Holy moly!!

Crikey123

I have reached the level to redeem a £10 Amazon voucher on one of the survey sites that I use, but they're currently doing a promotion & there's loads of surveys on my dashboard so I might try & get up to a £15 voucher while it's busy on the site. Hopefully I can achieve this which means I'll be able to pay for my dad's birthday present with just vouchers.

In other money news, most of my bills have gone out & I only remembered today that I don't pay council tax this month or next month, so I can reallocate that money to debts. This gives me an extra £197 this month and £197 next month to pay off a debt. However, my council tax has increased year on year for the 10 years that I have been here, so I will probably keep a little bit of this money back for the increase, so I think I'll probably pay £150 this month then I should get my letter through the post soon notifying me of what this years rates will be.

I ended some of the ebay listings last night. I put about 12 things on there on Thursday evening, but some of them had no watchers & hardly any views, so clearly people aren't looking for them so pointless me letting the auction run. I will put them in a box because I am planning to do a car boot sale when the weather gets a little bit warmer. Some of the other things I put on there are doing fairly well though, they all have bids & quite a lot of watchers, so fingers crossed they get me a decent amount. I have the evening to myself tomorrow so I'm going to pack them ready to post, so that when the auctions end on Sunday night I can just put them in my car & then as people pay for them I will be able to get to the post office to get them sent.

I've finally received some information from my new gas & electric supplier. I had a letter in the post yesterday & have also had an email to activate my account. I have to give meter readings next week & then it should all be set up towards the end of the month apparently.

I'm pretty sure my home insurance is due for renewal in March. I always pay it annually, saving a fixed amount every month ready for the following years renewal. Considering how rubbish I've been with money over the years, this is one of the things I've been good with, as well as my car insurance.

Crikey123

Ok I had another look at the survey site & the £10 voucher is the best value because if I wait for the £15 voucher, it works out more points per £1 again, so I have redeemed the £10 voucher now & should have that in the next few days. I will just keep doing the surveys and hopefully get another £10 voucher again soon.

Drawingaline

Well done with sticking with the survey's. I tried them about a year ago, managed to get £20 Amazon vouchers over a couple of months, but in the end I decided it was too time consuming for me.

enthusiasticsaver

Just quickly skimmed your diary and wanted to say that paying around £1400 to £1700 off the debt is great and good you are using YNAB although I am too mean to pay the £3 a month so I use clear checkbook instead and spreadsheets.

A few things

You need an emergency savings account. I know many people when they are debt busting think that throwing every spare penny at the debt is the most important thing but actually budgeting correctly and having emergency savings should be priority. Otherwise if you have an emergency and no savings then people resort to credit cards again which defeats the purpose of eventually aiming to live without credit or at least paying it off in full every month.

Can you get the interest bearing card moved to a 0% deal?

Crikey123

Drawingaline - Thanks for popping in. I know what you mean, I used to do them a lot a few years ago & got quite a lot of vouchers from it but that was when they seemed to pay more for surveys and a lot of the time the surveys were shorter as well. I found after a while though that there were more & more longer surveys (I won't ever do a survey over 15 minutes) and also found that they seemed to pay less per survey. Since starting back up on them I find I've been able to get some decent earnings from just doing the shorter surveys and on Swagbucks they do promotions as well, which earns me points without even having to do a survey which is good. If I find it's all getting too time consuming again I will leave it a while though.

enthusiasticsaver - Thank you, I am really pleased with myself being able to pay these amounts off. It helps with the motivation when I see the balances reducing at a decent rate. I actually bought YNAB years ago when it was just the one off cost so I still use that version. I did look at the newer version but I wasn't all that fussed on it & also wasn't willing to pay a monthly fee for it.

As for savings, we do have an emergency fund put away which I try to forget about because whenever I think about it I am tempted to use some of it to clear some of the debts. My OH gets paid weekly so he puts a bit of his weekly money into that account & then just sends the rest over to the joint account for our bills etc.

I have recently noticed that when I login to some of my card accounts, they have some offers available, so I need to have a proper look at these to see if any of them are 0% offers or even just lower offers that would save interest.

It's so cold today, when the weather is like this I don't want to go anywhere. I feel like we've had this cold weather forever, I can't wait for it to warm up a bit. I have a quiet weekend planned apart from Sunday as we are visiting family. I'm also going to spend some time this weekend making soup that I can bring to work in the week. For the last few weeks I have been bringing lunch into work with me & I have really noticed a difference in the amount of fuel I'm using, as before I would end up popping out to get lunch & it's those little journeys that seem to make a difference.

Stayathomemum36

Hi, just wanted to say that Im going to have a weekend of baking and cooking too, the kids can help. We are also watching our fuel consumption and if i have the car out then i will try and do anything else thats needed while Im out. We've got our fuel consumption down to one tank a month - £55 (I'm a stay at home mum).

Mumoffourkids

We have been baking today as well and more is planned for tomorrow. Today was chocolate cake and chocolate chip brownies, tomorrow is going to be doughnut cakes and chocolate fudge. Not sure how long they will all last though with the kids being off next week. One of my daughter's has really got into cooking recently so she has been baking all the cakes. She is also going to cook loaded potato skins for tea on Monday. I am glad in a way as it gives me a rest from cooking but I can see my food budget being pushed up a bit if she carries on baking!

Drawingaline

It does look cold this weekend. We are off to stay in a premier Inn for my son's birthday. We're planning a wildlife park, have changed that after the last four days of numb hands and feet lol!

Crikey123

Hi All

It sounds like you have all had lovely baking sessions & DAL I hope your son enjoyed his birthday

My weekend went as planned. I made soup and a cake. The soup is gone now because me & my husband took it to work Monday, Tuesday and today & we also had it for our tea on Monday night.

SAHM36, Well done on the fuel consumption! I don't think I'll get it down to that level but I am happy that I am reducing it by making less trips. When the better weather starts I will make an effort to walk more places as well.

It is half term for my kids next week so my childcare is a bit more than the normal monthly amount, but I have budgeted for this anyway so all prepared for that.

Nothing really to report financially because nothing really gets paid around this time of the month. All our household bills come out at the beginning of the month and then all the credit card DD's go out towards the end of the month, so I'm waiting for that now so I can see the reduced balances again.

System

Crikey123 wrote: »

I use YNAB, have used it for a few years after my friend introduced me to it. My problem is I do my budgets on YNAB, but then spend money & then adjust everything in YNAB after spending which means I end up having less money to pay towards my debts because I've spent the 'spare' money on other things instead. I have to stop doing this, start sticking to my budget.

This is SO my problem too. Subscribing. Looking to forward to following your journey xxx