Accrued £136,325.55 in 5 years! Time to stop.

We're taking the dog for a little holiday at the seaside in the UK this weekend and looking forward to a few days away from work, especially after all the overtime, we're not expecting to spend much (except on fuel driving there as we've already paid for accommodation) and a budget is in place on YNAB for the trip

Last month I did apply for a couple of 0% balance transfer cards which took a while to hear back from and I was accepted for however I'm not going to bother, the majority of my unsecured debt is a very cheap 3.3% personal loan and I want to totally end this spiral of applying for credit/finance even if it will save me a little in interest and I think there's more value in having an incentive to continue to clear the credit cards and then close down all but the cheapest, which should happen before the end of summer.

My mortgage deal is due for renewal this time next year so I'd like to do as much as possible to repair my credit score before then to secure a good fixed-rate deal, so I need to keep that in mind that I can't swear off credit, but draw a line that the only time I should be using credit is my mortgage so any advice on this is appreciated.

As of today we're at £127,553.79 (£32.753.79 unsecured), slowly but surely.

Just a small update, total debt now £124,857.98 and unsecured at £30,195.98.

It's interesting reading the old post and seeing that I was aiming at September 2021 to clear but now it's looking more like December 2019, we'll actually have the mortgage just about paid off by then based on the current budget/plan - again, assuming no major setbacks - no doubt there will be some but by the same token the quicker we get it cleared the less likely we are to hit a setback before we are able to deal with it.

MeenaM mentioned Dave Ramsey and I must admit I've become somewhat obsessed watching his show, I guess I'm currently on babystep 2, I'm excited about what the future will bring but can't help feel regret/remorse for not having this lightbulb moment ten years ago.

Hi Enthusiasticsaver - I certainly don't feel like a high earner but overall our household income is comfortable - once you start tracking your spending you find all sorts of money you didn't know you had, and realise you're spending all sorts on things you don't even care about - I did always feel like we were starting to struggle somewhat needlessly and were dependant on credit for the things we wanted - as really we do have a comfortable income between us.

We do have an emergency fund although it's only funded up to £750 so far, we add £50 to it each month.

I've planned our October over-payment 'snowball' to the car service / some unexpected maintenance, Christmas and making sure the emergency fund is topped up to £1000. This will be the first snowball payment after everything but our larger, longer term, low interest loans are paid off, so I have also tried to account for some 'true expenses' in the budget as well so I won't need the emergency fund for these types of events.

Well, we've actually gone up a little bit - I hadn't been including my wife's credit card debt in my original calculations and I've now taken over managing that aspect of our budget and debt snowball as well (should have from the start really).

This has added almost £3000 onto the total (fortunately most of it is in an interest free basis) this will now take priority over the other debts and I'll be hoping to have this all paid off in August.

The good news is she's really disciplined, all of the spending on those cards was for things like holidays and impulse purchases made on a joint decision, she's not actively using them and the cards are safely out of the way.

Fortunately it won't make a difference to our debt free and longer term mortgage free dates because dw is now earning a little more and is willing to use half of this increase to contribute to our goals so our new debt free target (excluding the mortgage) is October 2019 which I believe is just under 18 months away - about the length of a phone contract. We will do this.