My lightbullb's on but so is my dimmer switch!

MJ41

OK so here goes – I’m going to keep this diary in the hope that I can start to make my lightbulb shine a bit brighter! As my title says, I have had a lightbulb moment – but it flickers a lot and I really do want to be debt free for the first time in my adult life! So the plan is that keeping a diary will give me something to refer back to on days when motivation is low and hopefully get that dimmer switch in my head removed!
Some background – there is just me and my husband, no kids unfortunately. We both earn decent salaries and have a take home pay of £4335 so we should be living the highlife – problem is we did this BEFORE our income matched our lifestyle and so we have embarrassing levels of debt – but then from reading his forum we are not alone!
My lightbulb moment came in October 2009 – my husband was made redundant and we lost his income, luckily I am in a secure job (as secure as is possible in this economic climate) and am the higher earner, but the loss of his income really hit home – we couldn’t manage our monthly commitments and our frivolous spending ground to a complete halt. We naively assumed he would get a new job quickly and so didn’t panic – we had his redundancy to keep us going – we would be fine! Except the new job took a year to find and came just in the nick of time. Luckily we managed to scrape by, meeting all minimum payments and unfortunately increasing our credit card balances along the way, but at the time it was a case of needs must!
So now we are back in the position of having 2 incomes, a much better attitude to spending money for the sake of it and trying hard to clear our debts, but complacency is starting to set in and I need this to stop! Our travel expenses have shot up due to my husband’s job involving an 80 mile a day round trip and the little extras are starting to creep back in – Sunday morning breakfast at Starbucks, takeaway or eating out because we can’t be bothered to cook or plan meals – IT HAS TO STOP!!
So my mission is to stop the extras, cut the debt then graduate to the mortgage free wannabe board – and loose some weight along the way.
I plan to set regular goals on here and record successes and failures as a means to motivate myself and also to try to find a pattern of why the failures happen – any advice always welcome J
Goals – broadly speaking to reduce debt and loose weight! But as we all know from any good time management course, this is comparable to eating an elephant – you can’t do it all at one sitting, you have to break in down into manageable chunks – so here are mine:

By 31st March I will :-

Loose 7lbs in weight – current weight is 294lbs
Not eat crisps (given up for Lent)
Not put any additional spending on my credit cards
Not have any takeaway meals or coffees, and use the money we would have spent to pay extra off my credit card.
Reduce my Sky bill by removing the movie package


My list of unsecured debt as at today is as follows:

HSBC Gold Card 9200.00
Barclaycard – mine 8800.00
Barclaycard – husband 995.00
Capital One card 7491.23
Personal loan – bank 1086.78
Tesco Card – husband 2800.00
Overdraft 4900.00
Loan to family 9500.00
Total 44773.01

HappyMJ

It's only really bad when you owe more than you earn. You earn £52,000 after tax and owe just under £45,000 not it's not all that bad. You may have some space to switch debts onto cheaper interest rates so try that then try snowballing by paying the highest interest charging debts first (usually credit cards). I would remove the credit cards from the wallet and never take them out only using them in case of emergency for a start and cut down all your expenses that you have already thought of. Compare all of your insurance policies, gas and electric to make sure they are all the cheapest.

MJ41

Thanks HappyMJ - re the credit cards, I have actually closed up the accounts with highest interest and am concentrating on clearing these first, sadly can't get any lower rated cards at the moment - I assume due to level of debt so will check periodically as it lowers:D

We did the review of insurance, utilities etc and are currently on best rates we can be - our only extravagance is Sky. We added movies on for Christmas, and not got round to reducing again - this is on my action list this week.

MJ41

I've been reading a few other diaries to pick up some tips and I'm going to try the cash idea - payday is on Monday, so once all direct debits have been accounted for I'm going to withdraw the balance in cash so that I can really track what we are spending on. It's got to be worth a try! Anything left over, I'll pay off our gold card as it as the highest interest rate

Also going to give HSBC a call and see if I stand a chance of reclaiming PPI on a car loan from the late 90s - I keep putting it off so if I write it down as a goal it may give me the kick up the backside to actually do it!

MJ41

Ups and downs already!

Epic fail on the "no crisps" front - bad day at work had me reaching for them as soon as I got home. I think I need to have a routine change so that I don't eat them from habit - will have to give that some thought as to what I can replace it with!

On a more positive note, last night we discussed going out for a coffee - we decided to make our own at home and put the £5 into a pot for clearing debt at the end of the month :T

Tonights change in routine is to call HSBC regading PPI claim - that will hopefully keep me out of the kitchen and may even end up earning some money - win win situation

I'm really hoping that by writing all this down I can look back on where I'm going wrong and rediscover the motivation when it starts to slip.

mum2one

another expediture may be birthday + xmas presents, I try to hit Jan sales, saves a fortune.

Good luck with sky x

MJ41

I can't believe how simple calling HSBC was! I call, complaint registered and they have all the details already, really kicking myself for not doing the sooner, but probably wouldn't have done it today if I hadn't written it down here that I was going to do it, so the diary is working already :T

Failed on meal planning tonight (again:() but haven't gone down the takeaway route, called at supermarket instead, so saved another £4 to put in the pot - shockingly that's £9 in 2 days that I would have frittered away, imagine how much that would be in a year!!!:eek:

MJ41

mum2one wrote: »

another expediture may be birthday + xmas presents, I try to hit Jan sales, saves a fortune.

Good luck with sky x

Good plan about the sales - will keep my eyes open for offers and buy things as I find them. Sky is going at the end of the month - already paid for this month but will have it reduced before next payment

I'm already learning that it's small steps which count - and not giving up over little setbacks!

MJ41

Not having a lot of success on the giving up crisps plan, but at least I haven't had any chocolate:D I've now realised that I can't resist them when they are in the house, so next shopping list won't have any on - it won't hurt my husband to have fruit instead for his lunch!

Other than the few crisps lapses I have been avoiding eating junk so it's not all bad news!

My husband got his expenses paid today - we've been chasing these for months so that's an unexpected bonus! Money is going straight into a savings account and pay for his tax disc which is due next week - I'll then pay the amount from my salary which it would have cost off the credit card!

We are having a night out tonight, but instead of eating out which we would normally do, we are eating first and just going for a drink - max spend for the 2 of us will be £10 - not bad for a Friday night!

Although I desperately want to be debt free, my aim is to cut the thoughtless spending rather than completely cut out all treats - we had over a year of that when my OH was job hunting adn that was more than enough! I just want the treats to be planned and budgeted for rather than spending on a whim:)

Although I'm new to the diary lark and it's still early days, it's definitely working for me. I know that last night I would have put off ringing HSBC if I hadn't written it down here, and that's now a job ticked off the list - and it literally took minutes.

Note to self - keep up the diary and stop putting things off!!!

Payday on Monday, so once monthly payments to debts have been made I can update the total debt - I'm looking forward to seeing the balance be chipped away:j

serious_saver

With your Sky, have you just cut it back or are you cancelling completely? If you are in a position to cancel, but don't actually want to, then it's still worth calling them up and threatening to cancel any way. It doesn't always work but I know plenty of people who have been given some very good deals. Half price for 6 months etc . . .

If you they don't offer you a deal you don't have to go through with cancellation. Just say, "I'm going to think on it" and hang up.

EDIT

By the way, well done on your efforts so far.

anh1904

Excellent start to the year.
We sound similar to you, except we have the kids! Two very healthy incomes, and previously, two even healthier spending habits. Similar levels of debt to yours, but have been up in the 70's at peak thanks to divorces and poor or lack of discipline when spending.
We do an annual financial makeover and assessment now - we look into what we spent, what got paid off, what we rate tarted (Barclays 18m 0% for an existing holder was a very welcome surprise), what insurance renewal quotes were and what we ended up paying, and that allows you to make a few targets for the following 12 months too. Works for us, and always good to put down the figures you've paid off, saved, etc.