’Tis the season of good will!

Tuesday 14th October, 2008 - £7,899.83 in debt…

It’s Christmas time - there’s no need to be afraid.

Well, it’s not quite, but the keys to managing your money are in preparation and budgeting, so there’s nothing wrong with getting excited two months early. That’s my excuse, anyway.

So what can we do at this early stage to make Christmas a bit more bearable, money-wise? This is what we can do:

     1.  Start your shopping early, but don’t start buying presents yet. Make a list of all the other stuff you’ll need - food that will keep, wrapping paper, decorations, etc - and buy it when you see a good deal. This will prevent panic-buying at a later stage. If you start on presents now, you’re likely to change your mind between now and December, and you might find it’s too late (or too much hassle) to get your money back.

     2.  Talk to friends and family about Christmas decorations before you start buying new ones. You’ll probably find they don’t use everything they’ve got every year, so you can rummage through their leftovers or even have a complete swap.

     3.  If you can trust yourself with it, and you’re currently debt-free, apply for a cashback credit card before you start spending. These can give you as much as 5 percent back on whatever you spend, but pay your balance as soon as the bill comes in or you’ll be charged interest.

     4.  When you do start gift-shopping, do it online and compare prices using sites like Kelkoo and Pricerunner. Equally, using MySupermarket to compare prices from four major supermarkets will save you money on your Christmas groceries.

     5.  If you haven’t got them already, apply for as many loyalty cards as you can handle. Hand them over when you stock up on Christmas food and presents, and spend the points later. Most supermarkets have them, as do Waterstone’s and Boots. Watch out for Boots ‘double points’ days.

     6.  According to the news, there’s some sort of global financial armageddon looming. If I hadn’t had to switch over for Neighbours, I’d be able to tell you more, but suffice to say that everyone will be tightening their belts this year. There is now no shame in buying presents from Ebay or TK Maxx, or going to pound shops for stocking fillers.

     7.  If you know anyone who’d appreciate some sort of greenery for Christmas, now’s the time to get some pots and compost from a garden centre and take some cuttings from your own plants (or your neighbour’s garden, but don’t tell them I said that). With the right care and attention, they’ll be small but beautiful by December.

     8.  The more people you can talk to about your debt, the better. Make agreements with as many people as possible that you won’t be exchanging gifts this year, or that they’ll only be small tokens for the sake of unwrapping something. If you don’t want to confess your debt, blame the credit crunch.

     9.  If you’re likely to be buying presents from Amazon, sign up for Amazon Prime first, which will give you free first-class delivery for a month. Don’t forget to cancel before the month is up.

Keep checking this blog for more ideas as the time looms, but if you’re looking for ‘bah humbug - I’m not spending anything on Christmas this year - boo hoo, I hate it all’, you won’t find it here. I love Christmas and I’m not going to let thousands of pounds worth of debt stop me enjoying it. Bring it on.

Dunce

Friday 1st August, 2008 - £8,378.83 in debt…

Time goes so fast when you’re scrabbling around in the gutter for pennies and working 14-hour days, doesn’t it? I’m now at the end of my third month (or first quarter, in finance-speak), and here’s how it’s going.

I’m clapping my hands like a trained seal because…

1)    I’ve learned that the best way to pay off your debts is to work until your brain bleeds and earn lots of money. This month has been my best so far in terms of workload, and I should be able to shift more than £1000 to my credit cards in total once all the money comes through. I’ve paid £605 towards my debts this month, which reduces what I owe by £472.15 when you take the interest off.

2)    I saved £10 on my grocery shopping by visiting MySupermarket and then Asda. The Asda shopping experience was harrowing, to say the least, but I’m trying Morrison’s next month, which isn’t on MySupermarket but looks pretty cheap to me.

3)    I also saved £7.45 by getting McFly’s latest body of work, Radio:ACTIVE, free with Beelzebub’s latest body of work, the Mail on Sunday.

