The story so far is that I am, quite literally up to my eyeballs in it at about £84,426 £88,093 at the last count, (all on credit cards), and that doesn't include my mortgage!
I've wrestled with various options such as bankruptcy and IVAs but so far I've resisted those. I have embarked on a Debt Management Plan, though.
Look below to see how well, (or badly), I've done in my struggle to get out of debt!!!
Donate me out of Debt
At the current rate I'm paying off my debts, it's going to take me another 8 years or so of penuary to get to my 'Debt Free Day'.
Click on the button below to make a donation to bring my 'Debt Free Day' forward, end my life of frugality and allow me to start LIVING again!
If you leave a note with your donation, I'll publish it on this site along with an expression of my undying gratitude!
28th March 2016
Well, it's been quite a while since I updated this website, 7 years and 8 months in fact, so I thought now might be a good time to say a bit about how things have been going in the interim.I'm going to try and update every couple of days from now on, so for now, it will suffice to say that I'm still on the debt management plan and my debts are now down to around the £18,000 mark.
A week or so ago, I decided to teach myself web design, with a view to possibly finding some freelance web design work to try to earn some additional cash and hopefully manage to finally pay off my debts a little sooner than the three years I currently have left.
I previously wrote this site using a wysiwyg program called Komposer, but today's entry has all been done manually. As you can see, it's early days yet, but I'm hoping to improve the look of this site as I go along and hopefully update you on my journey to becoming a fully fledged web design expert as well as, of course, how I'm getting on with the debt reduction!
29th July 2008
Time
Management
Well, today, I was going to carry on where I left off yesterday, but
unfortunately, lack of available time has got the better of me again.
I´ve spent so much time doing other stuff that I haven´t left time to
put much here.
Anyway, I´ve been reading up on time management as well and along with
all the guff I´ve read, one useful piece of advice is to just start
whatever it is you´re trying to put off, which is good advice if you´re
a bit of a prevaricator like I am. But I think you can extend this
little tip a bit further to include things you actually like doing, but
can´t seem to find time for. So, today, even though I´ve not really got
time, I´ve made 5 minutes to write this.
The effect of this is that now, even though I haven´t written on the
topic I wanted to, or found the amount of time I really needed to, I
have written something and so far, although it´s
early days and this is only the second day, I have written something
every day. And do you know what, that feels good - I may not have
achieved exactly what I wanted, but I have made progress, and
if you can make just a tiny amount of progress every day, just think
where you´ll be in a year´s time.
By way of a personal example, I´ve paid a little, (well it´s quite a
sizeable amount really, but it doesn´t seem to make much of an
impression), off my debts by doing a Debt Management Plan every month
for the last eight months and hey presto, I´ve paid off 6% of my debt.
Now there´s a long way still to go, but 6% is 6% - it´s progress,
and that can only be a good thing.
Comments
18th April 2008
Wow, I can hardly believe it............
I just got my renewal notice through for my car insurance and it's actually £40.00 less than it was last year!
I'm absolutely amazed - I need to do some research to find out whether premiums have gone down in general, or whether all the haggling I did with my insurance company last year has alerted them to the fact that I don't appreciate being scammed!
....Later in October last year
Making the first call to the CCCS
So, on the 25th October 2007, after sitting around most of the day finding first one excuse and then another to put off the awful moment, and more time spent sat there frozen like a rabbit in the headlights, my brain refusing to let me pick up the phone or even to process any thoughts whatsoever, at 4:30pm when I couldn't put it off any longer, I finally phoned the CCCS and spoke to someone called Rosie.
Rosie was very kind to me, understanding of both my embarrassment at being such an abject failure financially and of my, well for want of a better word, depression caused by the stress of worrying on a daily basis about what might happen if things took a turn for the worse and I wasn't able to earn my current salary for whatever reason and the daily worry that I might well find myself and my family without a roof over our heads or any food to eat.
After having a bit of a chat about just what sort of a mess I'd got myself into, she gave me a Client Number and made me an appointment to have a telephone meeting with one of their counsellors.
She then told me all the information I'd need to collect ready for the meeting, which was a list of all my debts and the amounts owed, details of household bills, (gas, electricity, water, mortgage etc.), and payslips to show how much I earned. She also told me to list how much I spent on just about anything, so I had enough details to work out a budget.
