It's the final countdown...£10k to go

t2rry

Tightpants24 said:

I have been following and just wanted to say how impressed I am with your determination to slay the debt.  Incredible effort 👏   I am cheering you on with your final push to debt freedom 

Thank you so much @Tightpants24, that's so lovely!  And determination has definitely been me these last couple of months!! 

My budget now puts my pay off target at £180, so that's £40 less than it was the last time I posted about a week ago.  Slowly but surely is my current mantra.  Every £5 is like another step closer and makes a difference.  Just a week to go to payday, too, it's amazing how much less I've been waiting for that when I have little bits of money coming in from elsewhere throughout the month.

I should probably admit here where the focus has come from...we're moving house!! Which actually means adding significantly to our overall debt, but we've been really careful to make sure our monthly budget will still be healthy, and with no credit card debt and no car debt, it will actually still be the healthiest it has ever been.  The new mortgage will be not far off double what it is now, but only £100pcm more than we paid when we first bought here, with an income now significantly higher, so we feel comfortable with it at that level.  Importantly, we will still be able to afford all bills and usual spends every month with one of our incomes (worst case scenario) and the mortgage payment is around 25% of our total net income.  Our plan will still be to save save save for a full 6 month emergency fund as well as save for home improvements (eventually) and with the longer term plan of paying down the mortgage to start cutting the term.  It feels like we're leaving a whole stage of life behind, and with it the cycle of debt.

crunchy_time

Congratulations!!  And this is what it has all been about. Getting to that next stage of life xx

t2rry

crunchy_time said:

Congratulations!!  And this is what it has all been about. Getting to that next stage of life xx

Thanks Crunchy! I'm very excited!

PiPi2019

t2rry said:

I am drawing a line today to prepare the budget spreadsheet for tomorrow.

I have money still pending from online sales that I don't think will come through today (there's a chance it may do but I shall presume not) so I am going to move across those figures from coming off the CCs this month, to coming off next month.  This adjusts the amount I need to pay off the Car CC tomorrow ever so slightly.

I had another £50ish online sales yesterday so need a post office run today too, so I'm still feeling pretty good about starting the month with £50 odd already pending from online sales and £20 cash sales expected to be collected over the next few days.  It's a good start to the selling month!

And whilst I didn't quite do it in time, I'm counting it that I effectively did make my target and would have been able to pay off the Car CC even if my backpay wouldn't have come through, it just might have taken a day or two beyond payday.  As it happens now, this refresh just means I can officially change my target to what I need to clear My CC that one month earlier too.  I'm hoping payday might bring a few more online sales as I have a lot of watchers and still around 50 items listed.

So as it currently stands, my cleared earnings from selling this month equals £648.04.  That has pushed the month to my second best of the year.  February was the best as I used some banked funds to help pay off the Car PCP as it was.  When I started April, I thought it was going to seem like a disappointing month in comparison as both February and March I paid off over £3,000 each, but with the sales I've pushed April up to having paid off £3,336.48.

So the new target is £455.  That's how much I will have left on My CC after May's payday, not accounting for my new job pay increase.  I'll count that as a bonus towards it when it lands I think.  With pending sales, I've already started to get that figure down, so keeping the incentive up to keep going!

As for an April spending round up - we spent:

£484.33 on food (including 2 pub visits for OH, 2 takeaways for all 4 of us and 2 sets of tea/coffee out and about) - under budget
£50 petrol - on budget
£4 work lottery syndicates - on budget

The only other spending was on car tax/insurance and a deposit for an event later in the year.  All of these came in under budget.  I also have another deposit that still never came to fruition so that's £125 I haven't spent this month, but the deposit will still need to be paid, so that just rolls over.

That's a pretty frugal month yet again, I think.

The little we have left (basically a tenner or so leftover from the food budget) will roll over into next month so will be accounted for somewhere reasonable there.  

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” ­Nelson Mandela
Welldone

Sarahwithlove

That's very exciting news and glad to see you have looked at worst case scenario and can still manage it. Sounds like you have it all planned out sensibly. 

DayDreamerandGeneralWaster

Well done T3rry. Great achievement. Also very exciting to be moving house! 

t2rry

Thanks all  

We are going to be trying really hard to make sure that the only lifestyle creep that comes with being debt free will be the additional house expenses.  Insurance etc will have to go up slightly, as does council tax and obviously the mortgage payment, but we should still have the healthiest disposable income we've ever had still, I'm looking at the spreadsheet and it's telling me we can still manage to set aside approx. £1,000 for sinking funds (this is essentially going to double as a sinking fund and an emergency fund as I will over estimate galore and keep saving this into that pot regardless of how high it gets), then another £1,000-£1,500 can go to an actual lockable savings pot.  I'm not sure what we'll do with this yet but the first job will be to start building it up.  Probably this will become a pot for home improvements, which are needed but which we'll be doing slowly and frugally.

