Caz counts it down

cazmanian_minx

Morning Things are considerably better than they were yesterday, which is a step (ha! no pun intended - read on to see why!) in the right direction

Yesterday morning I accidentally managed to be in the way of Finn's only escape route when Merlin decided to nip him on the bottom and found out what it feels like to be knocked flat by 400kg of Welsh cob and then trodden on. He got my foot and while it's not the first time he's trodden on my toes, it's the first time he's done it while my foot was sideways on the ground rather than flat. It got steadily more and more painful throughout the day and I ended up having to go down the road to the surgery to ask them to check if I'd broken a small bone because I couldn't put any weight on it at all. They reckoned it's just soft tissue damage thankfully and after a night's rest I'm hobbling around fairly fast as long as I remember to take the weight on my heel - he trod on my arch, basically, and it's still very sore if I try and walk normally.

Not much debt-busting news to report today. I rang the Post Office card up this morning, but they don't have any balance transfer offers for me, so I'll go to the plan B of using it as my food and fuel card to keep spends off the overdraft for as long as possible.

The Amazon warehouse staff excelled themselves yesterday and shipped out £150-worth of orders for me, so there's £1114 and change on its way to the business account :j:j:j

Hiddenidenity

Oh dear I hope your foots better soon.

Wow thats some good sales

cazmanian_minx

I'm sure it will be, I normally heal pretty fast

Just had a rush of blood to the head and paid another £1000 off the 'orrible-rate-Barclaycard :j:j:j:j:j (<- that's the only way I'm going to be doing any kind of jumping up and down for a while :rotfl:)

cazmanian_minx

Mortgage payment day and how depressing to see the total only go down by £70 instead of the normal £570. This is the result of the post I made last month about wanting to rant at Mr Minx and then deleting it before posting as it was too personal for a public board Basically because he forgot about something he'd promised to do, we only have 9 months to find the £10k to buy our croft next May. Diverting some of the mortgage overpayment will sort out £4,500 of it, we'll have £500 in the loose change bank account by then and we have another £500 my brother gave us as a wedding present, but that still leaves £4,500 to find. My mother has offered to lend it to us, but I feel really bad about taking her money when it's us that messed up. We'll see.

No news to report really. £10.20 from Amazon thanks to selling a Carry On DVD and my old copy of Dungeon Keeper (yes, I did load it up and play it one last time before selling it!). My foot is feeling much better again, I can walk normally now if I take it very slowly

cazmanian_minx

Some better news this morning - I logged into the Barclaycard Formerly Known As Egg to see if the statement had generated and thought I'd check that the payment had gone through on the 'orrible rate Barclaycard while I was on the site. It had, and the resulting spare balance had opened up the 6.9% offer again So another £1000 has been sent from the Tesco card to the Barclaycard and the interest rate situation now looks like this:

'orrible rate Barclaycard - £6,500 at 20.9% :eek:
NatWest overdraft - £2,323 at 19.9% :eek:
Barclaycard-Formerly-Known-As-Egg - £3,367 at 16.9%
Tesco - £350 at 15.9%
Barclaycard LOB transfer - £2,500.47 at 6.9%
Tooth fairy loan - £750 at 0%

I ran the personal debts through a snowball calculator and if I can continue to throw £600 a month at them, I should be debt free by the end of January 2014 :j:j:j:j

I'm *hoping* to get another £1,500 paid off the 'orrible rate card this month and will then be able to transfer the last £350 from the Tesco card to 6.9%. The Post Office and Tesco cards will then both be empty and I'll switch to using the Tesco one for food and fuel, because it'll earn me Clubcard points towards our next holiday. Unless they offer me a 0% BT of course

cazmanian_minx

Hang on, if I don't get a BT on the Tesco card, would I be better off running it up again and not using the overdraft? It would essentially be a slow balance transfer of the NatWest overdraft (19.9%) to the Tesco card (15.9%) and once it's on a card it's easier to shift the debt around to lower rates.

Hiddenidenity

cazmanian_minx wrote: »

Hang on, if I don't get a BT on the Tesco card, would I be better off running it up again and not using the overdraft? It would essentially be a slow balance transfer of the NatWest overdraft (19.9%) to the Tesco card (15.9%) and once it's on a card it's easier to shift the debt around to lower rates.

