AIBU to think we can clear £12k debt in four months?

[Climbingoutofthered]

mumsnetters please help!

DH and I have 12k worth of credit cards debt between us - this is a mixture of doing up our house and then shoving a holiday on cards because we needed a break after the renovations, by this point DS hadn’t been away for 3 years either. So it’s not overspending- I know where it came from.

I now want to clear this debt very fast!! Within 3 to 4 months, we have the income to clear it down at a rate of 3200 a month. With all other bills paid.

this would mean 4 extremely TIGHT months. No coffee out, no takeaways….. nothing.

i have budgeted 600 pounds a month for food and household consumables such as laundry liquids etc. DH doesn’t believe this is possible!! We are two adults and one very hungry boy.

who is BU! Me or him 👍

Precisely. I can’t remember the last time I had either and I bet that’s the same for many on here 🙄

Personally cant stand DR, he gets off on being nasty to people and that stupid bloody spreadsheet 🤨

Alvin Hall all the way
" Pay yourself first"
Much more positive

I would just kill it
Its summer so plenty to do outside and rather than sit at home, get out and about.
The secret is not
Paid treats vs nothing
Its
Paid treats vs affordable

I rarely buy coffee out, does this mean I never have coffee?
Nope
I have a Yeti and just make one at home to have on the train etc
Make coffee at work or take a flask
Drink water, its better for you anyway

Compromise on the takeaway and do a Supermarket meal deal
Charlie Bighams curry is £8 ish for 2 if you get an offer they are always on offer
Pizza and sides offer
Supermarket chinese meal deal
Rotate each week

Make bread/ rolls/ pizza dough
It keeps you busy and its cheap as chips

Park or day out, bung together cheese and pickle rolls and crisps,pack of biscuits etc
Join NT, its a great way to get out as a family
Personally I would keep back £20 of the food budget for ice creams a month
If you are at home keep a stash
Ditto a 30 multipack of cheap crisps from Lidl .

Sell stuff on Vinted and use that for lipstick and sunnies / haircut
When you want something but have to sell first, its amazing how it focuses you!!

Once this is all sorted, be far more intentional
Budget and stick to it
Monzo pots are great for this

Possibly as you mentioned the C word

Great idea for extra cash

Save when wages received and manage in the rest. At least in the summer you have more options for outside and cheaper entertainment and outings - and don't reward yourself with another credit card splurge at the end!

Is this a joke?

I think most of the posts are made up ads or engagement crap these days.

I think you can do it and it'll be well worth it. One year we ate only home cooked food, no meals out, really careful with everything and managed to save a significant sum to put down as a deposit to buy our dream second house as the value of our first house had fallen a lot. Still living in the house after 28 years and still love our home.

I think it is a short enough time period to be do-able. And quite motivating. The summer is also easier in many ways for entertainment (picnics in the park, free events, sitting in a deckchair with a book). I can understand how it happened- I assume you had savings before but the renovations were a bit more expensive than planned. I wouldn't worry too much though if I had to extend by a month. It is when you have to make choices/miss out long term that things get miserable.

❤️love this for you! Life is long - the year cutting back at home was worth it 👍

thanks! We plan on doing all the free activities this summer 💕

Thanks to everyone who has contributed positively! And for all your ideas 💡
DH fully on board 👍👍 we start on our next payday at the end of this month, plan is to be clear of debt by September the 1st 🤞🤞 I might to a follow on thread tracking our journey.
actually feeling really positive about it, I have opened a Vinted account and will upload some bits and bobs on there over the summer to fund some modest treats .

I think the fact you've mentioned so much disposable income here is going to rile people, but different circumstances are a fact of life and we all have them.

Honestly, unless you have a specific reason to do it so aggressively Id give yourself some breathing room. I'd also consider doing it in a slightly different way. Maybe commit to 1 month as an experiment. Do maybe a 'no spend month' as a challenge, in some ways its easy to stick to when you know its just going to be a month, then re-evaluate and go from there. I'd also do something that motivates each month. Maybe even set a competition up, with forfeits or a challenge etc. Say you'll think of novel nights out or in etc. Or if your anything like me, think whether you could eat from your freezer for a week / month without buying new stuff. I think you do need to both be on board to make it easier though so I'd agree on a compromise. Also do a cull of other things, like subscriptions, reduce utilities, broadband, phone bills etc. Most people I know have been able to raise at least a few hundred if not a thousand pound by selling things on vinted. Maybe say this could be your spends if you do the very strict route your thinking of. If its on credit cards, have you even thought of swapping it to a lower interest loan instead? That means you'd both need to pay it off each month rather than the minimum amount, but you'd be paying less than if it remained on credit cards.

I’m not sure why some posters have been so wilfully missing the point. OP has said why they ended up in debt, and it was due to building work going over budget. Anyone who has done a big renovation will know that a 50k estimate suddenly becomes 80k when it turns out you need a full rewire/new roof/new boiler etc.

Also some people will be annoyed that you aren’t living off beans 24/7 and that you have any disposable income, that is a them problem and not a you problem. Honestly it’s ridiculous that people can’t post anything about money without being piled on, unless they’re saying they’ve got £2.56 to last them 6 weeks. I don’t understand why people in this country are so obsessed with inverse snobbery.

Having to cut back for 4 months is doable. The time will fly by. The suggestion by FigAboutTheRules of moving it to a six-month 0% interest credit card is a great idea. Then it would make sense to take six months.

