Just taken out a huge debt consolidation loan

[Debtandmoredebt]

And it’s really made me feel terrible. Fucking cost of living crisis. Anyone else who’s had to do this, did you manage to pay it off earlier? Does it get easier?

I won’t be debt free for 8 years if I stick to the schedule.

Just a combination of really bad luck and the cost of living has screwed us financially. Hopefully this is the first step on the way to being back to ‘normal’ but it’s really crap.

I like the plan above.

Rather than over pay, at this moment you need to build an emergency fund, so use your £50 to create that first.

Dave Ramsey says to save £1,000 first, so you have something to dip into. THEN start to overpay / repay.

We got a 16k consolidation loan, paying back over 7 years. It's not ideal but for us it was due to circumstances suddenly changing after we moved house. In my mind I frame it as part of our housing cost / mortgage. We are hoping to pay it off when we remortgage, but if we can't then we just keep plugging away at it. It is what it is, we are not extravagant people (I'm currently on a UK camping holiday!) and we are where we are.

My son is about to start uni and build up debt that we he probably never pay off in his whole working life 😫

We also just went camping, rained the whole time 😄

We never really go out, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t drive brand new cars. I’ve got no idea where I’ve gone wrong! I do have 3 small children which doesn’t help by the time I’ve paid childcare, lunch costs etc but still I don’t think I should be this poor!

On paper we have a good wage, more than most, which makes this even more embarrasing! I’m going to build savings first, then try and plug away at the debt and hope for the best.
I was also considering a remortgage to pay it off but I was thinking paying it over 7 years is better than paying it over 30!

You should be able to extract details of your spending over the past year to see where your money has been going.

Look to see if you can reduce the amount you spend on any particular expense (eg mobile phones, broadband, supermarket food and drink instead of fast food/takeaways/bought lunches and coffees etc) or cut down the times you do it - eg packed lunch most of the time and bought lunch once a week for example.

Question every expense and remember that while it might not be worth changing to save a fiver a month, do that a few times and it starts to add up to a noticeable amount.

Not sure if you have a partner or not, but if so, make sure they're on board with any spending reduction plan. Otherwise they'll just be undoing the efforts you're making.

I had to consolidate credit cards into a loan of £20k, paying £400 per month. I could just cry thinking about it. We were given notice on our rental and only thing we could afford to buy needed renovations which we did prior to moving in. I have kids so there was no way we could have lived in it during. This was in 2022/23 so of course all the costs ran over and trades were hard to find meaning we were paying the double rent/mortgage for longer. In hindsight we should have bought a small place that didn't need work. But we thought we'd be doing this once and it was our chance to create a dream home. Unfortunately our mortgage then went up in 2024 by £700, the heating bills are astronomical (we live in Scotland) and our earnings just can't keep up. Now thinking we should just sell, release the equity, pay off loan and start over with everything we have learned. In hindsight I was naive and assumed that as good earners we wouldn't be affected by the CoL so much. Probably some lifestyle creep in there aswell that we need to address.