Anyone want to join me on getting debt free?

[2026debtfreeme]

I thought it might be nice to share this journey together as it can feel quite lonely.

We had an awful couple of years financially, genuinely due to no fault of our own (house moves falling through, ripped off by a builder, you name it, it happened). It left us in quite a bit of debt. We are now totally settled and tackling the debt. It is mainly all together.

I earn £50k a year and my husband similar. We have 2 children. We have about £5k in savings but need this for any issues such as cars breaking down etc. We have a mortgage.

We can pay about £500 a month extra off our debt iver and above normal paynents.
In the last 4 months we have cleared the £2000 on my husband's credit card 😀

I will get the exact figure but I have about £12k loan in my name and £1900 on a credit card.
We don't have an overdraft and there is no other debt, so at least it is 'neat'. I'm going to pay off the credit card first, and then the loan.

Thankfully we both have good credit ratings, no bad debt or anything so this feels achievable, if not horrifying figures.

I want to keep a running monthly record of my debt disappearing.

Anyone want to join me?

Now off to get the exact figures...

Thank you @Mum2Fergus
ive had a dreadful few years for various reasons but it's meant I'm basically starting from scratch again financially and it's worrying when there's so much I don't know!

We can do this @Tibby99

@Mum2FergusThanks for all your help and support. I'm thinking I should suggest my daughter opens a LISA whilst they are still available. She's just turned 18

Awe bless you…it’s hard getting back on your feet when you’ve had a tough time-but you can, and will recover.

Keep your end game in sight-that will keep you on track. It might be early retirement, relocating, dream house…whatever it is for you. Focus on it, and you’ll get there x

Definitely! My son is only 16 or he’d have one. I think from yesterday they will still be around in the years to come, sounds like the plan is to make them a bit more simple (there are certain restrictions when buying a house for example).

Having added everything up, it should take 11 months to do what we need to. Barring any big expenditures that we haven't yet saved for! I'm hoping to get it down to 10 with being frugal with my allocated spending money. So hopefully by this time next year I will be in a hugely different place! With a fully decorated hallway and landing 😂

That’s great news…well done you!

How are you all getting on with your debt free journeys?

I’m doing ok, done a new budget and faced some things I’ve been hiding from. Feel a tad more hopeful! Big decision is no holiday this year. The kids will go away with relatives so that’s good. I might run to a week camping, and am also looking at increasing my income.

That’s great, well done you! The no holiday thing can feel tough but your debt free end game plan will more than make up for it.

I hit a bollard in my car. That's how it's going here 😭. However, DH is due a tax rebate of about £3,000 from when he was made redundant last year, we were going to put all that into the redundancy pot of money but we will now use some of it to fix the car and the rest will go into that pot. So the debt free plan hasn't been changed! Christmas is going OK, the boys need a few more bits otherwise Christmas day is going to look very daughter heavy (it will be her last one of getting toys so I've gone a bit over board). But I think I'll be able to keep it under control.

Oh no! Car issues are a total pain, I sometimes have thought about not running one - I spent £1k on mine this month, just maintenance and parts worn out. So you have my sympathy.

Life is so expensive these days.

Yes I wish I didn't need a car! We run two annoyingly. But I use mine all the time for the school run, kids clubs, all the shopping. We have a supermarket in walking distance but nothing else. DH also drives to work. His is electric though and he charges at work so that's a bonus. But he's got a £750 service coming up! That's planning to be the last thing on his credit card and then stop using it.
And hopefully by the time anything else is needed we've got a pot for it. (my car is on a service plan that includes MOTs so hopefully it passes) no idea about DH next service and MOT though. I'd hope after a £750 one we won't need one for about 5 years 😂.

I agree about everything being expensive, the kids are asking to go rock climbing at the weekend. It will cost £65 in total for two kids rock climbing, two high ropes (DD and DH as she won't go on her own), and the youngest in soft play then the middle in soft play while they do the high ropes. It's not the worst if we can make sure we don't eat out (that's one of our biggest downfall).

