Untangling our financial disaster

sarahb100

Just wanted to say hello and offer a few words of encouragement. There are others far more qualified to offer advice here but something resonated with your story and SOA!

I recently took stock of where my income was going, I am relatively lucky in that aside from a massive amount of mortgage debt I never had a very high amount of unsecured debt. At least I never had an high amount at the same time but for all of my 20s and 30s I had at least 15-25K and as soon as I paid something off I would build up again. So over the years I must have borrowed 100K.

Recently after moving to a more expensive part of the country and buying a more expensive house I really began to look at what I was spending. Until then I made the classic mistake of repeatedly telling myself its not that much for whatever I wanted and I assumed that as I had a good income I could afford whatever it was I was buying or subscribing (regards of the quanitity of items I applied this to). To justify my spending I made a beautifully formatted budget in an excel spreadsheet (SOA stylie!). I updated this regularly, tweaked it, reformatted it, changed the colours, opened, fiddled with a few times a week and generally felt very organised.

It wasn't until after house move when I realised my beautiful spreadsheet was a work of fiction. Take 7 or 8 later and its started getting closer to reality which as it turns out was a pretty scary place. I couldn't afford my life, in fact my 6 figure salary didn't cover my monthly outgoings. I know, I am lucky here and I appreciate this. For me I couldn't increase my income (no more hours in a week!) but I could work out where it was going.

Am 39, live on my own so the head in the sand, creative accounting was all my responsibility. In the end I realised the only to get an grip on reality was brutal honesty. I used an app / program to track my spending. Not sure if I am allowed to say which, I used moneydashboard and forced myself to go through historic outgoings. £800 in one month for food!! Yes ashamed and perplexed as to how I managed this particular achievement.

Anyway my rambling point is that on SOA number 9 and I am probably getting closer to the truth but this all reamins a work in progress. It is hard to really be honest and accurate about what is being spent. My estimates were way off. I have now paid off my unsecured debts but I am aiming for £3000 a month of my mortgage.

I still mess up fairly regularly and promise myself next month not to do that but its increasingly small amounts and getting less and less. My way of trying to stick to seriously reduced outgoings it to use the fact I have two jobs, each make about half my income. I use one of them is for my living expenses plus a bit of saving and the rest is for mortgage overpayment and saving for house renovation. Its also helped me to know that if I stopped one of the jobs I could survive on the other.

Good luck and my one non expert tip is that no matter what approach you take to sort this (I am sure you can and will) is do not guesstimate, track previous spending and current spending and if for instance doing so means reducing the grocery spend a bit more each month be proud of these achievements.

phillw

tallyhoh wrote: »

I second the suggestion for Dave Ramsey. I watch him on youtube, very motivating!

I don't like him. I watched on where a woman phoned up because she thought her boyfriend didn't earn enough and he told her to ditch him because he didn't.

He often isn't listening properly to what people are saying and gives advice on what he thought they said.