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

One-step-at-a-time

Yesterday was a good day for house/garden work. The compost bin is full, the kitchen is sparkling, we've sorted through some old electronics to figure out what to bin/recycle/ebay (as it turns out we're recycling most of it), and decided to sell a bookcase from the spare room that we no longer need to hang on to due to this year's decluttering. 
In order of importance, then next few DIY jobs are: repaint all the upstairs door frames (cost £0 as we have an unopened tin of white satinwood in the paint stash), regrout the kitchen floor tiles (<£10, it's not a big space), replace a piece of damaged  plasterboard (the panel itself will be less than £10 bit), and fix and repaint a bit of broken ceiling cornice in my little office room. I'm *almost* in the mood to start the painting today. I know that my enthusiasm is partly down to procrastinating over a bit of paperwork, but paperwork can be done in the evening and I do prefer painting in daylight.
There's a lot to do in this house - we've been here more than 15 years so lots of areas are starting to look pretty tired/worn out now. Some of the larger jobs (e.g. carpet replacement) are things we can't justify until we're much closer to the end of the debt repayments, but the smaller things are gradually getting done. Seeing each job get ticked off the list is *almost* as much fun as seeing the debt shrink

Kakiste

One-step-at-a-time said:

Thanks Drawingaline
I think what keeps me the most focused is not knowing what lies ahead, and wanting 'future me' to have as stress-free a time of it as possible. 'Past me' was definitely not thinking about the effect that her decisions would have on 'future me', so 'current me' is trying to make up for that. 

I absolutely think like this! Past me was such an idiot. I'm now reasurring myself that the next 2 years of debt repayments will mean that future me has a much easier time of it thanks to present me.

Drawingaline

I hate painting woodwork! Have had to do some as we have marketed to sell. I finally finished painting a door that I started in 2010 🤦

One-step-at-a-time

I still haven't started that painting. The decluttering continues at pace, though, so that's a positive. Two more bin bags gone! Unfortunately I've been reminded why I hate selling things online for local collection -  a potential buyer for the bookcase basically mucked me around all day yesterday until I kicked her to the curb. I can't stand timewasters! Really, how difficult is it to agree a time and stick to it? Oh well. Now I'm holding out for a) a sensible person to want the bookcase and b) a £1 final fees offer on eB4y so I can have another push at clearing small, postable items.
Payday is tomorrow and I've decided to go super-frugal to make the repayments up to £1000 and push us under £16k. We've got quite a lot of food in the freezer from the last big shop, so I should be able to shave the food/household supplies down to £150 to help with that. I'm feeling even more impatient than usual at the moment because I'm eyeing up the next big percentages on the spreadsheet - 70% paid off, and owing under 50% of my net annual income. I'll hit both of those with September's payments, and hopefully get the cards under £15k at the same time.  

One-step-at-a-time

This morning I've scheduled all our payments and rounded a couple of balances down and got us to £15950.
Also, for the first time ever, the combined EF and savings pots contain more than a month's salary! I'm going to enjoy looking at that number while it lasts as I have a bunch of annual bills and some home maintenance costs coming out in the next couple of months which will most likely decimate it, but seeing that positive balance is great. I am yet again tempted to throw a big chunk of it at the balance to break the £15k barrier, but forward planning/realistic head says no - it's better to have cash readily available, especially when all the debt is at 0% for the duration. I can wait a few more weeks for that to happen - but I'm *really* excited about seeing a number that starts with a 14
I'm due to catch up on side hustle admin tonight, and the good news there is that I'm due to submit more than £300 in invoices, which after tax will still make a good dent (probably in September's payments).
If I can maintain repayments at the rate of the last few months, and if we avoid disaster (those are a couple of very big ifs, I know - I'm not going to pretend it's easy to have 40% of income going to paying off non-mortgage debt), the DFD *could* be pulled forward to the end of 2021, which would be AMAZING.  I've updated my sig with this (probably too) optimistic outlook.  
I did a charity shop run today to remove one of the queued-up bags of stuff from the house, and was very pleasantly surprised to see how they've organised it - loads of space and completely stress-free. It's the first shop I've been in that's not a supermarket or post office since March.

Drawingaline

Keep it up, it gets addictive getting under the next thousand!

One-step-at-a-time

Drawingaline said:

Keep it up, it gets addictive getting under the next thousand!

I've done it more than thirty times already so I'm not going to disagree. Somehow I don't think I'm going to get withdrawal symptoms when it's over!   

One-step-at-a-time

It was a slow brain type of weekend. My sleep was really disturbed on Friday night by noisy neighbours somewhere across the street having a shouting match between 1 and 2.15 am. DH’s hearing isn’t great, so he was blissfully ignorant - eventually I remembered my stash of foam earplugs and managed to block the noise out and get to sleep, but the damage was done by that point. I slept in a little bit on Saturday morning but was tired all day, so just wombled around the house and garden doing a few odd jobs but generally being a bit of a potato. Yesterday was better.

Having slept on the numbers for a few days, we're going to fight hard to be debt-free by Christmas 2021. We did another money shuffle this month and having been repaid for a couple of things we were owed, today we're at £15690. That’s more than £3k down in less than 2 months, which is a bit surreal, and worthy of a happy dance! I We'll then need to hit £981/month from September onwards to be free and clear. September could clear £1200 if my invoices get paid, which would bring the ongoing target number to £966/month. It's a tall order to go that hard for that long, but the harder we can hit it now the more change we have of getting there.

Drawingaline

Go for it! 😁

One-step-at-a-time

Another update - I really didn't expect to be doing this so soon! I knuckled down to paperwork last night and it's come to fruition already. Two invoices have been paid weeks earlier than expected, taking us under £15.5k (with the monthly payments needed now already down to £966.5).
Things are still looking good for September too - my aim is now to get the minimum payments needed from October onwards down to £950/month.