trying to cost up the possibility of a visit later this year. Anyway, I seem to remember that you found a really great place to stay which wasn't too expensive, and I was wondering whether you would mind giving me the details of this place (I seem to remember that you mentioned it once because I think I looked it up - but I may be wrong, because I can't find any mention of it looking back through posts now...!).

If it is against site rules to "advertise" these things, I wonder if you would be kind enough to PM me?;)

Many thanks in advance,:A

Piglet

brainfreeze

themaccas wrote: »

And I have a note from National Insurance contributions to say they stopped giving me contributions towards my pension in 2003 as I wasn't working (I was on maternity leave and receiving mat pay) so they want to know if I want to pay them £1510 to cover this shortfall:eek: Ehhhhh......NO!

Hi

Not sure if this will be any help but there is a government scheme which protects NI contributions see here and if you were at home on maternity leave, but also caring for a child you may be entitled to protection under this scheme. It's definitely worth phoning them up and talking to them about it. It says it's automatic if you are in receipt of Child Benefit in your name for a child under the age of 16 but that's a load of rubbish. I only know about this scheme because my husband had to claim this for a couple of years whilst he was not working but caring for our children. The child benefit was in his name but they still wrote to him about making up shortfalls in NI.

Anyway, it's definitely worth phoning and asking about it.

HTH

themaccas

Piglet6, I have pm'd you
x

themaccas

Hi brainfreeze, many thanks for that. I have just read some more literature from the NI people and you are right! It seems like that I need to tell them exactly that. The thing is I have had mat leave before and never got this! Oh well more pieces of paper to fill out!

themaccas

Feeling a bit tired after working many hours over the last 5 days but have just looked at our finances. We have now reduced our OD to £739.33 so paid off £1450.67 this month so far. We still have a further £205 to come in the way of expenses and that will straight off this too. Next month we start clearing Sainsbury's cc, I really want to try and clear that one ASAP as it seems ages since we cleared a debt, in fact I think it was september last year as we are left with all the big ones - over £4k. We have really tried to curb our spending and budget really tightly and it's worked this month. The only extra I paid for was DS provisional licence which was £45. He won't start driving until August and we are hoping to pay for lessons for his birthday. We might have to put a cap on it though!

themaccas

Just been updating our debt total, now owe

£11,747.90 over 5 debts - 3 x credit cards and 2 x loans. In fact the loans only total around £1200 of the total debt, it's mainly 2 credit cards (AMEX) both owing around £4800 that are doing the damage.

Tryng not to feel too despondant at the moment, the last 2 months we have only been able to pay small amounts off the debt whilst we try and clear the overdraft. Just desperate to pay it all off and it seems to be going so slowly!

slowlyfading

You are doing great, look how much you've paid off your debt as a whole!
sf x

taxi73

Well done...over £25000 off so far....amazing!!!