Diary of a 30-something idiot

uralmaid

I am sorry but until you really change your mindset you will be on this continuing spiral.  The minute you have any spare money, you spend it.  Hard as it may appear, you should not be spending £500 on 2 bikes.  There are lots of bikes on marketplace and other places for a lot less money. With so much outstanding debt the last thing you should be doing is having a holiday as it always costs more than you budget.  The home renovation budget is mad, as is the £1000 gift fund. You are not in a position to be spending £1000 over the year on gifts. Use the majority of it to pay off debt. As Warby says - short term pain for long term gain. 

Jellytotts

If you have a Morrisons near by then try their GF macaroni, it's not bad (as far as GF pasta goes).

I don't use a "round up" tool as every penny is budgeted for within my monthly workings, if there's money left in the account it has a purpose and I don't need it flitting off to another account.  I think it's a great too, if there's surplus income each month but you don't have surplus income.

Im in agreement with others, big pots of money sitting around for gifts/clothes etc aren't feasible when you have debt and debt to friends, I'd need to pay them back first before I started buying other people gifts.  I appreciate you have all the kids to buy for but the older ones need to be aware of the money situation (they need to learn how to budget) and younger ones can be gifted smaller/second hand gifts and will still be grateful.  Our family has a no buy rule for anyone over 16, works fantastically well and saves so much hassle.

You are so close to having your LBM, it's flickering but you need to have it fully on before you get into an even worse position.  

foxandflowers

Ooft, waking up this morning and it appears I am under fire. 

The £1000 gift fund is actually exactly how much I need in the pot - its £100 per child for Christmas and Birthdays. Part of the thing I have been struggling with is not being able to budget appropriately for Christmas, which inevitably has led to missing bills, and then spending Jan/Feb catching up. I don't want to do that any more, but I also don't want the children to go without. Given the cost of things, £100 each doesn't actually get very much any more. 

I'm quite happy to spend less on secondhand bikes, but I've also bought one off Marketplace for £40 before and it was totally knackered and according to the bike shop I took it to, unsafe to ride. So there ought to be a balance there as well. The idea is to buy second hand and then have FREE adventures as a family. 

Home renovation fund is needed. Unfortunately, the house we bought requires a lot of work including uncovering lots of broken floor tiles. The floor tiles have asbestos in them so can't be disturbed. The electrics are shonky, and some of my roof tiles have begun to crack. The garden is a disaster zone. A lot of things we can do ourselves, but some of it we can't. I am not a roofer or a sparky. I will happily pay someone to do those jobs. 

£400 on clothes includes... coat, shoes, wellies, pyjamas, underwear, school clothes, weekend clothes, literally EVERYTHING as she has grown about 4 inches and literally nothing fits her. I need to replace everything. About the only thing that doesn't need replacing is her school bag. I'm more than happy to look secondhand - I very rarely buy anything new, but even going to Primark for the basics and topping up on Vinted is still going to be expensive as it all adds up. 

And given my track record with things going incredibly wrong at a rate of knots, yes I think a £3,000 emergency fund is actually pretty reasonable. It would be put in my PBs so no immediate access, and would be for actual emergencies, such as when we attempted to fix the wonky floorboards and sprung a leak that flooded the kitchen and I had to call an emergency plumber. I would feel much safer and happier knowing there was a lump sum behind me for if things went wrong. I think it is stupid to not plan for things going wrong, as I have the type of life that lurches from disaster to disaster, and a lot of the time, the debt I am in could have been avoided just by having a solid emergency fund.

I am trying really really hard. I am continuing to pay off debt each month, and I am trying to find a middle ground whereby my family doesn't miss out and we don't live a life of penury, but I am still overpaying to the debt and working on my habits as I want this to be a lasting change. I've been writing here screaming into the void for over a year, and I do think I have made progress. I've cut down on bills, got a better paying job, tracked what I've spent, and generally kept our heads above water. 

I am doing my best.  

warby68

Of course you are Foxy, noone is doubting that and that you are doing it largely alone for the benefit of 6(?) others.

You have debts though and missed your relatively modest Stepchange payment 3 times. 