4)    I used the snowball calculator on Whatsthecost.com to help manage my debts better. It told me that, if I pay off £470 a month (including interest) in a particular order, I’ll clear my debt before my 30th birthday and save £650 in interest.

5)    I received a letter confirming that I’d opted out of the Barclays personal reserve. I already knew that I’d done this, but it’s nice to be acknowledged.

6)    I earned £118.50 mystery shopping for GfK, which is by far the nicest mystery shopping company I’ve worked for. It doesn’t bombard me with irrelevant emails, the jobs I’ve done are quick and easy, and it’s even paid for a lovely bowl of soup and a Cornish cream tea. Yum.

I’m slapping my forehead like a cartoon dunce because…

1)    I spent £52.80 on one weekend in Nottingham, buying things I wouldn’t normally buy because my companions didn’t know about my debts. This has made me think about confessing to everyone, but there’s a very good reason why I haven’t done this yet: I’m ashamed. That’s normal, right?

2)    What with temping up to five days a week, mystery shopping and disliking the idea of cabin fever, I’ve been filling up my car’s petrol tank every nine days on average. Because it’s a beautiful and tiny Daewoo Matiz, this only costs £35 a time, but it’s still about £46 per month over budget.

3)    Speaking of budget, I might have also bought a couple of McFly tickets. And a ticket to a theatre adaptation of my favourite Edward Gorey book. But that’s all – I swear. Oh, and a ticket for Blood Brothers starring one of the Nolans. I just can’t help myself.

4)    My eBay so-called “buyers” have been nothing but trouble, with four of them refusing to pay up. Hopefully I’ll be able to re-sell the stuff or settle on a good eBay alternative but, until then, I’ll wear a constant look of vague disgruntlement.

I’m jittering with anticipation because…

1)    I can’t yet be sure whether I did the right thing switching to an E.ON capped energy tariff - this will only be worthwhile if all the other energy bills in the country rise by more than about 10%, which looks likely but you never know.

2)    I’m not yet sure what kind of impact my bridesmaid duties are going to have on my finances. The next step is dress shopping with the other bridesmaid, who lives 40 miles away, and casually tossing around some hen-night ideas without sounding like I have a budget of £3.50.

Generally speaking, I can’t complain about how this month has gone. After last month’s disastrous performance, July’s sudden onslaught of evening work has given me a ‘get out of jail free’ card and got me back on track. And, although I can’t expect this level of work every month, at least I know that I can be trusted to put the extra money towards my debt when it does happen. Well, most of it anyway…

—

First quarter results:

Amount paid towards my debt so far: £1376.63 (average £458.88 per month)

Amount I’ve reduced my debt by, after interest: £1120.62

 Takin’ it to the streets…

Thursday 24th July, 2008 - £8,778.07 in debt…

Ebay is the bane of my flipping life at the moment.

If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I started off by sticking some old stuff on Ebay and paying off my smallest debt in a week. That was great - everyone paid up and life was good. But then I carried on, blindly and recklessly Ebaying thing after thing, and now I’ve got four (FOUR!) unpaid item disputes on my hands.

FOUR! That’s enough to make me slightly cheesed off.

I’ve got a feeling this might be something to do with Ebay’s new feedback rules, so I’ve been on the hunt for some Ebay alternatives to try out. So far, I’ve found the following:

      PlayTrade: You can sell CD albums, books, DVDs, games, consoles and audiobooks on Play.com, and the site’s offering ten free listings per member until the end of July. It’s not an auction site - you pick a selling price and wait for someone to buy.

      Amazon Marketplace: You can sell practically anything here, on the same basis as PlayTrade - the item just appears on Amazon with your price against it, and you get access to Amazon’s millions of customers.

      Ebid: An international auction site, this is one of Ebay’s main competitors. Luckily for sellers, it doesn’t charge listing fees or final value fees, but not so luckily it doesn’t have anywhere near the traffic of Ebay. But, if you upgrade to a Seller+ Lifetime account (half price at £49.99 at the moment), you’ll get a… wait for it… FREE t-shirt!