If you’ve got a rough idea how much the cars and repairs/maintenance etc are costing you over a year, divide total by 12 and that will give you the amount you need to save as a sinking fund for them every month - no more big bills that you’ve not budgeted for.

I’ve got accepted by Data Annotation today so I am hoping to make some money off that. Hurray!

We've done this this morning so we can go into Jan with clear aims.

We've decided to change tactic. After DH car service and a weekend away already booked in in Jan we will stop using DH credit card (we stopped using mine in summer) and turn to building the pots rather than clearing the debt then building the pots. We realised we're never going to clear them if we are still open to using them for certain things (that's when we think oh I'll just put x on there too!) We need to just stop using it. So building the pots will help with that. Still decorator first.

Me! £7k credit card debt, earn £43k but pay a chunk towards pension, no mortgage/rent, one primary aged child & one 19 y old who doesn’t pay board (apprenticeship), one car, £50 a week in petrol (mainly commute).

So our new plan for the £950 is £750 into pots - cars and holiday/3 weekends away. And £200 on the credit cards. So will be longer to clear the debt but with the pots starting for the above we shouldn't be adding to the credit cards anymore. I still want them gone ASAP so anything that comes in after the decorating that will be going on the debt.

Hope everyone is managing in Dec to not add to the debt before 2026 starts!

Hopping on to join!

My current debt is around £18.6k. I started tracking using the Financialle app (free) earlier this year and have paid off 25% of my debt so far.

I have two loans ending next year. February and August which will free up £350 and £260 a month which will be great to throw at credit cards.

Me £529 left of £1000 loan and £500 overdraft both due to house repairs that struck at a time when other things went wrong have been throwing everything I can to get the loan down first we are a one income family, I have a Sen child in a specialist setting will sleep better when they are both cleared.

I'm thinking £100,000 joint salary, almost similar to the PM, and £5000 in savings ?

Be aware that's how Dave Ramsey describes it. Many UK based websites will only talk about the snowball method and ise this to mean starting with the debt that charges the highest interest rate, which is the cheapest and fastest way to get out of debt.

@2026debtfreeme it sounds like you’re doing great but can I make a couple of suggestions?

Assuming your loan rate is not trivial (ie 5% or less) you'd be best overpaying that if you or your DH can get 0% CC debt.

I would pay most (ie £4 to £4.5k) of your savings to your loan (or split between CC and loan if CC is not 0%) because the savings will be earning less than the debt is costing you. Then if you have an emergency, you can pay for it with an empty credit card and pay it off over a couple of months or transfer it to a 0% deal.

I'd also look at building some 0% CC debt (bear with me here) so you can prioritise the loan.

With a good credit rating you should either be able to get a 0% fee or low fee balance transfer or a card that allows interest free purchases or money transfer without interest or fees. Then you can either take some money to pay off the loan or build up debt on the card by using it for normal spending like groceries, petrol etc and send the money you would have spent on those items to the loan.

If you still have CC debt when the offer runs out, just repeat the above.

<insert obligatory disclaimer for the MN anti CC crowd that this is not free money you're just using the system to your advantage and you must set up a DD for the minimum payment to maintain your good credit history>

Your 19 YO will be bringing home over £1k pm so they should be paying you something eg around £200 pm, plus saving a similar amount as well as paying for their own phone, travel, lunches etc. Really bad idea for them to not contribute especially when you have debts.

Yep.

I've run up £3000 on my credit card in 6 months on crap. I bought some much needed clothes but that is only maybe £200. The rest went on... who knows?

I have £400 "pocket money" a month. I'm hoping to pay off at least £200 a month but hopefully with top ups when I can, I will pay it off in 1yr.

I am so annoyed with myself.

Looking at what I can sell but I dont really want to sell stuff unless I have to and I dont think this is a "have to situation". I have a few things that I can sell happily and will maybe come to £100 on Vinted but it will help.

