Sink or Swim...just about

getmeouttahere · 10 July 2014 at 11:23AM

Having read a few of the diaries in here, I thought I would give this a shot.

My wife and I have run up a number of debts refurbishing our house and it has hit me in the face (almost suddenly) how much of a mess we've gotten ourselves in so I am starting this diary in an effort to bring things back on track.

It's going to be a bumpy ride with many twists and turns but I'm really hopeful we'll find a way out of this.

A bit of background: My wife and I have no kids (but 4 dogs and a cat that we adopted after the dogs found her in the garden). I work full time and my wife is currently unemployed due to the closure of our own company. We are going to start up a new company offering web design services to bring in some extra money. I own a house that is currently being rented out and the rent just about covers the mortgage and we jointly own the house that we live in.

We have owned our house for 4 months and in that time have had to spend a considerable amount of money on it which just wasn't expected. This has meant maxing out most of our credit cards.

Our debts currently stand at £21,679.52 (credit card and catalog) and £11,400 (car finance). Our monthly payments at present far exceed my sole income.

My mother in law has offered to pay my wifes car finance until a point where we can hand the car back without penalty (approx 6 months). We will then either find a cheap run about or she will be insured on my car. This will reduce our outgoings by £150 per month.

After paying 'priority bills', my aim at present is to maintain payments on the credit cards as much as possible (but the cards will be locked away so they can't be spent on as they are our only source of 'emergency funding' at the moment).

We have set ourselves a target of £20 per week for groceries (will be cheap frozen food but hey), and thankfully car insurances are paid for in full so we don't have to worry about that for the time being.

getmeouttahere · 22 July 2014 at 2:58PM

It's been 12 days since my last post here for one reason or another but I have managed to make all payments so far by selling items around the house that we don't 'need' (one credit card payment was returned unpaid but have since managed to pay it).

I think we will make it to the end of this month and will have maintained all of our monthly payments but next month will be harder as we're running out of things to sell.

I have resigned myself to the fact that my credit file might get trashed (trying to avoid the same happening to my wifes) but will see how we go.

We have found that with Farmfoods and Iceland, we can manage (just) on £20 per week for groceries and we have spend a bit of time trying to start a web design business which we will keep working at to bring some extra money in.