Scrimping behind the scenes - with debt of £31,000!

FZwanab

Hi Seasidegal58, I see your point, everyone knows themselves best. Yes perhaps your daughter may worry and try to help. I like your thought process re. eating the elephant bite by bite and providing the good training for when you retire.

It's really good training for many things, currently I'm trying to lose a few pounds and approaching it the same way I.e. resistance (to cakes & chocolate) & eating healthily will speed up weight loss (hopefully) much like no spend days and wise spending habits speed up savings and reduce debt.

I heard lastminute.com could be good for theatre tickets too but you may know about that already.

This forum/ blog is a good start for your writing, keep up the good work, that schoolgirl ambition may happen yet...

in_need_of_direction

I'm with you SSG re sharing with family. my elephant is my health issue which i know they would worry about and try to help and i couldn't cope with that kind of concern. like you, it worsened due to a head in the sand attitude and like you i'm now tackling it a bit at a time. some people may also question your evenings out but I think that's what keeps you sane and allows you to make the changes you're making. you could maybe fib about your pay increase playing it down so that no one expects you to spend more. you're doing so well, i love following your progress.

Chrysalis1976

I haven't shared my debt with family, my mum especially would be disappointed but in a nice way and even so I don't want anyone to know.

Well done on the dress sale and the pay rise.

C x

crunch_time

My husband and I haven't shared our debt situation with anyone anyway for fear of judgement so I understand. I like the eating the elephant in the room analogy too - going to remember that one!!


Crunchy xx

Seasidegal58

Hi everyone and thanks to FZwanab, inod, Chrysalis and Crunchy for your posts and useful comments as always :hello:

I think everyone is different when it comes to how you handle a life cycle journey, whether it be debt, health, slimming etc. We all have our own little demons in our heads – some people like to get everything out in the open and feel a sense of relief from sharing. From reading diaries on this thread and the DFW thread, I think it this is especially true of those who have been hiding their debts from live in OHs - I always think that this must be such a hard thing to do. Others like me would rather tackle it privately. I try to think of us private people like swans (metaphorically speaking) – you know, gliding along serenely to the outside world, but frantically paddling under the water! You know in the end what is the right path for you.

Good luck with your weight reducing FZ – tackling this like a debt journey is an excellent idea and one that I think should be tried!:T

It’s been a few days since I last posted – what’s been happening? Well we’ve had a special project in work so I’ve been working later. By the time I’ve been getting home in the evening I’m shattered (the heat hasn’t been helping) and have had a few early nights .I’ve managed to keep to virtually NSDs apart from newspapers and some food bits like milk, etc, so the final debit on spends won’t been too bad tomorrow night, which is the end of the month and the day before I get paid.

The Post Office balance transfer finally went through (interesting that this is Martin’s best credit card offer in the weekly email today) so I have a credit balance on the Halifax card of £243.58. The final interest payment is being debited on this card on the 25th so once I see what the final balance is I can then instruct Halifax to wing it over to my bank and then onwards to the M&S card.

It’s a funny old world – when I logged into the Halifax card website the other day to check to see if the funds had come in, there was a great big blue button called “Balance Transfer” which I swear had not been there before when the card was nearly up to its limit! On taking a peak they were offering 0% for 6 months with a 3% fee. Well six months isn’t really very long enough for me so I rang them up and asked if they would extend the time scale to a year or eighteen months. She checked but said the only balance transfer she could offer would be six months at 4.6% and I must be quoting a special online rate. I said that 0% at six months wasn’t long enough and she said if I had a few credit cards with large balances did I want to speak to one of their loans advisers with a view to consolidating them into one big loan :eek: !I had to smile to myself at this and politely thanked her and said I didn’t want to be locked into a loan and go down the consolidation route.:)So once the cash has been transferred off the card I will ask them to shut it down. It will make my credit card limits balance look a lot better and I can always apply for a 0% card from them again in 18 months’ time when I may need it.

BUT, when I got home the other night there was a letter from Santander credit card offering me 0% for a year with a 3% fee on my existing card. I must have hit their criterion for offering balance transfers again since I've reduced my original balance as when I asked them the other month they didn’t want to know!

So…..I have now transferred £3,838 onto the Santander card from the M&S card (18.9%) which means I have nearly cleared this and will be able to tackle the NatWest (17.9%) soon:j!

All in all not been an unsuccessful couple of days on the debt busting front!:D

gallygirl

Great news - carry on making the same payments and you'll be making some real inroads into your totals :T.

Dobbibill

You are doing fab and getting more and more transferred to 0% which is brilliant to tackle the balance rather than just chipping away with the interest so well done :j

Verbatim

Fantastic! 0% is better than 17 or 18% in any one's book. Roll on the next offer.

Seasidegal58

Hi to gallygirl, dobbi and Verbatim – thanks for your support and being my cheerleaders :A !

So today was end of Week 4 of Scrimp Month 3! A whole quarter of a year! After a rather spending, non-scrimpy three weeks, the Week 4 ad hoc spends only totalled £8.10, which was achieved by just buying newspapers and facial wipes today which were £2! These were actually really £7, and I would never ever pay this amount for facial wipes, but they were No 7 and I got a voucher in Boots the other week for a £5 spend on any No 7 facial care. So with the voucher they only cost £2 which I thought was much more respectable! They actually gave me another voucher today which when I had a look at it later was exactly the same so I’m going back tomorrow for some more!

( Incidentally there was an article in the Mail the other day that said baby wipes were as good or better than facial wipes for your skin as there isn’t any alcohol in them and they are much cheaper as well!So I am going to have a bash at these when the facial wipes are gone. That’s SSG’s beauty advice column over and done with for today!)

Anyway as I underbudgeted by both the ad hoc spends and food (by £6.09) my total deficit for the whole month rounded up to £28.94 which I am pleased about as the ad hoc spends for a couple of weeks was a bit hairy! As I’ve been working quite hard this week I’ve been able to get out of a couple of lunch/drink events and I’ve also been eating out of the cupboards more for quick meals when I’ve been getting home late (pasta and rice and various tinned types of beans have featured!)
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Plus I got my payslip for the next month today and the extra after stoppages came to £91.67 :j !So after paying my deficit I’m left with £62.73 that can go across to the M&S card which will help swallow the interest that will be going on in a couple of days time (I always forget about the pesky interest!). I was going to treat myself to download for my kindle but my boss gave me a paperback he had finished with today – “The Fear Index” by Robert Harris which I started on the train home and looks like it will be good. Someone else has promised to lend me a thriller that they have just finished at their book club so I‘m ok for reads for the moment.

Next month I’m going to add the extra cash to my credit card payments, but I’m going to have an overview of my budget at the weekend as a couple of things have gone up and I want to see whether I should be putting some more away each month.

So I'm off now for more chickpeas and pasta and will be back later to finally catch up on some diaries!

Chrysalis1976

Great news on the 0%, it will be lovely when your payments are making more in roads to the balance than being swallowed up by interest. Yay to a successful 3 months, I can't believe how quickly that has gone, you are proving that you can manage your debt whilst enjoying yourself too.

Good tip about the baby wipes, I always have packets in the house and car such good little workers although I am a soap and water girl so cheap beauty routine for me!

C x