She also told me I'd need to open a new bank account and get my wages paid into that as soon as possible, as I had an overdraft on my main account which would form part of my debt. She did say that it was OK to spend all the wages still left in the bank right up to my overdraft limit, which although I found a little surprising, did come as a huge relief as I, and my family, would basically have starved otherwise. She also said to cancel all the direct debit and standing orders off this account and transfer any that were for priority creditors over to the new account so that I wouldn't fall into arrears with utility bills and the like.
The other thing she suggested I do was to phone each of my creditors in turn and tell them I was in financial difficulty and couldn't afford to pay them, to tell them I was doing a Debt Management Plan with the CCCS and give them my Client Number and also to send them a token payment, which could be as little as £1, to tide them over until the Debt Management Plan started. She told me not to be pressured by my creditors into paying any more than I could afford as this would just get me in more difficulty.
She then told me not to worry and that if I had any problems of any sort, that I should contact them immediately, as I also should if I had any emergencies such as bailiffs calling at my house, or court papers being served.
And that was it, done. Not half as embarrassing as you'd expect, but also so liberating that I had to fight back the tears, unsuccessfully as it happens. It's not until someone takes some of the burden off you that you realise just how much stress you've been putting yourself under trying to keep your head above water financially while trying not to let anyone else know what a complete mess you're in.
There was much more stress to come, as I'd later find out, but for now, at least I'd taken the first step.
October last year sometime.....
Making the decision to do a Debt Management Plan
Well, it's been ages since I've posted anything on here. The reason is that things got so bad with my debts that I was spending hours every day trying to figure out how to, well, rob Peter to pay Paul, I suppose.
What initially pushed me over the edge was the holiday my other half booked for us at Christmas last year as a 'nice' surprise. Well, it was a surprise alright! She paid for the holiday which was great. It was when we came to the spending money that the problems started.
The other half had a couple of hundred pounds and had figured that, since we spent money on food and petrol and whatever while we were at home, and that since we weren't at home for that week we wouldn't be spending it, then we could spend that money while we were on holiday instead.
It would have worked ok if we had gone on holiday on our own, as we would have known how much money we had and could've budgeted, but we went, instead, with some friends and that made it much more difficult as we hadn't told them about our financial situation. What also made it worse was that the other couple weren't exactly throwing their money around, they were just spending quite reasonable sums for a normal holiday, so it was very difficult to say, "oh we can't afford to do that cos we're skint", without looking like some total really sad party poopers.
So instead I ended up drawing out money on my credit cards and pushing them all to their absolute limits. Don't get me wrong we're not talking massive amounts here, just 300 quid spread across 4 credit cards. Now that might not seem like a lot, but it pushed me right to my card limit BEFORE they added on the month's interest. So when they did add the interest on, I was over my credit limit, which meant that when I made the minimum payment, it only just cleared the interest, meaning I could hardly spend anything on the card without going over my credit limit again. Basically I had spent that month's money the month before.
And what was worse was not only was I totally destitute the month after the holiday, but I couldn't afford to make any headway into the amounts I had spent on holiday - I paid as much as I could, was short of money as I hadn't cleared any room to respend on the card and I was still up to my credit limit before the interest payment went on - I was now totally screwed and there was no way back.
What is so scary is how little money made that much difference between just getting by and being totally over the brink. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't living the high life and there was no way I could have ever got myself out of debt carrying on the way I was going, but I was keeping up the payments and sucessfully servicing my debt every month - £90,000 worth! And it only took £300 to push me over the edge - that's one third of a percent of the total debt that pushed me forever over the edge with no way back!
So, that was pretty much that. I struggled on for another few months, but every month, a week after I'd been paid, I'd have no money left as I'd paid it all out on credit card bills and was waiting for that money to clear on those cards so that then I could do balance transfers to other cards, then wait again while that cleared and then finally I had a little money to spend, but not enough to make ends meet.
By October, things were so bad that I was having to borrow a couple of hundred pounds a month off my Dad, but I couldn't afford to give it him back and it was at this moment that I finally cracked and just couldn't cope any more. I'd had a sort of 'light bulb' moment a while before this and inadvertently contacted one of those get you out of debt companies that charge you thinking it was free, but they gave it a real hard sell and when I asked how much of a cut they took they were really reluctant to tell me, but I stuck to my guns and eventually they told me.
