Time to 'grow up' - the slippery slope to 30.

immoral_angeluk

Oooh exciting news.. I've applied for and been approved in principle for the nationwide 0% card for 20 months (1.5% fee) with a limit of 4k. All being well should get it within 10 days and that means I can shift the majority of my debt to it and get it all 0% including the loan! Huzzah! That would save me a load in interest just on the loan!

beanielou

Great news :j

immoral_angeluk

Happy belated standing order day! lol. I updated my sig yesterday but didn't get chance to post. My car addtional standing order is due to go out probably monday as well so will update properly once it has.

Annoyingly though my childcare costs have come in at £200 more than I was expecting. God damn easter break. Why does childcare have to be so expensive? Either way I'm expecting some money coming in from my photography to make up the balance so I'm not too worried anyway. Still frustrating though.

Ash had a great birthday and was totally spoilt. I did end up using £100 work of savings as ended up taking her shopping for clothes. But I'll make it back up anyway.

Hope everyone is well and enjoying the snow. What happened to spring?

immoral_angeluk

Updates! Updates galore!

My standing order has gone off the barclayloan, so have updated my sig
It's been a busy moneynerd week. I got accepted, and received, my 0% for 20 months nationwide card with a 4k limit. Hurrah! However annoyingly, they don't allow you to transfer loan balances so I couldn't pay off the loan as originally intended which is a b*gger. I asked barclays if they would accept a card payment as the apr on the card is 15.9 compared to the 24.1 on the loan but apparently they don't have that facility and the only way to do it is through your current account. I'll be damned if I'm going to get a cash advance at 30% to pay it off so I have a new plan....
I've now BT'd over the whole of the barclaycard which was part 0% and part interest bearing. There was a 1.5% fee of £39, but considering the interest on it last month was £20 odd the fact it's 0% for 20 months will mean I've saved money on it after a couple of months. The min payment on it is 1% so I'm going to pay the min payment on that and the halifax 0% and throw all my spare money at the loan to get it repaid ASAP and then pay off the 0% cards once it's cleared. Once the loan is cleared it'll free up the 161.28 minimum payment as well so I should be able to get the 0% cards paid off much quicker.

This week's budgets are catching up with the extra childcare fees so haven't got anything extra to pay off this week. Next week I need to update my budgets to take into account expected changes to tax credits, rent, council tax and all that malarky.

Hoping to get sme extra income coming in from my photography soon as well (I'm chasing invoices as we speak, groan..) but I need to upgrade my equipment so won't be looking to pay any of that off the debt for a bit.

Ooh that reminds me, it's nearly year end as well. Need to get my accounts finalised. Any excuse for a spreadsheet...

beanielou

Looking good

immoral_angeluk

Good moooorning. Not much to report as the past couple of weeks have been really busy so haven't had much chance for moneynerdery. £10 went off the halifax card today though so I'm updated my sig, also my loan DD is due to go out over the next few days so once that gets applied I'll update it. My BT has gone through as well so now I want to through all my spare cash at the loan. However I also need a new camera which is more pro quality ready for some weddings I've got coming up, I need a bigger car (mine is now getting too small for the girls so I've been looking around. My current car is worth around 3.5k part ex or 4-5k private sale, so I'm just thinking about it at the moment) and also need to recarpet the house in some places when we've finished decorating!

There's always something... Will work something out once I've got 5 mins spare to work out a proper budget

Hope everyone is well!

immoral_angeluk

I have had a budgets/debt busting overhall! Has been difficult to find the time over the last few weeks as everything has been chaotic but I'm determined to get stuff sorted now as hopefully things should be calming down over the next month or so (just in time for my exam. EEK.)

Can't remember if I've said before, but our holiday win is now confirmed and we're going away in October so that's taken the pressure off to save spending money. We're having a weekend away in Wales in June though for me/my brother's birthdays so still get to have a nice break away before October. It's definitely needed as well. 2013 has been very stressful so far!

Anyway, so here's the outstanding debt totals.

Nationwide 0% til 2014 £2,567.81
Barclayloan £1,556.00 (£161.28 DD payment due to go out imminently)
Halifax 0% til Dec 14 £257.00
Total £4,380.81

SO... with my intended DFD of the end of Dec 2013 still in my mind, here's what I thought about setting up.

Halifax - standing order of £6.95 each week (calculated based on how many weeks until end of December so that it clears it all off by then.)

Barclayloan - DD of £161.28 (fixed), in addition to a standing order of £100 payable out of my wages at the end of the month, plus a standing order of £50pw out of my tax credits each week. (Which if paid guaranteed every week would clear it by August, BUT considering I have large holiday club bills in summer and a holiday to save for this is more likely to be Oct/Nov)

Nationwide - Approx £26 by DD each month until the loan is paid off


The other option is doing the same as for Halifax with the Barclayloan and working out the SO amount based on what it would take to pay it off by Dec, which is approx £15pw without the extra £100pm.. I also considered starting a standing order for savings of a fixed amount a week. This would be less torturous and would mean we had money to live on rather than throwing every penny at debt, but would obviously cost more in interest.

The only problem is that to clear the Nationwide by Dec would take about £70pw. It seems daft to do that though as it's not costing me anything.

ANOTHER option could be using the nationwide remaining balance to pay off the loan, as it's something like 15.9% on purchases rather than the 24.1% on the loan, but considering the balance of the loan is relatively small now I don't think the difference would be that noticeable. It would mean though that I wasn't tied to a fixed monthly payment on the loan and could chuck all the money at the credit card (a brief calculation makes it £494pm to clear it by Dec then).

Not sure what the best thing to do is in all honesty! I want it all paid off ASAP but experience tells me chucking every spare penny at it will only end up in big one off bills out of the blue so want to bump up the savings as well. I do have some income due in over the next 6 months from wedding photography bookings, but that's not for a bit yet.

For the time being I've set it up with the first scenario (extra £50pw and £100pm SOs on the loan, £6.95 on the halifax and just standard DD on the Nationwide. Will see how we go I think and have another think about it.

Dilemma!