Got here by luck, intending to stay by judgement.

gallygirl

Re the ebay stuff - it's all totally worthless unless you're going to realise your assets. Having lived through your cardboard hell I know how much you hate ebay so just ditch the lot to your favourite charity. Either that or sort out a few things in order of possible value and do one at a time - maybe one or two good sales would help you out?

I know what you mean about sapping your joy - 'stuff' does that. There is a thread on one of the boards about Kondo'ing (google it) - probably not for you, but there is real joy to be had in releasing stuff and clearing mental and physical space.

Re the cars, well you've managed to (just about) pay for them every month so far so no 'need' to get rid of them. However, now you have the debt under control time to think of the future. Can you & Mrs B see yourselves teaching until your pensions kick in? £300 a month now saved for a year would give around £150 a year if you drew down 4% - not a lot admittedly but do that every year for 20 years and add compound growth and it starts to look better. And that's using 4% - if you only need to fund the gap between early retirement and your pension kicking in then you could use a much higher withdrawal rate. The choices you make now will affect Mr & Mrs B in 20 years time - if you're then faced with having to work instead of retiring how important will having had nice cars seem then? Don't wait till the debt is cleared to start planning for retirement.

Keeping_Motivated

I believe that decluttering elephant 2 in the quickest way will have more value to your sanity than any amount of money. I've done ebay and had some great success and been shocked by the amount I have been paid for an item however I have equally been disappointed at the 99p I have received for all that photographing, writing of text, packaging, post office etc etc.

Personally I got to a point where you seem to be so I gave myself permission to let it go and I picked just 10 items to finally list on ebay (that I though 'may' reap some rewards) then the rest I shared between ONE carboot sale and charity...basically anything that didn't go that day went to the charity shop and I was finally done with it. Its so freeing because when it was all sat in my garage it was just an eyesore, inconvenient and a massive reminder and put down for me that I was a procrastinator and not a good enough person, parent and homemaker! Ridiculous really when I could just let it go....

As for the cars..I too have an expensive car and I justify that by the fact I don't have what others might deem luxuries to them ie don't smoke, hardly drink, don't go out regularly (although I'm still working on how much we spend eating out progress not perfection!). Basically if I did all those things I would have to review having the car because I can't have it all. The good thing for us is we only have one expensive car and one 'ordinary' car. We have the best deal that works for us and we can easily afford it so thats ok for us and sits well with me. It sounds like you love your cars but it doesn't 'sit' right with you at the moment e the cost per month so its finding the compromise that works for your finances, your taste and needs/wants so that it 'sits' right with you and you can sleep easy.

What I find ironic from your post (as the same happened for me) is that when you had no money and where robbing Peter to pay Paul you had no intention of reviewing the car payments or compromising on the cars. You enjoyed parking it in prime position while being 'dignified and 'silent' about not showing off verbally however chaos financially behind the scenes and now money is under control and you are in a safer position and could 'afford' to stay the way you are you are willing to change, reduce, review. So when our finances our bad its obviously links to our self esteem which in turn we try and fix by outwardly having something to boost that self esteem which then becomes a massive destructive cycle. Waffling now so I hope that made sense....

elantan

gallygirl wrote: »

Can you & Mrs B see yourselves teaching until your pensions kick in? £300 a month now saved for a year would give around £150 a year if you drew down 4% - not a lot admittedly but do that every year for 20 years and add compound growth and it starts to look better. And that's using 4% - if you only need to fund the gap between early retirement and your pension kicking in then you could use a much higher withdrawal rate. The choices you make now will affect Mr & Mrs B in 20 years time - if you're then faced with having to work instead of retiring how important will having had nice cars seem then? Don't wait till the debt is cleared to start planning for retirement.

Thats what I meant to REAL and full cost Thanks GG

in_need_of_direction

Mr b, why not charity shop at least half. It's a good thing to do, it'll make the remainder more manageable and it's currently just draining joy from your life.

Goldiegirl

eBay is a bit of a hobby of mine, so I know the amount of time that sorting, photoing, listing, packing and posting takes.

Then, after eBay take their fees, there's precious little cash left.

Even though I enjoy it, I do have to take a break after a few weeks, so, if someone doesn't enjoy it it must be painful!

One of my rules is, if something doesn't sell the first time, I relist it once. If it doesn't sell after the second listing, I'll normally move it on to the charity shop, as I don't want it to sit around the house for ever.

