£67,031.92 is a frightening number indeed....

Treadingonplaymobil

A ramble for this evening...

I was contemplating our debt situation today - well, actually I was contemplating how stressed I am and wondering how to improve the situation, but it led to contemplating the debt. I've realised that the focus on the debt this year, and therefore the focus on working as much as possible (as well as spending as little as possible) has left me with an almost constant feeling of anxiety/guilt if I'm not working. Because I'm self employed, the more hours I work, the more I (generally) earn, and I've got into this weird cycle where I can't contemplate not working pretty much any hour of day or night when I am not actively engaged in something like cooking, sleeping or childcare (and even then I'll be trying to squeeze in bits of work while the DCs are occupied). Going out to see a friend works, but because I'm an introvert I find that mentally tiring even though I really enjoy it. I'm not really sure what the solution is to this, but it's become really apparent that this is happening, and it's not amazing for my mental health - I'm not depressed, but I can imagine that I would become so if I carried on as I am, as I have literally zero downtime. I'm not reading books, struggle to make half an hour more than once a week to knit, haven't watched a TV program of any description for six months or more. It's a little bonkers.

Obviously I need to keep earning, because we have an enormous debt to pay. And obviously as a self employed person with a variable income I can't cut my hours drastically because my income could fall through the floor in any given month, so if there isn't a bit of a buffer in my bank account then things could rapidly get even more stressful. I'm also trying to build up my website, so on top of the work that actually gains me an income, I'm putting in all the groundwork with that website to increase traffic so i can start making money from it, but I can't focus entirely on it as I need to keep doing the work that actually brings in money right now.

I'm hoping that the remortgage will happen (still no news on that front, not sure if that's good or bad, the broker did say it could take a few weeks), but I'm not sure I'll feel relaxed even then, as I know that I should keep on working as hard so that we can save that extra money for the extension/overpaying the debt.

I know the obvious answer is to lower my standards/make a change somewhere, but I'm genuinely not sure where - if I stop cooking food from scratch, our food bill goes up, if I work less then we obviously have less income, if I stop working on the website then I am killing off the chance of growing a more passive income and freeing myself from the work that feels like a huge ethical/moral compromise to me now.

I also have this big sense that the stress I have now is my 'punishment' for overspending, and actually there is no solution and we just need to keep on suffering until the debt is gone, because that's what we 'deserve'. That language is a little strong, but there is definitely a sense in my head that I have no right to complain about having to work hard now, because we made bad spending choices before.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, just getting my thoughts down in the hope they will coagulate into a meaningful plan to improve things.

To do today
1. start Christmas knitting. not done.
2. make chicken soup with leftovers. done.
3. make bolognese to freeze in portions - DC1 fancies taking in hot lunches. not done.
4. make more flapjacks for snacks. done.
5. catch up with work. done.
6. clear the ironing mountain (yeah, right). whatever.
7. order some Christmas presents for the DC. done, finally made a start.

To do this week
1. declutter and tidy utility room - it is such a dumping ground.
2. put advent calendar together.
3. do some Christmas shopping.
4. Christmas knitting.
5. pull out the Christmas decorations and see what we need - I have a vague recollection that we are totally lacking in house decorations, although we have some lovely tree decs. We are going to get a smaller tree this year though, so maybe I'll just use tree baubles throughout the house so they get used. Done, we're actually doing better than I expected.

To do this month
1. Keep the total spend at the budgeted level - it's high on YNAB this month (£3,842) as it includes the £470 paid off the MBNA card and all our savings pots are actually budgeted. This is not going well.
2. Keep a tight record of Christmas spends so I can ensure it sticks to budget as far as possible. Ongoing.
3. Keep beavering away at my business goals. Ongoing.
4. Make some candles - we've run out! And I know one person really wants another one for Christmas, so will add it to her hyacinth. Done! Although I'll probably use them up and need to make more before Christmas.

System

I know you have said previously that going to be an employee would be out of the question, but would this give you a better work life balance. Then your self employed work could be a small sideline , then when debt really gone down you could go back to self employment again.

The problem with your work it appeared to me a lot of it happens at home , so you can't differentiate between work and home., this adds to stress .

Please don't let the debt issue make you ill though , as the last thing you need to feel is that it's all to much so you give up. I hope what I have said isn't unhelpful , it's just what I see from an outsider .