      Ibootsale: This one is run like a car boot sale, where you buy a “pitch” and lay out your items to sell. Ninety-day, 25-item pitches are free right now. It’s not an auction site - the pitch system means that your item will be viewable for 90 days or until someone buys it. In theory, you only pay for your pitch and there are no other fees, but the site doesn’t currently say what the normal pitch price is.

      121bid.com: Another auction site, apparently 100% free to use. That’s no listing, reserve, buy-it-now or final value fees at all. God knows how they stay afloat, but the site does carry advertising and use PayPal.

      Gumtree: A great big online Classifieds section, where you can sell or swap.

And then there are the traditional ways of selling your old junk: Classifieds in the local papers or FreeAds, and car boot sales.

Any other ideas? Should I steer clear of any of the sites above, or should I just go for it? Are the buyers on these sites any more likely to pay up than my Ebay shysters?

 At the first month junction 

Tuesday 3rd June, 2008 - £8,920.19 in debt…

So, I’m a month into my two-year pledge to pay off all my debts. So how’s it going? Well, I’ve had a few victories, a few disappointments, and the jury is still out on a few things. The jury being me.

Unbridled triumph!

 (1) My biggest success has been filling out my tax return and paying the resulting £421 rebate straight onto my Barclaycard. This has saved me about £63 a year in interest.

(2) Second only to that was paying off my NatWest card by selling a few things on eBay. This has got me back into the habit of Ebaying things I don’t need, and I’ve made a total of £142.78, with more on the way.

(3) I’ve changed my current account to a Barclays First Additions account (which is only available to existing Barclays customers). This means I’m paying a monthly fee of £6.50, but the preferable overdraft interest rate will save me money in the long run: About £18 a month, if my calculations are correct.

(4) My Capital One card is now charging interest after the introductory offer, so I’ve chopped it up. Even though there’s a picture of a pig on it.

(5) And, through doing Martin Lewis’s budget planner, I’ve discovered how much I spend every month. It’s a lot more than I earn. This could be seen as a failure, but at least I know what I’m doing wrong and I can change my ways.

Failure! Doom! Disaster!

(1) Online surveys. After spending about a billion years (give or take) on the sign-up processes for these things, I’ve made no money from them because I don’t meet the criteria for answering any surveys. I might have to start lying.

(2) Trying to change the interest rates on my credit cards didn’t work at all.

(3) I quit my part-time job. Although this has been very good for me, mentally speaking, it means I’m £181 more skint every week. The four recruitment agencies I’ve spoken to so far have produced no jobs.

Not Quite Sure Yet…

(1)  I’ve written to my bank to reclaim the charges I’ve paid over the last six years, but this will take up to two years to sort out, so I’m not putting any of my eggs in that basket.

(2) I really must get around to switching my energy, broadband and home phone suppliers, but I always seem to find more interesting things to do, like creating Facebook profiles for my cats.

(3)  Mystery shopping for www.retaileyes.co.uk has the potential to be a good little pocket-money-spinner, and an excellent way to get someone else to pay for my shopping. It’s gone well so far, but I haven’t received any actual cash for it yet, so I’m still erring on the side of caution.

(4) The same goes for www.consumerpulse.co.uk – a site where you answer a few questions about the things you’ve bought during the week, building up points, which you then exchange for vouchers. So far, so massive-waste-of-time (is what I thought at first), but I’ve got a good tenner’s worth of points in a fortnight. I haven’t yet received my first voucher, and the site doesn’t give me any smallprint, so I’m crossing my fingers as it seems too good to be true. Again, watch this space…

 Olivia loved her new trampette…

Saturday 10th May, 2008 - £9.485.54 in debt…

This debt-paying-off malarkey isn’t all bad, you know. It’s not all about Economy tea bags and being beside oneself with fury. As it turns out, getting money for stuff on Ebay feels quite good.

