Moving on with things

alt80

Thanks all, hope you’ve all had a nice New Years Day. Started writing this late yesterday falling to sleep ha. We went out yesterday, did manage to do a bit of work ready for the first day back at the office today. For the first time in a long time I'm actually looking forward to the year ahead.

I haven’t managed to set up my goals for the year but I have set up my goals and habit targets for the coming quarter. Ones related to my own self development and personal finances are -
 1. Read three books, first on my list is James Clear, Atomic Habits. One of my major focuses for this coming year is to work on building better habits and having a body of evidence of better habits I’ve learned to (hopefully) help me through the bad times. Far too many years building a body of evidence of me having bad rather than good habits ha.
 2. Complete couch to 5k. Haven’t done any running in quite a while so going to ease back into it slowly.
 3. Automate personal finances where possible. Anyone who has automated a spends log straight from a list of transactions? Rest is pretty easy tbf but still needs to be checked and sorted where required. 
 4. I do have a sleep based goal/ habit. Planning to work with the pros to achieve this one with the aim of gradually tapering the bedtime back and the wake time forwards, it’s got a little silly over the past few months.

Thanks for comments relating to my SOA, they are appreciated. 

@mark55man @Humdinger1 thanks both, I was half expecting a lot of harsh responses. I have posted one before albeit when my spending was reckless and tbf I was not making ends meet and the responses were !!!!!! brutal ha. 

@Willowtree222 that’s the plan. I have learned from the past and my mistakes form part of my experience (always will) but the present and future are what I need to be concentrating on now.

@ladyholly thank you and you did prompt me to have a look at my policy before I answered this with certainty but the answer is yes. 

@MatyMoo the situation is that we still spend day to day using a credit card. Always have, likely always will. I find I keep a spending log which tallies against my personal budget each month works, that card is paid in full (ok it wasn’t last month, first time in over a year). Surplus money budgeted for ‘item’ e.g. holidays is ‘borrowed’ to pay a greater amount off the other card balances and tallied against the overall annual budget. When spends happen it pushes the balance up of course but it has been accounted for. 

foxgloves

I found "Atomic Habits' quite an interesting read & am definitely going to use his "habit stacking" method this year to try & put a few improvements in place.
F

Willowtree222

The difference between this Alt and the last thread was that you have learnt and are putting all that into practice. None of us are perfect and have done everything right first time, but we adapt and hopefully learn the lessons. Sometimes it takes a few times!!! 

You've made incredible progress in your mindset, which is often the hardest thing to reprogramme. Hopefully sleeping will start to get better. 

ladyholly

Another very positive post. The change in you is wonderful to see. You are enjoying your family and downtime so much more. Even more you are recognising when things are slipping and taking steps to get back on track. Your wife is also doing a great job both with limiting her social media time time and spending and supporting you in your struggles. You are working as a team now.

Baileys_Babe

I have just started reading Atomic Habits, you are highly likely to finish quite a while before me due to my dyslexia, concentration and fatigue problems. I hope it supports us both in forming positive habits and more importantly sticking with them.

Andyjflet

Great to see you back! I followed your original posts, I have now changed jobs and work for a bank! Basically I lend money to car dealerships...... not bad for a boy from North London with not one single qualification to my name huh.

I'll subscribe and see how you are getting on. 

Iamouttheotherside

@alt80

Happy New Year! 

Goodness it has been nearly a month since I have been on here.  December was so busy it flew by, then we went away and then to be back at work the day after New Years Day, is a little bit grim I must be honest.  

Congratulations on the move and I am so pleased you are all so happy there, new home, new beginnings.

Re your post of 19th December, it was so heartwarming, also good to hear that we were right with, regards to you having to put your family first 😊.

I love the idea of your alcohol free Christmas lunch, so thoughtful for the ones that don’t drink.

Re your post of the 23rd December, it brought tears to my eyes when you wife came to work to make sure you was ok, it shows how much she loves and cares for you, but also that she knows you so well, she knew you would probably be feeling down and therefore jumped to be with you – that’s a good strong marriage full of love and support.

Going through you SOA, wow what progress you have made, I am sure your unsecured debts were very close if not hitting six figures and to get them down to in the 20s is some achievement.

Well done on also being honest with your SOA, especially with personal grooming, holidays etc, at least you are also enjoying life still.

 

Keep on the path, onwards and forwards for 2024.

 

RelievedSheff

Alt I think people were brutal on your original post with your original SOA because it showed just how much you were squandering each and every month. 

The new SOA is a well balanced reflection of where you now stand and is a well thought out and realistic window into your finances.

If you don't mind me saying I do think that your diary is a reminder to people that money can not buy you happiness. There are far more important things in life. (and I mean that in the best possible way.)

alt80

It's been a busy start to the new year. Bit up and down health wise, so that hasn't been great for productivity although it has given me chance to reflect on why I have the longer term goals in place. Facing up to what chronic stress has done to me and seeing things for what they are now my head is clear has changed my perspective on both where my personal finances need to head and on business generally. I've had the pros and people in my life generally try to steer me away from having every scrap of self respect I did have being tied up in my business and its success. Still see things pretty much the same but do have something to work towards by working less and spending more time with my family. It !!!!!! kills me some days that I need to take this slow approach to growth or I'll be back to how things were.

