Adventure wanted, but first we must rid ourselves of debt

AdventureWanted · 8 October 2017 at 10:10PM

I’ve ummed and aahed about starting a diary on here for a couple of months, but have decided that it is a good way for me to keep track of how our debt reduction is going and hopefully on those dark days when it feels like we’re getting nowhere I can remind myself of how things have improved.

Anywho, I’ll give a brief overview of our life/debt.

I’m a Mum to 3 Kids. Hubby is self employed and I Home educate the older 2 Kids. In August I finally had enough of our debts and decided to do something about it. After reading lots of diaries I downloaded ynab and took control of our budget. Our debts are due to a car loan, house repairs and mostly a lack of control over finances so monthly spending got out of control and we didn’t really have much to show for it.

As at 1 August (LBM) our debts were:-
CC1 - £5,185
CC2 - £13,470
Cc3 - £11,400

All of the credit cards are 0% and will be balance transferred to new 0% cards if we haven’t paid them off at the end of the 0% deal.

The future -
We would love to travel. Firstly we’d love to visit every county in the uk and then travel further afield to the likes of Canada and Australia. Hubby and I regret not taking the opportunities to see the world pre children, but are now very keen to share these adventures with our kids.

We’d love to move to our forever family home, although we have no idea where in the country this would end up being in!

And more than those above we’d love to have savings for our children’s futures and not waste the extortionate amount of money we do each month on debt repayments.

I’ll post my current debt situation post LBM in the next post.x

AdventureWanted · 8 October 2017 at 10:27PM

Since our LBM I have taken advice from other diaries and have set up savings accounts for Christmas, car maintenance/tax,etc, emergency fund, Home Ed subscriptions, national trust and Home insurance.

I have joined the payment a day thread and am loving making a small payment each day to reduce our debt. It really is quite addictive and I find myself spending a lot of time thinking about how much I can pay off tomorrow against a debt or when I will get below a certain figure.

As of today our debts are:
CC1 - £4.202.04
CC2 - £12,530
Cc3 - £11.170.

I am really pleased with the changes we have made to our budget and how we have managed to reduce the CC balances by more than the minimum each month. Our budget was tested lots in September when we had lots of unexpected expenses for DHs car, which in the past we would have just put on a CC and not considered until we got the statement the following month. In September however we were able to rejig the budget and find the money required, which I was completely amazed at. I had got so used to overspending and having to use money from DHs business to bail us out.

My hope is that from now on I can keep an eye on our spending, not dip into the business account at all, save for our annual expenses and continue making additional payments to bring the debt down. There are days when I think we will never see the back of the debt as the balances seem so high, but I know if we continue slowly chipping away they will go eventually. I just hope it doesn’t take too long! (I am quite impatient!!)

charlies_tribe · 8 October 2017 at 10:38PM

I just wanted to post to say welcome and good luck.
You've also given me an idea for another pot. We also home ed our DS (and seriously considering it for the girls) so a subs pot is a good idea. I completely forgot about all our renewals being due this/next month.

AdventureWanted · 9 October 2017 at 8:10AM

charlies_tribe wrote: »

I just wanted to post to say welcome and good luck.
You've also given me an idea for another pot. We also home ed our DS (and seriously considering it for the girls) so a subs pot is a good idea. I completely forgot about all our renewals being due this/next month.

Hi Charlies tribe,
Thanks for commenting. It’s nice to meet a fellow Home edder. I only looked at my subscriptions in August and realised that they were due for renew in Sept. Next year should be much more organised hopefully!

AdventureWanted · 9 October 2017 at 8:22AM

Morning,
So today I have managed to pay off £2.04 on CC1, which has taken the balance down to £4.200.

In other news the national trust has taken a renewal payment for a gift membership I cancelled and as per their email won’t be refunding the money until 25th!! :mad: Fingers crossed the money will be returned before it’s needed for other bills. Luckily a lot of our DDs are staggered throughout the month, but still it’s awful having an unexpected £108 go out of your account when you’ve accounted for all of your money.

Today will be a reasonably busy day for us with swimming lessons for DC3 and then we need to start looking into gift ideas for DC3’s 1st birthday next month. Have managed to curb my spending already since LBM and resist buying (realise how ridiculous it was to consider buying) a teepee tent for £150 for DC3, when 1. There is a perfectly good play tent belonging to DC2 that they all love. 2. I have no idea where I would put it, as our house is already full of toys and 3. DC3 is most probably too young to appreciate it!

charlies_tribe · 9 October 2017 at 11:15AM

It's our first year home ed so will hopefully be more organised next year too.

