Day One, yet again.

ryanm8655

Amazing progress - good work.

I know what you mean re: chastising yourself for a small spend. It’s easy to get a bit obsessive about money saving, which is good when you’re in debt but as you say you do need to live. I’ve had that a little bit, particularly with travel costs, have been finding excuses to work from home to save the train fare, which is fine...though to the detriment of my work ultimately.

At this rate you’ll be debt free before Christmas!

monetxchange

Long overdue update. After such a lucrative summer work-wise, it's been dead over the last two months. Had a lot of work cancel and my income reduced much lower than expected. Hoping the new year brings a more even keel again. So my debt clearing has slowed much more than I'd like. This month and last I was only able to make around £200 per credit card (only two remaining now, balance transfers on 0%).

Trying not to beat myself up though because a few positives - I've lived within a budget when work has been slow and not used credit at all. The only money I've dipped into is the rainy day savings I put aside when I had a bumper wage back in the summer. I don't mind using that as a wage top up because that's essentially where it came from - it was unexpected extra and wasn't allocated to anything. My emergency fund remains untouched at £1000. I've also managed to keep up my tax bill savings fund every month too - today I used the fund to pay my £7.5k tax bill on time for the first year ever! I never expected to be on top of the HMRC fund at this stage in my debt clearing, so that's a great win I need to keep in mind when I get down about the slowed progress. I've also become a Monzo convert and my pots for dentist, car insurance, car maintenance, electricity and gas so always have the money on hand when the bills arise. It's nice to be able to pay from them and not worry about having enough money at the end of the month.

So at this stage, I'm at £3,800 debt remaining. This time last year, I had over £20,000 debt and several more thousands to come in terms of HMRC bills. Plus I managed to save the £7.5K tax bill and fund £3.5K of unexpected repair works. So I really do need to try and be proud of myself, even as far away as debt free seems.

2020 goals - get debt free. Current debt free dream date: May 2020. Keep putting aside monthly for tax bill in July and next January. Maintain my monthly pots for 'one offs'. When the debt is clear, stick to budget (maybe slightly looser reins!) and put all surplus into savings. Hopefully around summertime I'll have enough in savings and the proposed sale of an asset (hopefully £20K in equity in it) that I'll have enough to try and buy my first home

We'll see how the reality turns out! Happy new year to all and good luck on your journeys.

Chrystal

Wishing you a very Happy New Year too.

Sounds as though you're dealing with things brilliantly, so well done you. If you keep on track your future will be financially secure, and hopefully you can find a good work/life balance.

enthusiasticsaver

Terrific debt busting. Just £3800 to go and on top of tax bills. Hope the work picks up soon.

monetxchange

A very big update - today marks the day that I'm officially debt free. I had an extremely busy month at work, but it was worth it to pay that last £2,500 off the last remaining credit card. It's not really sank in, to be honest. I've been so used to either paying off debts every month or being overdrawn that it seems stranger to actually not have that. Coming on here and sorting out my finances properly was the best thing I ever did. I always thought not struggling was something for other people. I can't thank you all enough.

I'm not going to go back to old habits though. Next step is thinking about a mortgage. The monthly budget I've been sticking to has served me fine so see no need to adjust that. I don't use credit cards any more. Of the two I have left, one is in my mum's bureau drawer cut in two as it's only ever been used for balance transfer purposes and the other is a relatively low credit limit one that I use when travelling for work for expenses/hotel holds etc. That's with my travel docs and doubt will be seeing the light of day any time soon in this current climate.

I've been selling some old gadgets online and have done better out of that than I expected, which, along with a delayed PPI payout, allowed me to pay off a stupid phone contract I got just before my lightbulb moment last year - an overpriced iPhone that Apple have now tanked with their latest update as it's apparently an 'old' model. Didn't get much for it online, but it's now gone and I'm really pleased with my £100 cheap Android phone bought outright and £8 a month SIM only contract instead of £30 a month for half the data I'm now getting. It felt a shame to leave O2 after all these years, but there's no point staying loyal to a company that can't match their competitors prices.

So I'm focusing on my savings now. I might start doing monthly SOAs to see where I'm at when I get things together. I currently have my £1,000 emergency fund, £3,500 in the tax bill fund (next payment in July and am currently over-saving at £2,000 a month so I'm ahead with next years' increased bill), around £860 in my 'one offs' pots (though car insurance and an electricity bill are due next month), and £1,960 in my savings which is more for disaster type situations/moving costs going forward. This is the one I hope to start putting all the spare money previously used for debt into. It's going to be very expensive moving and trying to bridge the gap between places and trying to understand mortgages, so sure I'll be on here plenty more as I work out the next step!

[Deleted User]

Congratulations!! Tomorrow will be Day 1, but a new DF Day 1 Well done, you've shifted a staggering amount

Chrystal

Congratulations from me too!  You must be so pleased and relieved to be debt free. 

Wishing you well in getting your mortgage/new home sorted out, and don't forget what EnthusiasticSaver said about seeing to your pension.. you don't want to have achieved all this then end up skint when you retire!

monetxchange

Chrystal said:

Congratulations from me too!  You must be so pleased and relieved to be debt free. 

Wishing you well in getting your mortgage/new home sorted out, and don't forget what EnthusiasticSaver said about seeing to your pension.. you don't want to have achieved all this then end up skint when you retire!

Absolutely! When I've got the mortgage sorted, I plan to start paying £250 a month into my private pension and hopefully have around £150 a month to put into a Nutmeg style shares portfolio. Hopefully I'll have enough to overpay the mortgage too. My job is very taxing and wouldn't want to still be doing it into my 70s like some people I work with!

[Deleted User]

Congratulations, you have done so well. At one point we had £20,000debt, I went down the consolidation route and it worked for us. I overpaid every month and finished it in 2 1/2 years. Just building up an emergency pot of £5000, have pots for savings and also things like TV licence, car insurance, servicing and tax and the house insurance, pay them from the current account and then transfer the money to cover it. Works for me.