Reality bites ....

ineedtobedebtfree

I rejoined this forum originally in 2011 when we were circa £20k in debt. I didn't stay around long, I guess it just wasn't the right time to get it sorted. We kept kidding ourselves we could 'go it alone'. Today, I come back still just shy of £20k in debt (£19,777.37 to be precise). We can't do it alone, we need help. We've been trying to do this now and got nowhere at all. Things are getting out of control in several aspects of our lives and both of us are finding the strain is now affecting our mental and physical wellbeing. We have reached crisis point over our car, which had an enormous repair bill last week (courtesy of the bank of mum and dad), but is now facing another potentially major repair that I just don't think we can finance. The car is not worth it.

So it's forced us to take a long hard look at the state of our finances and the fact that we are potentially going to be without a car now because we literally cannot take on anymore debt. We are managing to make all the repayments on time, but only just affording it each month, and basics are now having to go to be able to afford the bills. We have no savings at all, and no budget for clothes for the children or ourselves as we don't have the spare money. We've already made changes such as stopping school meals for the younger children and putting them back on packed lunches (have kept older daughter on them at the moment). I know we need to make further changes.

Tonight, I have managed to get accepted for a Barclaycard balance transfer long term 0% deal (seen on this website) so that has given me some glimmer of hope that we can get this under control very quickly if we use the expertise of this site :money:. It's late now, so I won't start posting massive lists of debts and APRs etc. But I have them all tracked on a snowball calculator. It is saying 48 months at £500 per month at the moment, but I'm hoping once we've done all the balance transferring to the new barclaycard that might come down a little bit. To be honest I really wasn't expecting to get a large credit limit, so I just popped in a couple of figures from two of the cards and hoped for the best. I ended up with far more credit than I imagined I would, so there is room for more shuffling. It's too late to think about the best way to move it now, but I have 60 days from account opening to move it.

So hello everyone, please stick around my thread because we're going to need all the help we can get.:)

Busymumofthreeplusdog

I'm subscribing. I've not been on here that long myself but will watch your journey with interest. Others on these forum are very knowledgable and will be able to advise and support you.:)

Good luck!

solong

Hi, sounds very familiar, we were once £20k and now just over £50k, the BC interest free seemed the answer to me and then we each got a 10K limit and heads in sand off we went.


We have always managed to pay our bills each month from lenders but was always taking from on to another. 1st thing each day was checking our 3 bank accounts( his mine and ours on the internet and the transferring money around.


I work in health care and luckily am able to work lots of bank shifts, I found I was doing this more and more to pay bills, missing out on family time and maintaining the house.....sad isn't it....


We have 3 kids and tried the sandwiches thing but found we spent more at the supermarket and they were guzzling the treats we got for lunchboxes.


Anyway, good luck to you, I just took the BC and hadn't discovered this site then, you will get lots of support here I'm sure.


Bye for now