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

Drawingaline

Thank you, all we OK, bit of a panic over an oil light in the car, but sorted it. Was my husbands grandma who was 91 with advanced alzheimers. So although a saloss, it was also quite an uplifting occasion, celebrating a long and happy life.

One-step-at-a-time

Quick Sunday update - latest spreadsheet update tells me that a milestone has been reached!
Total debt including mortgage is now sub-£60k - £59838.15 to be precise.

Hoping to get enough through from side hustle this month to get the credit cards under £24k - getting so close to the halfway point now! At this point I'm still on target to be under £20k before Christmas with £600 in holiday savings. I need to focus on this whenever time is dragging and money feels tight.

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Another Sunday. Not very much to report this week, other than that I have just signed up for a Curve card thanks to a £10 incentive from one of my travel newsletter emails. I've chosen TFL as one of my 1% cashback retailers as I'm guaranteed to be using that almost every weekday so it should be worth a few pence a week at least.

I spent £1 on a very nice pair of jeans from a charity shop yesterday (clothes purchases are *very* rare, can't remember the last time I indulged and I currently only have one pair of jeans!), I then had a 'nice' reality check when I discovered I'm about half a stone from them being really comfortable (no stretch in them, so not at all forgiving), so that's my incentive for the next couple of months. I have been a bit of a sloth for the last few months and still eating as though I was running every day, so I just need to get my activity and eating levels back in sync with each other.

It's £1 final fees weekend on eb4y again so I am trying to persuade myself that I can be bothered to list some more things. I haven't convinced myself yet, I'm having one of those 'let's just drop it all at the charity shop' moods, which is fab for decluttering but doesn't help the debt!

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I'm feeling very restless today so I'm just going to write this down and get it out of my head. I'm thinking about doing another balance transfer shuffle - not to save on interest, but to reduce the number of transfer end dates I have to think about. I have £7.25k left on a card at 3.9%, with eight different balance end dates from Feb 2021 to Jan 2022. I have enough space on another card to bounce the whole thing across with no fee, and then bounce it all straight back, keeping it at 3.9% but having a single end date of July 2022, which barring disaster is long after my projected DFD. It's a few minutes of admin which will wipe seven lines from my debt spreadsheet. That will leave me with only one looming deadline - my bcard 0% balance which runs out in May 2020. This card has the biggest remaining balance at £8.5k, and at the current rate of payment will still have £6.25k on it when the promo rate ends. I will still need to keep a keen eye on transfer offers between now and then as I don't want to be stuck with that 6.25k leaping back up to 13.9% or higher - I could shuffle my payments to attack it more aggressively but that would be at the expense of the current snowball and cost me more than £250 in interest. It's difficult not knowing what will happen after October and I suspect there will be fewer good deals available, and I just want to get as many of the ducks lined up as possible.

[Deleted User]

It sounds sensible to me. Having less individual debt items definitely helped me with the mental load. It's just a lot less balls to juggle so doesn't feel as stressful. You know best what works for you!

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I think it does make sense, so I'm going to wait until the statements for both cards are in and then do it. Small dilemma -I also have a balance of 2.8k on the card I'll be using to bounce this money and am tempted to actually empty this one and close it; what's holding me back us that it would cost me around £25 in interest over the length of time it would take to pay it off, as it's on a lower rate. But if I move it I can close that card, which would be a good psychological boost! What to do...

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Still waiting for one more card statement to come in before I play transfer shuffle. I've decided to empty the second card but not close the account just yet, on the offchance that clearing it triggers a new transfer rate that's worth using. Unlikely, but worth waiting a few months to see what happens.
I've got to go in to London tomorrow for a work thing and be out all day, so am trying to figure out how best to fuel myself and spend minimal money. The snag is that I can't take food or drink into the venue so will need to preload myself as much as possible with breakfast; I'll need *something* in the afternoon, just hope there's a reasonable option! Funds seem to be evaporating at an alarming rate this month. Luckily the weekend isn't a busy one and we can have a couple of NSDs.

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Good result on Friday! There were enough complimentary snacks at the event that I didn't have to buy any food, we were kept well hydrated all day, and given complimentary drinks afterwards, so my only expenditure was on travel. My Curve card arrived on Friday morning and worked perfectly, so I will now be using it all the time to get 1% cashback on travel (I chose Transport for London as one of my three discounts).

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I've not exactly been busy today but there has been a little movement. An hour of gardening, and some scooting around the house emptying bins and finding things to get rid of which resulted in a full bin bag and full charity shop bag. I'm entering another phase of getting antsy about decluttering, after a few weeks where things have been fairly static in the house.

A bit of food shopping needs to be done tomorrow, which could be challenging - DH has got it into his head that it should be a big filling the freezer type shop, whereas the food budget says top-up shopping only until payday. This is the only thing that we still really butt heads on - before the LBM we used to spend an absolute fortune on grocery shopping, and he's still not got his head wrapped around only having x amount per month available for it and not being able to fill a trolley whenever the notion takes him. Frankly it's a bit wearing. I've asked him to prioritise the shopping list based on what's running lowest - to my mind the only urgents are brown rice, eggs, fresh vegetables, yoghurt and loo rolls, but I know full well it's not going to be a straightforward battle!
Deep breath...

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Last night's shopping was negotiated fairly successfully. We have plenty of food and DH understands that next month's food budget will be short by this month's overspend. I will need to borrow from myself for one day before payday, somewhere in the region of £40.

The first part of my BT completed and I've just applied for the second one, which will bring my Hfax card balance to a nice big fat zero! It's so, SO long since I've see a zero balance on a credit card statement - it's going to be a mental boost even though the debt has just been moved not cleared.

The payments on the MBNA and VM cards are both now set to pay them both off in full before the end of their respective offer periods, so that just leaves BCard with its current BT 0% deal expiring in May 2020 as the only one I still have to shift at some point. I can give myself nine months of freedom from having to think about shuffling balances and concentrate on the business of just paying the d!@%&! things down! :rotfl: