Paying off debt

[lovinglavidaloca]

I’m sure there used to be a thread for paying off debt but I can’t find it.

We’ve had between £3000 and £4500 on a credit card for as long as I can remember - moving it around, paying some off then adding more to it and sometimes it cost interest. Always ‘big things’ never just a weekly shop or anything thankfully.

At the start of the year I made a budget which we are managing to stick to and it’s allowing us to put much more towards paying off this card.

On Friday I made a payment of almost £700 to the credit card and another £105 will come off by DD. So the card it under £3000 for the first time in YEARS.

I have a plan to get the card paid off by the end of the year which will just feel amazing and free up lots of cash for us each month for savings etc.

Anyone else paying off debt at the moment? I have to pray that neither of our jobs are affected by Covid though.

That's brilliant progress! Well done, I bet that feels amazing. And how amazing to think you could have it all paid off by the end of the year.

I'm slowly chipping away at mine, same cycle as you for the last few years but I've had a bit more disposable funds to throw at mine since coronavirus kicked off so could have it paid off in a year.

I'm very focused at the moment, have created a good budget and trying to stick to it as tightly as possible.

Well done both of you

Me 🖐
I've got £600 on 1 cc
£1000 on another - interest free for 20 months
£450 very account- interest free for 3 more months

I've had to go down to min payments at the moment as I've been furloughed and I'm £300ish worse off a month.
But I'm trying not to spend as much and anything left at the end of the month is going off the card.
I'm focusing on cc1 as I have to pay interest
I payed £40 off cc1 yesterday I will pay £80 tomorrow.

Yes! In the past 3 years we've got our 9.5k credit card down to £1700 this month - woo hoo!

Such a satisfying feeling.

Well done us

Woohoo I am here for these wins!

It definitely feels so good seeing those numbers going down doesn’t it? I’m just so annoyed at myself that I let it happen in the first place - a night in a hotel here, some flights there and all of a sudden you owe £4k

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be trusted to sensibly use a credit card. 0% purchase offers just tempt me too much.

@hippoherostandinghere I try really hard to stick to my budget too. I actually added a new category for household stuff tonight because I realised I needed a new frying pan and didn’t have an appropriate ‘pot’ of money to buy it from

Kelly, that's amazing well done. Bet that feels good!
It's all about mindset isn't it. Don't let yourself have another 0% card until you've got yourself into the right way of thinking and created new habits.
Good idea about adding a new category, good to play about with the budget until you get it exactly the way you want it.

I finally paid mine off last year. I had always had about three grand on it, got a consolidation loan and slowly let it creep up again. Started to pay as much as I could on it and then I got a bonus at work that cheated off the remainder . The loan was paid off last year and I now have savings....the only things I owe money on is a mortgage and carbfinance!

That’s the stage I want to get to. Hopefully even just mortgage and no car finance for a bit cos we will keep the one we have for a while once it’s paid.

Was chatting to my partner and because we are getting married this year and still have some things to pay for the wedding I’m not going to hammer the credit card as much as I thought from now until then. It’s 0% still till June 2021 and it should only add about 3 months or so into my forecasted pay off date if December this year.

Yes, we've managed to get ours down a lot recently as we had about £3,000 on a card for quite a while. Hoping to have paid it off by next month.

Good luck Cad! It’ll be a weight off your shoulders. Do you think you’ll manage to avoid it happening again?

I have two - one at £1000 and one at £3000. Since I bought a home last year and Now have a mortgage, I’ve realised it’s very hard for me to pay off an additional debit like a credit card, and once these are paid, I am determined to close the £3000 one, and keep the other only for emergencies and automatic bills that won’t direct debit from a bank account.

I hope to use my annual leave money in August to pay the £3000 one off completely, and am putting as much as I can towards the the other one between now and then. I want the end of August to see these cards gone!

I am a bit annoyed that I can’t use my annual leave money for anything I enjoy, but I keep reminding myself that it’s my fault, as I already spent it. I want to pay these off and then make sure I live within my means. If I need something - I need to save for it in advance!

I'm just about to pay off my £5k credit card debt with the relocation allowance I was given for my new job and the rest is going on home renovation. It feels like such a relief. I'm never using a credit card again.

I had £25k on credit cards about 3 years ago and I'm down to £9k.
Sadly due to a broken boiler I've taken out a loan so total debt is back up to £16k.
Hoping to halve that by the end of the year. Hard though, income has taken a hot from Covid. Bills have gone up as the kids are off and have morphed into locusts.
I don't get how people are saving during lockdown, but then we never really went out much before. Spare money is always spent on the house