oh my life...... Light Bulb moment.

chevalier

Hi MiMi66 here is the SOA calculator for you. If you want to post it on here then you need to format if for MSE before copying and pasting it. http://www.stoozing.com/calculator/soa.php. The reason why I am still thinking it would be worth you doing is that it gives you more categories than you have in the SOA below. However my comments are in blue on this one too.

MiMi66 wrote: »

Statement Of Affairs

Monthly Income

Income Amount
Net Monthly Salary £ 2,241.00 When will you be physically able to pick up shifts again. I would also wonder about selling things like gold or jewellry you don't want now. Also do you have any old mobile phones that you can send off to get money for? Also you mentioned about having a streaming service. That being the case can you sell your DVD via Music Magpie or a carboot sale.
Partner's Monthly Salary £ 0.00
Benefits £ 82.00 If you son is continuing in full time education does child benefit continue?
With regards to having a student in, perhaps explain to your son, that surely a summer student, is better than having a Mon - Fri lodger all year round, which is the alternative:eek:
!Maintenance £ 260.00
TOTAL MONTHLY INCOME £ 2,583.00


Essential Monthly Outgoings

Outgoings Amount
Mortgage £ 620.00 Can you go interest only for say 6 months, just to get a buffer fund up behind you. That way emergencies would be absorbed more easily.
Council Tax £ 115.00
Electricity £ 86.00 Ouch are you on the best tariff? That seems pretty high unless you are paying back arrears? Or are you all electric?
Gas £ 0.00
Heating Oil £ 0.00
Water Rates £ 52.00
Telephone £ 10.00
Mobile Phone £ 30.00
TV Licence £ 12.00
Internet £ 20.00
Buildings Insurance £ 0.00 I am surprised that your mortgage lender isn't kicking up about this as for most mortgages no buildings insurance means no mortgage.....
Contents Insurance £ 25.00 Again this is pretty high, I have landlords insurance that is less than this! If you do find a cheaper quote, then have a look on the cash back sites like Quidco or Topcashback. You might find that you can get cash back on the insurance that means you almost pay nothing for it.
Life Insurance £ 19.08
Groceries £ 400.00
Clothing £ You need a budget here.
Petrol £ 40.00
Car Tax £ 0.00 I am assuming all of these are covered by the lease agreement?
Car Insurance £ 0.00
Car MOT £ 0.00
Car Maintenance £ 0.00
Car Parking £ 5.00
Other Travel £
Childminder/Nursery £
Medical/Dental Expenses £ Again you need a budget for all of these categories where you have nothing.
Pets Insurance/Vets Bills £ 56.00
Birthdays/Christmas £
Holidays £
Children's mobile £ 30.00
Mortgage insurance £ 15.78
Denplan £ 22.41
Homeserve £ 20.00
Scottish Friendly Son £ 25.00
TOTAL MONTHLY OUTGOINGS £ 1,603.27
NET MONTHLY SURPLUS £ 979.73 For CC payments and loan

The thing is that you don't have 979.73 available for overpayments. You have that less proper budgets for each of the categories above. Eg clothes you have a growing boy to buy for (oh how I know about this too lol), so you need to budget for him, so that the money is there when he has another growth spurt etc. I realise that yours is older but even so.

Likewise the other categories that you have blank, you need to be saving something each month for these, and for insurance so that then when that expense comes round again, you have the money sitting there, and you don't have to crab around to find the money.

Once you have set a budget that covers everything, you can set up virtual pots either in a spread sheet or for real in a bank account and then you have a real picture of what you have left over.

I am being long winded because one of your categories to put money aside for is a treat fund for you. That way you can have a little splurge that is budgeted for so that it doesn't take away money that is needed for something else.

However in the end I honestly wonder if you wouldn't be better going on a DMP with Stepchange or Payplan. The creditors agree to freeze the interest on the accounts and it would be breathing space for you. The downside it that you aren't allowed to take out any more credit, and it will trash your credit score. However if after this the only 'credit' you ever want to have again is your mortgage, then your credit score won't matter - right?

