Getting Debt-Free despite Struggling with MH problems

EssexHebridean

Good news on you getting shot of the overdrafts - I think that is very much the right decision as you'll see from my comment on your other thread.

I'll cast a proper look over your new SOA* in a moment but commenting first on your good/bad above I think to be blunt you need to give yourselves a bit of a shake over the "too tired to cook" thing. I presume that your wife is working part time to judge from the low contribution to the bills? Regardless - a lot of the world works a full day, is tired when they get home but still manages to prepare a meal for their families - and a lot of that is down to planning stuff that while good, healthy and essentially cooked from scratch, is also quick.

Batch cooking at weekends and stashing things in the freezer means you can have "Home made ready meals" with a fraction of the financial cost AND a fraction of the salt & sugar you'll find in many commercial versions. You can also pack far more of your 5-a-day in that way too. A slow cooker could be a great investment if you do not already have one - there's few better smells to walk in through the door to after a long day at work than a stew or casserole ready for eating. Salads are simple to throw together and can be made heartier and more filling with addition of something like steamed baby new, or baked jacket potatoes. Omelettes - same applies - quick to cook too. If you've steamed baby tatties for the salad one night, cook extra and throw some, chopped up, into your omelette to make it a frittata instead? Have a look at the Old Style board for more ideas - those guys are masters at this stuff!

On the personal entertainment budget - does it help to compare how your debt has made you feel in terms of mental health & wellbeing, and strike a value of which is more relevant to you to deal with right now? Once you are free of debt personal spending comes guilt free, is also worth focusing on...

*Got proper confused when I tried to quote that to comment and it wouldn't do it - then spotted you'd removed it!

wordswords

> I think to be blunt you need to give yourselves a bit of a shake over the "too tired to cook" thing. I presume that your wife is working part time to judge from the low contribution to the bills? Regardless - a lot of the world works a full day, is tired when they get home but still manages to prepare a meal for their families - and a lot of that is down to planning stuff that while good, healthy and essentially cooked from scratch, is also quick.

We both suffer from our own (quite severe) health problems. I also hate cooking, I'm vegetarian and the wife is not which makes it more difficult, and she is finding starting a full-time job as a cleaner difficult, but we are going to address issue as takeaway food is expensive and not good. What we've going to do is get prepared meals from https://www.prepperfect.co.uk. We've tried then and they are healthy and pretty good, and at £4 / meal, well within our budget for an evening meal.

We all have goals. I could do something about the entertainment spending.. will have to see. The culture I'm in at work and the hobbies I persuse are all quite spendy, but I have just about finished building my music studio in my house now, which is what I promised I would do to put up with the extra stress of this job, so there is no reason why I would need to spend more on that.

I could have a massive clearout of things I don't use anymore and sell a lot of stuff, that would help and free space for more simple living.

At the moment I spend a lot of money on textbooks and tools for work and self-improvement, which I see as a reasonable cost as it is helping my career, so I don't see that going down. I also spend a fair bit of money on vinyl and CDs as I collect music - I could cut that down a bit.

Transport.. that could be reduced. I get Ubers because it works out a lot cheaper than owning your own car where I live, and I don't really like taking the bus or the tram as it's too busy. However for regular commuting I only need to be in work 2-3 days a week at the moment so could just get the bus.

>On the personal entertainment budget - does it help to compare how your debt has made you feel in terms of mental health & wellbeing, and strike a value of which is more relevant to you to deal with right now? Once you are free of debt personal spending comes guilt free, is also worth focusing on...

I am not really that worried about my current level of debt (although I certainly was before). In the space of two years I have brought it down from 12k to 5k, and that 5k is in a personal loan that I'm paying off, and can easily afford to pay off each month, although I am looking to wipe it out. In terms of my personal entertainment spending - yes it does definitely increase my happiness by quite a lot. I wish I could find other things that could fill that void but at the moment I haven't found anything that helps as much. The thing is, it has to be sustainable though.

If I stay at the current company I am due another £2800 bonus in October, so that can go towards paying off the loan. From this month I will be putting £100 / month into an emergency fund account which I have just setup today.

My current gameplan is to try to move to a less stressful job after October, which will mean less money, but as I will mostly have paid off my debt by then it should be much more manageable.

EssexHebridean

Fair enough - there doesn't seem to be a lot of £4 main meals on that site but perhaps I'm not looking in the right place or you have a code. Those sort of sites have one huge advantage which is that if you find something that you like, and is simple to prepare, you can almost certainly buy the ingredients and prep it yourself in the future, so hopefully you can use it as a kickstarter for actually cooking a bit more going forwards. I presume you've realised also that by the time your other food (lunches, breakfasts, snacks, drinks) are taken into account even if you use solely £4 options on there you're probably going to end up spending at least as much as you do currently on groceries, if not more?

Something that does stand out - unless you have cropped a lot of income between your last SOA and now there is a good surplus on your monthly income -v- expenditure, yet you're saying you've only just set up an account for an Emergency Fund - that surplus money (over £12k a year as at the last SOA) has obviously been going somewhere, so do you in fact have an EF already in real terms, in the form of other savings, but are just not thinking of it in that way?

The personal entertainment budget has to be largely subjective - what one person feels is "a lot" someone else feels is "just about right" and you're on a good income, with a surplus even allowing for a high entertainment budget. If it were me I'd want to screw it down, get rid of that last loan and start getting a lump into savings/start overpaying the mortgage to get that gone sooner, purely for peace of mind. Reaching the point when you no longer owe anyone else a penny is not to be underestimated, particularly if it cane be done without needing to cut things to the bone as your income would allow. You might want to think about budgeting specifically for holidays, as particular in a high stress job some time away can sometimes be pretty much vital.

