First attempt at going debt free...and hopefully last!

Kitten868

I'm a newbie too. I can't see where you £400 a month goes on the SOA - I'm on my phone. £100 on food and £50 on clothes. Is there anyway to reduce this until you're sorted financially?
I luckily haven't lost out financially to stupid boyfriends, mines from the car from hell (turned out it was an illegal crashed car). So I don't have anything to show for it but regardless have done really well with eBay. Would that help you? Enables me to make payments between pay days which helps me keep going. I have a list for my debts where I focus on the soonest one first then just make minimum payments on the rest. Again would this fit your debts? X

Bex1989

HI Kitten, thanks for your post and sorry for the late reply! I was at my boyfriend's over the weekend and while I was able to read my updates, I wasn't able to post because he gives me the frowny face if I'm on my phone too much in his company

Realistically, I should redo my SOA. I did it before I'd properly looked at my budget, and guesstimated a lot of it. So in truth, I budget perhaps £10 a week for food (that covers lunches at work and breakfast) then any other meals out or getting a takeaway if I'm at my boyfriends comes out of my "allowance" that I'll be giving myself of £200 a month, which I really won't spend all of, I don't imagine. It'll be a bit of trial and error for the first few months until I get into my groove with pay slips!

How horrible about your car! I can't believe how many people are willing to endanger other people to make a bit of money.

As far as eBay goes, I've got a week's holiday booked off work as annual leave in about a fortnight, so my plan is to do just that - sort through all of my belongings and see if any of it is worth going on eBay or the like. I also really need to have a proper clear out anyway...I'm such a hoarder!


Xx

Bex1989

Good morning MSE folks!
Ugh, getting that late bus home from my boyfriend's last night was such a good idea at the time, but now that I'm about to leave for work, I realise that 5 hours sleep probably really won't cut it for dealing with the workload and the people in the lab today :rotfl:

On the plus side, I have my lunch and snacks for today packed, and have filled a big 1L water bottle full of tap water so if all goes to plan, today should be an NSD for sure! Although...I should probably nip into one or other of the budget German foodstores I'm lucky enough to have within walking distance and purchase some lunch things for the rest of the week...and also cereal, since the packet I last bought seems to have depleted in the cupboard. Surely there's some sort of cereal that my 19 year old brother wont nom his way through?! This needs to be addressed, I can't afford to feed both him and myself :rotfl:

Happy Monday everyone, hope your week gets off to a good start! :j

Bex1989

I went grocery shopping for the first time today since starting my budget, and for the first time since being a student, I made a list and followed it to the letter, no deviations. I got a weeks worth of lunch/dinner stuff for while at work (when I'm on a late shift, which is 12-8, I take enough for two meals because I have roughly an hour commuting time either end of my working day); consisting of cold meat, cheese, bread, tomatoes, apples, yogurts and a couple of tins of soup. I also picked up some ibuprofen and cold & flu tablets because I've been feeling decidedly achey and snuffly since Sunday morning! My total came to £7.37 which isn't bad at all, since I'd budgeted £10. So 63p of that change has gone into my sealed jar, the rest I'll keep in my purse just in case...I'd rather have a couple of quid in my purse to spend rather than use my chip and pin. Otherwise I'll be tempted to overspend!

I think tomorrow I'll be nipping into the co-op on my way to my boyfriend's, maybe I'll get lucky and get something for tea reduced...I also saw a poster outside the shop near me tonight - has anyone taken advantage of their £5 meal deal? It looks pretty good!

Bex1989

Massively overspent during the past couple of days while staying at my boyfriend's - on the usual suspects, beer and takeaways! I bought my weekly bus ticket today too, costing £28, so that leaves me with £20 to last me until pay day, which is Wednesday. So, minimal spending over the weekend, I already have enough food from my grocery shop to prevent me having to buy lunches at work next week, and I should hopefully even have some cash left over on pay day...even if it's just a fiver, it'll be more than I've left on pay day in years! By this point I'm usually borrowing the odd tenner from family members.

Positive thinking!

I also emptied the loose change from my purse as soon as I got in from work tonight (99p!) so that's gone into my sealed jar. I'm looking forward to my first pay day since making the decision to become debt free..so I can start inputting things into my spreadsheet, and watch the debt totals go down

Hope everyone is having a good week x

Bex1989

After my fails with spending earlier in the week, I'm happy to say that I had a complete no spend weekend! My OH bought everything that I potentially would have spent money on, and while I don't expect him to do it all the time, it was really nice to feel like I'm being looked after for a change, and of course nice that he's understanding and supporting my goals of being debt free! He's even said he wants to get a sealed pot of his own so we can have a wee competition to see who manages to save the most over the course of the year!

I have a week's annual leave coming up, so hopefully most of those days will be no-spend days. There'll be one or two where I'll be paying a bus/train fare to see OH, but other than that my plan is simply to spend time at home, declutter a little bit, maybe sort some stuff to sell online...then binge watch Supernatural and play some World of Warcraft

Still three days to go at work before that, though. I have enough sandwich stuff to do lunches until then, so I shouldn't have to spend any money over the next few days anyways.