Please feel free to ignore any or all of the above

Monthly Debts

Debt Total Debt Min Payment Rate
Overdraft £ 0.00 £ 0.00 0.00 %
Car Loan £ 0.00 £ 0.00 0.00 %
Credit Card Halifax £ 6,936.00 £ 70.00 0.00 %
Credit Card M&S £ 2,997.00 £ 77.00 0.00 %
Credit Card Virgin £ 8,361.00 £ 84.00 0.00 %
Credit Car Tesco £ 2,066.00 £ 43.00 0.00 %
Nationwide Loan £ 13,427.00 £ 255.00 3.20 %
TOTAL DEBT £ 33,787.00


Assets

Asset Value
Cash £ 965.00
House Equity £ 115,000.00
Shares/Bonds £ 200.00
Car(s) £ 0.00
TOTAL ASSETS £ 116,165.00

Good luck
Chev

MiMi66

foxgloves wrote: »

Hello MiMi66,
Just spotted that you found my last post reassuring. That's good to know. You & I are a similar age (I'm a couple of years older than you) & that kind of means we entered adulthood in the 1980s when 'Having stuff' just exploded as a concept, followed by the 1990s, which brought easy credit to facilitate this. I freely admit that my debt arose because I never bothered to budget & from the age of 19 to my 40s, I spent more than I earned. Looking back at some of my old journals from that time, I don't know whether to laugh or wince......There are regular entries which say things like 'I have no money. I must have a really careful month'. The next day"s entry will see me auditing my food cupboards & batch-cooking. Then the next day will be 'Bought some shoes & a top in town, treated myself at the Clinique counter, met up with X, got in late so got a takeaway'. Oh dear......my spendy decades. But I did change eventually because we now have no debt except our mortgage despite our income having halved. We used to spend £80 a week minimum on groceries (in reality it was often nearer or over £100), not.including takeaways & eating out. We now spend £200 or £250 a month (depending on if I need the extra £50 to pay the fish man for our bulk order every 2 months). That's for 2 foodies (inc big hungry husband), cat food, all cleaning/household stuff & basic toiletries such as deodorant, bath bubbles, etc. Meal planning has been key to this & growing what food I can helps too. We all slip off the wagon now & again. Sounds like you're ready to climb back up! Best wishes for the journey!
F x

Thanks for this foxgloves - sounds very similar to my experience - silly expenditure to some extent, and also some unexpected and unplanned costs. And I am so wanting to stay on track this time - I am almost too scared to commit too much for fear of losing face - isn't that ridiculous. But I can't fail at it this time - really no scope left to wriggle around the debt. Thank you for your positive framing though and I will need a fair bit of it over the coming years.:o

MiMi66

chevalier wrote: »

Hi MiMi66 here is the SOA calculator for you. If you want to post it on here then you need to format if for MSE before copying and pasting it. http://www.stoozing.com/calculator/soa.php. The reason why I am still thinking it would be worth you doing is that it gives you more categories than you have in the SOA below. However my comments are in blue on this one too.



Good luck
Chev

Thank you Chev - what a load of good advice and guidance. I need to digest it properly and redo my SOA - just to say though I cut corners on the SOA before so the costs for electric and gas are merged together under electric and similar for buildings and contents insurance - I will divide them up next time so it is clearer.

The suggestion for a DMP made me sit up - I don't know.....I don't think I want to go down that avenue - not so much about not having credit available or my credit rating, but just a sense of wanting to do this myself - my initial thoughts are - 'if I can't make the self imposed goal of reducing the debt to under £30K this year, by December, I will have to get formal help.' I will have tried to turn the tide, and made headway or not and if that is the case I really will need to do things very differently in terms of a repayment plan.

With a DMP, an agency looks over your figures and then arranges the payments? Does a person have to pay the whole amount back or do they settle on something smaller. And how long does it kill a credit rating? (thinking mortgage deals).

If I can follow through with my own personal debt management plan (at home) I was aiming to pay off 20% a year of the debt - more if I can. Hence the five year plan.

