Learning to Live on Less!

debtfreesomeday

Great news WI and lovely to hear your update. I have been wondering how you were doing and hope you would post again soon!

White_Iris

White_Iris wrote: »

Merry Christmas everyone, with a bit of luck the next time you hear from me, we'll be living in a new house in a new town!

Well, we've done it! We've moved house and our tenants should move in on Friday. Fingers crossed they're happy with everything as we really can't afford to pay for any landlord-related issues at the moment :eek:

So far, so good with the move. The new house is smaller and a bit cluttered at the moment but looking on the bright side, clutter is just more eBay inventory :rotfl: It's lovely being in a town again, on Monday I walked the 5 minutes up the road to the library, both children in tow, then popped to the shops and walked home again. Little things but being in a village really was quite isolating.

I've just done a review of our budget and it's not looking good, although the house is smaller our bills haven't changed very much and we estimate it's going to cost DH an extra £100 a month-ish in petrol to commute to work. This leaves us with a deficit of nearly £150 :eek:. Now this will only be until our loan ends in the summer (still hoping to pay it off early - aiming for August) but I'm not sure how we're going to manage it until then :cool:.

Iris .x.

debtfreesomeday

Exellent! That's great news Iris x

White_Iris

Pay day last Thursday for DH, which means it was my "payday" on Friday when his wages got transferred to the various pots including my spending money. We agreed to reduce the amount to spending money we both get and divert the extra into the bills account to try and balance the budget, so we now have £75 each a month.

We went to a charity ball on Saturday and it now looks like we've both blown through most of our money already :eek: In our defense, the drinks were horrendously expensive and as we were with a group of friends and DHs parents work colleagues we had to make sure we bought our fair share of wine for the table and any other drinks (must make a good impression, keep up appearances and all that ). I also had to buy a pair of shoes on Saturday morning as the eBay pair I had won turned up on Thursday and were a different size from that advertised :mad: and I splashed out £20 on a pair of tongs to try and fancy-up my hair (failed miserably - curls dropped out within half an hour :cool:). It's a good job we both had a really nice time otherwise I'd be sobbing in my coffee by now.

To add insult to injury, I got the finally electricity bill from our old house and it seems we owe them £145. Have to pay that this morning otherwise they're going to try and take it out of our account later in the month. Thank goodness there's no council tax this month (although we were trying to save that to buy a garden shed as we have no outdoor storage in the new house). Oh well, better go check the bank accounts and see what the damage is .

White_Iris

Phew, it's nice to back with my laptop. It suddenly stopped working last Wednesday and I thought it would end up in the big computer shop in the sky, but DH took it in to work and their computer guy tinkered with it and now it's better than ever :j. I've been stuck with DHs ibook (Macs are weird!!) or my phone since then, so posting here hasn't really been possible.

Anyway, it looks like our budget might be back on track (with the extra fuel issues aside - still not entirely sure how much more it's going to cost and whether it'll be cheaper for DH to use my car for commuting). Jan and Feb have been difficult months to budget for, as we've been closing down old accounts and opening new ones, so some payments have been increased, some refunded and some stopped altogether. March will be the real test but I think with the extra we've diverted from DHs salary (from our reduced spending money), we should be ok.

Our biggest challenge at the moment is to avoid spending on our credit cards for the next few months. In August we're aiming to pay off one of our loans a few months early and then focus on our credit cards. If we can keep the credit card balance to around £10K (:eek:), we should be able to get a loan to cover the lot and then chop up the credit cards.

We're currently waiting to hear from NRAM as to how much they're going to reduce our other loan by (we're one of the "lucky" ones who have a CCA regulated loan and are entitled to money back after they messed up their paperwork!). If it is reduced by as much as I hope, based on the amount of interest we have paid since 2009, then it may be possible to consolidate both the credit cards and NRAM loan in to one, paid back over a slightly longer term but leaving us with more disposable income every month. :T Just have to wait and see - NRAM have given themselves 12 weeks to sort it out...maybe I should also use that time frame to try and sort out the credit cards. To get them down to around £10K we need to pay off around £1000 (and obviously not spend any more on them ), so I wonder if I can try to do that by the time we get news from NRAM?

I've got to get my backside in to gear and sort out our spare room a.k.a. the room of doom! Anything we can't currently find a home for has been stacked in their but unfortunately all my eBay stuff is also stored in there, at the bottom of the pile :mad: So, by the end of February I'm aiming to have unearthed my eBay boxes, photographed, weighed and priced anything that can be listed now (a lot is summer stuff) and got it ready to list in March. All eBay profits can go towards paying off the credit card...it's a plan!

White_Iris

White_Iris wrote: »

To get them down to around £10K we need to pay off around £1000 (and obviously not spend any more on them ), so I wonder if I can try to do that by the time we get news from NRAM?

Well that's not going to happen :mad: Shortly after I wrote this, I get a call from DH telling me he's stranded on the side of the road with a broken clutch. Not as expensive as it could have been but still had to be added to the credit card as we have no spare cash to pay for car repairs. It's also been half-term for us last week which was quite spendy. First holiday in a new town and we wanted to enjoy it - wandering around, going for coffee and eating out Luckily the weather was too cold for us to be out every day, so it's not as bad as it could have been.

White_Iris wrote: »

So, by the end of February I'm aiming to have unearthed my eBay boxes, photographed, weighed and priced anything that can be listed now (a lot is summer stuff) and got it ready to list in March. All eBay profits can go towards paying off the credit card...it's a plan!

Better news with regards to this. I have sorted out my eBay bits. Most of it is either summer or Christmas stuff, so I can't get it listed yet but I have listed a load of large bulky items as buy-it-nows for collection only. I've sold two already and the rest all have watchers, so I'm optimistic I should make some cash from all that lot.

I think for the foreseeable future I'll avoid making grand plans to pay off £X in X days, as it rarely happens and tends to leave me feeling cross when I fail. So I'll just try to keep things ticking over until August and when the loan is paid off and we have some money to play with, I'll evaluate the damage and see where to go from there.

I'll also try to post on here a lot more. It makes me more accountable for our spending and it also helps to vent about money things or just use it as a virtual sounding board if I do have any ideas about how we should save/spend our money.

Off to check the bank accounts now :cool:

White_Iris

Well I've just spent a soul-sucking hour completing on-line surveys but at least I'm up to date now and nearly able to claim some cash from one site. I've really let the surveys slip over the last few months but I need to get back in to it as it can bring in some small but regular income.

So instead of moaning about how much I've spent and how much debt I'm in, lets think about all the good stuff I've done over the last few days...

1. only one survey to go before I can claim enough cash to pay my eBay fees for this month
2. Slow cooked a joint out of the freezer on Sunday, making a lovely roast dinner and leaving enough for sandwiches
3. didn't carry on bidding for some items on eBay once the price had gone past my maximum
4. NSD yesterday (and hopefully today!)
5. managed to get DH to stay within his overdraft this month (just!) which will have a positive knock-on effect when he gets paid on Thursday
6. listed 7 items on eBay on Saturday, which should make me about £60 if they all sell

Off to go check the cupboards, fridge and freezer and get a meal plan together for the next week.

White_Iris

So, I only made £40 from eBay last month instead of £60 but it's better than nothing and I'll get the things that didn't sell re-listed on the next free listing weekend. I also managed to complete another survey and claim a £6 PayPal payment, which will cover my eBay seller fees for February.

We've managed to pick up a gate for the side of our house for £20 instead of the £60 we were expecting to pay. I know we shouldn't really be spending money on things like that when we're only renting but we've got quite a busy road at the front of the house and there would have been a constant risk of the dog or children sneaking off down the side of the house and out on to the road :eek: I'ts going to probably cost another £30ish for all the bits needed to hang it but peace of mind is worth more than money.

I've been following the NRAM thread on the loans forum and it seems that people are starting to get letters stating how much redress they're going to get. I'm really looking forward to getting ours as we want to consolidate our credit cards and the NRAM loan and hopefully get everything paid off more quickly. Of course we can't do anything until our other loan is paid off in the summer but after that we could potentially have only one debt (admittedly quite a big one) and no credit cards :j

So the plan for today is hang out the washing (we actually have some sunshine today!), go for a walk in to town and swap the library books, maybe go to the park on the way home, if it's not too cold, and then come home to eagerly await the postie to seen if we've got our NRAM letter yet.

White_Iris

Bah, no letter from NRAM today :-(

White_Iris

Yay, got our NRAM letter today and they've redressed the account to the tune of nearly £5k :j. Doesn't do anything to help our outgoings in the short term but in six months we should be in a good position to consolidate the loan and our credit cards and go down to one fixed monthly re-payment