Debt Free in how long?!

silentmike486 · 2 February 2011 at 3:58PM

Hey - I am the wife:)

I just cheacked through this and want to add a few things.

Groceries - I spend between £30-£80 a week whilst husband is at work, and when he is home he tends to spend £90-120, So the estimate is off a little. I have started to withdraw £100 a week and make it stretch to diesel and groceries. I used to do the meal planners and shopping lists and will return to them again. Thank you for the suggestion.

In july, with any luck we will be granted mobility for my son and will sell one car, and receive another free. I think with mobility we will save on car tax as well as maintanance and make a payment on the debt with the sale cost. So there is a bonus.

Credit cards - I am afraid I am responsible for most of them. I had them from a previous marriage before the days when I had children and I had a good income. Unfortunately since then I lost this income to become a full time student and was therefore unable to do the regular balance transfers. Then came the time when we needed to call on the large limits to simply survive and now we are being crippled with interest payments which are extortionate and there is nothing we can do about them. On top of this problem is the face that an old natwest creditcard of mine was not shutdown properly by the bank three years ago and remained on my credit file as unpaid, making a huge dent in my credit score.

Now I am off to phone sky and do the I'm leaving trick and see what I can get for basic sky, phone and broadband combined.

silentmike486 · 2 February 2011 at 4:05PM

tbourner wrote: »

Really!!! Where on earth did you get her from? Is she KC and were the parents not hip scored? Seriously bad news for a young puppy to have problems like that.

Did your vet tell you that (the vet that went to University sponsored by Royal Canin)?

She was not KC - I bought her off of someone who I thought was a geniune breeder but unfortunately I knew nothing about breeders so was taken in by their appearence and false paper work. The parents were hip scored but I was not allowed to take any paperwork home. I should have been suspicious at that, as the hip scores werent even on a real scale I discovered since. I am greatful I used an expensive insurance from day one, as they are going to cover most of the hip problems. After the operations though, the insurance will be no good for that particular problem anymore, so I will cancel it and put £10 a month into a savings account to cover future costs. Thanksfully the new hips will be fully guaranteed for life.

As for Royal Canin - I admit it is expensive and I do have a cheaper alternative which I will change to. it is £40 per 7 weeks instead of £50 per 4 weeks. But my vets tells me the supplements are £80 per box?!? I need to look in to this more. Surely a dog can use human glucosamine etc?

tbourner · 2 February 2011 at 4:12PM

silentmike486 wrote: »

As for Royal Canin - I admit it is expensive and I do have a cheaper alternative which I will change to. it is £40 per 7 weeks instead of £50 per 4 weeks. But my vets tells me the supplements are £80 per box?!? I need to look in to this more. Surely a dog can use human glucosamine etc?

Sorry to hear that, we were quite lucky that we fell into a forum which helped us through our breeder process, otherwise we'd probably have fallen for the same things. We now run a rescue so know all too well about back yard breeders.

We feed the BARF diet and we use all human supplements, but you have to know the levels you're giving!!! We don't feed any commercial dog food now (apart from Bakers in their kong, using most people's normal dog food as a 'treat' for the dog is an eye opener in itself). We make a veg mush for ours which we feed every couple of days, it includes VitC, VitE, garlic, cod liver oil, kelp, alfalfa (if we can ever get it), apple cider vinegar, there are forums for BARF feeding that will help with amounts to use, or have a look at our site we're trying to get up and running: click.

Tixy · 2 February 2011 at 4:17PM

Hello Mike's wife!

Hope you get the car through the mobility scheme, that would certainly help.

It may be that you would want to consider a DMP - if some debts are in one name and some in the other maybe wife could do a DMP and Mike could try to preserve his credit rating (you would need to financially disassociate if you have had any joint financial products). On a DMP many of your creditors may agree to freeze interest etc. Maybe consider talking to one of the debt charities about your situation.

EDIT - another fan of the BARF diet here - I use some human supplements (garlic etc) but also use the 'missing link' supplement for dogs. Might be worth looking at this to see if it would help with what your dog needs extra, and whether you could use this along with the cheaper dog food.

silentmike486 · 2 February 2011 at 11:16PM

after a quick call, sky now do our phone/net/tv for £40, saving us nearly £70! Im still annoyed about Quinn charging me over £100 to change my address on my car insurance though :mad:

Denzel09uk · 3 February 2011 at 1:19PM

Quick suggestion.
If you are paying the council tax over 10 months then I would suggest paying off some of the debt in February and March as this would be spare cash. Get the Engagement ring or the old electric bill paid off or something like that.
Hope this helps.
All the other items I think are covered by other people but would agree totally with them.
Denzel09uk

dancingfairy · 3 February 2011 at 1:26PM

silentmike486 wrote: »

after a quick call, sky now do our phone/net/tv for £40, saving us nearly £70! Im still annoyed about Quinn charging me over £100 to change my address on my car insurance though :mad:

This sounds extortionate to me and I would write and complain. If this produced no results I would look into who they are regulated by and complain to them - paying for admin/letters is fair enough to a certain extent but 100 pounds :eek::eek:
df