Karonher

I cant add much, but as I am classed as self employed, I am always trying to do mystery shopping and online surveys/forums etc. I have just bought knitting needles and wool, and am going to start turning the laptop off at about 9.00 and just knit for a while. I know you knit already but if you set a time for it, you should get some time back.

groovychick69

I work full time shifts and have my own part time business. I too like you am focusing on what I can do all the time to build that business, make money/reduce debt. I do overtime at work when I can and we are also renovating our home so that keeps me constantly on the go. my mental health isnt great and I actually need to ring a work place counseller next week after a particularly back week last week. I can totally relate to your post TOPM - every day I get up thinking what can I sell today, can I pay a few more £'s off that credit card, has that invoice been paid, what can I eat from the freezer to avoid spending any money. It's totally draining and it doesn't matter how many times each day I check my "snowball" calculator the months till I'm debt free don't melt away. I feel uptight all the time and like you can't relax, I also don't sleep well due to shifts. You don't deserve to feel bad about any of this - please be kind to yourself. You made choices at the time that you thought were right, yes you/family created the debt but you will also solve it - it's a marathon not a sprint and unless you look after yourself your race will be over. Stay positive and keep going - we are all routing for.

armchairexpert

Hey TOPM, I hear you. I have been there/am there too, I haven't knitted in a year and I watch TV once a week. I know I don't have the same debt, but I do have money anxiety issues which makes it feel to me that I do have the debt/am one pay away from financial ruin/generally no sense of perspective.

I don't know if this helps, but I sat down and worked out a bunch of income goals. And at each goal I worked out how much of that money I would put towards time-savers, how much would be payable in tax, etc.

So for me that looks like:

Earn $3K/month to meet our expenses
Earn $4K/month = extra $750 in our pockets, divide that between mortgage overpayment $250, extra spending $250, time saving (dog walking, after school child care) $250
Earn $5K/month = extra $1K* in our pockets, as above but add $250 into my superannuation (pension).

I also:

Projected out the time line under which I can start to work more hours with kids getting older
Worked out how many hours I am willing to work now
Worked out a strategy to target my lowest-paying clients and replace each of them with a higher-paying client, and what the ceiling for that would be. I.e., there's obviously a point at which I can't keep charging more!
So that gave me a five year plan which looks like: I can work 25 hours a week for X years, this is the percentage by which I can increase my effective hourly rate each year, this is my income goal graph. After that I can increase my hours per week to 35, which means an extra Z dollars.

I realise this is a lot of detail, but it was precisely that level of detail that helped me. Because I could see that I am heading in the right direction, and that every gain is cumulative. The higher hourly rate now helps when I have more free time later. That sort of thing. And it helps me put a few conditions on my work/leisure time. If nothing comes up, my goal is to only work every second evening, so I'm only one day away from an evening where I can read or watch TV.

You know already that long term you need to build in that downtime, and it's better for you and better for the family if you do so. Nobody can keep going like this, and your financial state will be far worse if you crash and burn completely and suddenly there's no second income and you're all surviving on takeaway. But as an anxious over planner, the only way I could make myself do it was, well, going into far too much detail!

*This was also a useful exercise because it showed me where the marginal tax rates kicked in to make it less useful to earn more. I'm near the threshold over which I have to start paying back my

Treadingonplaymobil

Week 40: Day 5

Morning, thanks for all the supportive comments yesterday. A few things that came into my head while reading your replies...

- I have thought a lot about going back into paid employment. I just can't make the sums add up. Dh is away a lot for work these days, so I would have to be the one available for the children if they were sick etc, and paying for out-of-school childcare would eat up so much of what I would earn. I would struggle to find a job that would bring home that £350 that I manage most months, with the flexibility I need, especially when school holiday childcare is taken into account. I wasn't in a well paid industry before I stopped to have children, and I've been out of the job market for a decade.

- working from home is definitely an enormous part of the problem - it's so easy to just open up the laptop and grab five minutes here and there, which turns into more than five minutes of course.

- I am trying to set aside time to knit or read or whatever, but without fail I realise that I haven't done the laundry/made packed lunches/filled in a vital form for school/made an important phonecall, and by the time I've done that my precious booked in free time is gone.

- I haven't even been adding up our debt numbers recently, as I know the debt is going to increase rapidly in the month leading up to Christmas - there simply isn't anywhere else for the Christmas money to come from - so I don't want to look at what the debt is now and then be depressed when it's £1k higher in two months time. So I'm kind of going for an ostrich approach there, which means I'm not celebrating any successes, but also limiting the annoyance when the debt inevitably goes up. Not sure if that's the right approach or if I should nail down the numbers.