I'm not in debt but have lived on tight budgets as it took 11 years and 2 degrees to qualify and now are on a single income after I got made redundant in Feb whilst pregnant.

It's really easy to look week to week, month to month with expenses but in these scenarios you are more likely to have unexpected bills to throw yourself off course. It's a good time of year to go through every thing you have had to pay for in the last year and see what were additional costs not included in the regular expenses and then move them into a budget. We have a spreadsheet for monthly expenses and this includes our annual expenses/12.

Make your money go as far as you can. My partners work offers discounts for goods. We often get 3% of our food shop by buying the vouchers. It doesn't save us a huge amount week to week but looking over the year it makes quite a difference. We make of subscribe and save through Amazon for things. We get 5+ items each time which means we save 15% as well as some of the items being cheaper to start with from the supermarket. My daughter has food allergies and her oat milk in the supermarkets is £2.20 a litre. The last two orders have been £1.25 a litre - we get 30-36 litres a month so that's £60-70 we have saved in the last 2 months on oat milk alone. I don't think we have paid more than £1.70! It also means that we aren't nipping to the shop for oat milk and coming away with a basket of shopping.

Knowledge is power so get a spreadsheet or notebook with your expenditure, your savings and your debts. What are the rates, when do they expire etc. If you are going to save a emergency pot ahead of chipping away at the debt you want that savings to be the best rate you can to offset the difference between the rate on the debt and the savings. Review the balance of savings, debts and costs every 3-4 months

When I am working on big projects I make myself a bar chart and colour it in as I make progress (a bit like the kids fundraising total chart things you used to get on blue Peter back in the day) and it helps see how to small bits of progress adds up.

Sort through your crap we have been selling stuff on eBay for the last year. We have made £120 on crap the previous owner left in the house that we didn't want or need but was too good to throw away. We needed to replace the dishwasher earlier this year and we broke the old one down and sold the various bits. I think we are currently at £40-50 from that.

Make sure you build on things for pleasure too others its a lot hard to keep things going in the long term. Think about spending your money in ways that makes the bigger difference to your soul rather than your wallet. We made the decision years ago that eating in cheap pubs was a false economy, it was costing us money but we would come away thinking of "I could have made that". We decided to keep the same eating out budget but go somewhere nicer less frequently.

Holidays for us are about escaping and getting outside. This time last year, we were looking at a holiday. We were looking at renting a house or apartment in the lakes but it was coming in at £1k we couldn't justify it, we ended up booking a campsite for £200. Thankfully we did as I lost my job between booking and it would have been a push. We spent only another £200 over the week too. We have a cool box so took ingredients to make sandwiches when we went out for the day. We bought the odd coffee and cake but also had a flask of coffee with us. My daughters favourite day was when we went to an outside playground with 2 treasure hunts. It was £5 for her, free for us. We bought 2 coffees and a carton of juice for a very good price of £6! We were there for 6h which was good value for money. Think about what you want from holidays and what you need to top up your reserves rather than doing something because it's cheap. You might find that a couple of days trips or a weekend away is more beneficial to you than a week away that doesn't fill your cup.

Hi 👋 can I join?
we have about 18k spread across 3 cards, mostly on 0%.
it’s been this way over the last 18 months and this is despite throwing about £1600 a month on debt repayments.
ours has come from building work and renovating, which we still have a lot to do but trying to focus on doing very small jobs now.
i do budget but clearly not well enough, i think i need to explore the sinking pots / yearly budget thing more as this is where we get caught out.
Christmas, birthdays, car repairs all tend to get shoved on a card because i have the mentality that every spare penny gets sent to the card. If that makes sense.
clearly it’s not working!
as this time last year we had about 22k in debt which means we’ve only paid off 4K despite sending over 13k in payments. Argh writing it out like this really makes me realise im doing something topsy turvy!