Countdown to clean credit file...

wannabehermit

I received a letter from the ICO today informing me that the complaint had been dealt with and my credit file has been updated. I'll give it a couple of weeks and then check it out. The letter said that basically M&S 'forgot' to carry out my original instruction to correct the info and that after my 2nd request they 'forgot' again, but now that the ICO have told them to they have 'remembered' to do it. Funny that.

Basically they've had a firm telling off but nothing further. Finally though I will get that showing as settled and now I can start building things up. I have a set shopping & diesel budget which is put aside each month from the rest of the money so I'm going to get a Vanquis & Capital One card in the near future, use one for diesel, one for shopping and start getting things going again.

wannabehermit

Well I have a clean credit file!!! Completely blank apart from my current account, didn't realise that matting married would give me a totally seperate credit file to before I was married. This does cause problems as I can't see my pre-married credit file online as I've already had the 30 day free trials so need to apply for the £2 paper ones to be sent out to me so that I can check M&S have actually done what they need to. One thing that does confuse me (apart from the fact that I seem to be a whole new person since getting married) is that only my bank account has come over with me. Neither Orange nor Virgin have moved my credit details onto my new file from my old one, not sure how I get them to do that so will have to do a bit of research.

Did this months budget and we pretty much scraped in with no surplus, but DH has been paid £100 more than I was expecting today which is very nice indeed . PLus I had a nice surprise yesterday with a letter saying I was due an £80 tax rebate, on phoning to request it they told me I was also due a further £214, so almost £300 is on its way to me. That will be very welcome. So I've moved £520 for shopping over, £140 for diesel plus put back a ton that I nicked out of the overdraft. Leaves plenty for the car, insurance and contents, plus will have a bit of space to buy a few bits for Christmas.

I was hoping that after Christmas is out of the way I could start concentrating on getting these cards paid off, but then remembered that MOT is due in Feb, so we'll get that done in Jan. Def need new exhaust for that, hopefully only one part, but there's a small hole right on the join, so maybe need 2 sections if they can't split it, def need 2 more tyres as the ones we put on are dreadful. The drive shaft is making a funny noise (only since having the cv joint done, so not sure what the garage have done there) so possibly money needing to be spent there. Not sure what else but this will be the 1st MOT we've had with this car so not really sure what could go wrong, and worrying that now there will be stuff going wrong. Eek! Plus new cambelt etc in 4000 miles time which is another £300+.

wannabehermit

:jFinally got the offer letter for the new supermarket job.

:mad: We're going to be approx £50 a week worse off, leaving us with a £25 a week deficit.

:mad: So much for making sure you're better off if you work.

marciekandthefunkybunch

Counting down to a clean credit file.....we got in a mess when my husband was a student nurse in 2005 and we had a baby in the middle of his course so i had to go part time...he is now working and i have just increased my hours we are nearly there!!! 2 x CCJ sucessfully removed (took a lot of letters but i did not give up) and between us 4 defaults have come off this year....1 x default each left and both come off next year !!! Its been a long 5 year struggle with several lots of help from this board and cccs , working 4 x jobs between us but i am so glad to be seeing the light....
a loan we had for £12000.00 also finishes in july and the credit card (we only have one) is now under £1000.00.
I know what my wish is gonna be on new years eve.!!! I would not have survived it without this site as because of this site i managed to get bank charges back and get my ccj removed.

marciekandthefunkybunch

and get central heating installed from energy grant which i read about on this site.!!!

wannabehermit

That's great Marciek :j. Must be lovely knowing it will be clean in such a short time. You'll finally be able to get on with things without that big black cloud looming over your heads.

You're right, this board (in the right places, here in DFW especially) is so helpful and supportive. If it wasn't for mse I wouldn't have had a clue that I needed to clean up my credit file after discharge from the DRO and certainly wouldn't have been able to write a letter to the ICO to sort out the problems with M&S.

Thank you all the helpful, supportive posters. :T:beer::T

wannabehermit

OK, so I've been quite pleased with myself as I've developed a plan for the two credit cards. It's similar to what I used to do with my ex's cards and that always worked well (until the CC company sent out a new card and he got to the post before me and went out and ran the new card up to its new higher limit :mad:). Basically the plan is to round up the minimum payment to the nearest fiver, pay that and then each week pay a further £5 towards the balance. So this month both minimum payments were £16 something so I paid £20 the first Friday after the statement and have made a couple of £5 payments since. At that rate they should both be paid off in roughly 10 months.

That was great, only this new job is going to leave us so much worse off that's not going to happen until I can really rejig the budget a long way.

Before I start I need to buy steel toecaps as the company don't provide them :mad:. I'm not prepared to be going in and out of the warehouse and dragging cages around without protective footwear. I've found some for £35 so I'll be ordering those probably tomorrow. Luckily some old trousers that have been rotting away in the wardrobe just about fit (if I breathe in ) so at least I don't have to pay out for them.

Then 3 shifts a week is going to work out at £12 a week bus fare it would cost us £15 a week to borrow my dads car so if I pick up one extra shift a week then we'll be doing that instead. ANd as I miss their payday by a few days I have to work the first 3 and a half weeks without pay. Great! Childcare is going to be approx £150 a week (not 100% on that yet as I don't know the exact fees for the nursery I'll be using) so we're going to have to find £600 for the first 4 weeks childcare before I even get paid. I hate being paid monthly/4 weekly. Most jobs I've had have been paid weekly which I find so much easier to deal with, and of course you only have to wait a lot less if you miss payday when you start.

Our shopping budget looks as though it's coming down so I could probably shave off a fiver a week from that to begin with and then hopefully another £5 a month later would be good. Can't do anything with the car as we use as much diesel as we use. The car is really only used for DH to get to work and back, you can't really tear@r5e around country lanes in a Galaxy so there's no way we can cut back there. We have discovered though that she runs a heck of a lot better on Tesco diesel (about 10mpg more than with Shell and about 5mpg more than any others) so that's saving us about a fiver a week already. I haven't brought that budget down yet though as I want to make sure I have the money set aside in my budget for any increases in fuel prices that may happen (they seem to have been stable at 137.9 for a long time now, there has to be a massive price hike due (or am I just being very sceptical?)).

Erm...what else? Not too sure atm. Most things are fixed price, so can't do anything about those. I'm on a very low tariff for my mobile so nothing doing there. We're on the lowest tariff for the home phone etc as well. We don't use excess gas & electric so can't cut down there. The only thing I have done to get through to that 1st payday is contact the G&E company and have offered a token payment of £1 a week until I am paid which they are happy with, so that does at least help in the short term.

The good news is it's only 3 days and I can knock another month off of the credit file clean date. June is the next big milestone as that takes it into the 30's.

wannabehermit

Crazy stuff! There's me worrying about how we're going to pay this and pay that, then this weekend I transferred money from the HSBC account for the rent and not only did we have enough to get it paid a few days early, but there is also money left over in every single account we have :j and not just that it even leaves me with enough money for shopping and diesel tomorrow :j. That is the first time we've been able to do that for absolute months.

wannabehermit

Bloody Natwest!!! So they've changed their Step accounts to Basic accounts and with that change came a change as to how you can access your cash. Having been able to access cash at any cash point, now you can only get it at Natwest or RBS cashpoints. That's all well and good if you have one near you, but I don't.

I forgot about this change when I tried to get cash this morning and ended up walking home fighting back the tears. It seems silly crying over not being able to get cash out, and for an outsider it probably is silly, there's much bigger things to get upset about they'd think. But it's not the lack of access to cash that gets me, it's the whole reason behind it, the bigger picture. When something like that happens I feel like I've been set back massively and it's just something else that my ex has caused. If it wasn't for his spending and !!!!ing money up the wall then I wouldn't be in this mess and I'd be able to walk up to any cash machine and take out my own bloody money. I so often feel that it must sound like I'm not taking responsibility for my situation, but that's what got me in this bloody mess. If I hadn't taken responsibility years ago for his spending then it would be him having these problems and I'd be just fine with a nice clean credit file, but no instead I tried to sort things out, I tried to get things paid off, I tried to get our finances straight, I worked my !!!! off to make enough money to get things paid off, going without to put all the extra money into the debts. What did he do? !!!! bloody all except go out every night drinking and taking drugs, taking more and more cash out on the credit cards. And here I am now not even able to take cash out of my current account which has money in it.

It's such a hassle to change banks but what with starting this new job this week I need to get cash. I don't like using cash, so very rarely actually withdraw cash from a cashpoint, in the past maybe 2 or 3 times a year is it, but now I'm going to need to get cash for childcare and travelling so I'm going to need to get cash on a weekly basis, and the amount that I need is too much for cashback so I can't even get round it that way. It's so frustrating that now I either have to go to a different bank or transfer the money into DHs account when I need it and have his card and he take mine to work. Not exactly ideal, but the best way around it as far as I can see.

marciekandthefunkybunch

wannabehermit so sorry you are having a set back...don't give up i know its frustrating and i complelty understand what seems a tiny thing to someone eles can cause you to nearly cry...i have been there. Maybe you can transfer money into the bank where you can withdraw cash.??
Just think about what you have achieved you have done really really well and you WILL get there. With regard to your job making you worse off remember there may be overtime etc at times which will help and it may lead to better jobs in the future. And with the job market the way it is hundreds would have applied and they pick YOU! (just trying to be positive)Also have you made sure you are claiming any working tax credit/child tax credit and any childcare voucher schemes to help with the cost of childcare.?(from what i understand these mean you don;t pay tax on them so you can save hundreds of pounds a year)
hope i have helped and i believe most people who use this site have been in similar situations.xxx