Ready to get back on the sensible train

Kebby

So we've now both been paid - husband had an extra £300 in overtime this month which is great - however unfortunately a chunk of this has gone on paying extra bits and bobs off that he added to the CC balance this month!! (since taken the card off him may I add!)

Had some more money come off the CC for Aus - so the grand total on the Barclaycard is at £10,375.81 - but this now means we only have an expected amount of £1,821 to pay for hotels etc whilst over in Australia, so still in a similar position as before.

Just waiting for all the accounts to settle down after paying everything off to see what we've got left to pay off the balance of the card - by working it out I make it just shy of £200, which would be fantastic, but I'll wait until all the payments have cleared just to be sure I haven't missed anything!

On another positive note - the husband's Xmas bonus has been announced at £360! We will be using £260 of this to top up our xmas present fund (unfortunately almost all of it is family, only giving ourselves a £30 present each!) So the remaining £100 will go towards our Aus spending money, this gets paid in a few weeks time. Yet to find out what my xmas bonus will be.. so still waiting on that surprise! Another surprise was an additional £40 cashback from Quidco once that's gone into the account it will go straight off the card. Also expecting another £25 from selling bits from around the house, so not doing too badly in this department!

We went to see my grandparents at the weekend and took them out for dinner as their xmas present, this worked out at only £25 for the 2 of them, so really not too bad. Also had a trip to Makro whilst we were there and bulk bought chicken, salmon, dishwasher tablets & washing liquid - so that should keep us going for a while, and works out a lot cheaper... £19.99 for 5kg of chicken :O

So to get to the update on the totals:

Owe parents: £0
Barclay Card: £10,375.81
Halifax card: £0

Savings for Aus:

Spending money £1200/£2000

It's frustrating to see the Barclaycard increase, however need to keep telling myself it's not because we're not doing well, it's because of the Aus hotels - just disheartening not seeing it decreasing!

Will update in a few days time when all the balances are settled

Kebby

Hi everyone,

Sorry it's been a while since I updated this. Australia was absolutely amazing and I'm gutted to be back. Going to give you a recap of how things have been going, some really positive things happened, and a couple of negative but things are looking good!

Positive

• I got a huge unexpected bonus of £1,250
• I got a pay rise of £1k
• Husband got a 1.5% cost of living pay rise
• Husband due his second 'half yearly' bonus - eagerly awaiting figure, it's usually more than the one before xmas.
• Had a win with a boat trip in Aus - they insisted we had paid in full when we had actually only paid a deposit. We did argue with them but that was that - so saved around £500!!

Negatives

• Spent a lot more than anticipated in Aus, so this came out of my lovely bonus
• Bloody cat ended up costing us money whilst staying with my parents - to the tune of £85
• Our brand new grass appears to have ruined itself whilst we've been away and we're now having to look at costs to get this corrected - it's looking quite small numbers at the moment as a grass company are quite confident they can fix it with low cost treatments (we're talking £20 at a time, so not too bad)
• I may or may not have burnt our bedroom carpet with some stupid curlers (I've since returned them!!) Leaving this for the moment, but I'm devastated

So down to the numbers - we ended up being able to pay £600 off the card with the remainder of my bonus, and a further £800 from our end of January pay.

Taking our grand total card debt too: £10,595.17

So despite the huge number, it's actually nearly £2k less than I was anticipating after our Aus trip, so I'm pretty pleased! We're forecast to pay off another £750 at the end of Feb, and also have the other halfs bonus to look forward to later this month, but amount is currently unknown. Feeling quite positive at the moment and hopeful we're soon going to see it chipping away! :T

Oh and one other thing - I've started using a company called Abel & cole that deliver boxes of fruit and veg to your door - got the first box half price and a free £10 voucher to spend of 'essentials' such as milk etc. The fruit and veg seems to be quite reasonably priced, so hoping this might help to bring our food costs down!

Will update again at the end of the month when final figures come in. Hope everyone else had a lovely Christmas and New Year!

Kebby

Had a pretty good month - despite forgetting to put aside some money for some friends coming down for the weekend, and spending £150 :O - thanks to selling an old table & chairs for £100, and having 1 month of no council tax to pay (£194), we were still able to pay off over £900 from the card.

Happy with our progress, hoping we can keep going and have this card debt paid off by the end of the year! Other half has been doing lots of overtime this month so far, so hopefully we'll have another really good amount to pay off at the end of March.

New balance is now £9,612

Kebby

So it's a bad month for spending money on renewals and bits - House insurance, car insurance, car tax (only £30 though!!), car service, annual cat jabs at the vets and not to mention our Sky subscription is going back up to full price!

But as we save for everything except for the cats jabs (really should do that..) throughout the year, it's really nice to be able to just pay these things knowing we've got the money for them! Something I would thoroughly recommend to anyone if they don't already do it.

House insurance, we had £250 put aside for - and I managed to get a bargain at £205, and also £40 cashback on Quidco! So the extra £45 is coming off the card balance, along with the cashback when it comes in. We also received the husband's bonus of £75 - so have just paid off an extra £120 in total from the card balance in total taking us down to: £9,492

Things seem to be going really well and although I know we could probably do better, I'm happy that we're managing to keep the balance down consistently every month. After pay day this month we'll be into the 8k's which is really nice and not something I expected to see this early on! Also the other half has done A LOT of overtime so far this month, so will be really nice to see what that adds up to and really hit the card hard this month.

In terms of our car insurance, it's gone up around £80 from last year, for no apparent reason, and our renewal price is actually the cheapest I've been able to find so far which is frustrating. Going to give it one last ditch attempt and give them a call to try and get them to lower it, otherwise just going to have to suck it up - we can afford to with what we have set aside, it's just out of principle I don't want to pay it! Also going to see whether we can blag Sky into reducing our monthly bill, unfortunately it's not something the husband is willing to have taken away!

Hope everyone is all doing well

Kebby

Hi everyone,

Managed to get a bargain on our car insurance in the end - cheapest I could find originally was actually our renewal price (I know right!?) at £418. But last year it was only £333, and nothing has changed in my opinion since then, so did a little haggling on the phone, they applied a £41 discount and then we discovered that although both of our cars are insured with the same company we weren't receiving the multicar discount, so the price then dropped to £334.02 - so pretty happy with that!

Husband has been working super hard and did lots of overtime over the bank holiday. Just paid off a satisfying £1250 from the credit card taking the balance to: £8,382.82. Also just had confirmation of some more cashback from Quidco - to the tune of £104 So once we've got this in the account will also be coming off the card. And we've still got the other halfs bonus to be announced later in the month. So things are looking great, meaning next month we'll be under the £8k mark, a position I didn't think we'd be in by this point.

On a slight downside, our other car is due a service now and the headlight has also just gone, it's got a lot of miles on it and having a little trouble with it turning over a little in the mornings - hoping the service will sort it out, but our main worry is that the clutch might go at any point with the amount of miles it has on it. Hoping it will hold out until we're in a better position with the credit card and we can sell it and get a new one. A new clutch would be around £1k - so really really don't want this to happen. Fingers are crossed extremely hard!!

Swash

Great news you're in the 8k's!