So all your stuff that didn't sell before, send it to the charity shop, as it's unlikely to sell now.

As for the rest of it, I'd pick out the things that would be worthwhile to try to sell - things that people want to buy, would raise a decent price and aren't too difficult to pack.

All the rest, I'd send to the charity shop and get it out of my house.

Igamogam

I do understand where you are coming from with the whole lease car thing. We have just gone down the lease car route. My car, owned from new and bought 9 years ago with money we inherited was beginning to be a bit of a money pit. Cant do without it so began looking for a new one..............12 months research and I am now the owner of a brand spanking new all electric car. My trusty, but getting creaky, nippy diesel was costing me an average £270/month - fuel, road tax, repairs, servicing and insurance ( I have a 100 mile daily round trip commute 39 weeks of the year) new lease is £260/month. No road tax, cheap insurance,longer intervals between servicing and almost free 'fuel' - free to charge at work, and free charge points elsewhere............. just as nippy despite it being bigger than the car its replaced and goes like a rocket There is no way we could have bought a brand new car and pumped over £200 into to it every month but neither did it make any sense to buy something a few years old and start funding repair bills................

Fortune_Smiles

Hi there Mr B


The Bay is not my friend either. I use the following approach to make the de-cluttering less painful:

• If I think it will bring in £10 or over - Ebay
• If I think it will bring in £5 to £10 - FB/local sites
• If I think it will bring in £1 to £5 - car boot
• Anything worth less than £1 or that I think won't/or doesn't sell - charity shop

Anything that doesn't sell by the first method gets moved down the list until it hits charity shop.


If you started with the charity shop items it might bring the stash down to a more manageable level.


Or, if all that stuff is sucking the joy out of the world, take it all down to the charity shop and breathe out.


Fortune x

juststuff123

Try to remember that joy sucking feeling when you're shopping. It may prevent you from making a few purchases in the first place.

MrBloater

Started typing an update at stupid o'clock this morning but then the family woke up and so it vanished into the ether. But anyways, I have just checked back and it was a sunny Friday evening three weeks ago when I got the cleared funds and started upon this MFW journey. Time for me to take stock of how things have changed.

Credit Cards - despite my initial plans to keep a few of them, I now have none - except for a shared one with Mrs B (that I don't know the PIN for) which we use for the groceries and resultant points - which is being paid off in full each month, and the other one that we have shifted a few little balances because of its lower interest rate - and the plan is to pay off chunks of that to get it down to zero in the next few months. I have had a steady stream of letters from my former lenders expressing their regret at my departure - and it feels great to have a skinny wallet.

Savings - ISAs opened up, generic savings accounts,. Junior ISAs awaiting transfer forms to arrive, all opened up with nominal balances now, but ready to receive an influx of cash once the CC paid off in full, to provide the safety nets for international emergency travel, sickness or redundancy.

Mortgage - Happy with the rate and the fixed term and the online facilities aside from the overpayment features - which seem a bit clunky. But clunky I can live with cos I never had any idea what my previous mortgage's OP facilities were like as it was the furthest thing from my financial mind. Now it's the third closest thing to my financial mind (after paying off the CC and building the safety net of savings).

Pensions - Both Mrs B and I are lucky enough to be in a very favourable employee scheme and the projections are looking good from all angles. We have the capacity to overpay into it if we want but at the moment I cannot see either her or myself wanting to retire too much earlier than predicted. I'd like to think I have another 25 years of fulltime work in me - and I'm now really enjoying it again (I am so tempting fate by writing that. Somewhere a little hex is being put on me now...)

Fixed Costs - having been forensically through our expenditure on services, utilities, insurance etc. I am 95% certain I have got the best deals available for what we want. Some battles will be left for a more opportune time but every contract expiry date is now logged and there is no excuse of not being able to find the paperwork. And even the cars are no longer an elephant - there are a situation with a potential solution, but not at this current time as the financial penalties would be too high.

The Stuff - Got some brilliant ideas on how to deal with the tubs of despair in the shed of no return. Managed to acquire an even bigger tub today and tomorrow will attempt to fill that with things of discernable value that are worth another shot online. These items will then reside in the understairs cupboard - causing me to curse them everytime I get the hoover and hence galvanising me into shifting them. The remainder of the tubs can go with me and the kids to be firstly carbooted sometime over the summer, or else donated, either to Mrs B's school or the British Heart Foundation. I might also implement strict border controls on the shed, at the moment it appears the family consider it fair game for anything that can't find a home for inside. I might put a sign up outside warning my lot that any items found in the shed will be considered by the management to be donateable.