Yes i think this would make more sense, although Im not 100% sure x

cazmanian_minx

SO much to talk about today, but since it's Friday I'll start with the scores on the doors.

(last week/this week/ + or - amount)
Business
Overdraft: -£1765.71 / -£1980.17 -£214.46
Barclaycard: -£7500.00 / £6500.00 +£1000.00

Business total: -£9265.71 / -£8480.17 +£785.54

Personal
Overdraft: -£2980.00 / -£2413.75 +£566.25
Tesco card: -£1350.00 / -£350.00 +£1000.00
Egg card: -£3367.00 / -£3367.00 no change
Dental loan: -£750.00 / -£750.00 no change
Post Office card: -£0.00 / -£0.00 no change
Barclaycard: £1471.47 / £2500.47 -£1029.00

Personal total: -£9918.47 / -£9381.22 +£537.25

Grand total: -£19,184.18 / -£17,861.39 +£1322.79 :D:D:D:D:D

Not a bad week

I was still umming and ahhing over the card shuffling issue and ended up getting some advice from a friend who's a specialist debt advisor with the CAB. She recommended shutting the Post Office card now, paying off or transferring to 6.9% the Tesco and closing that as well if they don't offer a 0% BT, then waiting three or four months for it to all filter through to the credit reports and then applying for a new 0% card to BT the old Egg card to. By the time I make that application, the tooth fairy loan will have been paid off completely, the business Barclaycard should be gone (leaving just the 6.9% transfer amount on it, which will be less than 30% of the available credit limit) and closing the two cards will remove nearly £6k of available credit, so I should look a much better prospect to lenders and she thinks that a 0% BT would ultimately save me more money than a slow BT from overdraft to Tesco to save 4%. So I've paid off the shopping balance from the Post Office card this morning and will write a letter next week to get it closed.

The other news today is that I won a poker tournament last night :j:j:j I've had an account with one of the online poker companies for years, they were offering £32 cashback through Quidco with no minimum wagering requirements (this was before the casinos got wise to people just signing up for the cashback!), so I deposited my tenner, played a couple of games out of interest, won about US$2.00 and withdrew my tenner again. Since then I've used it occasionally and built the balance up to about £5, but over the last month or so I've started playing regularly again to try and get up to the minimum withdrawal level of £10. For the last two months they've been running a competition called the Freeroll Fight. There's a free-to-enter Hold'Em tournament every weekday evening, the first 10 places get paid. The site puts in €50 as prize money (split between the top 10) and any add-ons or buy-in money is added to the prize pool, so it goes up as the tournament progresses. I've been finishing anywhere between about 50th and 140th (with one 13th, which was galling!), but last night, inspired by reading Victoria Coren's book on winning the European championship, I really concentrated on the game, had a couple of lucky hands and won it €21,53, which pushed my account balance to £21.56 and I took out £20 this morning.

I shall keep playing - points are awarded each night dependent on how many players are in (last night there were 324 of us, the first person out got 1 point, I got 324) and the top 32 players after 4 weeks play a final tournament with a prize fund of €1,000. I don't think I'm good enough to make that tournament yet (I'm currently 64th out of about 550), but I think if I keep playing regularly and learning from my mistakes, I could be one day. It's not costing me anything and it's a lot more fun than taking surveys for Swagbucks

Hiddenidenity

Lots of good news this week The figures look good

cazmanian_minx

A bit of an ouchy Tesco trip this week as we have guests arriving for three nights. But I've been proactive with the debt shuffling - I bashed some calculator buttons yesterday afternoon and paid off another £500 from the 'orrible-rate-Barclaycard, which opened up enough space on it to move the remaining £350 from the Tesco card to the 6.9% BT offer. So I now have an empty Tesco card AND an empty Post Office card, as I paid that off from the overdraft yesterday afternoon as well. As soon as the BT clears, I'll give Tesco a ring to see if they have an offer for me and if they don't, I'll get the card closed once the statement has generated with the residual interest on it and been paid.

If nothing else, it's going to simplify things. The 6.9% balance can just be left with no payments for a while, because any money paid to that card is going to be allocated to the remaining 20.9% balance (now down to £6,000 ), and with no payments to make to Tesco or the Post Office, I can make the minimum payment on the old Egg card and throw all remaining personal finance firepower at the overdraft. The interest bill for the month is going to look fairly horrible because of the balance transfer fees, but next month should see a drastic improvement