Personal finance / self development goals aren't going that well so far but its still early days:
1. Still reading Atomic Habits. A few snippets to take from it that I thought might be useful to some on here:
i. The state of obtaining a new possession creating a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases has a name 'The Diderot Effect' after a 17th Century French philosopher who suddenly came into money and after buying his first extravagant purchase started spending like a madman. 100% made me think haha. 
ii. 'Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment'. Been told this one before and took a while for me to see why but it did help me to work out some of the reasons I struggled with addiction for so long. Might be useful to some people on here who have problems with spending to think about some of the reasons and start to modify those. 
iii. 'Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits' 100%.
 iv. 'Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well. ' 100% - no more needs saying there other than it's really !!!!!! slow and really !!!!!! painful sometimes.
 
2. Haha that'll be one for when this !!!!!! freezing cold spell has passed. Still aim to complete it by the end of the quarter.

3. Still looking for a bit of guidance with this if possible I want spend logs in banking / card apps to automatically populate excel. Any excel wizards on here?

4. Very !!!!!! gradual and quite the bumpy ride to get any better with sleeping. Start to think I'm doing OK and then back to struggling. Unfortunately I haven't done my mental health and internal body clock any favours whatsoever, now left with having to unpick !!!!!! decades of bad habits. I'll take work in progress with this one though. 
 
@foxgloves read about a quart of it. The table in Ch.1 highlighting the compounding of positive and negatives resonates very !!!!!! loudly haha. Quite a lot to take from it, although a lot I have heard before. The habit stacking I'm going to also look to implement a little more. It is something I have had a little experience of already.

@Willowtree222 thank you. I couldn’t have given up, I wasn’t in a good place and hadn’t been for a very long time. I’m not cured, still very much a work in progress but aren’t we all? 

@ladyholly my wife and I have worked on our marriage every day since I came home from residential treatment and that is not an exaggeration. She agreed to therapy at the point I entered residential treatment and I can honestly say it saved my life. She knew it was going to be tough and she did it for me - got a lot out of it herself along the way and I couldn’t be more proud of the woman she has become but she agreed to it for me and our marriage. I get she should have run for the !!!!!! hills as fast as she could away from me and how I was but I’m so grateful she didn’t. I owe her the world.

As for social media, she barely goes on it, seen it for what it is and these days almost all of the girls she was mates with don’t want anything to do with her. She still has a small, strong friendship group but a lot of the girls she was good friends with just don’t speak to her anymore.

@Baileys_Babe I don’t get much time to read and have to be conscious of not binge reading, it was something I did a lot in addiction. Someone I know assumed it was 3-4 wild nights out a week, when I told him it was more often than not locking myself in my office for an all nighter doing my staff’s work and reading books and journals related to whatever my latest obsession was he thought it was funny as !!!!!!. Suppose it is looking at it from the outside tbf. Anyway, I’ll be reading it slowly, 1/4 of the way through it now and I 100% hope it helps us both to form and stick to better habits.

@Andyjflet That's fantastic mate, looks like you are doing really well too going by your signature no debt and £63k saved - I hope it's gaining interest over the rate of inflation. I'm not the biggest fan of Dave Ramsey but find some of what he has to say quite interesting and his demise was from over leveraged commercial type mortgages being called in. Recently, some of his philosophy has made me think especially in relation to not buying more units and pensions. I fundamentally disagree with some of his approaches some of which I am sure is cultural tbf. 

@Iamouttheotherside hope you had a nice time and back into the swing of things now. Thank you, we are very much settled here. Unfortunately I had to find out the way I did how much I need my little family. I should have known, valued them and put them first long before I did. 

The alcohol free Christmas lunch is something I've done since I was starting to try to take my recovery seriously but it benefits others who don't drink for whatever reason and tbh those that do but don't want to hang around those who take it too far.

My wife and I still work on our marriage every day, don't take it for granted. Used to and shouldn't have. It means more than I can ever give that she is there for me, most wouldn't I know that. I try to do the same but I know she does more for me than I for her.

My unsecured credit card debts when I first started posting on here were about £50k-£60k and I had three car loans to the sum of nigh on £200k. Just under 18 months prior to me first posting on here I had just under £120k of unsecured card debts which I only managed to get out of by refinancing my entire property portfolio. That landed me clear personally but at that point my portfolio was 85% leveraged, could do it then when the lenders were a lot less fussy (and personal rates were low but not that !!!!!! low through a SPV Ltd. with that sort of LTV I can tell you that much fml). I came very !!!!!! close to financial obliteration with some development finance. I know how close I've been to losing everything and I mean absolutely !!!!!! everything that I don't think I'll ever take the risks that had a lot of positive consequences in my younger years before I just !!!!!! lost it mentally. Not a day goes by that I don't regret the choices I made in my 30s. I know the way I lived my life is the reason why I have been left with still having !!!!!! panic attacks and the anxiety despite not touching the stuff for 18 months. What matters is staying on the path now for my little family it would hurt them if I hurt myself.

@RelievedSheff Thanks re SOA it is something we have worked on as a couple. Having a realistic budget means we  are both much more likely to stick to it.

I know you mean what you said in the best possible way. It hurts too much to say anything else about it.

RelievedSheff

Good to hear from you Alt.

All sounding much more positive again.

Glad to hear you are all settled in your new home. It sounds very much like it was the right choice for you all, a fresh start.