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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To wonder if we have a lot more debt?

165 replies

Noseytoday · 03/09/2018 12:44

We have £7k of debts, mixture of major house repair work, holiday, getting pregnant much quicker than expected and so not having long to save for maternity leave. We are now focusing on paying it off each month and its going down but it really stresses me out. My DH isn't as worried, he thinks a lot of people probably have similar. Does this sound fairly normal or not?

OP posts:
MouseholeCat · 03/09/2018 15:04

Your amount sounds pretty normal OP.

I have £1800 on a 0% credit card, I used the initial amount to pay off the last chunk of my masters degree loan (9% apr) along with some savings. Financially taking on that made a lot of sense. As it's 0% I'm not paying it off in a lump sum, doing equal instalments instead.

DH has a £20,000 car loan (again, 0%), but also has US student debts which we are aggressively paying down. At the beginning of the year, they were at £30k, now at £15k. We use all our spare money to pay them down.

The student loan and credit card will be gone by September next year, if not earlier. The only debt I'll take on after that is a mortgage, and we'll aggressively overpay on that and the car. I hate being in debt.

We're putting off having a child until the student debt is paid off. The payments equal the cost of full-time childcare.

polkadotpixie · 03/09/2018 15:13

My only debt is my mortgage and student loan. I have a credit card that I use for online or large purchases but pay it off in full every month.

No car finance or overdraft or anything like that because I find the idea of debt very stressful. If I can't afford it, I save for it or don't have it

That being said, I don't think £7K is unusual and you should be able to clear it fairly quickly

ChazsBrilliantAttitude · 03/09/2018 15:15

Our debts are interest free so that’s why we are not using savings to pay them off early. We will get the minuscule amount of interest available on the savings until just before the debts fall due and then pay them off in full.

Sandstormbrewing · 03/09/2018 15:36

MarthaArthur because my debt costs me nothing (0% interest) and my savings are earning me.

Winchester89 · 03/09/2018 16:08

Oh dear we have mortgage plus approx £30k of debt Blush

Lucisky · 03/09/2018 16:13

I am very surprised that people don't consider a mortgage a debt. You can't say you are debt free 'except for the mortgage'; it is very much a debt.

DieAntword · 03/09/2018 16:15

I guess the thing with a mortgage is that if you weren’t paying it you’d be paying rent. Least with a mortgage you’re slowly getting ownership.

GreenMeerkat · 03/09/2018 16:16

Until earlier this year we had around £25k of debt! Car finance, loans, credit cards etc. Cost of me working part time only while the children are small.

We managed to pay it off as we invested in our property at exactly the right time and it's gone up 50% in value since we bought it two years ago, so remortgaged.

£7k doesn't seem a HUGE amount.

Easilyflattered · 03/09/2018 16:19

Big mortgage and £4400 on credit cards. Had a conversation with DH about trying to get it down by about 2 grand before Xmas when it will jump again no doubt.

And our family car is getting old and could do with being replaced. And also ancient bathroom needs redoing. I'm on a frugality drive until further notice.

Sandstormbrewing · 03/09/2018 16:21

Lucisky you have to live somewhere and most people would prefer to pay debt and own the house eventually than pay for someone else to own it.

Pay rent or pay a mortgage, realistically those are the only 2 choices for most people

adaline · 03/09/2018 16:24

The only debt we have is the mortgage but we live very modestly - everything is second hand or bought in sales!

SerialNameChangerMe · 03/09/2018 16:25

I WISH we only had £7k debt!

GoatWithACoat · 03/09/2018 16:26

I got in so much debt in my 20’s I took the extreme measure of changing my name by deed poll, opening up new accounts in that name, moving and ran away from it all. Never again. Apart from student loan, I save for everything now. We recently had a baby and needed a bigger car. We drove two separate cars for 8 months until we had enough for a decent 7 seater as I refuse to get a car loan.

LorelaiVictoriaGilmore · 03/09/2018 16:26

A mortgage is a secured or asset backed debt. It's very much a debt but I can understand why people don't think of it in the same category as loans or credit cards.

I have a £9.5k and £3.5k on credit card. It should pretty much all get cleared this year. There are times which it's really stressed me out but I know I can clear it in the next 6-8 months, so I'm much less stressed now.

Crunchymum · 03/09/2018 16:28

About 12k debt here.

It's credit card debt and includes 2 house moves (new furniture and carpets throughout x2) and 3 maternity leaves.

