Budget or bust........again

XSpender

Hello DFWs :hello: Room for a little one?

In 2009 we were up to our proverbial in debt, £89k unsecured to be exact.:eek: We were just managing to make our payments but still overspending when DH’s salary was restructured and he was no longer paid for overtime and lost about half his bonuses. This meant we couldn’t meet our repayments; we lost about £400 month, and entered into an IVA on the advice of the CCCS in Feb 2009.

I was made redundant in early 2010, just a few weeks before my DS was born, which allowed us to clear the IVA in full.

Last year we managed to overpay £300 off our mortgage and I started a diary on the MFW board. Reflecting on the past 12 months I do not think I was ready to start that journey when we still have about £20,000 owing on a secured loan we stupidly took out to try and consolidate some unsecured debt in 2007.

In addition, we got in such a fuddle with our money in the summer and again at Christmas that we ended up missing payments on a couple of things, having to ‘borrow’ DS savings and having to recall the mortgage overpayments we had made to get out of the hole we had dug for ourselves.:mad:

We do not have any savings as we are still spending everything we earn and, because of the IVA, we do not have any credit facilities open to us so when an emergency happens we have no funds available to get us out of the sticky stuff. This is one of the reasons we got in a mess last year. Driving back through France with 25 Euros in my purse, not knowing whether it would be enough to pay the tolls and give us enough diesel to make it through the Chunnel is not an experience I want to repeat very quickly.:eek:

So why have I started a diary?

If we don’t start budgeting we are gonna go bust again at some point and never achieve what we want with our lives.

I feel that I belong over here with the DFW as I still have so much to learn about managing my money and I still have a debt, all be it secured on my house. I have a long way to go to clear the secured loan, I need to learn how to budget to be able to save money every month, we need to have some emergency savings and we still want to be able to take a family holiday (2 weeks in a caravan or with family) every year.

You are all such a lovely, supportive bunch of people and will give me a boot up the bot when I need it I am sure.:)

We have decent enough salaries and a definite surplus each month to afford to save something if I could just stick to the flaming budget. :money:

My goals for 2012 are:

• Save £3000 as an emergency fund, would love to fill an ISA but realistically, this is too much for us to save when we are so carp at it
• Pay the last of the arrears on the secured loan, £180
• Stick to my spending budget allowing me to stick to the savings budgets for the car, holidays, Christmas and the decorating that needs doing in the house
• Save up enough spending money for our holidays so that we can relax and enjoy the odd treat and not spend half the holiday panicking that we haven’t got enough money for diesel/food
• Start repaying the money we borrowed off DS as well as starting up the savings we were paying into an account for him again

Long Term Goals

• Settle the secured loan by 2015. Originally I had wanted to do this by the end of 2013 but can now see this is never going to happen. Not sure how 2015 will happen either!
• When secured is settled convert our mortgage from interest only to repayment over the shortest period we can comfortably afford with a view to reducing the size of our mortgage to enable us to move house
• Take 2 family holidays a year, one to visit family in France, the other s/c in the UK

There is me (41) DH (42) and DS (almost 2) and 2 small dogs on this journey together. DH and I both work FT.

Thanks for reading my ramblings if you got this far.:)

GreenSaints

Hey,

Welcome aboard (see what I did there? )

There's always room for DFWs

Good luck with your journey

XSpender

Thanks GreenSaints.

Quick update on the budgets:

Payment for secured loan gone out today so that is £50 off the arrears and £250 or so off the balance. I am going to request a settlement figure at the weekend and a total of the arrears still outstanding as I think it is more than I stated above, more like £250 than £180.

Food Budget - £360/£124

Only £124 left for the month with 2 weekends and one visit from my parents to cater for. This is do-able. I say that but I have never, ever been under budget with the amount I set for our food budget. Will try and feed parents from what we have in and just add some salad.

Diesel Budget - £100/£55

I only use my car to commute and drop off an pick up DS from nursery/Grandparents. 12 days left to get to work and about 1/4 of a tank or so in there at the moment. Will probably need to fill up before the end of the week. I aim for £25/week at the minute but it depends on which site I am at.

Miscellaneous Budget - £120/£25

This covers any items we buy for the house, presents, days out, meals out, prescriptions and OTC meds. This month we bought a new soft close kitchen drawer, quite a few meds as DH was ill and some replacemet parts for the hot water tank. This budget is looking good compared with last month when we had a budget of £100 and spent £213.46:eek: No wonder we wiped out the savings!

Savings

So far this month we have saved:

£10.00 Christmas 2012 (Tgt £800)
£53.31 Holidays 2012 and paid £50 deposit(Tgt £1600)
£150.00 Towards a new bed that is being delivered 30/3 (Tgt £675 , remainder to be paid out of DH bonus end of March)
£0.00 Emergency savings (Tgt £3000)

I am also putting £1/day in a sealed pot, saving £2 coins in another, 20ps in another and all my shrapnel in a big pot pig called Shirley:D

I owe the £1/day pot £61 as I had three days unpaid sick leave and my expenses didn't get processed last month which left us short. This is to be repaid out of DH bonus next month and the month after as I am saving for Christmas. The £2 our for our hols and the rest is to add to the savings pot at the end of the year.:)

Squidge123

I'll be subscribing to your diary and reading with interest

XSpender

Hi Squidge123 Thanks for reading:)

I am leaving work shortly to go to college to do some research for my next assignment which is due in next week:eek: It is only 1250 words but I need the bumph before I can make a start.

