Advice required

fatbelly

As the calculator says, By paying off the highest costing debts first you can pay them off quicker and reduce your total interest bill. This calculator will help you plan which order to pay off your debts.

Read a Snowball Guide from debtcamel

Financially best approach is to repay the highest interest debt, as this reduces the amount of interest you have to pay

SanguineOnSaturn

I think I'd be tempted to get back on with repayment of the mortgage, so an extra £1000 per month. Then all other surplus at the unsecured debt with the highest interest first and switching deals as much as possible.

alittlecynical

I’m concerned that you appear to have little financial discipline and that you have an interest only mortgage. You can’t keep using up your pension. I’d snowball through the first few months with highest % first and then see what you can transfer onto either new 0% cards or into a low interest loan when some of these end next year.

zAndy1

Thanks everyone, I've updated the original post with an updated SOA with some extra and perhaps slightly more realistic numbers in and added the end dates for the promotional rates on the credit cards. 
As far as cars mine is a 17yr old Audi worth maybe £2k, wife's is a Kia Sportage worth maybe £7k (that's partly what the loan was for)
I'll try the snowball thing but I've seen one person comment that they think it would still be sensible to overpay the mortgage and given the interest rate on that is higher than most of the credit card balance and loans I think it would be a good idea to do that. If nothing else it would also be beneficial when we come to remortgage I guess if we can show we've been overpaying the existing mortgage. 
Just one thing I would ask, £30k of the DC pension pot is with pensionbee. It's done absolutely nothing really in terms of growth in the time it's been invested, think the most it's gone up was £6k above the initial deposit and it's now about £3k above after a good few years. Surely there's mileage in perhaps taking the tax free lump sum from that at least and using it to pay off one of the credit cards at least? Maybe leave the current company DC pension that's invested in equity funds and that I think has a good chance of recovering rather than taking £25k out of that right now when the market is down but taking £7k out of the other Pensionbee DC fund isn't going to affect my retirement significantly at all really but could make quite a difference to helping to clear my debts, a potential compromise maybe?

Clueless56

To be blunt, I think you're still looking for a get out of jail free card. If you sold your car for round £2k you could pay almost 4% of your debt and reduce your monthly outgoings, allowing you to pay off more debt each month or start building up an emergency fund.

I don't think you should be musing about cashing in any pension until you have investigated your spending properly, set a realistic budget and revised it a couple of times (in my experience there's always something that is missed/miscalculated in the first budget).  I reckon you could clear your current debt in 3 years, leaving another 7 years before you retire to clear down your mortgage using the money freed up by no longer needing to service your other debts.  Any mortgage balance at the time of retirement could then be cleared using a pension lump sum, if you wished to do that.  This has the double benefits of getting you into good habits with money and giving your pensions time to recover and increase.

Edited to add: the poster who suggested concentrating on paying down your mortgage didn't give their thinking behind that, or suggest what you should do next year when your various 0% deals end.

SusieT

So, putting things in order of highest interest rate at the top as being priority, and earliest finishing 0% rates next. Therefor Ignore the mortgage right now as it will save you a LOT more by getting rid of the credit cards before the interest kicks in - and that could be up to 28% so look up those rates asap as it could well make a big difference
 

Secured

Mortgage...................... 164000...(820)......6%    Just keep paying this for now 

Unsecured Debts

Description....................Debt......Monthly...APR
Barclaycard......................700..............18.68
Lloyds (part of).................402...............18 (guessing at this %)
Nationwide.....................3500...............12.9

MBNA...........................11600.....     .......0            until 19/04/23

Lloyds (part of)...............6163 ................3.9%      until 30/04/23

Halifax............................1087......   ........0             until 04/07/23
Nationwide.....................5439......    .......0             until 24/07/23 

Virgin............................10600.....     .......0             until Aug 23
Nationwide.....................1500..................0            until 03/11/23
Lloyds (part of).................516 ................3.9%      until 23/11/24

Ikano Loan.....................900.......34........0 - not sure what % this is, but it is slowly clearing itself 

Tesco loan.....................14800.....395.......2.3 Clearing itself, so for now just keep paying it

Total unsecured debts..........57187.....949.......

So, you really NEED to know what rates will be charged on the 0 and low% deals when they finish. 
Currentlyyou are paying most interest on the 402 of Lloyds and the 700 of Barclaycard, so these should be your priority to clear right now. 
Nationwide is a more reasonable rate, but, MBNA  may possibly more likely to offer another 0% deal and more likely to be a higher interest rate when it goes up, therefore I would probably be paying this down before Nationwide and hoping like mad that you can get another 0% somehow.

PLEASE forget about the pension, it will not be your get out of jail free card, you can get out of this but ignore the pension until you retire, just leave it to do its thing.

RAS

Another one here:

You absolutely have to know the rates into which ALL these cards with transfer when the 0% deal ends. No point frantically paying down one which finishes in mid23 and reverts to 5% if you've got another ending two months later that reverts to 18%.

