Help to keep me honest

Thanks Lacherlich and wishus for your encouraging words. I have definitely been an impulse buyer, especially on line. I have stuck my last credit card in the back of a drawer at work! I am keeping it in case I need it for some reason, but otherwise intend not to use it ever again. Spending using the debit card definitely gives me more pause for thought. On the food shopping front, I am embarrassed to admit that we have been spending over £150 per week in Sainsbury. This is now coming down due to meal planning and the fact that my OH is vegetarian and now the son has decided he is too, so we hardly buy any meat. Also moving away from brands and just being more aware of what we are spending. Still coming in at £80-100 per week, this is nowhere near what others on these forums are achieving I realise that, much more work to do, I am still learning. Just pausing to think is half the battle.

Good morning diary and all,


I have booked the day off, hope to have a relaxing day. Last night went to a ballroom and latin class with the OH. I will admit to a couple of hobbies which I am going to keep going with because to be honest they keep me sane! The dancing isn't cheap, but then again neither of us is paying for gym membership because this is how we get our exercise. I also have a half hour piano lesson once a week for £8, which is pretty good value I reckon. I have recently adopted YNAB and it has helped me in two ways at least. Firstly, when I budgeted for November it brought home to me some hard choices. For example, if I wanted to keep going with the hobbies and build up a buffer, then there really isn't much left over for holidays. And so I realised that this coming summer, we are going to have to really economise and holiday really cheaply if at all. But weirdly I felt ok about that because I understood that for me keeping going on the hobbies and building up a buffer are much more important at the moment. The second big lesson is to do with overspending. The idea here is that if you overspend in a category, you need to try to find that money from somewhere else in the budget. This has happened a couple of times so far. It has made me think again about some areas of expense and look for savings. This is all really common sense stuff, all about choices and priorities. But previously, I would probably have let the credit card deal with some of that. I guess we all have our own priorities and they make sense to us. The difference for me on this debt free journey is that one of those priorities is to pay down the debt.


This caught my eye on the BBC website yesterday


- About two million people - 6.9% of cardholders - are in arrears or have defaulted on credit card
- Another two million may be struggling to repay
- A further 1.6 million are repeatedly making only the minimum repayments on their debts

So this means that approx. 20% or 1 in 5 credit card holders in the UK have serious debt problems with their credit cards. Food for thought.