Mindset - Throughout my years over on DFW I was always fairly gung-ho about the debts, I put on a lot of bravado about them not being a major problem. Of course they were, but far easier to relay anecdotes of the odd folk I encountered on my early-morning runs than get to the heart of the matter. This time round I'm trying to get focused on the financial side of things - my other goals of weight loss and having a considerable amount of AFDs (hence my almost constant referring to having mugs of tea - meaning I can count back on the diary entries and realise I wasn't imbibing anything stronger) do not have to take centre-stage. My mindset is changing, my resolve to become mortgage-free is very very real - it takes a few weeks to break old habits and form new ones, and I'm getting very close.

Which leaves the other two elephants - but it's not so much about asking for help with them, as getting it written out down here about them. And that in itself will rid them of their elephaninity

Elephant 3 - Variable Expenditure
By variable expenditure I mean groceries, clothes, takeaways, haircuts, general tat like that. Thankfully we're not smokers or animal owners. My resolve to have lots of AFDs will have some minimal impact on the budget (I've never paid more than £7.50 for a bottle of wine and usually get stuff around the fiver mark). Clothing/Haircuts are going to be left as they are, it's not like the Bloaters are dripping in designer gear, and a few items of good quality are a better investment than a monthly visit to pick up more disposable rags from the lower end of the market. But where we can (and will) make some substantial savings is in our food consumption. And to that end, I started at 3am this morning (aided, as I am now, by my trusty mug of tea) to Inventorise the food cupboards and fridge. I love Excel, and when I realised I could make a new worksheet tracking the movement of food through the door, into the cupboards, and then either into our digestive systems or fast-tracked into the bin, I got a bit excited. My years in industry dealing with MRP are being put to good use here, everything's being tracked with its sell-by-date, and categorised into mealtimes. The next time the kids open the fridge and say "there's nothing for dinner" - I'll be able to call up the dinner list and tell them exactly what the options are. It will also allow us to have a far leaner system of storage - I've counted three packets of gluten-free spaghetti in the cupboards. This is the sort of inefficiency that finished off the British Motor Industry, we're going to be running a tight ship food-wise here at Bloater Towers - because at the moment we are throwing out too much stuff, so clearly we never should have bought it in the first place. I'd like eventually to go to exclusively online shopping - tying in the store cupboard system I am implementing here to logging our previous purchases online. There's probably an app somewhere that does it, but I'm busy playing with my spreadsheets at the moment (and if I get really into it, I'll start a database) but I think, conservatively, that I can shave around £200pcm off what we tend to spend on groceries without anyone noticing much of a difference. I'm also going to start being a voucher fiend - I love Extreme Couponing as a show and a concept, so I'm going to start digging deep to see what I can find.

Elephant 4 - Travel
The keen-eyed among you may have noticed that I appeared to go from being virtually debt-free to mentioning a credit card with a balance on it. Not a massive (by my standards) balance, but a balance nonetheless. And that balance was put on after the remortgage, because it's going to allow the kids to spend some time with their only cousin (plus hopefully be there at the birth of their new cousin), means Mrs B can spend some time with her sister. mother and extended family and I get to drive on the wrong side of the road on a remote island where you can turn on a red light and people don't know how to use the one roundabout in town. We're a transatlantic family, and it costs money to get over there, but, you know what, if this remortgage hadn't gone through, I'd have gone to Wonga and all those other bad guys and scraped the money together, because at the end of the day - family comes first, and you cannot put a price on that.

Angry_Bear

MrBloater wrote: »

... it feels great to have a skinny wallet.
... I love Extreme Couponing as a show and a concept, so I'm going to start digging deep to see what I can find.

If you ever feel nostalgia for the old fat wallet, you can always fill it up with loyalty cards .

I'd have gone to Wonga and all those other bad guys and scraped the money together, because at the end of the day - family comes first, and you cannot put a price on that.

Which means that it's critical that you work out how often you have/want to visit family and how much it will cost. Work out a monthly cost for that and pay it into savings as if you already had to pay for it on a credit card bill - at least you won't have to pay interest.