Dinner just bleeping at me so must go - been a long day with work - but rather satisfyingly I have just made a chicken pie out of leftovers - got three meals for 2 out of one chicken - am a domestic goddess!!

Thank you again for the guidance I shall look over it more closely and ponder.......

chevalier

MiMi66 wrote: »

With a DMP, an agency looks over your figures and then arranges the payments? Does a person have to pay the whole amount back or do they settle on something smaller. And how long does it kill a credit rating? (thinking mortgage deals). I don't have personal experience, however having supported a number of people who have, arranging a DMP goes like this. You contact someone like Stepchange (NOT A FEE TAKING COMPANY). Stepchange do the work at no cost to you. You will go through your proper outgoings with them (so a bit of work needed before hand, but see below), and they will then help you set a budget. What is left over is then allocated pro rata between your creditors. So the ones with bigger amounts owing to them get proportionately more of the pot.

Stepchange (or Payplan eg) then assign you a number which you can use to send letters to your creditors. These letters explain that you are in financial difficulty and that you are consulting Stepchange to get it sorted.

Once that is done Stepchange write to your list of creditors asking them to stop interest on the debt and to offer them their proportion of your money left over.

Some creditors will accept straight away, some would quite frankly call you up and pressure about it. This is the most stressful time. But in the end creditors fall in line and stop the interest and accept the new repayment.

Yes you do pay everything back with this method. But over a longer time frame, but interest isn't being added to your account.

If you do this you agree to not take out any form of credit. Which can be pretty hard to do for some people. You also have to treat each creditor fairly, so you can't make overpayments to one without making a proportional overpayment to the rest,

It WILL affect your credit file. And this can get tricky. Creditors should default the account which then stays on your credit file for 6 years. But they can be slow to do this so that even though you go into a DMP say in July, if they don't default you until December then the 6 years would start from December not July.

NOTE TO OTHER CONTRIBUTORS. If I have got any of the above wrong, please let MiMi66 know. Thanks
If I can follow through with my own personal debt management plan (at home) I was aiming to pay off 20% a year of the debt - more if I can. Hence the five year plan.

..

The benefit of this is of course that you once it is set up and running, you don't have the continued stress and worry about it all. You are about to lose a fair bit of income I think due to the children's age, and maintenance ending? So you would need to take that into account when setting up an SOA.

Here is the link to the debt remedy tool. Have a look and see what you think.
http://www.stepchange.org/DebtRemedy.aspx

I went through the first few pages and it seems fairly straight forward.

The thing is when Stepchange set your budget, they set it with industry acceptable amounts for each category. So eg food for 2 of your would be x amount as a standard, rather than the minimum that you would set for yourself.

You can't include any secured lending in a DMP, so not the mortgage.

If you are worried about getting deals on the mortgage in the future, then perhaps it would be worth asking about that in either the DMP supporters thread in this part of the forum, or else asking in the Mortgages part of the forum. I suspect that currently you would not get a very good deal anyway because of the new affordability criteria, but I have no experience of this, so you would need to get interdependent advice, Good luck with whatever you decide to do
chev

Sazzie23

Hi Mimi

I'd recommend the SC debt remedy, it can be anonymous if you choose, makes you think about your budget and gives you the options. Try yo use accurate figures though as guesswork can scew the results.

Regards a DMP though, there's no guarantee that interest will be frozen, especially if your repayments are closer to the minimum payment it's likely it would be a reduced interest rather than none, BC, hBOS and others are well known for charging some interest. Also you lose your 0% deals so sometimes it's better to snowball your debts and go hardcore debtbusting hit a short time rather than a DMP which is really useful for folk that need a long term remedy.

If you want to know more about DMP reality, check out the DMP mutual support threads (part 11).
Saz

Verbatim

That will feel so good Mimi!

MiMi66

:DWell, a long long day at work. Didn't get it til 8pm catching up on a few things. On the bright side I've had a NSD. First one in a while! And with a bit of luck I shall have one tomorrow. I know I am not spending anything but my son is likely to need some lunch money unless I manage to convince home that a fan sanwich from home is a good bet!! Need those triangle plastic wrappers so I can disguise it as a shop bought one.

