Payment A Day - Chapter 2023

Keedie

Hello all,

The total PAD for 1 August 2023 was £2,221.85

Following on from my verbal vomit of my previous post, I do really believe that our debt free/savings/financial freedom journey is personal to the individual, but the most common asset that we all have is to break our journey down into manageable steps. Hence we are all PADders! But if you ever feel that you have too much of a mammoth task, or you're running on fumes or experiencing budget burn out, just pause and find the small steps to help you recalibrate and move forward...

Spinayarn

Morning all! Thanks for the explanation @Keedie
- I’ve often wondered what your payments were!

PAD today of £45 into car tax pot. I’ve decided I want to pay next years car tax in one go rather than monthly instalments. As it’s due 1 Nov I need to make 4 x payments of £45 into my savings pot for it.

LittleMissDetermined

Good morning   Great quote Keedie! 

My PAD today is £3 to the EF
LMD x

Keedie

I suppose I've confused a lot of people with the name of my debts and savings pots @Spinayarn 😂!

Glad you liked the quote @LittleMissDetermined.

The first handset for Sky Mobile has been paid off! I checked the app after my direct debit came out today and it was already reduced so I've cleared the balance - yippee! So my PADs are

£77.13 to Mobile Madness (towards the next handset)
£32.87 to Sky Mobile (direct debit)
£286.84 to Sky Mobile (overpayment)
£100 to Bank of Mum - school fees
£25 to my son's savings

£521.84 total

Keedie

Oops I forgot the Help to Save payment so an additional PAD of £50.

dreambig19

@Keedie thanks so much for the detailed response! I definitely think I'm going to start doing something like that. I want to take baby steps though, I'm coming back at this after yet another failed attempt and think if I try to do 'all the things, all at once' I'll fail again 

Keedie

You're more than welcome @dreambig19, hopefully it was useful. And don't think about the bigger picture, it'll just scare you. You totally got this and you won't fail. You'll just need to have one goal at a time and break that goal into small baby steps, so that you can cross off the mini milestones.

I have a macro/micro approach and that has really helped me. So being debt free (macro goal), clear 1 specific debt (micro goal). And I use my energy and focus to break my micro goal into little phases and work on those until that goal is done and then move onto the next. The same approach applies to my budget, so reducing fixed expenses (macro goal), done by cancelling anything unnecessary, shopping around for deals or saving up to convert a subscription renewal etc (micro level).

Debts - I started by writing a list of everything I owed and numbered them in terms of mental priority (as in the impact it had on my mental health and not the actual balance, and prioritised my snowball that way). I decided that I needed less creditors and things to think about, so I did some balance and money transfers to tidy things up and lump some of them together and clear a few and then just slowly went down the list (which admittedly changed a few times as life happened and I can often be indecisive). 

Expenses - I decided that less is more and I got rid of a few things and the focus is on reducing my fixed expenses so that I can have more disposable income to have a better life balance and have spare money to throw at my debts and savings. Paying off the mobile handsets early clears a creditor and reduces my fixed expenses by default, so my main expenses goal has been the subscriptions like Disney+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Kindle Unlimited etc. I decided that in terms of quality of life, I didn't want to do away with them so I had to work out how to do them cheaper. I used Clubcard vouchers to get 2 lots of 3 months Disney+ for 'free' and used the monthly £7.99 to accumulate as a surplus and put that towards saving up to pay for Amazon annually and to save for an annual Disney+ subscription. 

The Build a Buffer is simply made up of round ups on my Monzo account and rounding down my balance whenever it's something like £10.93 to £10 and putting the £0.93 into the savings pot. Then I move whatever is left in the account at the end of the month into the pot and I reset for the following month. 

I just consistently do lots of very tiny actions and habits to have a bigger impact and it's all been a lot of trial and error, but I now don't feel so stressed by it all.

AntoMac

£20 to debt please

Jrcoal5

£19.67 for me please today x

LittleMissDetermined

That quote @Keedie was a question on The Chase yesterday.... I gave the answer before the options came up and my hubby was so impressed with me!! I didn't mention how I knew  

My PAD today is £27.67 to various places
LMD x