Fliss27 - In this for the long haul

Fliss27

Hi all, have been reading for ages but never got up the courage to post...

Anyway, we are in a pickle. £13.5k on credit cards (including £6.5k on BT/MBNA at more than 26% :eek:), £3k overdraft, £10k owed to my Dad. No assets to speak of beyond the house. The car is on HP, £175 pm and we'd have to pay £3k at the end of the term (Jan 2012) to keep it. We could give it back, but then we'd have to find the money to buy something else for hubby to do the 60-odd mile round trip to work. House is probably worth around £135k and the mortgage is for £85k, fixed for another 2 years at just over 5%, £493pm. At least we're not in negative equity. The house, car and all credit card payments add up to approx £1200pm.

Hubby's take-home is £1650 approx per month. I work from home in between looking after DD (just turned 1) and at the moment I'm lucky to clear £100 in a month, it's usually more like £50. I get £366pm maintenance from my former partner for DS (nearly 13) and we're getting Child Tax Credits and Child Benefit which adds up to another £250-odd per month.

Currently we are two months behind on two of our credit cards (the only two not paid by direct debit), this adds up to just over £300 and will be paid up by mid-month, but of course our credit rating is shot to he££. I have some ideas on how to wrestle the creddies once our credit rating has improved, like getting a low-cost loan to cover some at least of the debt (thus lowering the interest we have to pay and shortening the time to Debt-Free Day), transferring balances to 0% cards once we're accepted for them again and so on.

And how did we get into this mess? I honestly don't know - apart from the obvious which is spending more than we earn, every month. And then, for the last few months, using the credit card to pay off the credit card. Stupid stupid stupid.

But if I can get us out of this mess (and hubby is totally on board now, it took me a while but he now understands this is our last chance before bankruptcy), I will move heaven and earth to do so. And do without anything I need to do without. I hate having to make the kids go without, but they are well-fed, clothed and loved and they have a home. Right now that's the best I can do - 5 years from now it will be a different story.

Onward...

Fliss27

Today's TopCashBack tracked amount = £61.95.
Fonebank is offering £85 for hubby's old mobile, plus another £3.50 cashback for going through TopCashBack.

It's a start. This month is proving difficult, no surprises there. Still waiting for hubby to call Lloyds and Barclaycard to get them to add the outstanding payments to the balance (suggested by a debt advisor). If he doesn't do that, the outstanding payments are going to eat my entire pay for last month and I don't know when, if ever, I'll be able to earn this much in a month again. I really want to use the bulk of it to throw at the gaping maw that is the BT creddie. I've asked for and got half the Christmas/birthday money my parents were keeping back for me, just to keep us in petrol and food until I get paid. I would normally be paid around the middle of the month, but this time it looks like it might be the end of the month, leaving us with a shortfall and not much of a bridge... The money was meant to be saved to pave our tiny back garden, but that's a low priority now. The Boy needs £10 for his judo grading, there's a school book he ruined last year that needs paying for (another £10), Santander have upped the APR on that creddie from 18.9% to 21.9%, petrol's gone up again, the water bills (we have two - one for the water supply and one for the sewerage, different companies - why? I have no idea) are due, it just seems endless. And hopeless. I am so sick of waiting for money to come in so that I can silence the ever-screeching 'pay me now' of the bills for a little while. It's nerve racking every month - will the CSA money come in before the council tax goes out? Will I get enough to pay the phone bill before we're late enough for late payment charges?

Soap operas like Eastenders and Corrie have dealt with drugs, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality and all sorts of other things. I think there needs to be a debt story-line, educate the public about credit card debt and how easy it is to get in so deep you feel like you'll never get out again.

We'll get there in the end. I just feel like I'm facing 5 years or more of this.... hopelessness and it's got me down a bit. I'm back to the cashback sites, every little helps.

[Deleted User]

Hi Fliss,

Just wanted to welcome you to the boards, they are a friendly lot here and don't bite.

Tea
x

Fliss27

Thank you for the welcome Tea - it's good (in a funny kind of way) to be here.

Fliss27

A couple of minor successes to report today. Firstly, one of my clients (who I thought had dropped off the face of the earth and would never pay) has paid - yippee! :T

Secondly, I went shopping at Morrisons last night and got a whole week's worth of meat for dinners, plus lots of veg, lunch stuff for the The Boy and hubby and one little treat (Lavazza coffee) - over £50 worth for £30. Chuffed.

