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

reality_check

The good news is that the food budget is totally within your control and savings can def be made. I don't believe that eating healthy costs more, just need to buy what's on offer with fruit mostly, rather than what you fancy.

Here's to a great June, I need one myself after May too xx

Honeysucklelou2

Well done...at least the figure is going down and 3k in 5 months is an achievement:j

Treadingonplaymobil

Thanks for all the supportive comments everyone, it really does mean a lot.

Other thoughts for today...

Extension plans
In short, we have realised that we're going to need to extend our house before we have paid off all our debt. DS1 is almost 9, and sharing a room with his younger siblings. He is totally uncomplaining about that fact (indeed, never mentions it - he has always shared with them), but we feel that eventually he's going to totally hate it and we'll have a rebellion on our hands. And then we'll have a similar problem with DS2 (6y now) and DD (3yo) in a few more years. Obviously if we can't make 4 bedrooms then we can't, but we've been pencilling out designs and we think we have the space to make four small bedrooms in our house with a fairly modest extension (we have the space to make three now, as the DCs' bedroom is huge). We could also use some more living space, but that's less pressing - our house is a dormer bungalow, so bigger downstairs than upstairs. I can see that we'll outgrow it in the next 5 years or so though. The jump up to a 3-4 bed house would be at least £100,000 round here, so we think we can do better extending than trying to buy a bigger house, and the location of this one is just perfect.

Obviously, none of this extending lark is remotely feasible with our current debt situation, so we have been number crunching today with a view to how to make it work. In broad terms, we know we'd be looking at £60k for a big two storey extension, and £10k for a rear dormer window (which would give us three bedrooms), so we think we're probably looking at a number somewhere in between (say, £45k) for a small two storey extension plus a larger single storey extension, which would give us four modest bedrooms and a decent sized space downstairs to make up for smallish rooms. Frankly, that might as well be £450k in terms of how feasible it is right now, but it's concentrated our minds a little to try to crunch down our debt over the coming 12-24 months, and at that stage, realistically, we're going to be adding a crapload of secured and unsecured debt in order to make the extension happen. It's a difficult thing to accept - that the debt will go up again after all this work to drive it down - but realistically we cannot expect our three DC to be sharing a room into their teens, and that would be the case if we didn't get the work done on the house.

Our first step is going to be to talk to an architect, to see what kinds of plans might be possible, which will inform the overall budget, so we've got a couple coming to the house in the next couple of months, and hopefully that will help to give us more of a handle on the numbers (I know a builder who will give us very ballpark figures once we have plans). I'm not sure where we'll go from there to be honest, but I think it's clear that we need to get the debt down as much as possible so that we have as many options as possible in the next couple of years.

This is all long term thinking, but I have been stressing about the thought of adding to the debt, and the '!!!!!! it, I might as well keep spending if we're going to be in debt even longer' way of thinking has been sneaking up on me, so I needed to crunch the numbers in order to give myself a reality check.

0% deals
We are going to try to move one of our cards onto a new 0% this week, fingers crossed the application is approved this time (rejected a month ago, but DH thinks he made a mistake in the application). If it doesn't work we'll be looking at a more depressing repayment plan, but at least we can afford repayments and it will keep going down.

food shopping
I need to go back to putting my shopping list onto mysupermarket each week - I found it much easier to move things around and rejig the menu plan to keep the price down when doing that - it's crept up in the last 6 weeks as I have abandoned it, thinking I had mastered budget food shopping. Clearly not :rotfl:

GeorgianaCavendish

On the food front, have you tried the frozen smoothie packs from Aldi/Tesco/ Waitrose / Ocado? I've found these to be a much cheaper way of getting a good fix of greens than using fresh veggies or buying green smoothies ... and nice and refreshing as they are so cold.

Silver_Queen

I'm no expert when it comes to extending the house, but I've watched enough crappy daytime TV to know that oftentimes, these things don't go by the budget. Also, I assume that you would have to continue living in the house whilst the extension work happens, do you think you would be able to manage? Especially seeing as your job sounds like impressions are very important! Hope I'm not being too much of a downer but I'm just genuinely curious, but definitely have no knowledge in this area!

