Payment A Day - Chapter 2023

LittleMissDetermined

Great July total PADders! Welcome along @dreambig19  everyone is welcome here. 

It’s 1st of the month so £1,071.76 for me today. 

Keedie

Thank you so much @IndiJonesi for being a great counter upper for July 2023 and well done to everyone on that fantastic total! I've updated the first page with the total, and it's so exciting to see how much we've PADded so far this year, and I've looked at the overall totals and we're very fast approaching £100k! Keep it up everyone, every penny counts.

Welcome @dreambig19, you can PAD as much or little as you like, whenever you like, but keep up with reading the group's posts if you can, as it helps with motivation 🤗.

That's a whopper of a PAD there @LittleMissDetermined to kickstart August, great stuff.

My PADs are

£75.57 to Mobile Madness
£76.95 to Emergency Fund
£25 to Build a Buffer
£45 to Amazon Prime subscription accrual
£10.38 to Lionsgate subscription accrual

£232.90 total

Spinayarn

Wow! Great totals everyone!
my PAD today is £255.50 on a loan payment.

Divingmad

Great totals everyone 😀
My PAD for today is £644.29 to the mortgage, loan and CC

dreambig19

@Keedie I'm interested in what some of those payments are - mobile madness etc - are they other challenges you're doing?

My PAD today is an extra £8.40 to the credit card.

LittleMissDetermined

I’ve probably missed it, but do we have a counter-upper for August?

BlueJ94

LittleMissDetermined said:

I’ve probably missed it, but do we have a counter-upper for August?

Scrolled back and found this.. 

Can I just check @rsdiscos are you still able to do August as counter upper? I realised that I am away for most of September for my hospital treatment, so I have moved myself to October 2023, but if you are no longe@Keedie to do August (which is perfectly fine if you can't), then I will do August 2023.

From @keedie

LittleMissDetermined

Thanks! I would be happy to volunteer for September duties 
LMD x

AntoMac

Great work with the counting up for July @IndiJonesi
Some awesome PADding in July.
£9 to debt for me please 

Keedie

Thanks for volunteering for September 2023 @LittleMissDetermined, I've added you as the counter upper and I'll be doing August 2023.

dreambig19 said:

@Keedie I'm interested in what some of those payments are - mobile madness etc - are they other challenges you're doing?

My PAD today is an extra £8.40 to the credit card.

I have a habit of naming my debts, savings pots and bills pots with fun names to amuse myself @dreambig19. It keeps me motivated in my own little way if it's not so serious and dull. The Mobile Madness is a savings pot that I've created to save up the money for early repayment for the iPhones that I brought through Sky Mobile for me and my son. I called it 'Madness' as I brought two handsets within a month totalling over £1,000 as I was having bipolar hypomanic episode and if I'd been stable at the time, I wouldn't have done it. I can laugh about that episode now, hence the mockery via the name of the savings pot, but at the time it was all just draining.

But anyways, I worked out when I wanted to pay the phones off, and set that as my target and keep the money in an interest earning Chase savings account. And I put any money that I get from surveys, money that is owed to me, cashback, rounding down my bank balances, a small standing order and some debt snowball money into that account. It's like a little savings challenge game and I track my progress to keep me going. I've reached the target to pay off my handset and will do that later this week, and by the end of September 2023, I will have cleared my son's phone. Then I'll use the same approach to have multiple mini targets for lump sum payments to clear my debt to my mum as she is the next on my debt snowball list.

Build a Buffer is my homemade overdraft with a £500 target, so that if something happens and I have to go over budget, then I use the buffer first and then I'll replenish it the next month so that it always stays at £500 (once I reach my target as it's still a work in progress). If it's something major, then I'll use the buffer before I touch the emergency fund, and then rebuild them both back up.

With my entertainment subscriptions, I have just started saving up the money to do annual subscriptions instead of monthly ones as it's cheaper and I wanted to know that it's covered and I don't have to think about them. So I've been putting £100 a month aside, plus my sister's contribution which more than covers the current subscriptions and provides a surplus that I accumulate. Once I have enough for an annual subscription I switch the renewal basis, and use the value of that monthly payment to roll into the surplus and then save for the next one. That way, I will have set aside the money for all my subscriptions for 2024 by December 2023. I can then reduce my overall budget from January 2024, and will be cash stuffing for the renewals for 2025 throughout 2024 and I'll have the back up of my sister's contribution to the subscriptions also. 

I get easily overwhelmed, so having small manageable targets has meant that I progress through them quicker, and it's more fun and balanced.