And thirdly, hubby got a letter yesterday from the RAC about his renewal. Having a shufty on TopCashBack reveals that we can get better breakdown cover from the AA for £43 less than the RAC will charge us, plus we'll get £42 cashback. Very, very sweet.

Car insurance is up for renewal in January - I can't wait to see how much I can save us and how much cash back I can get, just by clicking.

Feeling a bit better today...

Fliss27

Had a look at the minimum repayment calculator last night - the BT / MBNA credit card would take over 100 years to pay back at minimum payment! This, of course, is because the minimum payment is only a tiny bit more than the interest every month. In fact, some months the balance and therefore the interest and minimum payment goes up despite the fact that we don't spend on the card and we do meet the payment on time - how does that work then? A few months ago the minimum payment was £125, last month it was £145 and this month it's £139. I don't get it. I know that some months we'd pay over £140 and the debt would go down by about 70p. Daylight robbery, but still our fault for spending it in the first place. I wish we at least had something to show for this mountain of debt - you know, holiday memories or something, but we don't. Our honeymoon three years ago was a week travelling around the UK going to theme parks. I loved it, but it was hardly your standard expensive honeymoon. Even the wedding was cheap as weddings go, and my parents paid for most of it. I wish I knew where it all went.

The £1700 on the Lloyds card would, at minimum payment, take nearly 58 years to pay. Barclaycard 37. Santander 44. Dear God.

I did some playing around with that calculator using the BT / MBNA interest rate and minimum payment amount. Any balance over £1k would take over 100 years to pay off. Words fail me.

[Deleted User]

Hi Fliss,

I sympathise with you regards the interest. DH has a Virgin card and it is underwritten by MBNA and it is just horrendous. If we'd known MBNA had such a high rate of interest we wouldn't have taken them out in the first place, you live and learn eh hun?

Keep going hun there is light at the end of the tunnel, you are going great guns.

Tea
x

pennywisepoundstupid

Just wanted to say hi fliss and say that people on this board are really helpful and friendly, Is there any chance you could do some ebaying or surveys to bring in a little extra cash.

Also if you posted your SOA maybe people would be able to give you some ideas on cutting back.

Fliss27

Thanks Tea! (or should I call you Purple?)

Pennywise - thank you for the welcome! Sadly I missed ebay's last free listing day as I was at my parents', but I intend to sell a load of stuff at the next one. I'm doing Lightspeed surveys (have 350 points so far), but I don't seem to qualify for a lot of them. I still need to send DH's old phone back, so that will net us £85 (plus another £3.50 cashback) and the AA membership will be done by the end of the month for another £42 cashback. I know we won't see the cashback probably til late winter but at least it's mounting up! Our 'official' SOA (which doesn't show my pay as it's so erratic) shows us as insolvent, so I don't really want to post it. Outgoings have already been slashed as far as I can slash them (I have years of experience of this, getting to the supermarket at the right time for 'best before' goods to be at their cheapest and so on, I brought DS up on income support for 10 years!), we may yet get rid of Sky although tbh we have everything (phone, broadband, satellite TV) with them and we're on the cheapest TV package already so just getting rid of the satellite probably won't save us much. They did bung us on unlimited broadband a couple of months ago for going over our limit a couple of times in 6 months - I think I'll have to look at that and get us back down again.

In good news today my client has permanently passed one of her main clients on to me, so although the work that comes in there will be erratic it will be interesting and quite time-heavy - and they pay on time!

In bad news today DH is still unable to get the call centre person at Barclaycard to understand what he wants them to do, so I've sent an email to their complaints department instead. Hopefully this will do the trick.

Feeling a bit down again, waiting to be paid, waiting for maintenance money so I can pay some bills and try to get a bit straighter and stop being behind myself all the time. I'd like to have £100 in hand just so I know the next lot of council tax going out won't put the account in the red - not savings as savings would be daft when we have so much debt, just a bit in hand.

Fliss27

Oooh, nearly forgot, could you tell me how to sort myself out a sig? I'd really like to get the debt figures in there so I can (hopefully!) watch them go down...

pennywisepoundstupid

HI fliss - regarding sig, go into user cp at the green bar at top of page, then into edit sig which you should be able to see on the left hand side, hope that helps.