DMP & Mutual Support Thread - Part 8

Hopelessly_Hopeful

Finshopefulmum wrote: »

Hi everyone

I've just been reading through all of the posts and have realised I'm guilty of taking it all in and am not terribly good at sharing, so sorry about that!

My DMP started in May, and it really was the best thing that we ever could have done in my situation. I was clinging to my good credit score and the fact I'd never missed a payment like it was something to be proud of, when the reality was we were just about to reach our limits on everything and would be in serious trouble.

I did lots of reading on MSE and decided to go down the CCCS route. The process was relatively painless, we opened our Co-op bank account, cancelled ddms, made token payments for a couple of months to build up a bit of a buffer, received only 2 calls from our 10 :eek: creditors, got lots and lots of letters which didn't scare me because I'd read so much on here and then we were off.......

I'm possibly a little sad that I found living to a budget and trying to save a few pounds here or there on the shopping so we could have a bit extra, and that we were paying for things with actual cash, really really good!!

However, just a mere 3 months later and my husband's work hours were cut and my tax code changed, knocking £450 a month off of our combined income . I emailed CCCS who sent me a new budget planner to complete, I added our new income details and also updated a couple of things I'd forgotten on the original budget (like increased childcare costs during the summer hols). It was accepted within about 3 days, and CCCS wrote to our creditors advising them of our new reduced payments. I expected a lot of fallout over this, but it was amazing! We recieved 2 letters from our creditors accepting the reduced payments, from the other 8, absolutely nothing!!!!! Nothing at all! We've made 3 payments at the reduced rate and it was just accepted by them all.

Sorry this is a bit long winded, I just wanted to let people know that even if your circumstances change, it doesn't have to be a horrible situation. In fact, if we hadn't have been on our DMP our situation would have been so so much worse.

Anyway, enough from me, apologies again for not posting more. I need to get on with some work and look at buying a slow cooker! :rotfl:

xxx

Great to hear from you. Sorry re hubbies job but sounds like you were well equipped to deal fantastically well with the situation.

Updates every now and then are fine , am not a total ogre

HHx

Hopelessly_Hopeful

Tigsmom wrote: »

I bought one over the weekend - £21.99 for 6.5l cookworks from Argos. It cooked our large chicken breast joint (£6 Iceland) perfectly along with a dozen small potatoes. The joint was great value for money, fed 6 of us for lunch, sandwiches for 2 of us yesterday and today and just enough left for DH's sandwich tomorrow. My only gripe is that it's stainless steel and black. It looks great but all of my other appliances are 'value range white'!:rotfl:I'm using the leftover veggies & potatoes in a stew tomorrow The gerbils even got the carrot peelings! :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

And today's DMP MSE angel award goes out to Tigsmom :A

You have a very lucky gerbil

HHx

Hopelessly_Hopeful

NaughtySpot wrote: »

I keep dithering over a slow cooker. They sound a good idea and I love the thought of coming home to tea made, but I am a vegetarian and I wonder if it'll be any good as veg doesn't take as long to cook as meat.

Veg takes longer than meat in a slow cooker. Hope that helps

HHx

Tigsmom

Hopelessly_Hopeful wrote: »

And today's DMP MSE angel award goes out to Tigsmom :A

You have a very lucky gerbil

HHx

We've got two :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Growurown

NaughtySpot wrote: »

I keep dithering over a slow cooker. They sound a good idea and I love the thought of coming home to tea made, but I am a vegetarian and I wonder if it'll be any good as veg doesn't take as long to cook as meat.

It depends on what type of veg you are cooking. Root vegetables and potatoes etc. actually take a long time to cook in the slow cooker. I found lots of recipes on the web from soups to veggy chilli, veggy cobbler, curry and stew. It is worth a look before you decide whether to buy a slow cooker or not.

Time_to_face_the_music

Tigsmom wrote: »

We've got two :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

We once had two gerbils and ended up with 35 :eek:

The girl in the petshop wasn't very good at gender IDing gerbils :rotfl:

Tigsmom

Time_to_face_the_music wrote: »

We once had two gerbils and ended up with 35 :eek:

The girl in the petshop wasn't very good at gender IDing gerbils :rotfl:

:shocked: How long did that take? (and what did you do?) We've had ours 6mths. It's a big tank (but not big enough for 35!) They are cute though

Time_to_face_the_music

Tigsmom wrote: »

:shocked: How long did that take? (and what did you do?) We've had ours 6mths. It's a big tank (but not big enough for 35!) They are cute though

Ummm not very long, they are faster than rabbits :rotfl:

We took most of them to the petshop and swapped them for another cage, gerbil food and bedding. Then we had 2 lots of gerbils, male and female cages who were kept apart

powerchimp

Hi All

I have been very naughty and not posted here for quite a while

So here's an update

We are just over 2 years into our DMP and with roughly 11 months left

There have a few ups and down with the DMP, we had to reduce it a couple of times and also were able to increase it, so are roughly at the same payment as when started.

After the initial panic starting out, we fell into a pretty good routine, and the 1st year went by without to much trouble, the 2nd year has been a rollcoaster with payments having to be changed every few months, mainly due to having to take another pay cut but wife was able to get some more hours at her work and this helped to straighten things out.

Through all of this CCCS have been a great help and helped and guided us when the panic has started to set in again.

This week my wife has found out that she is been made redundant :eek: and although she won't be getting a lot, we are hoping that we maybe able to make F&F, although I think one of the final 3 creditor *cough* Tesco *cough* will refuse as they have always been the hardest creditor to deal with.

That's me up to date

If you are just starting out it will be daunting and things will go wrong and look bad but there is a light are the end of the tunnel, ours is still dim but at least we can now see one, which wasn't the case 2 1/2 years ago.

Best

PC

win123

Hi everyone

Wonder if anyone could offer me some advice please I am on a DMP with CCCS and they have been great - just rang the CCCS today about getting my mum on a DMP plan too she was accepted today on the phone so that was a relief howver when we went through the budget on the phone we have missed some things out of the budget as they said mum could afford about 200 per month but before I rang we had gne through everything and we worked out mum had about £100 spare at the end of the month - so when I got off the phone we went through everything with a fine toothcomb and found that we had forgotten to add things into the budget and this added up to about 90 pound a month - does anyone know how we go about sorting this out as no way does mum have 200 spare a month as if we did we could pay the credit card bill etc - The CCCS lady did say on the phone that she would send the expenditure sheet out for us to check but does anyone know if this is ok to ring them back and tell them once we have gone through this form what we have missed off it - She did say that even if we could only afford 100 it would still be ok to do a DMP it would just take longer than her paying the 200 - Please any advice would be appreciated as I wont sleep like my mum with the worry tonight x HELP Panic coming on