Have grasped the nettle..........now to deal with the ensuing rash

peb

Lovely to see you.  Retired now?

liselle

Love the thought of instead of grasping the mettle, you’ve chosen to grasp the prickly nettle! Ouch!Is it a penance? Very best wishes for your debt free journey.

Igamogam

peb said:

Lovely to see you.  Retired now?

Yes I am! Highly recoomended and should be tried by everyone at least once The sooner the better!

Igamogam

liselle said:

Love the thought of instead of grasping the mettle, you’ve chosen to grasp the prickly nettle! Ouch!Is it a penance? Very best wishes for your debt free journey.

No, not a penance. More a need to get on with the job. Nettles when gently touched sting, so grasping was my way of been determined to get with and deal with the problem. Took a while and a few itchy moments but got there in the end with everything intact. 

Igamogam

I promised myself I would revisit my MSE Debt Free Dairy and post an update – just in case anyone was interested, but more as a method of a self-review, the how, the what and the why……..so here is Part 1

I stumbled across Debt Free diaries in 2011 with £28k of unsecured debt plus a repayment mortgage which was grinding slowly to the end of its life. I worked FT in a well-paid job, had two children and the OH worked PT – his choice, a lifestyle one apparently. My job was pressured but rewarding. I had a 100 mile daily commute – my choice, a lifestyle one apparently. We lived well but not extravagantly. Our 150-year-old cottage was functional but not modern. ….. I loved the garden and the rural location (my lifestyle choice).

 We didn’t need lots of new things, we are not a family of fashion victims but what we did purchase we bought the best we could afford – buy cheap buy twice and all that. OH had an extreme sport, high risk and expensive hobby (his lifestyle choice)

 The children did well at school, were involved in lots of extracurricular activities. We had holidays, days out, ate well, paid our bills. Yes we PAID ALL OUR BILLS………but the debt, MY debt stood at 28K. OH had debt of his own. We never talked about money and I never told the OH the extent of the debt that was in my own name because we were living a good life and paying the bills and that was the important bit, yes??

Not really sure what the true LBM was, but there was one and it brought with it the realisation that it couldn’t go on.  I was the high earner, with prospects of continuing earning and a good pension at the end so in truth I just let thing drift….well I put my head in the sand!

I was already moving CC debt onto 0% deals and had got really adept at it; I can honestly say I paid very little interest on that 28K debt but I really had to do more as it never decreased. It had reached its critical mass, never increasing and not really decreasing. So, ‘grasping that nettle’, I found myself logging into MSE late one night and suddenly found it wasn’t just me! In fact, some people were in worse position than I was which was truly sobering.

It became clear that this debt busting malarky had to become a hobby, a pastime that I dedicated some time to every day and not just something I looked at on a payday.  I downloaded a spreadsheet that a fellow diarist had recommended that calculated how long it would take to pay off the debt at the rate I as doing, which cards to pay off first etc etc……I cried. I realised that although we were living well and paying our bills it could easily spin out of control. Or if something catastrophic happened – ill health, redundancy etc we had nothing to fall back on We had no emergency savings as we had no leftover income to put away.

I spent days reading other peoples diaries and challenges, picking up ideas, hints and tips and finding the courage to meet this head on – however long it took. It was going to take forever if I didn’t  start dealing with the rash.

First thing I did was move to use cash only. I cut up all my cards bar one which I used for car things and which was paid in full every month and I started over paying the CCs, hitting the one ending its 0% deal first. From this point my daily finances hobby took shape – and I really do mean daily!

 I found ways to over pay/generate extra money through some of the ideas I read in other people’s diaries and in the challenges – “Tilly Tidies” spring to mind. I would round down my bank account every day and pay it to a chosen card for that month, even if it was just a few pence. I would set rules about how much so if the last digits were say, 2.65, I would move that. If it was 9.65 I would round down to 5.00 so paying £4.65 off the allocated card, depending on how flush I was feeling. It made a difference and I loved it! I looked forward to my weekly MSE emails and moved exclusively to using cash.

The move to cash was revolutionary….seriously. I was not averse to using it but what it did was generate change and change turned into saving pots and each saving pot had rules around them.

All coppers went into an over sized whisky bottle in the corner of our home office. I found some long forgotten money boxes and saved every 20p every 5p and every £2. When I started, we had £1 coins which emblems the four nations – so I collected every one with a dragon on it! The rules around the change pots where as follows:

Whiskey jar, 5p,20p and £2 pots – empty when full take to bank and pay against the focus CC at the time. It was then I realised how much banks don’t like cash, especially carefully counted out bags of coins….with the cashiers who scowled at me or sighed I would ask if the bank had stopped dealing with money!

Dragon coins – saved up and pay for Christmas food shopping.

Road kill – every coin found out in the wild was saved and put towards a family meal out, usually coinciding with Christmas or a birthday. The amounts ranged from a few £’s to £20.

 In addition, I would throw into a tin on a Sunday any 50ps and 10ps in my purse and this money would be dipped into to pay things like the MOT or car tax - when they were due, I would take out of the tin whatever was in there, and use it towards my cash allowance cash for that week. I would take £80 a week from my account. I made a meal plan and a shopping list and stuck to it. Our weekly shop fluctuated between £40-£60 and pretty much stayed like that until Covid lockdown – when it jumped to between £200- £300 a week…..but that is another story!

 Although it was imperceptibly slow, within a few months the debts started to decrease and more importantly we didn’t feel were denying ourselves anything. OH was able to continue with his extreme sport and the children continued with their activities and studies. With the feeling of a bit more control and a with new found confidence I was able to address a long-term health issue having had years of being fobbed off by my GP and which I when I think back now, contributed to my ‘head in the sand’ stance. The biggest change was, all of a sudden, I seemed to have money left over in my account and not running to the full 3K overdraft and just replacing it with 0’s every payday.

Definitely the magic was working. It wasn’t an overnight fix but I was in it for the long haul and I was determined to make it work even better.