A small victory today too - on Friday as I was getting out of my workmate's car (she was nice enough to give me a lift to my boyfriend's since it was freezing cold!) I ripped the inside leg of my second last pair of jeans...and normally I'd be going straight out to replace them as I very rarely buy clothes, and literally have 2-3 pairs of jeans that I cycle through. Instead, when I got home this evening, I raked around my wardrobe and tried on some jeans that are now too big because of a 2st weight loss earlier this year...I can keep them up with a belt, and hopefully the remaining pairs will last until Christmas time, then I can go clothes shopping with any Christmas money I get!

I do hope everyone has had a good weekend...back to reality tomorrow! X

Bex1989

Good morning

Yesterday could have been disastrous spending wise, but I reined it in as I felt it was disaster enough as it was...and decided that I really need to learn to drive! I take a bus to work every morning, and usually it's running like clockwork, which is great because it's a service that connects two major hospitals, running through most of the towns in between. But yesterday, I was two and a half hours late for work! My usual bus didn't show...so I called my boss and told her I was running late due to buses, and would be in as soon as I could. I figured I'd wait for the next one, if for whatever reason my usual had disappeared off the face of the earth. Except...the next one didn't show either! By which point I was cold, wet, and very fed up. So I called work again, and told them I was going to try other services and maybe bus hop my way to work...I got there eventually, and didn't need to make the time back, which was nice!

Until 5pm came, and OH walked me to the bus stop outside work and waited with me. And waited, and waited...I eventually sent him on his way home because he was absolutely freezing and still had a 20 minute walk ahead of him. 40 minutes later my bus did turn up. Apparently, the cause of all the hassle was that some unfortunate person had put the wrong diesel into a whole fleet of buses in the depot and they'd all been breaking down all day! I did get home in the end though, so all's well.

Normally I would have been straight into Costa (or the supermarket for some wine!) to cope with the stress but I decided against, must save the pennies!

Pay day tomorrow too, and I still have £15 left over! Yay!

moneycantbuyyouhappiness

Well done Bex you are doing really well :T

All these small changes don't seem like much but they really add up x

Bex1989

Thanks moneycantbuyyouhappiness :beer: x

Well, it's pay day, and I woke up a whole 15 minutes before my alarm because I was so excited to see some debt disappear! :rotfl:

First to go was PDL #1, it's now sitting at £0, never to be opened again! I also had approx. £60 extra on my pay due to working a few weekends, but my sister has asked for her Christmas present early (she couldn't decide what she wanted so I was just going to give her cash)...I had budgeted to give her the present off of my next pay, but she's decided she wants to use it towards a tattoo she's getting on the 7th, so I'll just give her the cash for now, and use the budgeted amount from next month to make a couple of extra payments

I also have another two Christmas presents to buy this month. I was going to get my parents a bottle each (gin and whiskey respectively) from a local distillery that my OH and I went on a tour of a while back. But looking at their shop online this morning, for £5 extra each I can get them a wee gift set which includes glasses, and another tour for the gin set! So I'll maybe see if my sister wants to go halfers on those, since she was considering a gin tour for mum anyway. Means more savings for me, too!

Anyways, off to update my sig :j to reflect one less debt! Hope everyone is having a great week :beer:

Bex1989

Isn't it nice when after a few bad relationships, you get into a really good one, and the little nice things they do for you are so much more noticeable? :happyhear I went to my OH's after work last night, he bought some food and drinks on the walk up from the lab, and was so surprised when I handed him money for my half! He actually said, "But Bex, you're supposed to be paying off your debts!" I love that he's paying attention to what I'm doing, I know that might sound a little odd but I'm so used to going on about X Y or Z for literally months, then an ex giving me a confused look weeks later, having had no clue about what I'm on about because they've not been listening! :rotfl:

He also made the mistake of asking about my budget spreadsheet. I got very excited and started to describe it to him in great detail...until I noticed he was looking like a deer in the headlights, and he made the observation that women seem to be able to split up a chunk of money and assign it to a task, whereas men just have money until they don't! Apparently I'm starting to remind him of his mother. I don't know what that means for him, but his mum is pretty awesome so I'm taking it as a compliment! :rotfl:

No NSD today, it's my first day of my holiday so I decided to treat myself to a few of my favourite IPA beers, a packet of munchies...and when I was in the shop my dad texted me to ask me to bring home a loaf of bread to have with tea. So an £8.99 spending today, and the £1.01 change has gone straight into my savings jar. I'm looking after my mum's shop tomorrow as a favour because she's always so busy at this time of year, I thought I should use at least one of my days off productively she won't pay me for it, which of course I don't mind (it's times like these that it's important for me to reiterate that I don't pay any digs or contribute in any way to the household!) however she often gives me £5 to get my lunch, which is always appreciated Then this weekend, OH is working Saturday, so I'll be going out for lunch with some old workmates, then heading through to spend the night at his. Then home on Sunday night, followed by 3 more days off work, hopefully NSDs since I have loads of Supernatural to catch up on before my MediaHint expires (not renewing, as if I can finish SPN, I'll have a few series of shows on UK netflix to watch before having to use the US version again!), and plenty to do on World of Warcraft! :cool: