Shopaholic on the road to recovery!

J3nesis

I love the stories on this board. Everyone is so positive, so non-judgemental, and the way that people are dealing with and have successfully dealt with their debts is inspiring.

I come before you good people with a confession: I like shopping. I like shopping so much that I am £6,500 in debt.

£3,000 of that is a loan that I took to pay off my credit card (guess what? Didn't work - I just spent more.) The rest is credit card spending. I don't have a mortgage or any other debts apart from that loan and credit card. I'm not in my overdraft (just!).

My lightbulb moment was last month when I sat down with my partner and worked out why we can't seem to break even despite earning over £2000 per month between us. Our household expenses come in at just over £1,300 per month including rent, all bills and food/household shopping (except little extras like bread, milk and fruit). I'm left with £450 per month before loan and CC payments.

I saw how much I spent on useless crap like clothes and shoes (I have a wardrobe full of clothes and shoes!! Why did I buy more?), pizza (I can cook, sort of! I have a freezer full of food! Why did I spend that money?) and DVDs (we have LoveFilm for £5 per month, was I really so impatient I'd pay double or triple that just to see the film *now* and not wait a month for it?).

You get the idea. It was a wakeup call. It was horrible, shocking, I felt like a little girl crying while my father stood over me yelling "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE" (that did happen once but not about money ) it sounds silly but I really did feel like that. I felt like I'd let everyone down. I'm only 23 and I'm in massive amounts of debt (if you include my student loan we're up to the £30,000 mark).

I'm trying to sort it out. I cut my credit card into bits, and I have a fixed payment (a lot more than the minimum!) paying that off every month. That should be paid off by December 2013, earlier if I get cash for birthday/christmas and use it to pay off lump sums.

My loan is being paid off with fixed payments (agreed when we applied for it) and will be paid off in September 2013. I even got a free-to-use CashPlus prepaid cash card; I preload that every Monday with £30, that's my pocket money for the week and my debit card gets left at home.

I took my credit and debit cards off my PayPal account and attached the CashPlus card insted. I attached that card to Amazon and iTunes as well; I know I probably wouldn't be able to go cold turkey and shut down my accounts (I have a Kindle, for one thing, so I need Amazon if I don't want to download illegally) but having that finite, fixed budget amount has, even in a month, made it so much better.

For the first time in two years my bank balance is still a positive number in the last week of the month. Not by a lot, but it's there. I want to treat myself as a well done but that costs money

I'm here before I know all you fine folk will keep me on the straight and narrow! If anyone has any tips for lessening day-to-day spending, how to haggle, good places to get bargain christmas presents and so on I'm all ears.

One thing I'm worried about is next year. It's all very well seeing on my spreadsheets that I'll be debt-free by 2014 - but what happens in the intervening time? What if I lose my job, what if we get evicted, what if British Gas make good on the threat of fuel prices and double our bills, what if what if what if...

Thanks for reading and sorry for the essay

mummychicken

Hello and welcome !! You have already made lots of positive steps in tackling your debt, cutting up the CCs is a great start, could you transfer the balance to a 0% CC to save you paying the horrid interest fees _ there is alot of info on the main forum about this.

Good look & i will pop in to support your journey

klfairy

Well done on a great start

J3nesis

Thanks for the positivity I was worried I'd get a lot of "OMG you live somewhere too expensive, go and live in a bedsit" like I did at another forum I won't mention. Even leaving aside the fact that we like it here, we're under contract til April 2013. We can move in April 2012 but we have to give them 3 months' notice, AND flats in London are hideously expensive to rent next summer because of olympics people coming in (that's why we signed a 2-year lease with break option in the first place, to stop landlord turfing us out for a month to get in high-rent tourists). So we probably won't move out in April. We spent close to a thousand quid on furniture and other moving expenses when we moved in here and we don't want to spend that money or time again any time soon.

SO thanks all for the positivity. I'm relying on you all to keep me on the straight and narrow