Trying to clear card

[poppy1973]

Ok, really trying hard to not spend for the rest of the month on the credit card. Was looking really good, until I needed to order oil for the heating yesterday. Bumped it back up again. Don't know how I can get this down ??? Taking work whenever I can, have one job where I get paid weekly, only get a few hours a week doing this. Have two other jobs that pay monthly - again not huge hours. Work in hospitality now and this is such a bad time for businesses. Really trying hard this month to keep it down on card, as the idea was to pay the total off at the end of February when dh gets paid. This won't work now, as we will pay yet again more interest fees. Any ideas and advice would be appreciated ???

Can you get through the rest of this month without using the card again?

Do you have anything you could sell to pay more off the card?

the oil order would not have been unexpected.

can you go to a zero interest balance transfer?

meanwhile it is, I'm afraid, a matter of serious cutbacks. Sounds like you are really on the edge. Have you done a budget and looked at every spend?

www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/tools/budget-planner

I’d use this as it’s a great budget calculator for money coming in monthly and weekly and money going out in different ways

When you get the the end you can download the excell sheets which give you a monthly amount for everything

Thus your oil purchase would show up as a monthly payment you need to set aside

This is me. My cc kept creeping up as I paid off a bit and the spent some more and then suddenly I owed £10k. I've put the whole lot on a 0% balance transfer and set up a direct debit to pay it off over the interest free period, but I'm still struggling with not spending any money on credit card. One thing that is helping me is using the Yolt app to track spending and I think the other thing that's vital is planning - if you do have essential spend like fuel you have to prioritise it above non essential spend but to make that decision you have to know what's coming up. It's boring but necessary.

Just to say thank you for your advice from last month. I was a bit distressed.

Fingers crossed, but I have 4 days to wait for the credit card bill.

If we don't go overspend in the next 4 day, then when payday comes at the end of the month, then, we might actually pay off the credit card in full. Breathes a huge sigh of relief !!.

Spoke to dh and we decided after this month that we are going to send over a payment to a savings account that we have set up to put £100 in a month to cover fuel etc in the future.

We have also budgeted and cut back on any extra spends this month. I have changed shopping to Asda as the delivery price was only a £1 and I just spend up to a limit of £60 every week. Plus I told my dh to stop spending in Aldi every weekend when I was at work. He can only spend a maximum of £20 in Aldi every weekend. He has also cut back on buying sandwiches and coffee at mcdonalds. Also stopped the children having any treats this month. If they wanted anything then they have to spend using their own money from grandparents and I have been really lucky and had a few survey rewards come in that I have used on Amazon, so nothing has gone on our credit card for Amazon.

Fingers crossed for the next 4 days !!!! Thank you for the mumsnetters who gave me advice. Much appreciated!

Excellent!

Next - stop buying from amazon who sell nothing essential and are often overpriced.

I will try, but I don't actually try and spend a lot of my physical money on amazon. I do a lot of surveys in my spare time and exchange the points to vouchers. I am going to try and save them up for xmas instead.

I will try specialsubject!!!

OK, I suppose it is free - but you can do surveys that generate money. One poll and yougov are two.

Hi specialsubject. Yes I do those two already. Thanks for letting me know. I got tempted to order off Amazon last night, but didn't!!!