Taking Control: My Debt Free Diary

taylor11_2

Hello all,

Some may argue that my situation is no where near as severe as others, however, I want to take control now before it's too late and prevent myself from going down the slippery, slippery slope.

A bit about me - I am 21 and have a fairly good job for my age and earn a decent salary, however, with the salary increase my spending has also increased and I am now in a position where I need to curb my spending, reduce my unsecured debt and start saving towards the biggest purchase of my life - a house.

As it stands, I have around £3500 of unsecured debt on my credit card and on my store card. Credit limits amount to £16K and my first step is set about closing one of my credit card accounts which will bring the limit to £11K.

This month, I have been fairly frugal thus far and will be paying £650 towards my debts. In addition, I am aim to pay another £500 off of next months salary to further reduce the outstanding amount. Between two months £1150, I feel is quite a significant sum :j In addition, I also pay £200 per month to my Virgin Card which has the highest sum of £2200 - Luckily this is interest free!

You, know it is so easy to spend and spend and before you know you look at your bank statement and your credit statement and think "oh Sh*t". This is exactly what I thought when I looked at my statements last Friday.

To add a further spanner in the works, I have the remaining £720 of my holiday to pay by end of Feb! Duh!

I am new to this and really don't know what the next steps are. Again, there may be others that require more support than me, however, I need a place where I can think out loud and hopefully be supported by people who are/ have been in a similar situation. I hope to be able to provide encouragement and even a few words of support to help people get out the vicious place that is debt.

Any tips will be extremely helpful and I am looking forward to the challenge of reducing debt and saving for that next step.

Thanks for reading

taylor11

MaccaHallam

Looks like we're in a similar situation to each other in terms of debts and what we want. Be interesting to see how we both do. Good luck with clearing your debts and purchasing a house!