I sat and prevaricated a while longer and in the end I was glad I did because in the meantime, I was constantly badgered by that same debt management company, phoning me every couple of days badgering me to start the debt management plan with them. I've been a lifelong hater of the hard sell approach, so that was really all I took to convince me that they were not the right company for me. Eventually, I did answer one of their calls and told them I was thinking of going with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service instead as I wanted all my money to go towards paying off my debts. They were very rude about the CCCS, saying they didn't do a very good job because they were a charity and didn't have the same strong relationships to negotiate with creditors that they did and that was pretty much the final nail in their coffin as far as me doing a DMP with them. So I prevaricated a little longer.................
.............and finally, when I worked out one month that after I'd paid everything off and paid the mortgage etc., that I'd have £70 to pay for food and petrol for the rest of the month, I decided enough was enough - I really wasn't 'handling it' any more - and contacted the CCCS.
30th June 2007
Haven't posted anything on here in quite a while now - the reason for that is I've been very busy starting up a blog with the same name, which you can see here, doing some research on blogging, websites and writing in general plus I've also been on holiday for a week, which has had a very detrimental effect on my finances.
18th April 2007
At last - some proper money saving!
Some days when I've finished reading the Moneysaving Expert weekly email newsletter, or the Motley Fool, I sit back and think to myself, "Yes, I really must settle down sometime and change gas and electricity suppliers for cheaper ones, redo all my insurance for cheaper insurance, change to a cheaper bank account, move my balances to better credit cards etc., etc." And then, as usual, the demands of job, kids and life in general just fill up the next few hours and apathy kicks in and the next email newsletter has already arrived, but I still haven't done anything about reducing my outgoings.
Well, today, for once, was different!
My car insurance renewal quotation arrived from my current insurers and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, it was a bit steep. They wanted £622.31, but, since I'm so skint, I need to pay by instalments, so it would have been 11 payments of £61.13, which comes to a massive £672.43!
Now I've been with this company for several years and I've got other quotes from other companies most years and they've always been the cheapest, but when I swapped my car from a Punto to a Mondeo, they seemed to put the price up rather a lot. Anyway, with my best moneysaving hat on, I launched my web browser and, spurred on by countless TV adverts, I headed for Confused.com
I ended up getting quotes from 25 companies and surprise, surprise, all but six of them were lower than my renewal quote - admittedly most of them had a higher excess, but we're talking savings here of almost 200 quid!
At this point, I couldn't help but wonder what my current insurers would have to say, when I told them that I'd managed to beat their quote by around a third. So I phoned them up and asked them - and this is where the story starts to get really interesting! You see, the woman on the end of the phone said that all she could do was fiddle with my excess, but that only brought the price down by about 60 quid for upping my excess by a 100 quid. So she said all she could do was put me back through to the sales team. So back to the sales team I went, he re-entered all my details and came up with a quote of £412.22 with 200 quid excess, or £459.99 with 100 quid excess. I said he was still over my nearest quote, so he said, "That's alright, we can price match it.". So he did. Then he realised that because I still had my existing policy, it had given me a multi-policy discount and that I wasn't entitled to that as my other policy would have run out by the time this one started. So off he went to speak to someone. When he came back he said he had some bad news that I couldn't have the multi-policy discount, but the good news was that becasuse they had made a mistake and I shouldn't have been put through to that department, but to a different one, they were going to give me a 5% discount for their having made a mistake. The upshot of which was, I got it for the same price as my best quote. Unfortunately, they had to add on a bit of interest for paying by instalments, but their interest rate is a lot lower than the company who gave me the other quote, so I've still beaten them by £16.65!
My new quote, including the interest for paying in instalments is no less than 35.5% less than my original quote -and it's from the same company!!!!!!!!!
Whilst it does go to show that, like they say, it does always pay to shop around, it does also raise the niggling little question of why they wanted to charge me so much in the first place if they can offer the same product for so much less! It's basically a rip off!
13th April 2007
Well, I've been and gone and done it and enrolled on the Writer's Bureau course. I've got all my course books and I'm half way through filling in some forms giving them background information and I've made a start on my first assignment, which doesn't seem too bad. The second assignment is going to be a bit more difficult, but hopefully I'll be able to manage it. The third assignment is one that you can submit for publication as soon as your tutor says it's good enough, (which may entail rewritng it a few times?), but hopefullly, this means that you are straight into trying to earn some money from writing by your third assignment, which isn't bad going.
