Learning to Live on Less!

White_Iris

Happy 2015 everyone! We had a good night at home with friends last night, and have lots of drinks and snacks left over, so I should be able to get away with minimal food shopping for the next week.

The new year has started well, in that I've been offered an extra shift at work next week and DH and I have had a good sort out, resulting in a nice pile of stuff to put on eBay. I'm going to save any money from eBay, Quidco and Pinecone in my PayPal account until the end of the month, then use that and my extra shift pay, to put towards the credit card. Hopefully I can get the final card cleared by March.

lucielle

Will that be you debt free? Happy New Year
L

White_Iris

lucielle wrote: »

Will that be you debt free? Happy New Year
L

Sadly not we still have two loans to go after that but to be free of credit card debt for the first time since we were old enough to apply for credit cards is just as exciting! Particularly since we've done it the hard way by reducing outgoings and making large payments, rather than just consolidating everything in to bigger loans (which is how we've dealt with credit cards in the past).

White_Iris

So, I've sent a payment of £590 to the credit card which should reduce the balance to £1110 and I aim to get that to £1000 by the end of the month. Next month I'll pay the Council tax money off as well as the money normally earmarked for the credit card, so that should be a payment of £430.

We should start paying our new loan in February, after our two month payment break but when I phoned to ask them to change the payment date from the end of the month to the 1st, the lady on the phone told me the first payment would now be on March 1st. I'm not going to send it to the credit card until I'm sure the payment date has been changed but potentially that's an extra £400 to pay off. If we're lucky the credit card might be under £200 by the end of next month. :T

I listed 11 items on eBay last night and one has a bid already. I've got another 5 to add (once I've ironed them), so fingers crossed for some good sales this month.

jwil

Good luck with the sales, how exciting to be clear of CC debt!

White_Iris

Hmmm, I've been playing around with some online mortgage calculators and my plans for paying off one of our loans may have to change.

I had been intending to transfer our smaller loan on to our credit card, once it was cleared, taking advantage of the 0% period to pay it off but it may be more sensible to cancel the card and overpay the loan as it is. I know that the online mortgage calculators don't take account of personal circumstances but when I change the credit card balance from £0 to £8000 it reduces the amount we "might" be able to borrow by approximately £40K, even though the other monthly debt repayments are dropped by £200.

It also seems like we're going to need a much larger deposit than we currently have, so saving hard for a few months before committing our extra cash to debt repayments is probably sensible.

White_Iris

I've been looking at more online mortgage calculators today and I've depressed myself again, as these ones will only allow us to borrow half what we need to get a house in our area. In order to reduce our outgoings (and make us seem more desirable to mortgage lenders), I've called our loan provider for the smaller loan and asked them to stop the overpayments we were making and revert back to our original loan repayment. It will save us £25 a month - not massive but every little helps. eBay sales are still a bit slow, a few bids but nothing brilliant. There are still 3 days to go, so it should perk up over the weekend, fingers crossed. Pinecone surveys have dried up and I haven't got anymore additional hours booked at work next week, so it looks like my big credit card payment at the end of the month, won't be quite as large as I hoped. Oh well, things could be (and have been) worse.

sweetpea26

You will get there WI. Keep going, you have made excellent progress.

White_Iris

sweetpea26 wrote: »

You will get there WI. Keep going, you have made excellent progress.

Thanks sweetpea26. Some days I'm so pleased by the fact that we have nearly paid off our credit cards but other days (like today) I just get bogged down thinking of how much we still owe.

White_Iris

I thought I did an update a few days ago but it seems to have vanished (I probably didn't click post after spending ages writing it all and just closed the tab instead!).

All eBay buyers have paid up and their items have been posted, I've re-listed what didn't sell and added a couple of extra bits, so I'm hoping to be able to send close to £100 to the credit card at the end of the month, just from eBay sales.

So, by the end of January, the last credit card should be under £1000 and in February I'll be able to send a payment of either £450 or £850 depending on whether our new loan starts in Feb or March. With luck we should be at less than £200 by the end of February.

In March all spare money will be thrown at our savings pot - first target is £500 emergency funds then everything goes in to the house deposit ISA. My aim is to have at least £8k in there by August (we have £6k at the moment). In order to get a 10% deposit and buy the kind of house we want in our area, we will probably need in the region of £16k, so there is still a bit of saving ahead of us.

We also do have some outgoings in the next few months that I need to remember to budget for:
February
SIL birthday - £20
FIL birthday - £50ish (It's a big one but he doesn't want a present, so we'll all go out for a nice dinner instead and pay half).
March
Mothers Day - cards & presents for mum and MIL £30
Swimming lessons - £110
There is more in April, May and June but I'll just concentrate on the next two months for now.