120 days. Of course you can if you want to. You can do loads that cost nothing for 120 days and can sacrifice most non essential things for 120 days. It's all about knowing there is an end and a benefit.
We can all make sacrifices where we know there is an end that is not too far away and a tangible benefit from the sacrifices. The real issue is where the sacrifices are for prolonged periods of time and the benefits too abstract. But 120 days is not prolonged and your benefits not abstract.
Just do a 120 day plan of fun at no cost and log progress. Research it and you'd be surprised what you can do this sumner at low cost. Record all the non coffees etc. Log progress. It will fly by.

I would reassess how you determine need over wants. We are renovating our third house and have lived in all of them whilst doing so. The last house granted in 2018-2019 we renovated 3 bedrooms, 2 reception rooms, new kitchen and new bathroom for £5000 total!!

We had a prolonged period of low income as we took 10 years to qualify in our professions and had a household income of £25k until we turned 30. It allowed us to save hard when we did. We are now down to one income after I was made redundant last year and I am a SAHP for the time being and the skills have come in useful

Go through your budget with a fine tooth comb to look for where some of the extras are coming from. I would treat these 3 months as a chance to re-evaluate how you are spending your money. Try to make your money work for you as much as possible. It might mean keeping a takeaway once a month and changing some regular items from your weekly food shop as the takeaway brings you more pleasure than the regular item.

Check how much money you have in your energy account and review your direct debit. As we have just come out of the cold months you shouldn't have a large amount in credit. It doesn't hurt to keep a months worth in their but any more than that you can ask to be returned to you.

Make plans for 10am or 2pm so you are less likely to be out and hungry! Keep a box of snacks in your bag and car. Always take a bottle of water with you.

Review the clothes situation now for your son and buy them before starting if you can. I have a slow growing child which helps but by reviewing her needs ahead of them being needed means I can shop around and find the right things for a reasonable price. I did a shop last month for summer when there was a 20% start of summer sale in quite a few shops. Sainsbury's and M&S do a school uniform sale when they launch the autumn range at the end of June /beginning of July. I buy my daughter's uniforms then including the summer uniform in a size up.

Cancel subscription and only reinstate when you need them. We cancelled our prime membership in August. We have paid for two months worth since then when we have either needed the delivery or wanted to watch things on prime. We paid for a month of Disney+ over Christmas and I did 3 months of Audible when it was 99p a month

Challenge yourself to no spend days and once a month have an empty the fridge week. We aim to have an empty fridge by the end of the week and only buy enough to turn what is left into meals and make use of any frozen meals in the freezer. It gives me a chance to give the fridge a good clean and also helps with food waste. We have reduced our food and cooking bill by buying 2 joints of meat a week which are enough to do 3 days worth of meals. The oven goes on once or twice a week and we get 4 days of quick meals as the meat is already cooked.

If you can afford to scale back and spend over 3k on debt repayments then your debt is absolutely the result of over spending. The fact youbknownwhat you spent it on is irrelevant!

Yes please do a follow on thread. Let us know what worked and didn’t work

as I’ve said I try to be mean with myself and it has helped but I could save more.

Some great tips thanks!

shocked at the 5k for all those rooms kitchen and bathroom though!! Did you have tradesmen for the work?

It is overspending to put renovations and a holiday on credit cards when you have a good household income, and there is something a bit frantic about trying to pay it off so quickly. Perhaps you enjoy the excitement?!?

That's my usual shopping budget for a family of 4 including two teenagers so yes I think that is easily doable. We manage by not buying meat and cooking everything from scratch.

@Climbingoutofthered You can definitely do this! I’m in a very similar position if you want to buddy up..have a look at The Dave Ramsey baby steps (UK version). There are Dave Ramsey Facebook groups you can join too with people doing the same as us.

A tight month for me is keeping a very tight grip on food costs, not buying anything that isn’t absolutely necessary - no takeaway, coffee or days out. It also means the food budget has no room for treats or snacks, in my house the weekly budget would be £100 or less. No hair cuts, buying clothes for summer, using up all toiletries and cleaning products. Basically a survival budget.

You have a good amount of “spare” income, so you don’t need to be quite so tight but I’d be throwing everything at the credit card just to get rid. Short term pain for long term gain.

We did nearly everything ourselves we paid for the bathroom ceiling to be skimmed, the stair carpets to be fitted and for three panes of glass to be replaced in the windows.

A family friend was replacing a 3 yo kitchen as she was having an extension and complete remodel of downstairs so we got our kitchen units and doors very cheap but we then paid for a higher spec worktop.

We replaced just the glass on three windows that had failed double glazing rather than the full windows

The bathroom suite was £1200 including tiling and flooring. When we first started looking at the bathrooms the one we liked was about £2500, we could have paid much more too. At the end of the day whilst we needed a bathroom, a toilet is a toilet so we looked at the features we couldn't do without and the bits that were nice to have. We ended up going through a local independent bathroom shop a 5 minute walk from us and got a good deal. We did the tiling ourselves.

In our current house we did the kitchen diner last year. That came in at around £8k! The units were in very good condition, we wanted to rejig the lay out a little so we bought 3 extras. We replaced all the kitchen doors for solid wooden ones and had granite work tops fitted. We try to save our money for the bits that make the biggest impact. We built a utility room in our garage the year before and did all of that for £1000. We went with preassembled units, lino flooring and simple tiles, it's a room that not seen and didn't need to be as high spec. We still wanted it to look good but we were more mindful of costs.