My SOA - please help if you can

jenijen27

Hi
I have been a lurker for a year or two now but I have never been quite brave enough to post.
Our debt situation is now quite desperate and we don't really know what to do for the best. If anyone could look over our SOA and offer any advice (before we take out yet another loan) I would be very gratefull.

My income - £1080.00
DH income - £1400.00
Total £2480.00


Mortgage £471.88
TV Licence £12.00
Legal and general insurance £22.06
2 mobile phone bills £80.00
Gas £50.00
Electric £40.00
Water £8.50
Home Ins £27.00
Council Tax £96.00
Petrol £100
Food £150
Bus pass £60.00
Metro pass £45.00
Cat food £40.00
Virgin broadband, phone, tv £86.00


Debts:
First Plus Loan (£30k) - £407.00
HSBC Loan (£8746.25) - £159.03
Repayment prev employer for course fees (£150 approx left) - £50.00
HSBC CC (£442.63) - £40.00
Debenhams (£450) - £25.00
Next (£861.42) - £100.00
HSBC CC (2nd) - (£5472.28) - £160.00
HFC Bank (£200) - £10.00
Cahoot (£3095) - £63.00
Northern Rock (£9000) - £117.49
Alliance & Leicester OD (£250) - £30.00
Virgin CC (£250) - £20.00

As you can see our out-goings (minimum payments) come to £2469.88.

Can anybody suggest what our next step should be? Is another consolidation loan the answer?

Thanks for reading

newlywed

Hi, welcome.

I'm not too good at SOA's - but you seem to have missed off things like clothes, car tax, mot.

As for consolidation - you say "another consolidation loan". Are your two loans listed previous consolidation loans? If you do this, you need to be 100% sure you will not spend on the cards again or you will get into an even worse state. It took me 4 loans to work this out - and now I can't get any more credit due to being overstretched for my income

Shineyhappy

jenijen27 wrote: »

Mortgage £471.88
TV Licence £12.00
Legal and general insurance £22.06
2 mobile phone bills £80.00 This seems quite high can you swap to payg or give them up?
Gas £50.0
Electric £40.00
Water £8.50
Home Ins £27.00 This seems quite steep too, can you look through Quidco and try and get some cash back?
Council Tax £96.00
Petrol £100
Food £150 How many people is this for? Could you maybe try and cut it down or try and minimise shopping and live off the freezer and cubboards for a while?
Bus pass £60.00
Metro pass £45.00
Cat food £40.00 Can your cat manage on a value range?
Virgin broadband, phone, tv £86.00 That seems a lot to me, is there any way to cut it down? Do you need mobiles and a landline?


Debts:
First Plus Loan (£30k) - £407.00
HSBC Loan (£8746.25) - £159.03
Repayment prev employer for course fees (£150 approx left) - £50.00
HSBC CC (£442.63) - £40.00
Debenhams (£450) - £25.00
Next (£861.42) - £100.00
HSBC CC (2nd) - (£5472.28) - £160.00
HFC Bank (£200) - £10.00
Cahoot (£3095) - £63.00
Northern Rock (£9000) - £117.49
Alliance & Leicester OD (£250) - £30.00
Virgin CC (£250) - £20.00



Thanks for reading

Is there are way of raising a little extra cash to help pay off some of the smaller debts? Ie selling on Amazon or Ebay or doing a bootfair?

Good luck sorting things out

RAS

Hi

Can you post up the APrs on the credit cards and loans? It will help people to help you.

Lucy1982_2

I wouldn't get another consolidation loan. I've been there and done that and it doesn't really work.

If you could pop your APR's up that would be a help. But I did notice that you have a couple of debts at around £250. Can you ebay/Amazon anything to help you raise the money to pay these off? This alone would save you about £50 a month.

We have a cat and he eats dried food, costs about £20 for 3 bags but it last between 6 and 8 weeks. Much cheaper and I think it's healthier for him.

Try a spending diary as well to see where you are actually spending things. Apparently even a chocolate bar a day adds up over a year!

But good luck and you can solve this.

gizfizz

you can save on your virgin media bill-ours for tv, internet and phone was about the same as yours if not more :eek: OH phoned up to cancel sky sports (at last!! had been saying he'd do it for ages but there was just'one more match' he wanted to watch :rolleyes: ) and we ended up upgrading our package but paying less (and sky sports is gone yay) we're now paying about 50/60 and getting more (with the exception of sky sports), this is all because of the faffing with sky and their 'free' channels which have now disappeared from virgin-they dont want to lose customers to sky because of it. basically what i'm saying is call them up and ask if they can offer you any better deals and in the unlikely event they say no then threaten to switch to sky!

onamission_2

do you need both petrol and bus/metro passes?

jenijen27

Hi - thanks for all your help. I didn't expect any replies so quickly!

Newlywed - We have had a few loans in the past and we remortgaged to pay them off, but then stupidly built up some dept again and then sonsolidated them into the £30k first plus loan.

Shineyhappy - thanks for your thoughts. We're tied into the mobile contracts for quite a while yet, but I'll look into it. The cat food is for 3 cats and cat litter, this is as cheap as we can get it at the moment. Home Insurance - this was the cheapest offer we could find when we took the policy out a coupleof years ago but we'll look into changing it.

RAS - I'll try and post the APR's later tonight.

Lucy1982 - I do sell the odd few things on Ebay, but we've nothing to sell that would make much money.
We have 3 cats and buy cat litter too. We have tried lots of different cat biscuits and they always make 2 of them sick.

Onamission - Yes we need both petrol and bus/tram passes. We only have one car and we work in opposite directions.

Thanks for replying everybody

RAS

Thanks

it helps to clarify where saving might be possible.

With the phones, even if you are tied, you should be able to negoituate a basic contract instead of your existing one.

hypno06

Just to remind you that when you renew insurances, go through quidco to get some cash back.

https://www.quidco.com - we love it!

chevalier

can you both get second jobs for a while? If you could then you could know those small debts on the head in a couple of months, which would mean you could use that money to snowball on the bigger debts. I know it is a pain, I know it would mean that you wouldn't see each other potentially, but if you could do that for say 6 months, you would really see some progress.
best of luck
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