Defiantly get practical presents while they are little, it gets a whole lot more expensive when they are teens. I think for DD1's first birthday we spent £30 and a bbq on the garden but she was the first grandchild so was spoilt rotten so we didn't feel too bad at just the 1 present and some new clothes.

AdventureWanted · 10 October 2017 at 3:16PM

Today has been a pretty busy day. We had our boiler serviced, so I had a mammoth tidy up prior to their arrival as I thought they’d need to check each radiator (also I hate people to see how messy our house is!). The house looks so much nicer when it’s less cluttered, although all I have done is move the clutter from the house to the garage! I really need to declutter the house and list bits for sale, but it’s so overwhelming at times as there is lots of stuff and I have a relatively short amount of time in which to do it (depending on how clingy DC3 is being).

Anywho, today I’ve made a small payment of £1.66 to CC1, which has increased the total paid off this card since 1 August 2017 to 19%. I’m pretty pleased with how this is reducing, but really it is just a small pebble in our ocean of debt! I’m so annoyed that we allowed the debt to get so high. I really took my eye off the ball and it seems like it’ll take forever to rectify the situation.

Anyway enough of feeling sorry for myself, tomorrow is another day and the debt will reduce again by a small amount.

crunch_time · 10 October 2017 at 5:56PM

Hey!

Thanks for checking out my diary and commenting!!

We are very similar in our dreams yes!!

Subscribed xx

AdventureWanted · 11 October 2017 at 11:21AM

Morning,

Our DD for CC2 has come out today, taking the amount paid on this card since 1 August to 7.9%. Just another £9.87 to pay to get to 8%, so hopefully I can make a few extra payments to it before the end of the month.

Have paid £3.34 today to CC1 taking it to a nice figure. Hopefully by the end of the month I can get the figure £1000 below my starting figure of £5185 - only need an additional £10 payment.

Still feel pretty cr*ppy about the debt situation, but I guess I should be happy that it is going down, just not as quickly as I wished. Am very conscious that DH’s tax return is due at the end of jan and I have no idea as yet how much tax he’ll have to pay. He’s definitely not had a LBM. He doesn’t see the problem with our level of debt, as the balance is going down and he thinks it’s perfectly normal to have cc debt. Whereas I seem to spend far too much time thinking about our finances and how I can reduce the balances down.

Anyway, now off to practice telling the time with DC1 & DC2 and print maths worksheets for DC1. Hope you all have a good day.x

phizzimum · 11 October 2017 at 1:52PM

Hi Adventure Wanted

I'm a home educator too! My girls are in their teens now so only my youngest is still in education. I hate to think of the money I wasted over the years on books and courses we barely used. Whenever I had a wobble and doubted my abilities I would go on Amazon and buy books!

You've done really well with your overpayments. Are you targeting one card or spreading payments across all three?

Phizz

AdventureWanted · 11 October 2017 at 2:31PM

phizzimum wrote: »

Hi Adventure Wanted

I'm a home educator too! My girls are in their teens now so only my youngest is still in education. I hate to think of the money I wasted over the years on books and courses we barely used. Whenever I had a wobble and doubted my abilities I would go on Amazon and buy books!

You've done really well with your overpayments. Are you targeting one card or spreading payments across all three?

Phizz

Hi Phizz

Thanks for commenting. It’s so easy to waste money on resources you don’t need when you’re worrying about Home ed. I bought so many workbooks even before starting home educating DC1 and most of them are unused! Both my DCs are at primary school level (y3 & reception).

At the moment I’m mainly making overpayments on CC1 as part of the 0% ends in Jan. I should be able to clear that part by Jan (just over £1k), then I’ll concentrate on CC2 as part of its 0% ends in March (£2653), so will try and reduce that as much as possible before balance transferring it. The rest of CC1 & CC2 0% ends in July, but unless there’s some miracle we’ll have to transfer the balance again. Cc3 has a long 0% deal (2019) so we’re just paying the minimum on it.

Have managed to remortgage our main mortgage balance today, which is brilliant. We’ve managed to get a slightly lower fixed rate for 2 yrs than we were paying which will save £17 a month :j (we’ll most probably either pay this off credit cards or variable part of mortgage). Our second part of our mortgage is just over £3.5k from home improvements in the past. We can’t ever seem to transfer this to a fixed rate, so it’s currently on a variable rate of 3.64% (I think!). I often wonder about paying this off using a 0% card as we should save money doing it, but I don’t want to ruin our chances of getting new 0% CCs when we need them next year. So think we’ll just carry on as we are for the time being. Although would happily take advice from anyone else on this.

Adventure wanted, but first we must rid ourselves of debt

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