£62,000 in unsecured debt!

kimlisa66

Hi there

Just wanted to add my tuppence worth if it helps. Yours is a classic case of living to your means and beyond, we all do it sadly. You have a very good salary and like the rest of us, fallen into the complacency trap.

I notice, like others, your motoring, parking, travel, petrol expenses are astronomical, even with the hike in fuel prices. I am pretty sure if you have a good look at where this money is going you could save probably half of this by forward planning your journeys, car sharing, walking blah blah. Also your car insurance seems excessively high. My own insurance is through Esure, £20 quid a month for an almost new Honda Civic. Quidco might have a much better deal for you. This is a cashback site for financial products that many people have found useful.

Also Electric bill is as much as your council tax, which is relatively low. Any savings here by switching to another provider ?

£400 for food is a lot for 3 of your, excessive I would say. Since switching to shopping at Aldi, Lidl, Netto etc I can do a family of 4, 3 of which are adults and my 2 boys are both grown men and eat for england, for 60 - 70 quid a week and that includes a few really good bottles of wine for me. I won't scrimp on food but I still don't come close to your bill. Ex OH used to shop at Sainsburys, and our bills were 150 plus some weeks, more than the mortgage. I soon put a stop to that !

With planning and thought I reckon you could trim at least £300 per month off your current expenditure.

Good luck, keep us posted.

Kim

srichards

Also, are your wifes family on the internet? Becuase she could use Skype to call them, its completely free and could sit there all bloody day talking if she wanted to.

ALso a good mobile deal is Tmobile - I pay £30 a month and they give me £180 credit a month to use however I want. Which is a darn good deal.

Im wondering if your wife understands the kind of debts you both have, becuase her using a mobile to call abroad suggests that either she doesnt, or she doesnt care anyway. It might be a good idea to educate her a little.

Clariman

Well done for posting your SOA. Just a couple of comments about completing and formatting the SOA for when you next want to update or post it. It looks as if you have not typed in a number into the House Value field

House value (Gross)..................... NaN

"NaN" means "not a number". You may have entered spaces or perhaps you typed a comma in. Just type in a number or leave as 0 if you want to leave it blank. The non-numeric House Value is what has caused some of the calculated fields to show as NaN too.

The other thing is to make sure you format for "MSE", not for "Make Sense" when you want to copy and paste into a post here. Otherwise it generates the wrong tags.

This is not a reprimand, just some helpful (I hope) suggestions for next time

Clariman

Deep_In_Debt

I have family living abroad (mum in S of France and brother in Botswana) and I get a set amount of minutes per month through my supplier for calls abroad from my landline. My family understand how expensive it is so we don't spend too long on the phone or they call me, but I still don't use all my cheap minutes for calling. My brother has email so we tend to communicate that way more.

Another poster mentioned shopping in Lidl. I used to shop in Sainsburys and Waitrose before I discovered Lidl. Now my weekly shop has more than halved since I use Lidl and I still eat well and can now afford the occasional treat which I couldn't before. This is a little lifestyle change which I've not really noticed, in fact, it's better now that I can afford to treat myself to a bottle of wine of bar of choccie once a week and I'm still spending less than I used to. Not doing my waistline much good though!

mpusssm

Good day all...

Thank you so much for all your posts today. I am really starting to believe that we can make savings and start to pay off some of the debt.

Just a quick update for you:

Mobile

The mobile phone issue has been resolved. I found a site online that will allow my wife to make calls to a tunisia landline for 8p per minute and 15p per minute to a mobile. This is excellent value and will cut the bills dramatically.

Food

We currently shop in Tesco and always try to cut back on non essentials but still pay nearly £90 per week. I have just found our local aldi so will try shopping there and see if there is a difference in costs while still eating "descent" food.

Travel / Petrol

The problem with my travel costs is I commute to london every day to work. It works out about £7k per year (including parking) just to get to work... sounds crazy huh? This cost is fixed and can not be saved in anyway. Petrol is expensive i know, but i do travel every weekend to see my parents which costs on average £40 per month to do - they like to see their grandson.

Virgin Media TV; BB & Phone

I am going to call VirginMedia tomorrow morning and tell them i want to cancel my service and see their reaction. I will cut back on services and try and pay around £48 per month instead of £97!

Spending Diary

I have started the spending diary today and it has already saved me a few pounds. I normally go to the petrol station in the morning and buy a newspaper and drink, but when i realised i would have to write this expenditure down i noticed that i didnt want to and that this was clearly not a necessary purchase. Instead, i am reading the free newspaper at my parents house and had 2 coffees at home. Much cheaper!!

All of you have really given some excellent advice and I can not thank you enough. Please keep posting with any other feedback and ideas - It feels like we are all one big family...

Sabs

Hippychick

well done on making your steps, it is true that every little coffee etc adds up.

Definitely worth taking a look at Martins demotivator tool on the main site, put in how much you usually spend on that paper and it will show you how much it costs in the long run, a great way to make you not want to buy it.

Read the newspapers online is a good trick, thats free to do.

Deep_In_Debt

That's great news well done. I've stopped buying newspapers now - read them on-line instead and it's amazing how much you can save on cutting out those "little things" that you don't think about. Keeping a spending diary has helped me too and I soon realised how much money I was frittering away every day.

Shopping in Aldi is good too. I used to shop in Sainsburys, Waitrose and Tesco and used to find that I was tempted to buy "extras" such as clothes, DVDs, CDs etc. By shopping in Lidl, I don't have that temptation and now simply buy food and essentials, thus reducing my shopping bill massively and as I say, allowing some treats for myself!

Well done on the phone savings too.

Chin up, there is defo light at the end of the tunnel as you have found out and already in a short time you are taking steps to make savings whilst not having massive effects on your lifestyle. Keep posting here and let us know how you are getting along.

Curious_Moose

Could your wife talk to her family using Skype?

Miss_Marple_2

Could you get the train to work ? With fuel prices as they are, the train is working out better value all the time - plus the cost is fixed for 6 months at a time. (obviously if you need the car whilst at work, it's not an option).

If you are employed, your company might take part in the scheme where they loan you the money for an annual season ticket and then take money monthly from your salary to cover repayments - as the amount is before tax, not only do you save the amount that an annual season ticket saves you anyway, you also save the tax - which in your case would be 40%

mpusssm

Miss_Marple wrote: »

Could you get the train to work ? With fuel prices as they are, the train is working out better value all the time - plus the cost is fixed for 6 months at a time. (obviously if you need the car whilst at work, it's not an option).

If you are employed, your company might take part in the scheme where they loan you the money for an annual season ticket and then take money monthly from your salary to cover repayments - as the amount is before tax, not only do you save the amount that an annual season ticket saves you anyway, you also save the tax - which in your case would be 40%

Thanks for the post Miss_Marple. I do actually get the train to work daily so can not really save any costs with travel. with regards to the season ticket that is exactly what i do every year. Interest free loan for the ticket then they deducted direct from my salary.

spent NO money today!!