Shiny new debt diary - at the foot of the mountain!

Money_mayhem

Well done on all your progress :T

I like your idea of having monthly goals, very motivating.

Mm

marietje

Thanks MM! Do you have a diary that I can follow?

Not much to report, except that I had another fancy-coffee free day and made a PAD of £8.16 (rounding down my bank account). The money is on a savings account at the moment and because I write it down here, I think I'll feel less tempted to dip into it! Once I've raised enough I'll use it on my next payday to reduce my overdraft by as much as I can.

marietje

My post just disappeared!

Anyway, the news is that my new energy supplier just notified me of a new direct debit date of 17 March. It's going to be expensive because I still have to pay off any outstanding amounts (I set £170 aside for this) and the DD is £75 while I was hoping for a date after payday. Expensive stuff!

I've had to put my PAD sum towards this and I'll be making minimum PADs until the situation improves (i.e. until my OH gets paid!). It's been an expensive month so far but at least it's not a crisis like it used to be. I'll reduce my OD as soon as I've saved £100 on my savings account.

Have a good weekend everybody!

marietje

Oops, I haven't posted in ages. I haven't exactly fallen off the wagon because my totals are still going down although this is not as fast as I had hoped.

I mentioned before that I'm now contributing a total of £1000 to my OH's overdraft, which has the highest interest rate. I've negotiated with him that he pays off the rest. I'm still not entirely convinced by his commitment to it all but at least it will have been reduced by £1000 in the end.

I also had to pay £160 to close my energy bill plus a £75 first DD payment so that reduced my possibilities a bit.

On the positive side, I'm expecting a £49 cashback payment and I'm doing a small bit of work that will bring in £200. I'll need some of that to survive until payday but most of it will go towards my debt.

Although I've made a few PADs and stayed away from fancy coffee, I've lost track so I'm restarting in May. May will start with a trip to my home country and I already have some euros stashed away so the month will start with money saving.

marietje

I haven't posted much again but I should really start doing it again to keep on top of things. The debts have been going down though, but maybe not as much as I'd like so I need a bit of a challenge.

- I paid £250 of my OH's overdraft and the same off my credit cards.
- I've also restarted PADs off my CCs: £23.28 so far!
- I've paid a total of £3100 off my debt since September, or 12.5%.

My goal for this month is to get my second credit card balance under £4000 so this means a PAD of £7.25 at least. I'm also going to stay away from fancy coffee (except yesterday...) this month to save some extra cash.

I'm going to my home country for the weekend and I've got €120 that I had stashed away. If I keep within this limit, I'll match it with a £100 payment to the CC as a reward! If I don't, I'll pay less. Watch this space!

marietje

I haven't posted much recently but today is payday and I still had £30 cash in my wallet, which has never happened before!

I'm still paying down the debts and making PADs. They really add up and I hope to keep them up again in June. My debt is going down, maybe not as quickly as I would have hoped but it's better than it was before. The totals are as follows:

- OD2: £1250 (down from £2000 and my OH has promised to pay another £250 this month)
- OD3: £1500 (no change)
- CC1: £4490
- CC2: £3895 (target for PADs!)
- Family loan: £10000
Total £21135, £3715 paid off since September 2012

The good thing is that our holiday (travel and self-catering, as always!) and trips to see family are already paid for so that helps keep spending down.

I did manage to match the euros I had left over and paid them off the credit card, which meant that I could bring the balance under £3900.

marietje

A real miracle, I had 2 NSDs this weekend and I don't need to spend anything today! My OH is another story but I try to focus on my own spending first of all.

One thing that has really helped is that we've (well, me really) tightened the food budget a lot. When we started having a bit more income from my OH, we really spent too much. We've now decided that it's not worth spending a fortune on groceries, eating out and takeaways. We both love cooking and most restaurants where we live aren't that great so it's just not worth it. For example, I made a spicy tomato and lentil soup yesterday, which was wonderful and cost next to nothing, with leftovers for today.

I'm hoping that this means that I can up the payments a bit this month so I can see the end of at least one of my credit cards by the end of this year.

marietje

I haven't posted on my diary in more than a year, I noticed, so I thought it would be good for myself to keep it up again to make some more progress with debt-busting.

I've made some progress though compared to where I was in 2013 but I think it's time to accelerate things a bit. Everything is budgeted until my next pay day this month and I expect very little space for extra payments over the next few weeks. However, I want to pick up the small challenges again and make PADs on the basis of money I save from (unnecessary) daily spending on coffee, etc. Reading through my diary entries, I can see that this worked well as a strategy on a tight-ish budget and it means there is a reward if I spend less.

The other thing I set up is a budget in YNAB (I think I first read about this on here!) to get a better sense of my spending. Even after using it for a few days, it already gives me a much better sense of how much money I have left. There is also a strong incentive to stay within budget and manage with what you have when you see it on the screen.

One of the interesting effects is that it's making me more aware of the need to prepare for unusual expenses. I've often made the classic mistake of paying a sum of money towards my debt and subsequently running out of money for groceries or other spending. The effect is that I then end up putting the extras on the credit card. I knew this already, of course, but this type of budget strategy shows that you have to consider it.

I have a few of those expenses this month and next so I hope that being prepared will help me manage things better.

Let's see how it all goes!