Pinot's Potty debt free journey!!!

kerri_dfw

Glad it all went well Pinot

The one thing I'd say, having not long ago been a teenager, is that I'd have liked my parents to teach me about finances. They didn't have loads of money, but I was never made aware of this. So I was never taught about budgeting, or living within my means, or saving up for something. However, this was things that my parents did themselves. It's something they didn't teach us in school, but I'm going to pass it onto my kids.

I shall avoid that film, thanks for the tip.

Ooh and I satisfied the custard craving with some crumble & custard mmmm

Box_of_Fluffies

Aw c'mon you guys, stop it with all your talk of doughnuts. You're making me drool. They're just not the same in New Zealand. My favourites were custard doughnuts from Ainsleys Bakery in Leeds.... mmmmm

Good to hear parents evening went well and that you made it to the movies on time. It's always good to get some time out as a couple.

HappyNow

Right, I am REALLY gonna have to stay off this thread 'til all the doughnut talk has subsided. Some of us have signed up to a £100 January Grocery Challenge you know.......!

Pinot, I had a poke through your soa and I can really understand why you were so worried when you started this thread. I have zero understanding of business finance or even DMPs so can't offer any useful advice (apart from the few quid that you could shave off some of the outgoings, but you obviously know all that). However now that you have the CASHflow process in hand hopefully things will be more manageable, assuming the creditors have all accepted reasonable offers. Then you'll really be able to make some progress. Are you still waiting for some or is it sorted now?

I hope you feel better for writing it down. For me it was actually uplifting because I finally understand the problem I was tackling.

And look at the bottom line figure - you actually have assets of almost £75,000. I know that doesn't mean too much at the moment (mine shows assets of £250,000, yet I can't afford a doughnut!) but it means you have an awful lot to show for your efforts. x

Hopelessly_Hopeful

Morning.

Been away with work but back in the room now.

Well done on the SOA. If you post one on the main board entitled SOA you will get many responses. CASHflow appear to be more understanding with allowances than CCCS, did you find that? Things I am quite sure of now is that we all need to protect every penny, need to know what everything is spent on, planning makes them pennies go a whole lot further. One of the best bits of advice I can offer is to try to stay with as little changes to the DMP as possible. I am on my third different amount being paid into the DMP in 20 months. Also had a car emergency so had to have one month of tokens last year too. Each time it kicked off computer madness with some of the creditors and interest went up, hassle started. This was depsite doing it with approval and on CCCS advice and myself writting propsectively to the creditors.

I would keep the SOA as the official one but it may be worthwhile doing a personal one too. For example if you are being creative with the grocery budget to support some other activities adjust your own personal one to refect this so you can accuratly gauge and evaluate the true cost of each category. From experience I find keeping our fingers crossed doesn't work.

I don't have kids and have kept the knowledge of my DMP to a very limited audience. Luckily it has been relatively easy to 'manage' that with the general economic downturn.

It's fab you have assets, at least post DMP you will be much quicker up the assets curve too. Post DMP I am planning to use 75% of the payment to overpay my mortgage in preparation for retirement. For me DMP has presented a whole discipline for this. Much more productive that paying extorionate interest to overpaid bankers. Whilst no assets just now, I have just about reached enough off my mortgage to recoop the considerable negative equity I have been faced with over the past 4 years. It also boosts me when I think my life insurance is worth x and with the outstanding DMP off it's y this month and z the month after. Focussing on positives keeps me going. The wonderful thing is that the situation improves each month it has been a lot of years before I could say that.

Have a good day.

HHX

PinotGrigio41

I have quickly read your all of your comments this morning re the SOA, thankyou ! I will respond properly later. I also just wanted to mention that as you may have noticed the APR levels are at 0% thats not entireley correct some are some arent, but at 4.30am when I first started searching for everything I couldnt be bothered to hunt for the paperwork ! Just thought I would mention that !

Anyway I am off now, bit of social butterfly today ( stolen your title ITSA , at least I think it was you !!) I have a Champagne ( well maybe Bucks Fizz) Birthday brekkie to attend ! Not paid for by me either . I will be backlater.