Cherryfudge

Looking at the relative ages of your children, there are I think six years approx. between the oldest and the youngest, and both the older ones are boys - so would a separate room for your little girl work? The boys could perhaps continue to share the huge room, if you boxed clever with using furniture as dividers or having a stud wall to make it into two rooms?

It could be cheaper! There were three of us (2 girls then a boy) in an old house with just two biggish bedrooms. My Dad was clever with carpentry and divided the two rooms into four, so my parents had one, my sister and I shared and my brother had his own room. The other room was for guests but eventually became mine.

Just trying to save you the odd 20 grand:rotfl:. not knowing your home or children or the future I've no way of knowing if it would work out.

dawnybabes

I buy frozen avocado halves from tesco - saves me a fortune

Treadingonplaymobil

dawnybabes wrote: »

I buy frozen avocado halves from tesco - saves me a fortune

Tell me more! Aren't they brown and slimy when defrosted? Do you only use them in smoothies?

Cherryfudge wrote: »

Looking at the relative ages of your children, there are I think six years approx. between the oldest and the youngest, and both the older ones are boys - so would a separate room for your little girl work? The boys could perhaps continue to share the huge room, if you boxed clever with using furniture as dividers or having a stud wall to make it into two rooms?

It could be cheaper! There were three of us (2 girls then a boy) in an old house with just two biggish bedrooms. My Dad was clever with carpentry and divided the two rooms into four, so my parents had one, my sister and I shared and my brother had his own room. The other room was for guests but eventually became mine.

Just trying to save you the odd 20 grand:rotfl:. not knowing your home or children or the future I've no way of knowing if it would work out.

We could feasibly get away with the boys sharing and a little room for the girl (would still need some kind of extension for the extra room, as we couldn't split their room and still have room for 3 I think), but if we're extending anyway I'm not sure how much we'll save just having a tiny extension vs a slightly bigger one. I'm hoping the architect will help with all these decisions though.

GeorgianaCavendish wrote: »

On the food front, have you tried the frozen smoothie packs from Aldi/Tesco/ Waitrose / Ocado? I've found these to be a much cheaper way of getting a good fix of greens than using fresh veggies or buying green smoothies ... and nice and refreshing as they are so cold.

I haven't tried these - I'm not a bit smoothie drinker to be honest, but maybe I need to change my ways! The DC would be happy, I'm sure, they love smoothies.

Treadingonplaymobil

Silver_Queen wrote: »

I'm no expert when it comes to extending the house, but I've watched enough crappy daytime TV to know that oftentimes, these things don't go by the budget. Also, I assume that you would have to continue living in the house whilst the extension work happens, do you think you would be able to manage? Especially seeing as your job sounds like impressions are very important! Hope I'm not being too much of a downer but I'm just genuinely curious, but definitely have no knowledge in this area!

I don't have the answers either!

I think really we have to accept whatever we need to do to make the house ongoingly liveable. We are a family of five in about 800sq ft, of which some is used for my business, so we definitely need more space one way or another. I'm happy with small-space-living, but we need to be realistic about how small we can go. I am emphatically not inspired by those YouTube videos of families of 8 living in a 40ft trailer! Big families living in 1,000sq ft I can get on with though.

warby68

"We manage really well in a 2 bed house! Honestly, it isn't even close to being a concern for us. We'd like to extend one day, but if necessary we can divide the rooms up - we could turn it into four fairly poky bedrooms just by sticking up cheap partition walls. I get a lot of inspiration from those 'tiny house' blogs etc."

I read this thread but haven't posted as I tend to be a bit 'doom and gloom' at debt levels like yours OP but just had to say that your recent posts about extensions and architects got my alarm bells ringing big time .

The above is what you said in Feb in response to a comment that your house is too small. You have little equity, none really if you count the family loan and £60k+ unsecured debt. I just don't see how in a million years you can put a £40k-£60k extension on the horizon and all the usual comments about 'light bulbs' spring to mind. Its a bit like you've suddenly switched yours back off ! I know you say its for the future but you're getting architects in NOW!

The only rationale I can imagine is that you envisage a seriously substantial uplift in earnings short term?

Sorry to make my entry to the thread on such a downer but this really makes me worry for you.

Can't you make do with a partition wall and a boys' room/girl's room as you said in Feb?