The move to a lower stress job sounds like a very good long term plan!

wordswords

>Fair enough - there doesn't seem to be a lot of £4 main meals on that site but perhaps I'm not looking in the right place or you have a code. Those sort of sites have one huge advantage which is that if you find something that you like, and is simple to prepare, you can almost certainly buy the ingredients and prep it yourself in the future, so hopefully you can use it as a kickstarter for actually cooking a bit more going forwards.

As I said, we don't need to cook, we chose not to cook, so we don't have to cook I agree that it would be more frugal in the long run but really not something either of us want to worry about at the moment.

> I presume you've realised also that by the time your other food (lunches, breakfasts, snacks, drinks) are taken into account even if you use solely £4 options on there you're probably going to end up spending at least as much as you do currently on groceries, if not more?

On groceries yes, but not on takeaways, which are averaging a good £50-£100 a week at the moment, so want to get that down. It's healthy takeaways but still - not necessary. Groceries are much cheaper.

>Something that does stand out - unless you have cropped a lot of income between your last SOA and now there is a good surplus on your monthly income -v- expenditure, yet you're saying you've only just set up an account for an Emergency Fund - that surplus money (over £12k a year as at the last SOA) has obviously been going somewhere, so do you in fact have an EF already in real terms, in the form of other savings, but are just not thinking of it in that way?

The amount not mentioned on the SOA goes mostly on general expenses or things that come up that we need. For example this month we need to get a plumber in, a few months earlier we needed a new washing machine.. etc etc. I have a 3 bedroom semi-detached house that had needed quite a bit done to it. Outisde the SOA is also £9000 in bonuses after tax per year in my current job, which I've mostly used to pay off debt as well as get things like an ergonomic chair although last year I did spend about 50% on equipoment for my home studio. This year has been a good 80% on debt though as I'm targetting it more.

>The personal entertainment budget has to be largely subjective - what one person feels is "a lot" someone else feels is "just about right" and you're on a good income, with a surplus even allowing for a high entertainment budget. If it were me I'd want to screw it down, get rid of that last loan and start getting a lump into savings/start overpaying the mortgage to get that gone sooner, purely for peace of mind. Reaching the point when you no longer owe anyone else a penny is not to be underestimated, particularly if it cane be done without needing to cut things to the bone as your income would allow.

That is good general advice but as you said, everyone is different. I'm focusing on wiping out debt and building an emergency fund first, and then I might go further and aim to be mortgage free. Most people I know really don't seem that strict with money, so I find the fact that you can aim (and achieve) a mortgage free existance early on in your life to be quite a outlier concept and one which is not inline with the spending habits I have been brought up with, and my experience with similar people with mental health problems. Not to say that it isn't 100% worth persuing though.

>You might want to think about budgeting specifically for holidays, as particular in a high stress job some time away can sometimes be pretty much vital.

We take trips to my parents house on the coast quite a bit, and to visit friends in the South, which ticks the 'holiday' box for us. Wife doesn't like travelling that much.

>The move to a lower stress job sounds like a very good long term plan!
The stress is not as bad as it used to be but yes - that is the plan. Have to balance that up against loss of income though.

EssexHebridean

wordswords wrote: »

The amount not mentioned on the SOA goes mostly on general expenses or things that come up that we need. For example this month we need to get a plumber in, a few months earlier we needed a new washing machine.. etc etc. I have a 3 bedroom semi-detached house that had needed quite a bit done to it. Outisde the SOA is also £9000 in bonuses after tax per year in my current job, which I've mostly used to pay off debt as well as get things like an ergonomic chair although last year I did spend about 50% on equipoment for my home studio. This year has been a good 80% on debt though as I'm targetting it more.

The point of an SOA or indeed any sort of budget is that it covers all expected expenditure, and the purpose of an emergency fund is to cover unexpected stuff that occurs (in your examples above, both the plumber and the washing machine could fall into this category) and could not reasonably have been foreseen - so it may be a good plan to work on that SOA a little more to see a true picture. That's a heck of a lot of cash every year that's been going outside of your budget - you could buy a brand new car annually for that (but please don't!), just for a bit of perspective! Bonuses and overtime are things that usually should fall outside stated income on an SOA/Budget so that is absolutely correct - the key thing there is that they are then used consciously and paying down debt with them is a brilliant way to do that so you're bang-on with that one. :T Essentially though - stuff that you need should be on the SOA. Stuff that you want can be budgeted under "entertainment" for example, but should still be budgeted - otherwise you're really just fooling yourself that you're managing your money.

wordswords wrote: »

That is good general advice but as you said, everyone is different. I'm focusing on wiping out debt and building an emergency fund first, and then I might go further and aim to be mortgage free. Most people I know really don't seem that strict with money, so I find the fact that you can aim (and achieve) a mortgage free existance early on in your life to be quite a outlier concept and one which is not inline with the spending habits I have been brought up with, and my experience with similar people with mental health problems. Not to say that it isn't 100% worth persuing though.

Mortgage freedom was a bit of a strange concept to me too, as like you my background is very much from an environment where this was not something people did, or if they did it was as a result of an inheritance or some other form of windfall, not just from hard work and going without to achieve that aim. As for the mental health problems, I can certainly assure you that it IS entirely possible to achieve MF'dom in spite of that. 13 years rather than 25 is a MUCH nicer time to be paying a mortgage for, I promise you. (And we were on a FAR lower income than you at the time, too) - the added quality of life and peace of mind you get from being free of all debt is also extremely beneficial to MH as well, in my, and many others, experience, if only because it takes away a lot of the "what if" stress that can occur when things are bad.

I agree with you that focusing on your mortgage is not something to be done right now - the debt certainly should come first - but equally don't just dismiss any thought of OP'ing the mortgage in the long-term as "not something people like me do" - it is something that ANYONE can do, and reap the benefits from.