Have a good day everyone x

debtfreewannabe321

have fun pinot

And re the teen situation, i have told ds1 about the fact we are on a budget (totally new word in all of our vocabulary lol) and that we owe money because tenants never paid us & we overspent. I've not gone into too much detail as he is a worrier (you can prob tell this by my diary lmao)

Anyway i will go have a look at your soa properly now and see if i can be any help?! Prob not but always good to have a fresh pair of eyes on it. i agree post on main dfw board i did when i first joined and got some fab suggestions

debtfreewannabe321

[QUOTE=PinotGrigio41;50264433
Statement of Affairs and Personal Balance Sheet

Household Information
Number of adults in household........... 3
Number of children in household......... 1
Number of cars owned....................

Monthly Income Details
Monthly income after tax................ 2156.00
Partners monthly income after tax....... 2156.00
Benefits................................ 146 Child Benefit
Other income............................
Total monthly income.................... 4458

Monthly Expense Details
Mortgage................................ 1870
Secured/HP loan repayments.............. 0
Rent.................................... 0
Management charge (leasehold property).. 0
Council tax............................. 238 Electricity............................. 200 wow! do you live in a mansion! Have you shopped around lately, lots of price wars at the moment and cash back. Get yourself an energy monitor and try to the the whole family on board with switching things off, not charging phones all night, no standby etc
Gas..................................... 0
Oil..................................... 0
Water rates............................. 79
Telephone (land line)................... 45 incl Broadband....what else does this include? My landline for free evening/ weekend calls & broadband is £23? I'd ask for a better deal
Mobile phone............................ 20 Daughters phone due to end Feb 2012 ...Do you and hubby not have one each?
TV Licence.............................. 12.5
Satellite/Cable TV...................... 23 Essential due to business, actually probably should be paid for from Busines Expenditure come to think of it
Internet Services....................... 0
Groceries etc. ......................... 544 Aiming to reduce, incl toiletries and pet food ....I would put the figure you 'aim' to spend in here to give you a more accurate picture. I have 2 soa's one for cccs and one for me!
Clothing................................ 90 High, DD2 has problems with feet and requires new shoes regularly -How bout cutting down to £60?
Petrol/diesel........................... 0 - no car expenses incl , paid for via business
Road tax................................ 0
Car Insurance........................... 0
Car maintenance (including MOT)......... 0
Car parking............................. 0
Other travel............................ 65 - Girls bus / train fares
Childcare/nursery....................... 0
Other child related expenses............ 185 - tuition costs, pocket money, hobbies, school trips, GCSE courses
Medical (prescriptions, dentist etc).... 15
Pet insurance/vet bills................. 10 when this is due go through quidco or topcashback to see if you can get a better deal as well as cashback
Buildings insurance..................... 32 Renewal May 2012 ....This seems high to me?
Contents insurance...................... 0 As above - Joint
Life assurance ......................... 191 Cheapest available......What is this for? Life insurance?
Other insurance......................... 25 What is this for
Presents (birthday, christmas etc)...... 10 Not enough ! Will shave off elsewhere (Groceries) to increase this ...amend the groceries to what you think you can cope with (perhaps £300 to start with) and put a little extra here. Get the girls on board to make crafty things for the family rather than expensive things. I think homemade is always appreciated more
Haircuts................................ 20
Entertainment........................... 35
Holiday................................. 0
Emergency fund.......................... 45
Total monthly expenses.................. 3754.5

Do you and hubby not have any pocket money each? If you are in this for the long run you want to put something in for both of you otherwise you will end up falling off the wagon. I'd be tempted to put more in the entertainment budget too esp if you are not having holidays. If any is left at the end of the month pay straight to debts.


