Pay off as much as you can in 2012 challenge!

caroline504

I speak as someone who has a husband who was once hopeless with money (and had the black hole overdraft too). I insisted that he clear this debt himself - made him get a 0% card and deal with regualr payments to it. He's still going, and there's still 2k on there to clear (he reported very proudly to me the other day that he's now under £2k owing!). Meanwhile I have cleared and am sorting all our other debts using our joint money. DH is now much much better, now he can see how easily sucked up money is by debt, and how much better off we'd be if we weren't throwing all our spare cash at debt. It has taken several years though, and several showdowns (and some patient explanations and printed-out-on-paper-in-black-and-white moments) to get where we are, but I now know that he is pretty much on the same page as me. In the old days I might slave at extra jobs like mystery shopping or filling in online surveys and be thrillde to make an extra £50; to pay off a credit card, and then he would come home with a parking ticket that wiped it out. It was things like that that drove mental and I can honestly say that if he hadn't manned up and started acting like a grown up I'm not sure our marriage could have stood it.

I can completely understand the sentiment here Sarah and also understand how frustrating it is to have a hubby that doesn't get it.
Our finances were a bit of a mess, we decided to use my wages to pay bills as I get paid monthly and his weekly wage for groceries etc...
However my wage was ours and his wage (he thought) was his once the shopping was done. He planned nights out etc and didn't think that we should pay extra to get the debt down.
That is until one of his credit cards instisted on him paying £33 a week as he hadn't paid it for a few months so now he is more on boeard paying things off to get rid of the debt!

caroline504

I think I have done somethin wrong as the quote from Sarah999 has not come up green like everyone else's

jwil

seethelight wrote: »

Please can I join? I'm a newbie to this forum, although have been reading the MSE email for some time. I've stupidly ranked up £36,000 against credit cards and an overdraft over the last few years and am now in trouble. To cap it all, my car died last week and has been scrapped and worse, I've pulled my son from pre-school because we can't meet the fees. So I've had enough. I've no idea how I'm going to start, but once I get going, I'll keep going and will maintain a positive outlook!

Marvin6418 wrote: »

Can you add me please I would like to join in too. Put me down for £9350

Although I won't hit this target fully it is something to aim for. My aim for 2012 (although starting late) is to decrease my overdrafts/loan and clear my sofa payments.

Welcome seethelight and Marvin, good to have you both on board Good luck with the debtbusting and keep posting to let us know how you are getting on

jwil

sergeant_cookie wrote: »

Hey guys. I am new to this forum, but have been receiving the money saving email for quite a while now (1-2 years+). I would like to share my target of being debt free this year too if I may. A few years ago I was £9000 in debt with 4 credit cards, loans and general debts. Sadly I have 2 CCJs to my name of which one disappears from my file this year and the other in 2014. I have just written to one of my creditors for a CCA request to see if I signed up for PPI on a previous loan which if I have then that would go towards paying off the loan. My target is to be debt free within the next 6 months.

Lloyds TSB loan £2423 with a settlement offer of £1800 through Bryan Carter & Co.
Dad £654
Mum £235
Overdraft £446
Total debt £3970
2 CCJs disappear November 2012 / April 2014

Welcome to the challenge sergeant cookie, good to have you on board. Good luck with the debtbusting

caroline504 wrote: »

I think I have done somethin wrong as the quote from Sarah999 has not come up green like everyone else's

Caroline, if you click on the 'quote' button, there is some coding around the post you are quoting - QUOTE=caroline504;51255547 (in square brackets) and /QUOTE in square brackets at the end. These are the bits you need to ensure are in there to get it to come up green. If you copy and paste the text it won't happen.

Hope that helps (and doesn't confuse you, I'm not sure it's very clear :rotfl:)

deputydaz

£240/£1700 paid.

seethelight

sarahs999 wrote: »

An SOA is a statement of affairs. like this:

It details all your income and all your expenditure. If you look on the forum you'll see people doing it all the time. People can then look and help you decide where you could make changes to save yourself money. It's amazing what people spot that you can't see yourself (or sometimes that you don't want to see!). It can also give a clear idea of how imbalanced your income/expenditure is exactly, which can be helpful.

Thanks again Sarah. I've done several SOAs (I wasn't sure of the acronym) and we are now honed to the bone (with a 3rd party's assistance). I think we could only cut food from our expenditure to reduce it!

The reason I've left joining the forum for so long (a few years) is to get to a position of total consolidation, knowing the only way to go is to create more income to avoid any very serious consequences (such as bankruptcy), which is the point I'm at now.

I'm hoping to give andf receive support from the forum and this particular thread is certainly a great start!

jwil

deputydaz wrote: »

£240/£1700 paid.

Welcome to the challenge deputydaz, good luck with the debtbusting

The_Ubiquitous_Mrs_Smith

Husband won't be comfy with me posting the amount but we will be completely debt within 3 years (excluding the mortgage and student loans). We've been working on it for 3 weeks now so hopefully it'll continue to be as straight forward.

The post on here recently really hit home about how easily things can go wrong and we can't do our future plans if we don't sort ourselves out now.

Good luck all!

sergeant_cookie

Don't know whether this is the right section to post but following on from my earlier post, I have just downgraded my partners phone tariff (its in my name) and now saving a whopping £25 a month (from £35 to £10) - Happy days!

sergeant_cookie

The_Ubiquitous_Mrs_Smith wrote: »

Husband won't be comfy with me posting the amount but we will be completely debt within 3 years (excluding the mortgage and student loans). We've been working on it for 3 weeks now so hopefully it'll continue to be as straight forward.

The post on here recently really hit home about how easily things can go wrong and we can't do our future plans if we don't sort ourselves out now.

Good luck all!

Things really can spiral out of control oh so very quickly without you realising. Good luck to you both.