£48k stooze: managing the minimum payments

Reaper

Likewise, although £25,000 on a First Direct card at 3% minimum repayment is a bit of a killer! Just as well my next biggest stooze is an MBNA card.

By the way WesternPromise First Direct have dropped the £20 annual fee if you don't use your credit card enough. No annual fees on any of their cards for new applicants although apparently if you phone and ask they are willing to drop it for existing card holders too.

Reaper

peterbaker wrote:

I guess it would be rude not to use the initial 0% they offer but after that I suggest put the FD card away and forget it.

Much better than that is to pay it off and ask to switch from a Black to a Gold card, or even the other way round. They will give you at least the same credit limit (and probably much more) and the 6 months 0% starts all over again. I don't think they even do a credit search, although I haven't checked.

westernpromise

Reaper wrote:

Much better than that is to pay it off and ask to switch from a Black to a Gold card

Do you have to bank with them to do this? Wonder if having an ISA would count as banking?

Reaper

You don't have to bank with them to get a credit card so I don't suppose you have to bank with them to switch cards.

You won't get those famously generous credit limits unless you have banked with them for a number of years, but I'm sure that ISA will help.

peterbaker

westernpromise wrote:

The total, £61k, is about 60% of my gross income.

Ehm westernpromise are you saying you have an annual salary exceeding £100,000?

If so, what the hell are you doing buggering about establishing the finer details of these silly games ... unless you work for a credit card company that is and are fishing for information?:-)

I have never reached a salary of half that but I bettered your other numbers years ago. You are like a master of foxhounds in this forum mate! There's no sport in it if you can afford your own pack of hounds!

smartsaver

If you have an annual salary of 100k+ why can't you afford the monthly payments out of your salary?

Fiddling around with 1k a month, which will take some considerable time and trouble, is only going to give you about another £3.00 net a month in interest. It does beg the question of 'Why'?

westernpromise

peterbaker wrote:

Ehm westernpromise are you saying you have an annual salary exceeding £100,000?

If so, what the hell are you doing buggering about establishing the finer details of these silly games ...

Actual salary is about 3/4 of that. The rest is rental income from a property I own, which is mostly eaten up by the mortgage on it. I have noticed, though, that the credit card application forms don't make that distinction - they just ask for total household income, so I usually put £100k. This is why I am reasonably optimistic that I will be able to renew the 0% deals. The mortgage on the place we live in is not in my name, and that on my credit file is less than 3x that headline income figure, so it should appear relatively affordable.

I have a non-working partner and have just signed up for the pension deal at work, so my net income from work is only about £3,400 a month after deductions and before any expenses. We get by, and have no debt, but if we eat out it's a pizza 2 or 3 times a month and the only holiday we can afford is a weekend away once or maybe twice a year.

So the opportunity to blag a few thousand a year is not to be passed up. I am fortunate enough to work in a line of business where one is either manically busy or at a loose end, so I sort out finance - and post here - during the lulls.

smartsaver

westernpromise wrote:

I have a non-working partner and have just signed up for the pension deal at work, so my net income from work is only about £3,400 a month after deductions and before any expenses. We get by, and have no debt, but if we eat out it's a pizza 2 or 3 times a month and the only holiday we can afford is a weekend away once or maybe twice a year.

It is not for anyone here to judge who stoozes and there isn't an upper wage limit for doing so! We all have our reasons and it can be fun and addictive.

Even so, I don't think you can earn £3400.00 a month, own two properties and plead poverty. Their are people posting here who earn less than a third/quarter of your salary.

Unbelievable_2

westernpromise

I have, where possible, always used my minimum payments to make subsequent BTs. For instance, we have a Lloyds Premier card with 15k balance and Lloyds Advance card with 15k balance. Both these cards only allow BTs in the first 6 weeks of account opening. We have Mint cards with about 16k balance and One cards with about 12k, so I pay the minimum payment to Mint and One out of income and then use the freed up credit on Mint and One to pay the minimum payments on Lloyds.

That said, when we first started stoozing (we being Mr Unbelievable and me) we decided that we would stooze to the max because it wouldn't be the end of the world if our credit ratings got damaged in any way. We don't have a mortgage or any other borrowing apart from the stooze, we have savings other than the stooze and my husband earns a very decent salary.
I have just had my first card refusal (I don't work BTW) so (in the words of Galadriel) it's time to let my stooze pot diminish and go into the west - but it was fun (and lucrative) while it lasted. Thanks Martin and MSEers.

westernpromise

smartsaver wrote:

Even so, I don't think you can earn £3400.00 a month, own two properties and plead poverty. Their are people posting here who earn less than a third/quarter of your salary.

I certainly wouldn't exactly plead poverty on £5k a month either (i.e. including the rental income), but consider monthly expenses of:-

£1,200 (mortgage)
£900 (another mortgage)
£38 (buildings insurance where we live)
£130 (council tax)
£200 (service charges, both flats)
£199 (rental management charges)
£50 (contingency for maintenance; always needed in the end)
£50 (gas / elec)
£25 (water)
£11 (phone)
£18 (broadband)
£100 (commuting)
£68 (average for servicing / MOTing 2 cars)
£54 (average to insure 2 cars)
£40 (fuel)
£80 (critical illness insurance)
£32 (life insurance)
£35 (MPPI)
£10 (TV licence)
£132 (sandwich lunches / coffees)
£16 (newspapers)

...which add up to ~£3,400 before considering:-
- clothing
- food
- going out
- anything related to the baby, and
- anything the missus may spend on cups of tea etc when out and about.

In addition, in the last 6 months I've spent £1,200 on a new front wall, £1,600 repainting the outside of the house, £500 repainting the inside, £4,000 so far buying out the freehold, and £1,700 making the garden kiddy safe (fence repairs, etc) after the state the former occupants left it in. I figure I shouldn't be living in a pit, on what I earn.

That's another £9,000, or £1,500 more a month over those 6 months, and I can expect another big bill soon when the carpets are replaced in the shared hallway of the old flat.

We do not live lavishly; we live in a 2 bedroom garden flat and rent out another 2 bedroom flat in a posh area. The rationale for keeping the other flat is that my other half has no pension (was previously self employed) and the value of mine has been destroyed over the last 7 years. So we cannot expect mine to support 2 people in retirement.

Thus very little of this is discretionary expenditure. I could probably save cash by bringing lunch in, and plan to buy a scooter for commuting as this will save me money within a year. We are doing well if we have £100 or £200 left over each month to spend on ourselves, although the dentist has had all that off us this month, while last month's surplus was spent on a dishwasher repair.

This level of commitment is fairly typical for Londoners, in my experience. The poorest I've ever been was between '86 and about '92. At one point my disposable income was 2/3rds of 1% of the total. IIRC I was on £25k a year of which ~£15 a month was 'fun money', i.e. not spoken for by bills.

I have a horror of debt. I don't do debt. We have no debt, we have savings, but these are reserved for moving to a bigger place at some point.

Hence the need to blag every spare quid. The profits from stoozing will basically double our disposable income.