A baby, A business and A lightbulb Moment

mizzbiz

I've MSE's for nearly four years but always failed at diarying. MSE was my rule book for saving for our house deposit pre-baby. £10k in a year we saved, with hardly any debt! Itw as fab, we felt secure, and the bigger our savings pot grew, the more frugal we were.

18 months later. We have the house which needs everything doing (ALL the savings went on the deposit), we have a baby and I have no job other than a little business I started. The business has potential but is unrealised because of the baby. We also have nigh on 10k worth of credit card and overdraft debt.

The problems:

A house needing thousands of pounds of work (much of which is done but still loads to do)
Massive credit card debts
No savings
Me no employment
A seven month old baby
A mortgage I would love to pay off but not while we have the problems above


The bonuses

A seven month old baby :heart2:
A house with around £25k of equity now, £40k when completed
All of the cards are 0% deals and we shuffle them accordingly
A relatively small mortgage (65k)
A business which could make a lot of money with time and dedication
A lightbulb moment

The debts
Card 1 - £2400
Card 2 - £3000
Card 3 - £2000

Overdraft - £1000
Total debts - £8900

The good news this was around £13k this time last year so we have knocked money off, although I don't know how.

We've lost our frugal ways in many ways. We used to go to a rural area during our last frugal phase and spend £20 per week on food shopping, plus supermarket essentials.

We now shop at Aldi and have rejected supermarkets for the most part except for bottled water ( a must) and cat litter (also a must!) and beer, which hubby won't give up but is £1.50 per four pack at asda.

We need to get rid of that debt asap and this diary is going to keep me focussed. I've read other diaries and the achievements are amazing. Once you put your heart into something, you can achieve anything, we believe.

So from today, we are going back to frugaldom. It works. It has worked amazingly for us in the past. We wouldn;t have this house were it not for this site!

Our ultimate goal is to be mortgage free, but baby steps getting rid of debt and accumulating a safety net first.

Thanks for reading!

mizzbiz

Since having our LB moment, we've started with a few quick wins.

Virgin TV, broadband and phone was costing us £45 per month. We've knocked it down to braodband at £15 per month as we don;t use either of the other two enough, especially with a baby.

My o2 phone contract was £26 with five months left to run before I can go pack to PAYG. I hardly ever phone anyone, even for business, so I've downgraded my contract for the remaining five months to £18.50. Not a massive saving but better than shedding money for nothing.

OH's contract with Vodafone was up so he asked to leave and they offered him £7 per month a few months ago! Strangely, the most we have ever paid was £3.50 a month so that's a mahoosive saving.

All in all, around £50 per month saved with NO hardship!

mizzbiz

Had a big win last night! OH is back at work today after a short holiday and we decided to have a take-away as our 'last decadent supper' as it were. We got cold feet. We purchased double cream from the local shop and a garlic bread and made a carbonara from ingredients we had in the house. We saved around £10 doing this and I enjoyed the carbonara far more than I owuld have done take-away (the garlic bread was foul though, as are most things made by or for Spar shops).

We have half of the double cream left over so we can make another frugal meal from that tonight. My old brain looked in the freezer and thought we'd have burgers (good quality ones of course) so I would need to go shopping for cheese and buns. My new brain looked in the fridge and thought, what can I make with the remainder of the double cream? Salmon in a cream sauce. We have salmon in the freezer, asparagus, avocado, salad and various veg and potatoes, so no shopping trip required at all! Probably a good tenner saved again as I always find extra stuff I 'need' even in aldi.
Very happy.

In other news we are switching our separate accounts to a joint Nationwide account. I have no overdraft on my accoun t but OH has a big one on his. We have an overdraft facility at the new account but have vowed not to touch it. That means when OH money is all transferred to new account we either have to leave the old overdraft, pay it off in installements or clear it and close the account. I have almost £800 due from a job next month so I think we shall just clear it and close/make dormant the account. THat will be a big debt cleared and since my money is considered 'extra' we shouldn't feel the pinch.

Happy days everyone. Today I am going to :

Clean, polish, tidy and vacuum living room to clear the debris from the bomb that appears to have hit it this week!
Gert cracking with a few peices of business work (baby permitting)
Try and do some washing and ironing (weather permitting)

Oh, and today I am grateful that we can't afford for me to get a full time job. My bfriend went back to work today after over a year on maternity leave. I feel so happy and lucky I can stay at home with m y baby boy and earn too.

LunaLady

Good luck with your debt busting - looks like you have made a great start.