I regularly transfer the balance so we don't lay interest, we pay off way more than the minimum but debt won't be properly cleared for 18 months after I go back to work. Although we actually need to move again Shock

Fairylea · 03/09/2018 16:30

I think most people don’t count a mortgage because you have to live somewhere and you don’t consider rent a debt do you and it’s the same thing really - with a house to keep at the end of it!

We have quite a bit of debt. About £3.5k on a 0% interest credit card, £11k bank loan, bit into our overdraft. We don’t really worry about it. Most of its come from spending on our house - redone the roof and the bathroom, guttering etc etc. Day to day we don’t live beyond our means. This year we plan to pay as much of it back as we can.

We have a lot of equity in our house and if we ever fell into a dire situation we could easily afford to repay the debt we owe from that, even if property prices dropped.

We are generally a low income family however - dh works full time in a low ish wage job and we have two dc, one with severe disability so I am a full time carer. We just muddle through, like most people really. We don’t have savings, we don’t earn enough to have proper savings, so when things needed doing we had to borrow the money.

Elllicam · 03/09/2018 16:32

We owe about £270,000. That’s two mortgages (about 200,000 on our house, 60 on a rental flat) and 10,000 ish on two car loans. It’s bloody terrifying when you think about it. We probably have enough in savings to cover most of the car loans and have a fair amount of equity in the houses though.

ChazsBrilliantAttitude · 03/09/2018 16:41

I think whether or not you consider your mortgage as debt depends on your LTV. Our LTV is around 25% so we could sell, repay the mortgage and buy somewhere smaller or further out of London. So yes it is debt but more than covered by equity

Lazypuppy · 03/09/2018 16:41

I have a £10k car loan and a mortgage. We're just about to buy some sofas on finance so that will add another 2k, but paying that off over 2 years.

We always do finance and pay off to keep our credit score high.

Don't really think of the mortgage as debt

KitKat1985 · 03/09/2018 16:50

I don't consider a mortgage the same as same as a car loan or credit card debt. Mainly because:

  1. If we weren't making mortgage payments we would be paying rental payments (which for us would be more than our mortgage payments).

  2. It's a secured loan.

  3. For the vast majority of people it's not financially practical to buy a house outright, whereas often with other debts, people could buy cheaper alternatives (cheaper cars, holidays etc) or wait and save the money to buy the item they want outright, but choose not to.

genivert · 03/09/2018 17:24

Crunchymum this is where there's a stark difference between some posters. I wouldn't ever get into £££s debt for furniture and carpets - you aren't even seeing the benefits of them if you've had multiple moves and need to move again.
Yes, I say this as someone who put up with a freecycle not-very-sturdy office desk to work from for about 10 years (was originally meant to be a "this'll do for 6 months job" then we never had the spare cash to hand to replace something that somehow was still standing), and i currently have no carpets at all in the lower level of my house - flooding issue meant they all got ruined and it's part of a bigger insurance claim.. and i can't afford to replace this stuff without knowing the claim is coming in on a particular date. so we're all slippering up and walking across various boards, and it's been like that for months. i'm really really hoping that we're not like this at Christmas.

it's not great but to get into long-term debt for that sort of stuff is completely bonkers IMHO.

carpets are not important enough to get into debt for!

Bluelady · 03/09/2018 17:24

We're mortgage free and our "debt", such as it is, is because we pay for major purchases with interest free credit when it's available. To us it makes sense to use someone else's money for nothing and keep ours where it will accrue a tiny amount of interest.

HildaZelda · 03/09/2018 17:43

Just the mortgage here which isn't huge and will be paid off in about 5 years. DH has a company car but I owe about £1000 on mine which will be cleared before the end of the year.

Nannyplumshairstyle · 03/09/2018 17:47

14k here. No support and staying with my daughter and working pt rather than return to my stressful job full time time because i felt her confidence and security have had to be prioritised for now. Making repayments and not getting into further debt but yes definitely gnaws at my soul every night. Husband not too bothered.

Lucisky · 03/09/2018 18:00

@Sandstormbrewing, I know people have to live somewhere, and everyone I know either has or had a mortgage. That is not my quibble. To buy a house you usually have to borrow money and pay it back, so that is a debt, whether it is secured or not is immaterial . You don't pay, you lose your asset. Even if you achieve a decent amount of equity over the time you live in the house, you still have a debt you pay back when you move out, or else, like me, you pay for 25 years(over various houses) and eventually you are out of mortgage debt.
Of course, where it all goes wrong is when properties fall into negative equity, which has happened before and could happen again.
In my days of debt, anything secured on property (apart from mortgage obv.) was to be avoided, as you didn't want a creditor to be able to attach any claim on your house.