My Graduate (Post-Student) Debt Diary!

MrJester

>12 Months

sauceoclock wrote: »

Try Peopleperhour for freelance work.... I've ended up with regular clients outside the site by starting on there initially!

Good shout :T

SO major update. Got my Capital One card today, £1000 limit, just transferred £900 off my Bcard. (Left £100 for buffer & fee) It's going to drop my Bcard down to around 1k, keep paying the minimum on my Halifax and this new Capital One BT cards. And really try and hammer out this high interest Bcard!

Wish m eluck :cool:

theemptypurse

Good shout :T you really are doing great

System

Yes! You're doing so well

Purplepenguin88

Hiya I've been lurking and just got an account. I work in London too so know how expensive this city can be!
How's it going? November going ok so far?
PP x

MrJester

>12 Months

theemptypurse wrote: »

Good shout :T you really are doing great

sauceoclock wrote: »

Yes! You're doing so well

Purplepenguin88 wrote: »

Hiya I've been lurking and just got an account. I work in London too so know how expensive this city can be!
How's it going? November going ok so far?
PP x

Thanks for input all, Been fairly bad at the debts this past month and a bit. So I transferred to the capital one card, but then spent £600 on the card straight away on the new iPhone 6. I'm a bit of a techie and when I want something I'm pretty good at disregarding debts.

Anyway without getting too much into specifics, I plan to have FULLY PAID OFF my Barclaycard (around the 1.9k mark right now) within the next month or so. How you ask, well a big part of the reason why I am in debt is I spent a hefty 3 grand on something about 6 months ago, but I got a good student discount at the time so selling it on should mean I get that money back totally.
Basically its a hefty computer system, and I will be downgrading to something which costs 2k, freeing up 1k for the card.
I will also be selling a computer monitor, and external HDD I use with the current system to make up another £300, so there's 1300.

I literally TODAY sold my previous phone iPhone 5s for £300. That makes 1600. I will soon have £100 coming on from freelance work. 1700. I'll sell some other bits and bobs I have, and from my paycheque too, I will have the 1900 Bcard paid off. :cool:

The other two cards then makes up £2500, both are still interest free.

Balance Transfers on these cards looks something like this:

Halifax
£777.31 24/07/2016
£618 03/04/2015
£103 24/02/2015
£100 expires approx 06/05/2015

Capital One
£927 05/2015

So with these I will formulate a plan of action on paying those off hopefully without ANY interest. Going to do that now, will update..:D
EDIT: Well, the majority of the 0% BT will need to be paid by 05/15. I doubt I can pay all of it by that time, but with paying off my Barclaycard, and keeping up with payments and doing other things my credit should improve to a point whereby when it comes to April I can hopefully do one bigger balance transfer of the 618+927 BT's to a new BT card and then work out a plan to pay 0%.

In the meantime, will obvs get off the £103 on Hal-card which expires 02/15, then beyond that do my best to pay off as much as poss before i do another BT next year.

MrCrimeFiction

>12 Months

Without being too critical, surely you could have kept your old phone and saved £600 for the new iphone. Did you really need it that bad or did you just want it. If so, we all hope you go onto sell that stuff so you can get those debts down.

If you've got a iphone, do you need a computer at all? Can you sell the whole lot and wipe out all your debts. Downgrading to a 2k system is a but much?

Just food for thought. Your choice

MrJester

>12 Months

MrCrimeFiction wrote: »

Without being too critical, surely you could have kept your old phone and saved £600 for the new iphone. Did you really need it that bad or did you just want it. If so, we all hope you go onto sell that stuff so you can get those debts down.

If you've got a iphone, do you need a computer at all? Can you sell the whole lot and wipe out all your debts. Downgrading to a 2k system is a but much?

Just food for thought. Your choice

All very valid points and why I thought twice about bringing them up but want to provide full disclosure on my progress.
I could have saved up the cash, but I'm quite impulsive when it comes to tech things. How some people are obsessed with shoes or handbags, they just buy them without thought. Tech is like that for me, but at least with tech I know I am getting value which has a resale value.

I used to binge on clothing shops, but now when I do it, I end up returning most of the items unless I really like it/need it.

Yes I need a computer, a lot of my time is spent at the computer for one thing or another, video editing and filmmaking, I like to play a lot of games on it, etc - so I very much get my use out of it. It's not like I only need it for facebook like most.

A 2k system still is a lot I realise, but I need a powerful system for what I tend to use it for and the software I use is on Macs only, e.g. Final Cut Pro.
I don't want to sell my current system at all really, so in doing so I'm giving myself a bit of the pat on the back for doing it. Tech items are kind of what my passions circle around, so to me they are worth the investment.

I completely realise this may seem very blind-sighted to a lot of people. But your needs are different to mine.

MrJester

>12 Months

Paid that £310 into my bank today. Then later on paid it straight onto the Bcard.
Still looking for a buyer for my computer, might take time as its an expensive bit of kit.

Purplepenguin88

Please tell me you're (at least) not going to buy the 2k comp until you have a buyer for your current one? Otherwise your debt will spiral again.
I get why you need a powerful computer, I need one for my job, and all through uni, but maybe you need to take stock. Maybe selling the 3k one is actually a false economy if you already got an amazing discount etc. Maybe you need to slow down your expectations and work out how to cut the spending rather than sticking in the buy something to sell something rut?
I dunno, just my thoughts...

System

This is a fairly good plan of action... Sometimes you need to do something for yourself and as a techy the iPhone was your 'thing' and you seem to have a good plan to pay it off.. Maybe next time save up a bit when you hear about the release because hopefully by then you should be in a better financial situation to save up beforehand. My 'thing' is makeup and I'm on a spending ban until I have COMPLETELY totalled my collection as I had built up so much. It's been great and has made me appreciate what I have spent on and really squeeze the last out of every tube.. I also barely wear it on weekdays anymore so it’s helped me cut down spending in that respect too. Now spending on anything frivolous like that has to be well thought out and planned in advance – especially as I just don’t have the disposable money to blow with the higher rent costs & car payments to consider.

Completely understand why you bought such a high calibre computer (iMac I presume?) however I bought my macbook in 2011 and it’s still going strong (could actually do with a good tuning up so I’m going to be getting on to that this weekend). Hopefully you won’t even notice the downgrade and you’ll still be able to use final cut etc. Whilst I know and empathise it’s horrible not having the latest thing you might need to accept you’re not going to have the most recent *phone, computer, games console, graphics card* for a while, those are things that when you’re in a more settled financial situation and have progressed in your career you can have - I think often I look at people like my parents and think I'll just fall in to that without remembering that they work tirelessly and always have done. You’re smashing through the debt JJ, stick with it! You want to buy a bike to help cut down on your commute costs in the long-term, maybe start thinking about that rather than a tech-y item as your next spend as you’ll get great value out of a £600 bike over the space of 12 months (you’ll actually save more than the bike will cost you if you keep using it).