We will get this debt down & the savings up

2Scratters

Could you miss 1 year holiday? If the DMP is still in place I would not feel too happy about taking a holiday every year. I'm assuming if they found out about the holidays they may not be too happy about it and the chance of upping your payments would be too much worry for me. 
You are doing a great job in getting your little pots with money in and getting a balance which is not requiring you to rob Peter to pay Paul.

 2 Scratters xx

Makingabobor2

2Scratters said:

Could you miss 1 year holiday? If the DMP is still in place I would not feel too happy about taking a holiday every year. I'm assuming if they found out about the holidays they may not be too happy about it and the chance of upping your payments would be too much worry for me. 
You are doing a great job in getting your little pots with money in and getting a balance which is not requiring you to rob Peter to pay Paul.

 2 Scratters xx

We are self managed on the DMP, left SC a few years ago. We are just making small payments and saving towards F&F's, which we've already had a few. . We did miss many years holidays at the start, but do confess to having had small cheapies in UK. We certainly haven't been every year, we went several years without one at all.  In-laws tend to always give us quite hefty cheques for birthdays, Christmas & anniversaries, so they are always used towards it. 

Makingabobor2

Just feel like I want to justify my comments about holidays. I did say the other day that it did worry me booking anything when we are paying off our debts, but then you stop and think..as others have said, who knows what is round the corner?   When I say we booked "cheapie" breaks, that's what I mean...the last one cost £349 and every time we got a cheque from in-laws, or my dad, or we sold something on FB etc, it went towards it.  We took all our own food and cooked, don't go out to eat at all, so hardly spent any money while we were there. Think the only thing we bought was a chippy dinner one day and some car parking.   When I think back to the holidays we used to have before we had our LBM.....going abroad, sometimes twice a year. But now I realise how stupid that was.  Also as we have got older we have come to realise that we enjoy the more simple things in life. 

Also, as I have said, after next July, we will be in a much better place regarding income and will hopefully get most of the debts paid off quickly with F&F's, they have already sent us several offers, with 70% discount, so as soon as we can afford them we will hopefully be accepting some of them.  Also the plan then will be to make even bigger in-roads into the mortgage, we only have 3 1/2 years left on it, but my plan is to try and get it paid in 2 if we can.  
 
Now I have written all that down, I can see that maybe I should actually work it all out accurately so that I can actually set a DFD to work towards. Although with the cost of everything going up so much, including interest rates, I'm not sure if that is a good idea to do that....we'll see. 
But please don't anyone think that we are ignoring any of our debts or priority payments. We most certainly are not. 

LittleMissDetermined

No justification needed, as there's no judgement.

As much as anyone can offer advice on here, there is only 1 person who really understands your situation and that's you.  Different horses for different courses all that as they say... I personally need my holidays. I have a stressful job that I work hard at and so does DH.  If my debt wasn't interest free I may feel differently about taking a month or 2 longer to pay it off but that's not our situation. 

In terms of having an actual 'calculated' or forecasted DFD, I found it really helped. Especially as I am now on what feels like the home stretch. Have a look and see what you can work out
LMD x

Makingabobor2

Thanks @LittleMissDetermined. I didn't feel that I was being judged, but rather that it just made me stop and think about things and maybe I needed to justify things to myself more than anything.   Our debts are interest free apart from the mortgage, but at least there is a definite end day for that....June '26, but as I said, I intend to get that down to at least 2025, even sooner if I could.  Many things have happened over the last few years, that made us stop and think about what our priorities in life really are....that included the covid pandemic which I think made everyone re-evaluate life.  For us at least it showed is that what we discovered in our LBM was true, that life, family and experiences are far more important than material possessions. 
So our priority is to pay off our debts ASAP and never use credit ever again, whilst at the same time, saving for our future, but not at the expense of actually having a life. There are too many places we want to see and too many things we want to do. 

Crazycatlady2

Hope you don’t mind me posting

its very exciting that today we are debt free but as we are quite private I can’t really announce it anywhere 😂

it’s a big of an anticlimax really as mortgage was paid off by FIL and we think this wouldn’t have happened if MIL hadn’t passed away last year. Not having that to pay each month freed up the money to pay off debt and have a new bathroom 

LittleMissDetermined

Crazycatlady2 said:

Hope you don’t mind me posting

its very exciting that today we are debt free but as we are quite private I can’t really announce it anywhere 😂

it’s a big of an anticlimax really as mortgage was paid off by FIL and we think this wouldn’t have happened if MIL hadn’t passed away last year. Not having that to pay each month freed up the money to pay off debt and have a new bathroom 

Congratulations! I hope you have declared it on the Roll of Honour?

Makingabobor2

Welcome @Crazycatlady2, of course I don't mind you posting, the more the merrier.
How wonderful of FIL to do that for you, and congratulations on today being your DFD. I don't want our debt freedom to be an anticlimax. I think that is one time I might definitely have to book a big holiday to celebrate.    Only the people on MSE know about our other debts, friends and family only know about the mortgage, so maybe that's the big one that would need celebrating as at one point we had £114K on the mortgage and now its only just above £30K. 
One thing is for sure, I still intend to carry on with saving and never using credit again, even when we are debt free. 

Hope you have an enjoyable day and celebrate in some way. 

Sarahwithlove

I think sometimes we need a holiday for our sanity more than anything. I felt so guilty when I booked to go away but then realised actually it's important to have a life as long as you aren't being excessive and doing a 2 week all inclusive cruise or something 🙃 

Makingabobor2

You are so right @Sarahwithlove, and even the cheapest of holidays feels good when we know we have paid every penny ourselves without credit.  

Just popping online to day I have beaten my December target with making £5 a day, so I am well pleased as still another 10 days to go, although I suspect it will slow right down now. 

Will catch up with all the news tomorrow as I have pulled something in my back just now when I reached up to the bathroom window and typing is making it feel worse. So off to put some heat on it and watch the rest of Royal Variety,  will be back tomorrow. 

Have a good evening everybody