- I have sat down and worked out income goals, but I wonder if I have just been too ambitious, as I am just barely making them even with all the work I am doing. Those goals are not wildly impressive, but because I was stretched to my limit just making the bare minimum I needed each month, I feel like these goals have just formalised the fact that I need to push harder, work more, DO more. Maybe I need to readdress this goal setting and lower my expectations.

- I know that a part of the problem is struggling to figure out how I spend my time each day - I used to get so much housework done (laundry, ironing, batch cooking, deeper cleaning than just day to day kitchen/bathroom wipe down) while I had DC3 at home, which meant there was very little left to do in the evenings/weekends, but now I am working during the school day while she is at preschool that stuff either isn't getting done or is getting done in a mad rush during the day or in the evening. I feel like I have lost all sense of how much DH is doing/should be doing, and whether we have a fair divide, and how much we should be doing on weekends etc.

- My stress is at the point where I am getting up early to do yoga (as I have done for years) but only actually managing to do yoga about once a week, as the other mornings I am too stressed to think about taking half an hour out to do yoga, it seems like a waste of time. I recognise that this is counter productive and not helping, but can't seem to snap out of it.

- Another thing that is really bothering me in all this is that I don't feel I'm doing a great job with the DCs at the moment. I don't seem to have any time to just sit and spend time with them. After school it's clubs two evenings a week, the other evenings I'm trying to get something wholesome on the table so we can eat together as a family, and weekends I am usually working or we're away. I can't remember the last time I sat and did something crafty with them, or read a book to them during the day, or sat and played with animals. Which is also rubbish. This is one of my key priorities to improve (along with the key priorities of earning more, keeping the house more effectively, generally being superwoman... :eek: ).

- I have wondered if seeing a life coach or similar might help, but that feels like throwing more money away for no tangible benefit. I'm not really sure what I'm trying to achieve either. Making it ok that I'm so on the go? Making it so I'm doing less? Who is going to do the extra then? Prioritising? What would I drop?!

Hmmm. I'm really not sure where to take it from here to improve things, because the reality is still a c.£55k debt hanging round our necks. Which also makes me realise I have busted a gut for forty weeks to pay off something in the region of £3.5k, which isn't wildly impressive. Sigh. But I think I need to do something proactive to help get me out of this emotional rut.

Also I spent an hour making a quiche in a rush yesterday and realised once I'd cooked it I forgot to put any eggs in the mixture, so am fully expecting it to slop everywhere and be unusable when I cut it in a bit. Argh. Too much going on in my head!

Anyway, unsurprisingly I have lots to do today. DH gets home today, so at least I won't be managing the DCs single handed this evening on top of everything else - that definitely doesn't help. The house is messy because I've been on my own all week, and I also recognise that hugely impacts how in control I feel - having a messy house really really affects my mood.

To do today
1. make bolognese.
2. clear the laundry.
3. get DH to phone the swimming club to see if DC1 can move lessons (currently doing two clubs in one day and really struggling with it, but swimming is non-negotiable and the other is one he really enjoys).
4. ironing/put away clean laundry.
5. christmas knitting.
6. start making advent calendar.
7. make some headway on my contract work for the week. I need to get ahead with this this week or next, as I will be away for two days at the end of the month doing some other work (which will bring in an extra £300 or so this month, which is ace) and still need to get that contract work done for the last week of the month.
8. spend some more time thinking through how to improve my work/life balance, general achievement levels, general emotional state.

To do this week
1. declutter and tidy utility room - it is such a dumping ground.
2. put advent calendar together.
3. do some Christmas shopping.
4. Christmas knitting.
5. pull out the Christmas decorations and see what we need - I have a vague recollection that we are totally lacking in house decorations, although we have some lovely tree decs. We are going to get a smaller tree this year though, so maybe I'll just use tree baubles throughout the house so they get used. Done, we're actually doing better than I expected.

To do this month
1. Keep the total spend at the budgeted level - it's high on YNAB this month (£3,842) as it includes the £470 paid off the MBNA card and all our savings pots are actually budgeted. This is not going well.
2. Keep a tight record of Christmas spends so I can ensure it sticks to budget as far as possible. Ongoing.
3. Keep beavering away at my business goals. Ongoing.
4. Make some candles - we've run out! And I know one person really wants another one for Christmas, so will add it to her hyacinth. Done! Although I'll probably use them up and need to make more before Christmas.