Try not to put your head under the covers and fire us all off as unappreciative of your achievements. Try and look at the points everyone makes and consider them with an open mind. If your daughter needs so much as the moment, why did you spend on other stuff at the weekend? Those kinds of questions. Forgetting the size of your proposed pots, these are the savings that are supposed to come from income  but you are filling them by selling assets, this is not sustainable. Your planned pots/spends simply do not match your income level.

We want you to succeed very much and there is a lot of experience here that knows full well what works and what doesn't.

stymied

You are definitely making progress @foxandflowers, especially with tracking spends and budgeting x

foxandflowers

@Jellytotts thanks for the recommendation on the pasta front - I will give it a go. I like my roundup pots, if I'm spending £3.95 on something, I won't miss the 5p but it is all slowly adding up. The boat fund is a LONG way from the goal of £40,000 though. 

@warby68 I don't mean to come over as defensive, I'm just tired and waking up to a load of comments telling me I'm all wrong is v. disheartening. I do have savings set up each month to go to specific pots - I dont't imagine for a minute that it is sustainable to keep selling off assets and replenishing the pots that way. But the more I can fill the pots, the more the savings that go towards them will hopefully keep them at a good level, so when disaster does hit (which it inevitably will) I'm covered. It would be a nice boost to have those pots "funded" so that I can concentrate on paying more towards the debt, rather than paying back peter and robbing paul to cover emergencies or birthdays or problems with MOT's or whatever else may crop up. 

@stymied thank you


Just in case it was missed - £3,000 was allocated to pay off debt. On top of the £300 or so I am paying every month. My overpayment idea was to try and generate £25 extra a week towards the debt - and so far this year I have exceeded that overpayment target each month. 

MFWannabe

Oh dear it wasn’t my or anyone else’s intention to upset you, we are genuinely worried about you x 

We all see it as YOU doing all this on your own; scrimping and trying to get by and pay off all these debts 
We worry that you’re pawning stuff to put food on the table 
We worry that you’ll sell your car and van and the money will get frittered away and there will be nothing left to sell, you have already sold your old house and downsized? 

Your husband needs to stand up and get a job to help you even if it is low pay/ part time, whatever it is it will bring in an extra few pounds 

Our comments come from a concerned place not a have a go at you place 🫤

wildheart83

I think the problem is that as soon as you have money your husband suddenly needs things, or things need fixed/replaced etc and you're far too kind hearted to say no. You've come such a long way but doing it alone must surely be taking its toll on you lovely x

foxandflowers

There are union mutterings of a £3000 pay rise or 10% whichever is greater. I am manifesting earning £29,000 before the end of the year. That would mean in a 2 year period I would be £7000 per year better off. 

Have been playing with calculations and determine that I need to spend at least £3,464 of any money made from selling the vehicles towards debt payments, plus an additional £1783 to Friend One's loan. If I then find an additional £33 per week, I will be debt free in 8 years and 7 months, 18 years earlier than Stepchange predicts. Provided I keep up with paying £350 a month off the overall debt that is.  

enthusiasticsaver

Are your friends ok with waiting for you to pay them back?  Do you think they would understand if you prioritised some of the spends you intend using the van money for over repaying them?  Did you borrow off them for anything specific or was it for general living/overspending? 

Can you use the March bonus to pay towards one of the friends loans? I would certainly use some of the van money to pay at least 50% of your friends loans off given they are quite high. 

What is the breakdown of that £970 towards bills every month?  Does that include the £350 to stepchange? 

I think you are doing well in getting a better paying job and trying to live within a budget but every so often there is a pattern of you struggling to live within a budget but I do think you should recognise you are trying to change the habits of a lifetime.  If you are ND that can make it doubly hard.  My son in law has ADHD and struggles to manage money so my daughter manages their finances.  He says his brain is constantly craving the dopamine hit of spending on something he wants and he cannot get the concept of saving and waiting for things. I don't know if this is what you struggle with too but it would explain why keeping to a budget is hard for you. 

I would urge you to reconsider spending £400 on clothes etc for your DD in one go.  That indicates that what you are wanting to do is really splash out a heap of cash in one go rather than choosing the most urgent things she needs and trying to get them as cheap as possible. The same goes for bikes which are not essential especially as you are already spending on a camper van. Learning to prioritise your spends and save small amounts for things like your DDs clothes is ultimately the way to go as you will not always have assets to sell. Maybe use the Vinted money to go towards clothes for her?