My Hubby hid his debt from me for 18 months!

Warning, long post......again

OK, so I have finally managed to get back on here, I know it's been a few weeks since I have been back so here goes.

The Holiday - well where do I start? We had an amazing time, probably one of the best we have ever had. No arguments, bickering, b1tching or falling out. We kept to our budget and everything spent has now been paid off the holiday credit card so it is once again empty.

When we travelled about (and didn't have a car) we either walked, got an Uber or a Lyft. We set up new accounts with both Uber and Lyft and picked up vouchers for $20 of free rides on both so with both of us that's $80 of free rides which actually goes a long way.
With regards to walking, we did over 100 miles in the two weeks we were away so we most definitely made use of our legs!!
On that note, I found a website that you can download your own walking tours, it gives you all of the information for each location on the stop and you get to do it at your own pace. It was great for New Orleans and Miami, I have used it for other holidays too and I will definitely be using it again.

As previously mentioned, our hotels were mainly booked using points and we never went over the $35 a night limit we set and still stayed in some nice hotels. These were all pre-paid so we got a cheaper rate as we knew we weren't going to be cancelling them. We made sure we'd paid these off before we went too.

Now food, we were quite clever when it came to this. Regardless of the meal you have, they tend to be pretty big meals so we would either share (normally breakfast for sharing) or we would take it away with us and get a second meal out of it the following day. A couple of our hotels had small kitchens in so we would also buy what we needed and eat in the hotel.
We also made use of vouchers in the travel guides or that were being handed out (mainly in Vegas). Most of them were for places we would normally eat too which worked out well.

With regards to car hire, we had two over the stay, we again went for cheap and had pre-booked them so got a good deal. We also bought the full insurance ourselves instead of getting stung by the company. Thanks to this very site I will add. On top of this, we looked into the cost of filling up before handing it back or paying for the company to do it. In Miami, it was cheaper to pay Sixt to fill up as with the price of fuel at the fuel stations by the airport it would have cost us $20 more to fill the tank up!
I will add with this be careful with car hire, we went in to pick our car up 30 mins early and they tried to charge us an extra days hire and the car wasn't even ready. We didn't pay it and they took it off the bill but we only saw this as we read the hire receipt the guy in Sixt didn't point that out to us. Luckily my hubby had recently gone through a process at work and had been told to look out for these charges when hiring a car for company travel so he was fully aware of what to look out for.

Another major bargain was a visit to Disney, this was towards the end of our stay and we decided to treat ourselves. We got two, day, tickets for a total of $100, on the gate they would have been $132 each. We wouldn't have gone if we had to pay that price.
The reason we got them so cheap, we forfeited 90 mins of our day to go to timeshare sell, we made it clear from the start we weren't interested and the hard sell backed off massively. I did feel sorry for the guy as you could just see his enthusiasm dwindle but he still had to do his bit. We even had the option of a buffet breakfast but we'd already eaten so we didn't do that.
So for 90 mins we got our tickets for $50 each and spent 10 magical hours in the magic kingdom. I am pretty sure if you ask hubby if it was magical he'd ask you if you meant horrendous instead, the poor boy really did not want to be there that long but he tagged along behind me jumping around like a 5-year-old.

When we got back I made a point of paying off half of our spends from that month's wages and the other half out of this months to spread it out a bit. We were really good and spent just over £800 during the two weeks away - that's car hire costs (fuel), food, drinks, clothes (needed a new pair of jeans as I ripped mine out there) Disney and anything else we hadn't already bought beforehand.
I know that may seem a lot but it works out to £30 per day per person and I am pleased to say that it's fully paid off, 4 weeks after coming back.
I will add I have also had a purge through the house and sold quite a few unwanted items which have helped pay off the holiday too. I sold £250 worth of unwanted items, some of them were prizes so brand new and never opened.

So now we are back we have been very frugal with our spending, takeaways have stopped and we have set aside an amount each week to be spent on food/household shopping and what isn't spent that week will roll over to the next week. If at the end of the month there is enough money left then that will go towards the debt to be paid off. We have discussed that if we are invited out we need to decide whether we go based on whether it is something we have to go to and then how much is left in that week's kitty.
I know it is going to be tough but when I originally started working this out back in January it looked like it would take 3 years to clear, I can happily say that 4 months in I think it will be just over 2 years from now to clear it. As you can see from my signature we have paid of £5418.10, I didn't even think that was possible for us to achieve, lets hope it continues. Of course, that is if nothing major comes along that sets us back.
Also, the £4k he'd lent to friends is now down to £1600 left to pay so that has also gone towards that amount paid off.

I know we have a lot of work to do to keep on top of all of it but I can say 'We've got this, we can do this' and know I mean it.