System

TOPM you are a clever lady , you will work things out for yourself, you don't need a life coach. Maybe start with one small area first like the housework. Just say this week what doesn't get done in the morning etc isn't getting done.

Don't forget as well this is a stressful time of year, everyone rushing around like crazy and feeling guilty if things aren't right for Christmas.

If I lived round the corner I would say get that kettle on and let's have a chat about your worries , but thinking of you virtually if that helps .

wishingthemortgaheaway

Just a question.

How much do the children do to help out/look after themselves/ learn that running a house means everyone is a team?

One of the things I remember about my childhood was sorting the laundry with my mum. We'd collect it from the bedroom baskets, sort it into loads, then I'd hang up socks & undies and things on the aired, or pass pegs in the summer.
Then, when dry, pair socks, sort it all into piles and put the piles in the right person's room for them to put away.
It was a great social time, we'd have boogie to the radio, sing songs as loud as we could, listen to audio books. When I was older it's where we'd have the best 'teenage angst' conversations.
I learned how to do laundry (which is a thing as we've had 20 something lodgers who needed this life lesson) I got to spend quality time with mum and we had fun.

Mum (and dad) would often say 'if we do this together it will be twice as quick, then there is twice as long to... (insert something fun)

We had jobs from when we started walking. Simple things to start with, then getting more and more responsibilities. Even now Pickle tidies up his own toys before bedtime (and has done since he could crawl) puts his bowl & cup in the dishwasher (yes it's thrown in and I have to put it in the right place so it will actually get clean but still) and puts his shoes away when he takes them off.

Maybe your little ones could do something to help you out (or do a little more) and then you'll have more time to spend with them.

Treadingonplaymobil

wishingthemortgaheaway wrote: »

Just a question.

How much do the children do to help out/look after themselves/ learn that running a house means everyone is a team?

One of the things I remember about my childhood was sorting the laundry with my mum. We'd collect it from the bedroom baskets, sort it into loads, then I'd hang up socks & undies and things on the aired, or pass pegs in the summer.
Then, when dry, pair socks, sort it all into piles and put the piles in the right person's room for them to put away.
It was a great social time, we'd have boogie to the radio, sing songs as loud as we could, listen to audio books. When I was older it's where we'd have the best 'teenage angst' conversations.
I learned how to do laundry (which is a thing as we've had 20 something lodgers who needed this life lesson) I got to spend quality time with mum and we had fun.

Mum (and dad) would often say 'if we do this together it will be twice as quick, then there is twice as long to... (insert something fun)

We had jobs from when we started walking. Simple things to start with, then getting more and more responsibilities. Even now Pickle tidies up his own toys before bedtime (and has done since he could crawl) puts his bowl & cup in the dishwasher (yes it's thrown in and I have to put it in the right place so it will actually get clean but still) and puts his shoes away when he takes them off.

Maybe your little ones could do something to help you out (or do a little more) and then you'll have more time to spend with them.

This used to be something I was absolutely committed to, but I've found that the more stressed I get, the harder it seems to do a job slowly with help (because it is definitely slower in my house when the DCs first start helping with something, even if they get faster eventually). So much more manageable to just get it done and dusted and out the way, even though the net effect is less time with the DCs and me never stopping.

I also feel bad asking them to help when it feels like they get so little downtime - we are ferrying to and from clubs Monday and Tuesday evenings, they are at an after school club till 4:30 on a Wednesday, and we are often doing things on the weekend (not their choice, like DH has to take them out for the day because I have clients, or we are visiting friends for the weekend). I think the amount of activities they do needs rationalising at some point, as do our weekends. We did cut down, but I think we need to cut it further.

cocalls

i think the biggest thing you need to look at is your lack of sleep, if you natually get up at 4.30 (which i do as ive got advance stage sleep disorder so go to sleep early and get up early but thats what my body does, im not much fun at party's!) and you've had 8 hrs sleep then great but i'm thinking this isnt your natural body clock. You posted after 9 the other night then if you're getting up at 4.30 to not do Yoga i think this is something that you've got to give yourself a break from. Sleep is soooo important, this is probabaly why youre feeling stressed and unproductve. please look at this one thing and the other things will get a different perspective as you wont be feeling so tierd.