Getting professional help to beat debt. Diary

Getmeoutofdebt

Hi Shinner & armchairexpert!

Thanks for stopping by and having a read of my Diary.

Shinner, you sound to be having some success already. That's good news about your interest being frozen. I hope all goes well for you in your debt plan!

Armchair... Paying off my husband's debt was the worst thing I have ever done! At the time I thought it was the best thing to do because of the high interest and we thought he had no way out. The problem was, he was a compulsive spender and because the debt just got cleared he didn't learn his lesson. He was paying me some money each month in the beginning but after a year he was struggling to pay me and it turned out he had been spending on credit cards again and racked up a load more debt. Since then everything has been separate. We keep our wages in different accounts and pay an equal share of the bills and our own debts.
In hindsight I should have let him sort his own mess out and learn his lesson. Then maybe he wouldn't have got in any more debt and I wouldn't be in this mess now. But we have both learned from it. Yes I'm pretty much doing it alone. He is not unsupportive as such but no he doesn't really do much to help me, he isn't really in a position to and e thinks I'm doing a good job on my own. Plus I have plenty of support on here. Having this diary has really helped a lot.
Hubby is back at work but only 3 days. He is never going to recover fully. He is in a lot of pain, but he is trying and does put in overtime if he gets chance to if he's not in too much pain. I have set him on with trying to reduce some of our bills like cancelling sky tv and reducing the phone bill by shopping around. He is getting into it and has found some good deals so thats a help.
I do get quite tired and stressed with the hours I do and the ebay etc. yes its like having two jobs! To be honest I got a bit fed up with the ebay and haven't sold anything for about three weeks! I really need to crack on and get back into it. It is hard but it's not going to be hard forever. The more work I do now, the sooner the debt nightmare will be over. I just need to get the motivation to do it! Ha ha.

armchairexpert

I was wondering, if he's still got mobility issues that stop him from doing his usual job, could he not do the eBay thing?

It seems a bit much for him to just give you his debt and then wash his hands of it, which is effectively what he's done. It's as if he genuinely doesn't see it as his problem too.

Getmeoutofdebt

Well Barclaycard have me on a rollercoaster at the moment! First the harassing phonecalls bring me down, then their offer to extend my payment plan brings me back up again and now I have confirmation in writing regarding the plan and it seems in return for their kindness in keeping me on the plan, they want 6.9% interest!! It's a reduced rate apparently! Reduced from the 3% I was on!!????
So now I pay £5 extra a month but they charge me probably £10 extra in interest so it is totally not worth paying the extra fiver! Grrr! Now I am going to have to write to them and complain and it all starts again!
In the meantime I have been jazzing up my spreadsheet so that instead of me just inputting my payments every month it now shows my planned future payments and approx interest so I can scroll down and see when I may be debt free and how altering payments as I pay each debt off affects the other balances. I feel quite positive as I am bang on track to get out of debt by my 40th birthday in March 2015! :T
I'm off to do some Ebaying now. Need to stay focussed and earn more cash!

Getmeoutofdebt

Well in the past couple of weeks I have had my Yorkshire bank statement and my interest is still frozen and my payments have stayed the same so I guess my end of year update letter got to them and they have extended my payment plan.
Barclaycard is a bit confusing. I wrote to them regarding both cards but they phoned me about one of them. I agreed to pay and extra £5 a month on the one they phoned me about and they accepted but went and doubled my interest. However the card that they didn't phone me about they have kept at the same low interest rate and payments! Oh how I wish I'd not spoken to them on the phone and just let them deal with the letter. Still, the one with the doubled interest is only £20 in interest so I guess its not the end of the world and a lot better than what I was being charged at the start of my plan.

Other than that the only other news is that I have adapted the PAD (payment a day) that I started and have now got a "two purse challenge" I got a new purse for my birthday and started to put all my PAD payments into it along with money found while out and about, money saved by using supermarket vouchers / nectar points to buy groceries etc. And yes it had been by birthday so I had a tenner's birthday money in there too, but after two weeks I had £74 in my new purse! ( I had been taking the saving thing to the extremes though, I'm not sure if I'll get that much again) So I decided to do a "Two purse challenge" and put all my spare cash in the new purse over two weeks and then on the third week, instead of withdrawing my grocery money from the bank, swap purses and only use the money I've saved to buy the third weeks groceries! That left me with a week's grocery money in the bank that I could transfer to my overdraft and help reduce it. I think that if I can keep it going it will be a really good plan for me as it is a smaller thing to focus on to keep me going with my debt busting between pay days and it also makes me economise a bit more with my groceries. In the first 2 weeks I was determined to spend less so I had change to put in my other purse and on the third week I could only spend what I had managed to save so it made me a lot more careful. I just need to keep it up now and get my overdraft cleared! :rotfl:

shinner

Hi i have just received 1st of 3 letters from Mercers who are Barclaycard telling me i need to contact pay to bring my account upto date! Are yours with them or still Barclaycard? Are they ok to deal with?

