Time To Stop Spending!

JodieALee

My biggest issue is that I have a hard time with saving money and curbing my shopping sprees. If I have money or credit on a catalogue/credit card it kind of burns a hole in my brain until I spend it. I need to stop spending and work on paying off the debts we have. We would free up around £200 a month if we paid off all our debts!

My current debt situation is:

Littlewoods:
I currently owe them £495 (which has come down from around £700). Luckily for me they put me on a payment plan of £38 per fortnight and I cannot buy anything else until I have paid that amount off, so until it's cleared I cant use it which is a life saver.

Simply Be:
I currently owe them £567.64 and am paying it off at a rate of around £25 per fortnight. I am struggling with them though as I can still spend with them so I need to stop doing that!

Evans Store Card:
We owe them £494.08 at the minute and are paying it off at around £16 per month (it varies). Again I keep spending on it when I "need" something. :-(

Credit Card:
We owe them £627.55 (£27.55 OVER our limit!). We pay around £35 a month. Almost every month we go over the limit as we spend up to the limit and then the interest pushes us over.

Vets Bill:
We currently owe the vets £335.45 for an operation to remove one of our cats legs when he broke it badly. We paid £120 on the day and this is what is left. We will be paying random amounts each time we get paid and should hopefully be paid off by the end of may.

Studio:
We owe them £371.07 and pay around £27 per month off.

In total, as of today (07/02/14) we owe £2890.79! That doesn't include the £40 something we owe to VirginMedia from our last bill :-\

I can't believe how much I owe. My fiance has other debts of his own from before we got together that he doesn't even know the details of as he used to ignore them. We plan on getting these debts cleared first and then looking into the old ones of his.

Our biggest struggle is that whenever we have money we spend it rather than save it or use it to pay on a bill, we also tend to use bill money for other things and then have to scrimp on our food to cover it.

I've always been really good at budgeting and never used to spend bill money on other things when I lived alone, it was easier then as I had no debts at all.

I am determined to clear these debts off now, once they are all cleared I will still use the catalogues or credit card if I need to but will only buy one item on one of them and pay it off before using any of the others. They're there as back ups in case we can't get something with cash.

I also need to start saving what money doesn't go on bills as we want to get married, and my fiance wants to do his driving test and get our car on the road (which is currently up at his parents).

I am starting to get more frugal with our grocery shopping. Right now we are doing a stock take of what we have and planning meals around that before buying in more food. Then I will only buy what we need for the week or fortnight (not sure which yet), this will also help me lose weight which is something I want to do as well!

Wish me luck! Any advice will be welcomed with open arms!

kickuptheasstime

Hi JodieALee

Welcome to MSE! You'll find lots of incredibly supportive & positive people here, so you're in the right place :j

Wishing you the very best of luck with your journey

KUTAT x