Give me some motivation! Feeling embarrassed and down about debt!

sourcrates

I think this thread would be better served if it were moved to "Diaries" as its getting a tad long now.

leannes_3

sourcrates said:

I think this thread would be better served if it were moved to "Diaries" as its getting a tad long now.

How would I do this? 

EssexHebridean

On the staircase thing - take a look at Lemondrops other posts… 😉

leannes_3

Mini update! Thank goodness for emergency funds!

so I mentioned earlier that we have an expensive month this month. Mainly due to car service and MOT, our fur baby having her spay operation and my lovely partner chipping a tooth 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

Anyway, we’ve been keeping cash to one side in the house. We counted it the other day and we had £200! I paid for the service and MOT on my car using that so no need for more debt! Woohoo !

doggy bill will be on Tuesday this week. My partner gets paid weekly now so hopefully he will earn enough this week to cover the vet bill!

£200 in emergency fund still, and £75 in the Christmas fund!

I’m proud of the start I’ve made to clearing debt. I’m excited to see the buy now pay later dissapear soon, and to see my big MBNA CC drop below £6k soon. 

leannes_3

A diary is meant to show the highs and lows of debt journeys so here’s a bit of a low.

I was feeling really happy and positive about our journey but we’ve hit a bit of a setback and I’m feeling really down about it. 

So my partner is a landscape gardener and works been slow recently, so we’ve not had much money coming in. As well as this we’ve had our dog spayed which cost us £260. As well as this our car mot and service was more expensive at £240. So that’s £500 extra this month. This basically skinted us out, so we’ve needed to borrow more this month.

I know it’s just a blip, but I’m feeling disheartened by it and starting to believe we’ll never get there .

im sure it will get better again, but I feel rotten at the moment.

TheAble

These are just the natural expenses of life. Keep on building your emergency fund and in time they won't bother you anymore. As Dave Ramsey points out, "Having an emergency fund turns an emergency into an inconvenience."

As you then go on to build wealth and investments over and above your emergency fund you'll no longer even blink at this sort of stuff.

enthusiasticsaver

Unfortunately this can often happen at the beginning of a debt clearing journey before you have had a chance to build up emergency savings.  Presumably the dog will only be spayed once so that is a one off but things like dental costs, car mots and services will need to be saved for so next year the money is there for it and you won't need to use credit. 

leannes_3

Dog expense is a one off, and we have pet insurance to cover any future problems so there shouldn’t be another expense in terms of our dog. The car and MOT would have been fine had we had more in the emergency fund. I’ll keep going with the emergency fund and then hopefully next year will be a different story. 

leannes_3

November update!

I’m seemingly back on track after our hiccup earlier this month. We deliberately had a low spend week to make up for the expensive bills. So no weekend takeaway and used a bit of self/restraint in not buying any more cute baby clothes! 

here’s our payday update!

MBNA - £6413 (12% paid off since July 2021) 

Capital One Overdraft - £1834 (8% paid off since July 2021)

Creation Buy Now Pay Later - £83.48 (81% paid off since July 2021) 

Emergency Fund - £300

I worked out we’ve paid £1389 of debt off in 4 months. I’m really proud of that and hope that we can keep going. I’ll be honest, it feels never ending at the moment, but with a bit of positivity I’m determined to get debt free! 

leannes_3

December update!

it’s been a hard few weeks as my partner is a self employed landscape Gardener. He’s had 3 weeks off over Xmas and whilst that’s lovely, he doesn’t get paid which has meant dipping into our emergency fund. Not great, but at least it’s not on credit.

exciting news is that with my partner’s new job we can put more into the emergency fund. We’re gonna put £300 a month in there now. We could use the extra money to clear more debt, but I prefer having emergency money to prevent us going into more debt in tight situations. Stuff like that just demotivates me.

We’ve also booked a holiday. We used the emergency fund money again. Whoops. But it’s something fun to do with our little girl, and again, it’s not on credit! Woohoo!