I’m taking control of my life, now.

boxofpaws · 6 August 2017 at 9:28AM

Today I'm going to do stuff

I have done the BT (took less than 1 minute)
Load of washing in
Biking up to see my mum later. Might take her for afternoon tea
Sainsbury healthy food shop arrives at 11
Got my running gear on

boxofpaws · 6 August 2017 at 9:29AM

Cumbria_lass wrote: »

Paws am I right in thinking you have paid 10k in 7 months . If you have that is truly amazing !

You deserve your takeaway !

Stop being lazy and get the BT sorted asap.

Have a lovely weekend .

£10k, I know I can't believe it. Now to maintain the momentum

Deleted_User wrote: »

Hope your takeaway was nice and you enjoyed your night out?

Yay to being nearly at £30k, it's going in the right direction.

Have you sorted the BT out yet? Xx

BT done now. Yay !

System · 6 August 2017 at 9:38AM

That is fab, you will be debt free in less than 2 years if you keep going at same speed . Well done

Narola1976 · 6 August 2017 at 3:37PM

Hi Paws. You have made great progress...hoping to learn from you. subscribing to cheer you on.

boxofpaws · 13 August 2017 at 11:57AM

I may have tomodify this later if I think of other things but I am going to try to post our superfluous spends each month just before payday. This is because we are slowly eating into the emergency fund and I'm not sure I knew why

Spent since last payday

Takeaway -£18
Night on the town and meal £70
New motorbike helmet for husband - £130
New leather handbag (9th wedding anniversary present) -£40
Takeaway for/with friends - £35
Hanging basket for neighbour because we killed theirs -£10
Champagne and flowers for anniversary £31
Lunch and coffee at Meadowhall (anniversary) £12
Toaster -£43
Sun visor for car £80
Plants for border £43

£512 in total. It's all falling into place:think:

boxofpaws · 13 August 2017 at 12:01PM

Cumbria_lass wrote: »

That is fab, you will be debt free in less than 2 years if you keep going at same speed . Well done

I reckon it will 2.5 years from now. We did get a head start with bonuses and gifts at the start. I think we can maintain an average of £1100, bug it largely depends on in remortgaging. More about that later.

Narola1976 wrote: »

Hi Paws. You have made great progress...hoping to learn from you. subscribing to cheer you on.

Hello Narola,

I hope you don't learn frequency of diary posts, I'm not great at updating. Will pop over to yours later

boxofpaws · 13 August 2017 at 4:50PM

I need to put some of my money thoughts down to try and make sense of them. I am hoping that someone out there can give me some good advice.

I started this diary in January when it dawned on me that we were further in debt than we had ever been and remortgaging in 2018 was goin to be difficult with so much credit card debt. Clearly we are making some progress since then, the Big Number is going down but there is no real purpose to what I am doing.

I am 40 in November. Husband is 46. So really, ideally, we want to have paid off the mortgage in 14 years. Current mortgage term is 18 years.

Current debts are
Car loan - £6478 - payments of £323 per month until March 2019.
Car PCP loan. Payments of £161 from now until Nov 2017. December 2017 payment is £2016
Credit cards (4) total £22500. We pay £800 - £900 to those every month (it was £900 but we will be reducing this to £800 from next month)

Current mortgage payment is £1165. Outstanding when we come to mortgage will be £167,000. House value somewhere between £245 (nationwide calculator) - 266k (zoopla estimate) right now

Summary
£1165 mortgage pm £167k outstanding
£1284 debt payments - £32k outstanding

Questions
How do we pay off PCP bubble?
Option 1 - pay minimum off CCs for the next 3 months and save it up
Option 2 - use the MBNA card that I have just cleared to do a cash transfer

Next is about remortgaging. At the time of remortgaging, we will have around £20k of debt still on loans and credit cards

Should we also clear the big car loan before we come to remortgage? Probably via the same method above, super balance transfer to pay off the remaining £3.5k that we will ave in May. This means having all our debts on credit cards. In terms of affordability, it would mean our commitment would be £600 per month on debts (£20k @ 3%). As opposed to £323 per month for the loan and PLUS £500 on credit cards

We have £2300 to pay towards mortgage and debts each month Should we try to consolidate the remainder of the debt into the mortgage but go for a shorter term - ie pay £2k for 9 years per month? OR should we borrow on a mortgage the least we can get away with and keep the maximum on credit cards we can get away with and just overpay on the mortgage once the debts are cleared? That probably makes the most sense, i think consolidation might be dangerous.

I'm normally not that keen on looking towards complete debt-freeness purely because we have so far to go and I prefer to just concentrate on the short term goals, but I think to get the right mortgage deal so that we arent paying off the mortgage into our 60's, we need to start planning this right now.

Sorry for the long post, but I needed to do this as I think perhaps the answers are more obvious than I thought when I started!

System · 13 August 2017 at 9:23PM

Hi Paws,

How did you kill the neighbours hanging basket ? Made me smile .

As for your questions above , I am no expert on these matters.

If it was me I would want to get rid of the car loan and the pcp payment if I could.

Eager_Elephant · 14 August 2017 at 7:45AM

Are all your debts on your credit file? I know sometimes that car loans are not so in terms of debts on the credit file you might not appear to owe as much.

What interest rate are your cards? Just wondering how much interest you would end up paying if you put the PCP loan on the cards and took 6 months or so to pay it off.

I agree with not remortgaging to pay off debt, what if that extra bit added to the mortgage ended in disaster. At least when debt is on credit cards you can always default and go on reduced payments but you cant with a mortgage. Plus having a couple of credit cards gives you clear targets to aim for like clearing CC1 or 2 rather than paying off mortgage and not paying as much because eventually it will all be paid off at the end of the term anyway.

JoJoC · 14 August 2017 at 9:27AM

I wish I had advice to give you but alas, i am no expert on money matters (obviously, or I wouldn't be in my situation!). One thing i would say is that I'd stay well clear of consolodating everything into your mortgage - that seems like a really dangerous move and will change your debt from unsecured (credit card) to secured (mortgage) meaning if you can't pay it, you can lose your house.

Also, on credit cards there's always the chance of getting these onto 0% which would be a better rate than any mortgage could ever offer you. You might not be able to right now but the more you clear off your debt, the more chance you might have of getting a 0% card and hammering the debt down further.

Sorry I can't offer any more wisdom than that - i find myself regularly in the clueless camp or not being sure what financial move to make but I'm sure someone else will come along with a bit more knowledge.

All the best.

I’m taking control of my life, now.

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