And you need to know where ALL your money has been going for at least the last year. Otherwise you are going to carry on spending, strip your pension, and end up with a lump sum to pay off the mortgage and £50k worth of credit card debt. Retiring at 75 if you are lucky. 

Wake up many and smell the poo.

Grumpy_chap

zAndy1 said:

Thanks everyone, I've updated the original post with an updated SOA with some extra and perhaps slightly more realistic numbers in and added the end dates for the promotional rates on the credit cards. 
As far as cars mine is a 17yr old Audi worth maybe £2k, wife's is a Kia Sportage worth maybe £7k (that's partly what the loan was for)
I'll try the snowball thing but I've seen one person comment that they think it would still be sensible to overpay the mortgage and given the interest rate on that is higher than most of the credit card balance and loans I think it would be a good idea to do that. If nothing else it would also be beneficial when we come to remortgage I guess if we can show we've been overpaying the existing mortgage. 
Just one thing I would ask, £30k of the DC pension pot is with pensionbee. It's done absolutely nothing really in terms of growth in the time it's been invested, think the most it's gone up was £6k above the initial deposit and it's now about £3k above after a good few years. Surely there's mileage in perhaps taking the tax free lump sum from that at least and using it to pay off one of the credit cards at least? Maybe leave the current company DC pension that's invested in equity funds and that I think has a good chance of recovering rather than taking £25k out of that right now when the market is down but taking £7k out of the other Pensionbee DC fund isn't going to affect my retirement significantly at all really but could make quite a difference to helping to clear my debts, a potential compromise maybe?

It's great that you have taken some of the advice in your other thread in the pensions board, so thank you.

I note you have still steered the conversation round to taking some of your pension pot to pay off debt.  That was not a good idea this morning and it is still not a good idea this afternoon, as has been reiterated by the responses in this thread as well as those in the earlier thread.  I fear, if you were to take this route with a small amount, you'd see the slight reduction in debt and then either spend the money again or repeat the exercise by crystallising more of your pension resource.

With regard to the cars - is the Audi reliable?  If so, and you said in your other thread that you work from home, why not sell the Kia and your wife can use the Audi to go to her work teaching?  That will give you an instant £7k that can be used to clear some debts plus reduce ongoing expenses so releasing further regular amounts from income to clear debts quicker.

Other than that, here are my comments on the SoA:

zAndy1 said:

Satellite/Cable TV...................... 53

Clothing................................ 50

Presents (birthday, christmas etc)...... 40

Holiday................................. 300

Emergency fund.......................... 30[b]

Can either, or both, of you get any additional work?  Either overtime or second-job to supplement income and all the extra income go into clearing debts?

1. Cancel satellite / cable TV
2. Can you, for the short term, just not buy any new clothes?  Wear what you have in the wardrobe
3. Can you cut back on presents?  No need to give each other a present between you and your wife.  Could you adopt a "secret santa" type approach so you give lower value token presents and buy you lower value gifts?  If done sensitively and with thought, this can result in better outcomes than just the big spend.
4. Holiday.  Can you simply go a year or two without a holiday?  Or a much cheaper holiday than £3.6k per year?  
5. Emergency fund is important but what do you have currently in this fund?  It is not worth saving when you have expensive debts.

Others have made comments about the order to pay down debts so I won't add to that.

Finally, do you now understand how this debt situation came about?  If not, go through statements for the past couple of years and analyse the spend until you do understand what, where, when the spend has crept away from you. It can be frightening how some very small spends soon add up, for example the daily coffee or the meal deal lunch...
You need to understand what happened or you will be back in the cycle a short way down the line.

zAndy1

Thanks for the further comments folks. Regarding cars, yes I work from home but I need a car now and then to go to the office, to help my daughter out now and then etc, it would just be a major pain in the !!!!!! not having a car I can rely on when I need it cos public transport around here is really bad so I can't rely on that. The Audi is reliable at the moment but it's 17 years old and has 120k on the clock so who knows how much longer it will be reliable for. My wife needs her car cos she plays in a brass band in the percussion section and needs to take equipment (drums / timps / glockenspeil etc) to concerts and it only just fits in the sportage so a smaller car (including mine) would not be sufficient so frankly that's not going to happen. Can't cancel Sky as in contract for another 12 months at least. I very rarely buy clothes anyway. Don't have anything in an emergency fund, I figured I'd need to put a figure there as in an ideal world I would put some in an emergency fund each month but as you can probably tell it hasn't been top of my list of priorities recently. 
All credit cards with the exception of Nationwide revert to an interest rate of around 20% when the 0 or 3.9% low interest rate ends

Clueless56

The reason I suggested selling the Audi was not just because you work at home but because I too have an old luxury car which, though reliable, has higher running costs than a newer car due to high road tax, expensive parts when things wear out etc.  This is my choice and I can afford it but it seemed an obvious set of costs to cut from your budget. 

It may be cheaper to hire a car as an when you need one - I went a few years without a car and found hiring was cost effective for the odd occasion I needed a car.