Now I've laid out the fact we're moving, I must admit I've had to use £525 of our emergency fund to meet some moving expenses.  I'm pretty sure we won't have any other's until completion day, and all of those will come out of our equity.

This means that whilst technically I know I now *could* pay off the full balance on the CC (the target leftover amount is now down to £120 AND my payslips have come through which confirm I'm £135 up on budget there so I will have enough come Friday) - I'm probably not going to, it's still 0% for months so there's no pressure there, and I want some back up funds to replenish the emergency fund and some, plus either way it's still going to be gone in June/July which is still ahead of the original target and still so close.

With that and the move in mind, the selling will continue.  I think I'm going to move everything left on vinted across to ebay now.  I think vinted has been much better for profit, but I am left with things I just want gone and I think the time-pressure of ebay will clear things quicker, even if it is with less profit.  I'm also going to start packing the house well in advance so it is an easier job broken down, which I'm sure will enable me to find more things I don't want to take with me and can sell or at least clear so we don't move clutter from one to the next.

I'm quite sure I'll need maybe a good month or two post-move to see how everything settles in terms of bills and outgoings.  I am prepared for needing to meet costs we haven't yet accounted for but I'm feeling pretty confident about it all

Sarahwithlove

Packing up in advance is a great way to Declutter. Also when you come to unpack as well. If you can manage without it you probably don't need it. 

t2rry

Well....today is *the* day.

After an amazing selling month in April (making £633) I knew I couldn't maintain that level but wanted to keep the extra income ticking at least, I had £455 to make up to enable me to clear the very last CC come today's payday.

I made £187 in selling
I made £152 from survey sites (which is not sustainable, I really did spend almost every spare waking hour on them to do this)
I made £25 from cashback for switching our gas & electricity supplier a few months ago (which I had forgotten about)

On the flip, we also spent £114.51 over budget on odds and sods, a work collection here, a house fixing job there...
We scraped some of this back from a couple of underspends, most notably a blazing month for food/petrol/miscellaneous where we saved £90 (interestingly we had zero takeaways this month, usually we have at least one, often two).

Overall this left me with £110 short of my target to make up £455 and get the CC cleared once and for all.
I knew that my new job should bring in an extra £100-£150 on what I had entered into my spreadsheet for this payday as I don't enter figures over and above until I can see them with my own eyes.  But I knew it was very likely this would make up that last £110.

The new job did as I thought and brought in an extra £135.  So I've done it....

Except it's slightly hampered by the £525 I had to spend from the £1k emergency fund for house move stuff, right.....?

Well that's what I thought, until my old job salary landed...

I don't know why, I can guess and there are a couple of reasons why it's right, but I'm not 100% sure since I don't have a payslip yet, but it's come in £692 more than I had budgeted.  So that covers my house spend AND some.  

I haven't sorted my spreadsheet or payments out yet, I wanted to get this summary down first.  I'm basically enjoying the build up and the process today...!!! So I will be back to level out my signature later!  (I may still keep some back from the CC, just in case, especially in case of house move stuff, but I'll see...!)

t2rry

I've done it.  It's gone.  Zero debt (except student and mortgage )

I have paid back the emergency fund, paid off the CC in full and I still have about £200 leftover from the rest of the month's budget for wiggle room.  I'm not going to lie, I'm definitely going to allow myself a little celebration with that, OH and I are going for a meal out (nothing too fancy still but a nice lunch) and I'm going to have a glass of bubbly!  

The selling won't be easing up yet either, the less we have to move and the more pennies in the bank, the better!! I may ease off the surveys but I'm sure habit means I'll keep them ticking over for a bit too, at least until we actually move when I'm sure spare time will fly out of the window for a bit.

What a day!  I'm not sure I'll feel like it's gone until next payday when all the excess can go into savings rather than to a credit card - either way I can't imagine my approach is going to change much, we budget every penny and what's not required that month goes away... next aim is to get a £10,000 emergency fund together.  I think I can get this done fairly easily before the end of the year so I might stick around on here for a little while before I move across to the mortgage free wannabe threads