I have come here to chew bubblegum and clear debt - and I'm all outta bubblegum AKA the £83,000 saga

Kitten868

Are you doing a self arranged DMP? Have all your creditors frozen interest? If so I think making overpayments is a bad idea. You are meant to be demonstrating you are paying all you can afford to. Any money you have spare you need to save. These savings are essential for your emergency fund and to make f&f offers on debts. In saying that though I would prioritise paying back friends and family.

You're doing great. Keep going xxx

Guybrush_Threepwood

Kitten868 wrote: »

Are you doing a self arranged DMP? Have all your creditors frozen interest? If so I think making overpayments is a bad idea. You are meant to be demonstrating you are paying all you can afford to. Any money you have spare you need to save. These savings are essential for your emergency fund and to make f&f offers on debts. In saying that though I would prioritise paying back friends and family.

You're doing great. Keep going xxx

Thanks for the message!

I suppose I am in a self arranged DMP. When the wife and I totted up all of my debts, we did consider Stepchange, but the feeling I got from them was that they would assign the larger payments to my biggest creditors, which I guess is a sensible thing to do. But I felt that I wanted to initially make some larger payments to some of the smaller creditors in order to clear them sooner and reduce the total number of creditors. Plus I wanted to retain some form of control and oversight on what was going where.

Initially, we called every single creditor and told them my situation. Some made us fill in income and expenditure forms and others were happy to accept any regular amount. Most froze interest, but some did not.

What we were left with was around £1400 per month being paid across my 30-odd creditors. The largest monthly payment was a family loan (around £350 per month) and the smallest was £5 to an overdraft on an old bank account. As we have cleared some of the smaller debts, we've been able to snowball by assigning those repayments to other debts. Eventually, all £1400 will be going towards one single remaining debt (that's the plan anyway!). But we're not obliged to overpay - and on some months we keep back some of the 'extra' available funds for other expenses or additional savings.

I should mention that our initial monthly budget allowed for £1400 towards debt repayments and still allowed us to pay all priority bills and put some into savings. We're building a nice little pot whilst reducing the debts and still managing to live some kind of life (we don't splash out but we do watch the pennies - I can go into that in another post if people are interested in the changes we have made, i.e. ALDI ALDI ALDI!!!! :rotfl:).

Guybrush_Threepwood

Debt_buster wrote: »

Hi, I’ve jyst read your story and it is soooo similar to mine. Can I ask, how did you get to the point of going down the ombudsman route?

Hello!

I began by using the Resolver service (available via MSE) to make my initial complaints where I believed there was perhaps evidence of irresponsible lending. Some of those claims were successful and some were not. Where they were unsuccessful and I believed I still had a case, I escalated to the Financial Ombudsman via their website (you can submit claims online). You must have received a 'Final Response' letter from the creditor in question before submitting a Financial Ombudsman claim.

Guybrush_Threepwood

So all this month’s payments have been made. With just a slight over payment to clear off one of the small overdrafts, this month’s debt repayment total was £1,241.08 and the new balance is £67,194.56.

Guybrush_Threepwood

It's now been 6 months since I started tackling my debt, here's some stats from this period - for those that find this kind of stuff interesting!


May 2018:

Total Debt: £83,035.95

Credit Cards (x6): £32,263.27
Overdrafts (x5): £4,917.50
Personal Loans (x4): £11,343.65
Payday and Short-Term Lenders (x6): £6,957.10
Store Credit & Finance Agreements (x6): £5,921.43
Bank of Mum & Dad (x1): £21,633.00
Total Creditors: 28

November 2018:

Total Debt: £67,194.56 (-19.08%)

Credit Cards (x4): £29,890.10 (-7.36%)
Overdrafts (x3): £3,193.23 (-35.06%)
Personal Loans (x3): £9,703.99 (-14.45%)
Payday and Short-Term Lenders (x3): £2,393.70 (-65.59%)
Store Credit & Finance Agreements (x4): £2,555.69 (-56.84%)
Bank of Mum & Dad (x1): £19,457.85 (-10.05%)
Total Creditors: 18

Total Repayments: £10,230.72
Total Refunds: £5,610.67
Total Repaid: £15,841.39

I think the most interesting takeaway for me from the above is that over a third of my debt reduction has been via refunds as a result of irresponsible lending complaints. I never expect these to be as successful as they have been. I think it goes to show how rife "mis-lending" is.

fatrab

Pretty impressive numbers, keep it up

Guybrush_Threepwood

fatrab wrote: »

Pretty impressive numbers, keep it up

Thank you

My goal was always to get under £60k by the end of 2018. I don't think I'll hit that target, but I won't be a million miles away. It feels good to see it coming down though!

Guybrush_Threepwood

It's worth noting that as well as being 6 months since I started tackling my debt mountain, it's also 6 months since I started going to Gamblers Anonymous (GA).

I can't believe how much life has changed since then.

6 months ago I was ready to end it all. Now I'm taking life one day at a day a time, facing up to my responsibilities, paying off my debts bit-by-bit and generally enjoying life.

I'm not sure if I mentioned this in a previous post, but I'm also being weaned off of the anti-anxiety medication that I have been taking for the past 2-3 years

Guybrush_Threepwood

As expected, some of my creditors are getting in touch for their "6 month reviews"...

Just got off of the phone with one, happily increased my monthly payment from £30 to £50 per month. Never thought I'd be in a position where I'd happily offer to pay more off of a debt instead of making up excuses not to pay!

The debt in question is one of my smaller ones, around £630, so at £50 per month it will be cleared much sooner and then that £50 can be "snowballed" into increasing payments on something else.

Next I have to call one of my Credit Card lenders... this is one of my bigger debts, around £13,200. I've been paying £100 per month (interest is frozen) but they would like to review it. I'd like to keep that one the same for now, but will see what they say. I could increase the payment to £150 or even £200 per month, but given that the interest is frozen, I'd rather put those funds towards reducing other interest-bearing debts for now. We'll see how the chat goes.

Just looking at my figures - one of my smaller debts is down to £280 now. I may well be in a position to clear that before the end of November which would be good. That debt has a committed minimum payment of £25 per month, but I could then put that towards paying down something else too - plus it would bring my creditors down to 17 which would be good.

Hope anyone reading this is having a good weekend so far. I was thinking about maybe doing a Reddit style "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) post where anyone can ask me questions relating to my (large) debts and my compulsive gambling habit. I wonder if this is something people may be interested in and/or where the appropriate place to post such a thread would be? Any thoughts?

Starmummy

redofromstart wrote: »

Just dropping in to say happy new diary, and good luck with it.

Monkey Island was a great game

I knew I recognised the name from somewhere.

Best of Luck Guy. You've done amazingly well so far you should be proud