Getmeoutofdebt

Hi Shinner, I am still with Barclaycard. I don't know about Mercers, I take it that Barclays have sold your debt to them? If so, try not to worry too much and just offer what you can afford. Don't let them bully you. My friend is a debt collector and he was really a good help to me explaining how they work. He says that if you are seriously wanting to pay your debt and not just ignore it, you have a better chance once it has been sold to a collector. Because they buy the debt for a fraction of what it is, you have more scope for negotiation with them. He said most debts on his books have settlement offers available. I recently made MBNA a settlement offer of 40% of my balance and they accepted and wrote off the remaining £2k. My friend says thats probably because the next step would have been to sell it on to a debt collector and they would have probably offered MBNA less than 40% for it. The thing is you can only make these offers if you can get the cash together. I had to use some of my overdraft that I had paid off but I figured it was worth doing to make the saving.
Good luck

shinner

Well rang them asked them for email address was given one for Barclaycard lol. Woman asked if any changes i said no she made a note said when i had missed 7 payments i would be defaulted and then account passed to another agency.
So with a bit of luck i may get a chance for a F&F my mam will help with payment of this.:)

Getmeoutofdebt

Well this past week I have had two letters off Barclaycard saying "Please find enclosed a letter we sent to your debt management company".
Neither of them had an enclosed letter and i do not have a debt management company!!
I don't understand what is going on with them, I heard nothing for my first year on my DMP and as soon as that year was up i seem to have been put on a list of who to send spam letters and phonecalls to. I wouldn't mind if they made some sort of sense but they seem to be just choosing any old standard letter template and posting it to me. I considered replying to them and asking what it was all about but thought it would be a wast of a stamp as I probably wouldn't get an answer that made any sense.

I haven't done to well on my plan this month. I had forgotten to provide for a hairdresser appointment and ended up paying for it out of my grocery money! Yikes. I considered cancelling but I looked such a state with my 3 inch roots! Groan! I'm now totally skint and still have a week to go to pay day. I'm very annoyed with myself and determined to do better next month.
Fingers crossed I can get back on track.

Getmeoutofdebt

Well Im just over a week short of 14 months on my DMP and I have just passed the 10k paid off mark! Hooray!!!! It has just kind of sneaked up un me which was a nice surprise! Still 2 years to go (ish) but I can see light at the end of the tunnel at last! :T

Getmeoutofdebt

Are things suddenly starting to go my way at last? Dare I mention anything? Yikes! I don't want to Jinx myself but I am finally having some good luck! In the past few weeks My hubby Inherited some money which he has split with me (I got 5k!!!!!) on the condition that I use it to pay off some of my debt! (some of my debt is his from a long time ago) Hooray!!!! and I also got a pay rise at last after fighting for one for the past 5 years! I get an extra £100 per month in my hand! I have also managed to sell some old furniture that I had stored at a relatives house and forgotten about until she reminded me recently. I ended up, with my 1st extra bit of wage and the inheritance etc just short of 6k to pay off my debt! I feel so happy but on the other hand I feel really stressed out too!! I have been staring at my spreadsheet for days now trying to work out what to pay the money off and waiting for the inheritance cheque to clear is taking an eternity! I don't know what is wrong with me but I always find it really stressful when I have some extra money to pay off my debt! I'm the same when I have had an Ebay session. I get myself really wound up over which debt to pay it off. Does anyone else suffer from this?
Anyway I have decided My lloyds visa is to get cleared off as they are charging interest. I am leaving my Barclaycards alone, as even though they are now charging a small amount of interest I am on a fixed plan until next April so I have 11 months of steadiness with them. Plus if you pay extra they put the interest up. That leaves my overdraft which I could almost clear off with the remainder or my Yorkshire bank visa which I owe £4500 on and want an update and new financial statement every 3 months. My mind is in 2 halves over these! One half says "Get the overdraft cleared then that's two debts paid off" but the other says "reduce the yorkshire card and just use my ebay money and extra £100 in my wage to pay the overdraft."
Well thats my update for now. feel free to advise me or shout at me for being so indecisive! I know I'm useless! I just can't wait for it ALL to be paid off and the end of this nightmare of debt!