How much????/

homecroft

Well that was an interesting day - I had the day off work so I thought I'd try and sort out my finances, get my income/payments in an Excel spreadsheet. I knew I had fairly hefty debts but... £32488.95??

How in the hell did that happen? And why did I not notice?

£19918 left on a bank loan
£5209 on a credit card - 0%
£5903 on another credit card - 0%
£1416 on another credit card - 0%

No overdraft so that's something. The payments are manageable, which is probably why things have got where they are, but this has got to stop.
If I keep paying what I am at the moment, and stop borrowing money (and if I can keep the cards on 0%), then it is going to take 55 months to clear things.
That's going to have to change - reading some of the threads on here tonight is inspirational, so I am now a debt-free wannbe.

I think tomorrow is going to be a day of seeing where I can trim things and cut costs. I'm looking forward to it!

[Deleted User]

Usual advice.

Post an SOA, and let the good folks on MSE take a look.

aidy_b

I will have a look at a SOA later once I have had a look at what I pay out.
So far I am amazed at how much extra I seem to be paying through ignorance / laziness.

I know you should shop around for utilities / insurance and so on. I know this. But I ignored this.
By changing to a fixed deal on a duel fuel deal I have saved £33 per month - fixed until Dec 2016. 36 months at £33 - that's £1188 saved!!! And that's not taking into account any future price rises on the tariff I was paying.
Next I had a look at my home and contents insurance. A check on the joint a/c showed I was paying £70.86 per month. Even to me this seemed a bit steep. A quick check on Go Compare and a call to the best quoting company and I have just paid £177.62 for the year - I have just saved £672.70 for the year.
Sky Sports got cancelled so that's another £22 a month saved - £264 for the year.

There are other things I'm going to look at today. First of all smoking. I'm 40 next week so seems like a good idea to give up before then. Not had one so far today and have thrown away the couple of fags I had left in a packet. This will save in the region of £100 a month
Food shopping is next. I normally get food delivered by Ocado. There is only a small Tescos near here and by the time I get home from work and get the kids fed and to bed the last thing I want to do is go shopping. Getting a weekly shop delivered is the best option for me. Interestingly I entered the same shopping list into Ocado and Tesco to see what the difference would be. I entered the ingredients for one meal and Tesco was several pounds cheaper. I entered the rest of the shopping list, grinning to myself thinking I had found a way to save a significant amount of money. At the end a weeks shopping with as close to identical items as I could find came in with Tescos £2.69 more expensive than Ocado. I wasn't expecting that. Obviously it depends on the items bought, but on what I wanted Ocado was cheaper. I will try this for a few weeks to see if this was a one-off. I considered getting a delivery from each with the cheapest items from each, but with delivery charges I don't think this is going to make much difference.
I've got a big glass bowl of 1p, 2p, 5p and 10p coins in the kitchen. It's had all my small change from the last 2 years dumped in it. I think I will have a look at that this afternoon. Hopefully there will be £60 - £80 there, which will be nice.

This is a bit addictive...

aidy_b

This is a good day.
The glass bowl of small change amounted to £96 bagged up, with about another £5 left for next time. Even better there was a 50 euro note in there - no idea why.
I'll go to the bank in the morning and change the note and then pay it all into my bank account.

homecroft

aidy_b is an old a/c I set up - must have an auto-log on on this laptop.

Strange thing is I posted once under that name about a lightbulb moment that I must have forgotten about almost straight away. I guess it wasn't a LBM after all.

This time will be different

[Deleted User]

aidy_b wrote: »

Sky Sports got cancelled so that's another £22 a month saved - £264 for the year.

Have you considered dumping Sky completely,and going to Freeview or Freesat instead?