It's DMIL birthday on Sunday and I haven't got a scooby what to get her. No point asking DH as he won't have a clue either. Have a budget of £30 for this and £10 each for DM, DMIL and my Mother's Day presents. DMIL and DM are getting 4 cupcakes in a box (made by me) and some spring bulbs if I can get some for the right price.:money:

Forgot to get bread out of the freezer last night for lunch today so I have spent £1.45 on lunch and £1.08 on teas. I always spend this amount a day on teas as I can't have the stuff out of the machine and there are no tea making facilities available. I can get hot water out of a machine though.

Once I have this assignment completed I am going to look at doing surveys again on a night to earn some vouchers for gifts. I still get the odd email from the companies I signed up for but am never sure if it is worth doing the survey if it was emailed at 8am and it is now 7pm:(

XSpender

Quick update now I am back from college and have stuffed my face.

£9.75 spent out of the food budget

69p added to the holiday savings
£2 coin in the £2 pot
Handful of 20's and shrapnel to feed the pots and pig
£3 in the £1/day pot for Mon, Tue and Wed

Had a look at my secured loan spreadsheet today and there are still 54 payments left to go. Bleeuuugghhh:( Only good news is that by June the balance should be under £20k:) I can make overpayments to this but I think it is 10% of the balance at a time and there is a fee involved. Savings first, overpayments 2nd me thinks;)

DH got a letter from work yesterday to say that he has the opportunity to double one of his bonuses every quarter. That would be another £500 towards the targets:Tand could be earnt as quickly as end of July.

Done a quick reccee(sp) of what we need to spend on food shopping this weekend and it is a short list. If I could do it for under £40 I would be chuffed to bits.:) This includes feeding our visitors on Saturday.

XSpender

Wrote a long post on Thursday night jsut before bed and haven't had chance to re post until today.

I have made a bit of a booby on my spreadsheet and have missed off our car insurance at £44.05 from our outgoings. On top of that my hair cut and colour is due, I thought it was after pay day, so that is another big chunk of money to find. I have double checked the spreadsheet and added the car insurance in to the rest of the year's pages. I think the original pln was to pay it in one go so I hadn't put it in but as usual, with no money put aside, it never worked like that.

Found out that though a discount scheme at work I can buy Mr S gift cards with a 5% discount so it may be worth getting one of these for my diesel when I get paid on the 22nd. They also do boots, B&Q etc. The wallpaper I want for our bedroom is from B&Q so I might get one from there too if we decide that is definantly the paper we want.

I am about £87 short looking at what I have left for the month and what I still need to pay out. This is if I can minimise my food spends as there is less than £30 in there.

This means I will have to use some of the money I put away towards our holiday and to pay for the bed next month. On the plus side I will have paid the £50 deposit for our holiday and saved £100 for the bed. That's better than we normally manages as we have mothers day to pay for, MIL birthday, the car has been MOT and serviced and we have had £165 of joinery work done in the house..........normally we wouldn't have a penny saved at the end of the month:D

My sealed pots have also been fed nearly every day..including £6 of £2 coins and about a fiver of 20ps.

Will try and post more often next week, even if I am only talking to myself, it helps keep me focussed:rotfl:

mamato3

Hey there had a read at your diary and just wanted to wish you luck on your journey:) It really is all about budgeting & planning something I'm trying to get to grips with! I have subscribed if you don't mind and will follow along The diary really help keep you focused & on track so keep posting!

chevalier

Hi there, welcome to the boards. I am sure you will find lots of hints and tips on here.

I have included the link below, to perhaps let you think about budgeting for yearly things monthly. Ie dividing a yearly cost by 12 and putting money away each month? Even if it only goes into a bills account. That way you have a true reflection of what you actually have left each month.

http://www.makesenseofcards.com/soacalc.html

Just on one note though, you mentioned that your target for xmas is 800 pounds. Do you REALLY need to spend this much? If so how about setting yourself a challenge of making xmas money neutral, ie you have to earn extra say by doing ebay or surveys, to pay this much. I may buy presents that are WORTH that much, but I never pay that much for them, as I watch out for deals, or pay with vouchers etc.

good luck on your journey
chev

XSpender

mamato3 wrote: »

Hey there had a read at your diary and just wanted to wish you luck on your journey:) It really is all about budgeting & planning something I'm trying to get to grips with! I have subscribed if you don't mind and will follow along The diary really help keep you focused & on track so keep posting!

Hi mamato3 thanks for the encouragement:)

chevalier wrote: »

Just on one note though, you mentioned that your target for xmas is 800 pounds. Do you REALLY need to spend this much? If so how about setting yourself a challenge of making xmas money neutral, ie you have to earn extra say by doing ebay or surveys, to pay this much. I may buy presents that are WORTH that much, but I never pay that much for them, as I watch out for deals, or pay with vouchers etc.

My plan is to make a lot of gifts this year but so far I have had no time to start any of my projects so this is what I will need to save on top of the money I am saving in my change pots if I don't get anything made. DH does like a bit of a blow out on gifts at Christmas, I would spend less. We don't get much during the year so this pays for clothes and what not. This year I got a sewing machine:D I am going to give the surveys a go again, I have never done many but am prepared to have another go to earn some vouchers for gifts.

Thanks for the link, I will have a look at doing an annual budget as this may help with creating a bit of surplus. Most of our bills are paid by DD monthly but I would like to save up to pay our insurances up front and the NT membership is due in June.

Tried to ring secured loan company tonight to order a settlement figure (for info purposes) and check how much the arrears are but they only open 9-5 so will have to wait until Saturday. That's changed I used to be able to ring them later on an evening.:(

DH is at a meeting with work tonight and will have had nothing to eat so I am waiting for mine until he gets it. I'm starving!

brizzledfw

Hi Xspender

Great to see the diary. Lots we can learn from each other I think. I am also trying surveys..just got screened it though from one this morning after about 5 mins grr.

You sound like you're doing the right things..oh and we sound similar! Sticking to the budget is the tricky thing for me!!

Brizzle