I am off to subscribe

mizzbiz

Day three!
Not much planned for today except a major clean up operation. OH was off last week and went back yesterday and it was so difficult to get back into our little routine, but from today we really need to get our bums in gear!

Moneywise, well yesterday I set up separate 'pots' in our new nationwide bank account. You can have multiple e-savers attached to the account and change their names so you can save for different things. I set up

Credit cards - To put away money to pay off those CC debts at a small amount of interest. ALl of the cards are 0% so anything we get on the savings is super

Holidays - We are going on a great holiday this year in the Autumn. It will be our last luxury holiday for a while but is a must after our tiring two years of pregnancy, job loss, new baby and massive renovations. We used to go on foreign holiday three times a year, one of which was luxury, and still save up massive amounts but this holiday is a must really.

Car - We have an Audi, which, whilst a gorgeus (if impractical for renovations) car, costs a fortune to maintain. We keep having awful summers because tax, MOT and insurance all happen in July and AUgust. It will happen again this year, but we are going ot start this fund with £100 per month when it's possible to start so that it's there ready for the big bills!

Christmas - A nominal amount per month in here as anything to help with the expense is welcome. It's hard to pulla grand out of nowhere for presents and general festive 'stuff', as well as nights out and meals, so we'll put what we can in here, maybe £50 per month to start off with then increase it for next year.

Slush fund - This is a place where I can put any spare cash at the end of the month, any business earnings and any voucher savings or topcashback money. It will then get divvied up between the debts, the savings and an ISA each.

So that was what I did yesterday, and got very excited about it lol.

mizzbiz

Afternoon!
Went shopping to aldi yesterday and spent just over £7 but got some basics out of that. As a drink I'm drinking OJ concentrate mixed with soda water cos it's delicious but very cheap. I'm allergic to some of the chemicals in cordials, even the healthy ones! so I get bored of drinking plain old water or coffee all the time.

SO last night we had cheeseburgers and curly fries. We had one burger each instead of two, so I put the two extra buns from the four pack (30% off, 35p!) in the freezer to go with the two remaining burgers for another meal another day. Unfortunately I have a penchent for processed cheese so that 10 pack purchased yesterday was finished off this morning. Not very MSE but Ive not eaten anything else hehe.

OH gets paid tomorrow so we won;t really know how much we can spare until that happens. WIll have to transfer wages to new account as that isn't set up yet.

Today I've already mostly cleaned the living room and done my daily chores, dishwasher, washing etc. Unfortunately my littl eman is being a moaning nightmare today so hopefully I will be able to do some business work as I'm behind. I aim to do three peices today, so that's about two hours if I'm fast and lucid and £60 in the pot. Let's see if it happens....

I'm so itching to do a Mortgage free wannabe diary but absolutely refuse until the debt is consiged to the debt dust bin of histrory. That's a good motivation :-)

Belle208

Hello,, what business do you do?

splodge1983

wow... sounds like you are doing so well already (and I have subscribed to see how you get on).

I never went back to work after we had our 1st (and we are now expecting our 3rd) so I know what a struggle it is when you start working for yourself (especially if you need irregular childcare as it is a nightmare to find!!)

I too have all my little 'pots' of money and it does make you feel like you are doing something pro active.

Definately keep up the diary as since I started mine on here I am so focused on the debt payments as I am always desperate to update my signature with another £10 or so paid off (its the little things that motivate :rotfl:!

Keep up the good work

xx

mizzbiz

Hi Belle, I'm a web copywriter, so I write for websites, blogs, articles etc. It's good money but I struggle to concentrate with the little one and all of my chores. I should prioritise it really, it's just difficult to find the motivation other than money hehe.

Thanks for the encouragement Splodge! It's a start and anything is good. At the moment he is too young for child care but I plan on getting a childminder one or two mornings a week once he is one year old, probably January next year will be ideal, so it's a juggling game until then. Are you working for yourself then? I will have to seek out your diary as our circumstances sound similar.

splodge1983

We are definately quite similar, I am a piano teacher (and accompanist etc) so it is quite nice to fit everything around family needs.

The juggling is the nightmare part... you are absolutely right. Before DD came along OH and I used to work 5 part time jobs between us :rotfl:, he used to get passed form car seat to car seat in laybys sometimes :rotfl:!

Oh, looking back I have it so much easier now.

Keep up the money saving, we will all get there in the end

xx

Belle208

Mummies are excellent jugglers arent they.. If only I didn't need to sleep or there were another 8 hours in the day we would get everything done and earn money as well!! X