So I've fiddling around with figures. Not firmly decided but my motivation feels stronger with the debt busting option, thanks for that Sazz, and the pointer you and Chev have given me to the DMP forum will get looked at in the weekend.

I've miscalculated on my direct debits this month. Looked over it three times but can't figure what went wrong. Fortunately though my ex has agreed to pay £85 toward a train pass for our son which I've already paid in full for and also I've had what will be smallest PPI refund. £54 - 50% to the company that did the work. I'll get £22! Still the two will concer the shortfall and also add a bit to the cc payment. Small blessings.

And my son is giving way on the idea of a student, so with a bit of luck I can add to the debt busting a bit that way too. Half to payments and half to topping up my emergency fund.

I am going to go cold turkey in the using credit card. You know, the one that undoes me every time, that I pay off in full every month except for those months that I don't and then it gets added into the big debt as a transfer. Anyone familiar with that sort of madness! I'm going to take it out of my wallet tonight and if the £90 I have doesn't cover me for the next 16 days til pay day I shall take a bit from the emergency funds to over the difference with the prime aim of not using the blasted card. It's time. Death to the Platinum Credit Card!!!!

If I am very careful I can make £90 last. After all, the ever expanding chicken did 4 dinners for us. We had leftovers tonight, my son happily had the remains chicken pie and I had the leftover chicken curry. How economical is that! Pays to get a big chook as they say. (Poor chicken, I am a badly lapsed pseudo vegetarian - complete hypocrite - I can't even pretend to be vegetarian now - sigh). But back to the chicken. I am really grateful:T

Actually on that note I've done some reading about gratefulness recently. Apparently identifying things each day you are grateful for us good for your sense of wellbeing and reduces anxiety. Doesn't have to be the big things like children or a job but even the smaller things. So my ever expanding chook is on the list today, along with the nice email I had a work from a colleague who gave me lovely feedback for work I'm doing, and what else.....ah, the fact that my daughter at university likes watching something on Amazon Prime at the same time with me so we enjoy it 'together' and it makes me feel very close to her. That's a good one isn't it.

Happy wishes for more NSDs!!! :j

MiMi66

A quick post. My lovely son, looked at me sideways and said ok to packed lunch:-). Lovely boy. Don't teenagers eat money, but if I can encourage him to buy only once a week if at all that will save outgoing. I often have the right things in the fridge for lunches and it makes sense. Have just made a salad for myself, spinach leaves, pepper, tomatoe, raisins, mushrooms, pine nuts and chives with avocado and a boiled egg to add at work. Feeling smug. ��

Slightly less gleeful is the fact I am aware I will have a £500 bill in July. My sons train fare for the college year. Will do my best to pay it, but there is the option to pay by term but you lose the £30 saving for paying the whole year. I wish they wouldn't do that. Just share the saving out over each term instead. It just helps the rich get richer. ��

Anyway. Head in sand moment and thinking about my salad. Have a good day everyone!

pennystretcher

..just a thought - when is the last time you have switched bank accounts? Have a look if you can get a wee bonus for switching if you haven't done so recently

MiMi66

pennystretcher wrote: »

..just a thought - when is the last time you have switched bank accounts? Have a look if you can get a wee bonus for switching if you haven't done so recently

Thanks Penny Stretcher - I might look at that - i switched last in about November 2014. i really like your signature - love seeing those with big debts being paid down - gives me hope. I haven't seen too many on her with debts of my size - I know i am competitive but this is not a competition I would like to win!

I have had another NSD! Two in a row!!

I found out today that the lady who pointed me to having students can ask for a introduction bonus from the company - and she wants to claim this and share it with me;) £25 each when it happens (as long as I have students to stay which I will - I am quite looking forward to it. A distraction from myself and my debt.). I asked her today how much they pay for the students to stay in a home - £17.50 a day - £122.50 a week. That will be most welcome - I hope I can save half of it for the emergency fund or debt repayments - might split it in half to these two things.Or put it towards the train ticket.....decisions decisions.....