£50k to zero - made it across the finish line

One-step-at-a-time

Reasonably active day today. No debtbusting, just housebusting! DH is under the weather and has slept on and off for most of the day, so I've been keeping myself occupied.

It's been bright and mild enough for me to face going outside, and I managed two and a half hours of general gardening and another full garden waste bin. It's an extra cost on top of the Council Tax so I try to make sure that there's something to take away every collection day.

Once I'd gone inside and warmed up a bit I cleaned the hob, recycled a load of batteries, did some filing (analogue and digital) and paper recycling, and wandered around the house putting stray things back in their proper homes, having breaks to sit down and read. Tonight's task is to get my laptop sorted out by tidying up the hard drive, freeing up some space and checking for software updates.

One-step-at-a-time

DH is still not entirely himself (though a little better than yesterday) so it's been another pretty solitary day for me.
It's auction site day - the £1 final selling fees offer came in. Wish I had more patience for this, but I find it so, so boring! I photographed and listed 21 items before I temporarily lost the will to live - might do a bit more after dinner.
If (and it's a huge if) they all sell and I get my minimums, then I could clear as much as £200, though tbh I think I'd be lucky to shift 1/4 of them - we're running out of 'desirable' stuff to shift now and getting more towards 'last attempt before it goes to charity shop', but I will persevere, because you never know what people will want!

I didn't last very long in the garden today, just a bit more weeding and putting some of the hard plastic garden rubbish (broken flowerpots) in a sack. Currently cooking a roast for dinner so should have lots of yummy leftovers for tomorrow's lunch. NSD yesterday and just a few carrots today.

One-step-at-a-time

Oh dear. Both frogs are still intact - well, almost - one has had a bit of a nibble taken out of it. Deliberate procrastination and self-sabotage was the name of the game tonight. What I actually need is for people to set me strict deadlines; I appear to have no respect whatsoever for my self-imposed ones! A few fairly insignificant things have been crossed off the to-do list, and far too long spent staring at spreadsheets and eating bicuits.

In the morning I will take batteries to be recycled and get one charity shop bag out of the house.

Lucifa73

De-lurking to apply boot to butt.... Eat those frogs. I shall keep nagging until it is done

One-step-at-a-time

Lucifa73 wrote: »

De-lurking to apply boot to butt.... Eat those frogs. I shall keep nagging until it is done

Thank you, I shall try not to give you much cause to nag!

NSD today, I also went through the Feb. budget again and found £30 to chuck at the 2-instalments-left debt. Paying the final instalment a month early *should* also mean that the interest gets recalculated, so I will call up tomorrow and request the figure for a final payment made on Feb 28th. It will hurt, but the short-term pain will be totally cancelled out by getting one of the debts completely cleared before my birthday.

The going forward plan was originally to put £120/mo back in the normal household budget and pay an extra £400/mo to cards once this is paid off, but I'm leaning towards £400 to cards, £20 back into to normal budget and £100 to instant access savings, so that I don't get used to having it available but it's still close by if it's needed. I don't want to start getting complacent and slow the payments down too much.

OK, I think it's time to start staring down a frog...

Lucifa73

Did you eat them yet??? (You were warned :rotfl:)


Plan B with savings sounds good to me. You can always use it to pay off a chunk of cc debt at a later date if you end up not needing the savings.

One-step-at-a-time

One frog down, one to go!

Today is a fantastically brilliant day! Somehow I got in a muddle and the final payment I thought was on March 28th is actually Feb 28th. I only have one payment left! So instead of the high 900s, I have £446.88 remaining on this one. I must have carried over a 'left to pay' figure very early on last year without updating the spreadsheet and not realised, which is insane when I think about how obsessed I've been with all this, but hey ho. Maybe stressed me wanted to give future me a birthday gift My budget for next month is now way ahead of itself! So the savings plan gets to come into being a month early.
:j:j:j:beer::j:j:j

One-step-at-a-time

OMG, the second frog is a behemoth! My hard drives are SUCH a mess, and I have a lot of editing to do before this task is complete. I may need to split it into several smaller frogs... I am having a decaf tea while I regroup...

This morning the surprise arrival of the window cleaners deprived me of my work food supplies cash, so I broke out the prepaid reward Mastercard which still had £6.30 on it. It's now down to £1.90, but I am good for breakfast and lunch ingredients for another week and two of my regular buys were on offer.

On the MSE front it's been a good day for free food - someone in the department got a job lot of posh soup as some kind of promotion so we all had a free meal, and another colleague popped by with chocolate bars this afternoon. I've taken a picture of the soup and tweeted about it in the hope of winning a Fitbit (which I really could do with as I haven't managed to fix mine yet).
When the PA surveys I did at lunchtime get approved I'll have cleared £21 this month, my target for surveys in Feb was to make at least £30.

Right, time to get back to work...

Drawingaline

Sounda like a bit of a fab time!

One-step-at-a-time

Drawingaline wrote: »

Sounda like a bit of a fab time!

Realising that you are £520 closer to freedom than you thought is never a bad time :beer: