New to the forum - up debt creek - all advice welcome

Foggster

Couple of things.

You make no allocation for car tax, MOT or house contents insurance. What are your "other assets" of £2k?

_Persephone

I dont have any contents insurance at the moment, but will sort that out come payday.

The assets are my sofa and laptop less depreciation. Currently paying both off, as I got them on finance.

Car tax and MOT i have always just paid out of my disposable income in a lump sum. Point taken.

patman99

Car tax (assuming £200 p/a) is £16.66, and MOT is £1.03 per month.

Don't forget, when you renew/take-out insurance to use Gocompare, Confused and the Post Office web sites. Then visit The Co-Op, DirectLine, Churchills and Aviva (none of which are on conparison sites). Then take the cheapest 5 quotes and run the companies through TopCashBack to see which ome gives you the biggest amount of money to take-out their policy.

In fact, TCB has quite a few 'free cash' offers, so you can earn money by requesting free SIM cards, getting insurance qoutes, doing surveys etc.

WASHER

_Persephone wrote: »

I dont have any contents insurance at the moment, but will sort that out come payday.

The assets are my sofa and laptop less depreciation. Currently paying both off, as I got them on finance.

Car tax and MOT i have always just paid out of my disposable income in a lump sum. Point taken.

Personally, I would remove sofa and laptop from assets, they are worth very little if sold second hand.

Insurance is far far more important than a mobile phone contract in my opinion.

£80 per month for clothing is too much.

WASHER.x.

_Persephone

Both the laptop and sofa cost me £1500 brand new, and I'm paying them off interest free.

I only added them as someone pointed out earlier I had no assets!

Also, I'm not spending that much on clothing now... but was up until a few months ago...

I will start to set up payday standing orders for big yearly expenses listed on the budget, like tax and mot. I don't think I will be in a position to pay this year's insurance annually, but I can save the equivalent of the monthly payments and use that for next year's premium. Another question - I assume that lots of forumites do this, but where do you send the money? I have a savings account, as well as another current account I never use. Is there an optimum place?

dancingfairy

Hi. I've been through your SOA and have made a few pointers for you:
Household Information
Number of adults in household........... 1
Number of children in household......... 0
Number of cars owned.................... 1

Monthly Income Details
Monthly income after tax................ 1598
Partners monthly income after tax....... 0
Benefits................................ 0
Other income............................ 0
Total monthly income.................... 1598

Monthly Expense Details
Mortgage................................ 0
Secured/HP loan repayments.............. 200
Rent.................................... 450
Management charge (leasehold property).. 0
Council tax............................. 66
Electricity............................. 80 see if you can do anything about this, the energy board on here might be able to help with changing supplier /getting the metre changed to a normal one cheaply.
Gas..............................,....... 0
Oil..................................... 0
Water rates............................. 16
Telephone (land line)................... 0
Mobile phone............................ 45 try and reduce tariff when allowed
TV Licence.............................. 12
Satellite/Cable TV...................... 0
Internet Services....................... 21
Groceries etc. ......................... 100
Clothing................................ 80 do you really need to spend this much per month? can you make use of your existing wardrobe more - maybe buy accesories to jazz something up, have a clothes swap , charity shop for vintage look/bargains, buy only say 1 piece a month etc, you could try a clothes neutral challenge - ie you can only spend the money on clothes that you have generated by selling old clothes - on ebay/car boots etc?
Petrol/diesel........................... 80
Road tax................................ 0 have no idea how much this is but it might be worth diving the yearly amount by 12 and putting this in a savings account or something
Car Insurance........................... 53
Car maintenance (including MOT)......... 0 again you probably want to be putting something away here if you can.
Car parking............................. 10
Other travel............................ 0
Childcare/nursery....................... 0
Other child related expenses............ 0
Medical (prescriptions, dentist etc).... 0
Pet insurance/vet bills................. 0
Buildings insurance..................... 0
Contents insurance...................... 0 hopefully this wil cost less than 25 a month by shopping around.
Life assurance ......................... 0
Other insurance......................... 0
Presents (birthday, christmas etc)...... 30
Haircuts................................ 0
Entertainment........................... 50
Holiday................................. 0
Emergency fund.......................... 0
Total monthly expenses.................. 1293

it might be worth trying to redo your SOA with some figures for the extra expenses put in - this will give you a 'true' figure and you won't be scrambling about when the mot is due or insurance or whatever - either pay monthly by DD or put a small amount each month in a savings account.
The good news is that a few frugalish months now mean that after October you will free up a chunk of money
which can be put towards you other debts and get them paid off quicker
With regards to the credit card and only being offered 1,000 - it's better than nothing - if you only get 1,000 at a good rate it's still going to be saving you money.
Best of Luck
df

_Persephone

Thanks fairy.

Car tax is 68.25 every 6 months, so I can put £10 aside for that each month.

I've sorted out my contents insurance too, for £11 / month after intial £20 payment. Not too shabby!

7roland8

I will start to set up payday standing orders for big yearly expenses listed on the budget, like tax and mot. I don't think I will be in a position to pay this year's insurance annually, but I can save the equivalent of the monthly payments and use that for next year's premium. Another question - I assume that lots of forumites do this, but where do you send the money? I have a savings account, as well as another current account I never use. Is there an optimum place?

I try and have everything on monthy payments so i'm ot tempted to use the money I put away!

dancingfairy

Sounds like everything is getting sorted. As long as you can stick to the budget you'll be fine and start to see those debts coming down.
Best of Luck
df

KingElvis

Yep, go girl and good luck :-)