Assets
Cash.................................... 1000
House value (Gross)..................... 480000
Shares and bonds........................ 0
Car(s).................................. 0
Other assets............................ 13000 Is this car?
Total Assets............................ 494000


Secured & HP Debts
Description....................Debt......Monthly...APR
Mortgage...................... 335000...(1870).....0
Total secured & HP debts...... 335000....-.........-

Unsecured Debts
Description....................Debt......Monthly...APR
Loan1..........................33703.....458.......0get the apr's in here, although if you are doing dmp i guess it won't matter too much as you will be trying to get 0% deals?!
Loan 2.........................6333......317.......0
CC1............................10867.....350.......0
CC5............................3447......120.......0
CC4............................11990.....350.......0
CC3............................10158.....250.......0
CC2............................7819......250.......0
Total unsecured debts..........84317.....2095......-


Monthly Budget Summary
Total monthly income.................... 4,458
Expenses (including HP & secured debts). 3,754.5
Available for debt repayments........... 703.5
Monthly UNsecured debt repayments....... 2,095
Amount short for making debt repayments. -1,391.5 :eek: what do the cashflow people say about this this seems a big difference, i'm surprised they aren't trying to take you down the iva route?

Personal Balance Sheet Summary
Total assets (things you own)........... 494,000
Total HP & Secured debt................. -335,000
Total Unsecured debt.................... -84,317
Net Assets.............................. 74,683

Created using the SOA calculator at www.makesenseofcards.com.
Reproduced on Moneysavingexpert with permission, using Firefox browser.[/QUOTE]

Hope my suggestions help....if not feel free to ignore:D

Itsadogslife_2

Oooh Pinot, look at you all posh with a bucks fizz breakfast

PinotGrigio41

Hiya DFW, thanks for your comments above. I'm going to go backwards and forwards now trying to answer them.

1. Electricity / Gas - It is a dual fuel tarriff and yes we have just shopped around and changed, and managed to reduce by £50 already . I have unplugged the chest freezer in the garage and just use the fridge freezer indoors with the four little freezer drawers. The house is pretty large and working from home the computers are permanently on the day and evening so obviously will suckup electricity. Looking at our bills compared to last year we are using significantly less fuel now than we were then. . I am a stickler for lights I drive everybody mad and make us all sit in darkness if watching tv. We have a monitor, I could spend hours watching the little man with his smiley or sad face. We dont leave things on standby. Dont think theres much we can do here I'm afraid .

2. Landline £45, this is the BT cheapest tariff we were offered recently. I will ask Mr Pinot to check again ( thats his dept !) We make most of our calls on Skype also. I will dig out a bill and take another look. We have used other broadband providers before but it was constantly droppign and we cant afford for this to happen due to the business.

3. Groceries - Thanks for the suggestion. I have a Spending Log with budgets entered in there and update it everyday so have a constant track of expenditure for each column.

4 - Clothing - It is high, both girls are adult sizes now. They are sharing lots of clothes at the moment , as they are a similar size.The plan is not to use that amount each month, and then carry over any surplus if we dont need to use it elsewhere. The £90 was the figure allowed on our Financial Statement, so I have put all of my figures as absolute max amounts with no intentions of going that high with any of them if I can help it.

5 - No the Building and contents insurance is a low as we can get. Infact the cheapest I had prior to this was £1300 a year going up to £3000 ! We went without it for 6 months and kept our fingers crossed due to the cost !. The previous quotes were in joint names, then I decided to take mine off and just take it out in Mr Pinots name and I got the above quote. I am hoping I dont have the same problem this year when renewal is due. We are also near a flood plain, which doesnt help with cost.

6 - Life Assurance - It is Life Insurance yes. Was renewed last year and is the cheapest we could get.

7 - Presents - Yep that was exactly the plan !

8 - Phones - Yes we both have phones but they are paid out of the business.

9 - Pocket Money - I will use the entertainment and any excess elsewhere for that. I dont want to reduce the amount we are paying to the creditors as it is low already, so will re jig the budget accordingly. Any savings will be put into a pot towards an F&F and emergency funds.

10 - APRs - Yep all creditors as of today have frozen the interest for now at least, I do need to add the mortgage when I can dig it out.

11 - An IVA wasnt really discussed too much, as I think I have posted before, its not to say it may not be an option in the future. There is every possibility if things pick up on the business front we will be in a position to clear the debts much sooner than our current predicted DFD, so the decision was made, for the time being at least ,to follow this route and rethink at a later stage if need be. We are happy with this arangement currently .

Sorry having a really hectic day today, so must dash Will try and post again later x

PinotGrigio41

Itsadogslife wrote: »

Oooh Pinot, look at you all posh with a bucks fizz breakfast

Ooh I know !! I could get used to living the high life !!