The bad news is that most of the money I had from the cashed in savings scheme has been eaten up by having had two really bad wages for the last two months, though on the plus side, I haven't spent anything on any credit cards for almost two months as there's only 10 days to go to the next pay day. Unfortunately, next month is my daughter's and my partner's birthdays within 3 days of each other and I have to pay my car insurance and re-tax my car!
14th March 2007
Well, I haven't posted anything on here for quite a while - eight and a half months to be precise. Mind you, to be fair, unless my webcounter isn't working, not a single person has even stumbled on the site even by accident, despite the fact that Google has now stuck me as top of the list on page one of a web search for psychobanana!
Still over those last eight months, despite a couple of setbacks, (like I'm now £88, 773 up the swannee), I have managed to have a weeks holiday in Spain, (we rented an apartment off a friend for a very, very low price and the missus paid for that and the flights out of her last year's Christmas bonus which she'd been saving - though I still ended up contributing to the spending money). I also managed to get through Christmas without going bankrupt.
I have had to cash in my savings that I had been saving for the past eight years in a friendly society - I'd managed to save over £2000, but I calculated that even if I stuck it out for the full 10 year term and got the final bonuses, I'd still be better off cashing it in and paying off some of my credit card debt with it. Unfortunately, since I had simultaneously gone very near bursting point on a few of my credit cards, I still haven't paid much off, but I have had a month where I've spent nothing at all on credit cards, though this has eaten into my cash lump sum.
Also, our niece wanted to come up and spend a couple of days with us, but she lives in Swindon, so I had to meet her parents at Tamworth Services to pick her up and then do the same again to drop her off, meaning I wasted a fortune on petrol - 360 miles worth - over 40 quids worth! Then we had to entertain her while she was here!
I have dabbled with the idea of generating some extra income, so I started by putting the two books that I advertised on this webpage down below, on Amazon.co.uk and blow me if I haven't sold them both and made a small profit!
I've also started to explore the idea of writing for cash - i.e. getting myself published - I know what you're thinking, another hopeless hopeful with a novel just waiting to burst out of him all over the page, but, really, it isn't like that at all, (not to say that being a successful novelist wouldn't be very nice!), the problem is that with the job I have at the moment, I have to be on-call, (24 hours a day), one week in three, (as well as being in work the week I actually am on-call!), so my prospects for getting another job to fill my free hours are rather limited as I can only promise to be available for two weeks out of every three, so self-employment, when I can choose the hours I work seems like the only option.
I've looked at the Writer's Bureau course, the content of which seems good from their prospectus and they seem to have several sources of recommendation, they also reckon you'll earn back your course fees by getting your work published, or they'll refund your fees, but what you have to do to keep within the terms of the guarantee isn't exactly clear. I'm sure they're genuine, I'm certainly not saying they're dishonest in any way, but you can't help thinking to yourself, if it's so easy to become a published writer, why are they wasting their time running a course about it instead of getting on with being published and retiring to San Tropez? Then again, since part of the course is about marketing your own work, maybe they teach you how to run your own writing course!
26th June 2006
Had to buy some more petrol, as had run out. Gave the sprog 3 quid to spend on her school trip and had to sub the missus another tenner again. This is the last day of the month - tomorrow, thankfully, I get paid.
25th June 2006
I really can't understand this
- yesterday, we went to the supermarket and spent over 50 quid. Today
we went to a different supermarket for stuff we needed and spent
another 47 quid - how can this happen? What the hell am I doing wrong
here (apart from taking the missus with me!!)? Then, to top it all, cos we didn't have much in for tea,
we had a chinese????????????????
Am
I going nuts?24th June 2006
Another really rubbish moneysaving day.
First off, the pressie we'd bought online didn't turn up, so we had to go and buy another pressie, plus while we were there, the sprog decided she wanted to spend some of her birthday money on some stuff for herself. Then went to supermarket and spent a large amount, then had to put some petrol in car, so cos I was skint, only put a tenner's worth in. Total spend for the day £113.63. On the plus side, the sprog owes me 20 quid for what she bought, but on the minus side, the missus borrowed 15 quid out of the sprogs piggy bank to pay for her swimming lesson the other day, so I'm only going to get a fiver a back!Click below to see how much money I managed to save, (or not!) on the following days.....
19th - 23rd June 2006
18th - 12th June 2006
11th - 5th June 2006
4th June 2006
3rd June 2006