On a scale of one to being in the front row of a Take That concert on the feel-good-ometer, I’d say it was about a seven.

Most of my listings have finished now, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to pay off the NatWest card when the money comes through. Here’s a breakdown of my successes and failures (Ebay-wise):

• About a third of my books and a few CDs didn’t sell, so I’ll re-list them next week.
• I got nearly £20 for a signed copy of a Mark Haddon book. That might not sound like much but, when I bought it, the shop was bursting with them. It’s probably rarer to find one he hasn’t scribbled on.
• The rest of the books and CDs went for anything from 99p to £7.10 each.
• A couple of rare-ish vinyl records went for about £25 each. Another one went for £18.

So far, that gives me a total of £112.57 (after listing fees and what-have-you). That’s about £10.50 short of my NatWest balance, but I still have one listing on the go, which I’m hoping will make another £30.

Unfortunately, that’s the lot. I have cleared my garage of everything that might be worth anything. Unless I can Ebay an old broom and a dead mouse…?

 Yessss…i won that 1989 Shane Ritchie annual

Tuesday 6th May, 2008 - £9,485.54 in debt…..

Ebay is a funny old thing. How on earth does anyone make any money on it? Really? It takes me a day to take photos of all the stuff I want to sell, a further day and a half to list them all, and a day at the end to wrap it up and post it. And that’s assuming all my buyers pay up in the way they’re supposed to and I don’t have to enter into a week-long email conversation about why I don’t accept credit card payments.

So how much does the average person earn on Ebay, when you take all this into account? About 7p an hour, I reckon, but it’s better than nothing so here I go. I could report myself for exploitation.

Last time I sold anything on Ebay, I got into so many wrangles with buyers that eventually I gave up. It just didn’t seem worth the stress or hassle… maybe I have anger issues that should be dealt with. But now, I have a mission and a huge debt to pay off, so I’m giving it another go.

I’ve created a pile of things I can live without (CDs, books – including a couple of signed ones - unwanted presents, etc). By the end of yesterday, I’d calmly photographed and listed them all (complete with a slightly gruff “NO CREDIT CARDS” disclaimer), and I’m looking forward to getting rid of them and making some cash.

If I sell everything for the amounts I’m hoping for, I’ll be able to pay off my NatWest card within a week.

If you remember, my NatWest card is the one with only £123.99 on it. By paying it off first, it’s one in the eye for Martin Lewis and anyone else with half a financial brain, as the interest rate is by no means my highest. So why am I doing it?

Well, it seems like an achievable goal; it means I can add £10 to my monthly Barclaycard payment; and it will mean fewer cards to manage. I’m also doing it to prove that I can be sensible, bite the bullet and pay off a debt without spending all my so-called “disposable” cash on shoes. Hopefully. As soon as the NatWest card is paid off, I’ll start chipping away at them in the right order.

My listings end on Friday – I’ll keep you updated.

In other news…

After my last posting, I received a few comments about my credit card suppliers, telling me I should try calling them and asking if they can drop my interest rates. I had no idea that could be done, so I’ll be calling all my card issuers this week – watch this space.

By the way, you might have noticed that my debt has decreased since my last posting – YESSSS!!! This is because I’ve just received my Barclaycard bill. Last month I made my usual payment of £75, but my interest payment was so extortionate that my debt has only gone down by £13.91. Yes, it has cost me £75 to decrease my balance by less than £14. This has got to stop.

 Olivia Buck says ‘Hi’

Monday 1st May, 2008 – £9,499.45 in debt…

Let me introduce myself: I’ve just turned 28, I’ve been in debt for ten years, and now I’m desperate to pay it off. How did I get myself into this dungheap of a mess of a quagmire?

I’ve always been rubbish with money, and now I’m rubbish with debt. Being in the red was fine at uni - like so many students, I got used to spending money that wasn’t mine. After I graduated, I lived with my parents for two years and paid most of it off, but then I moved to London.

I’ll tell you this for nothing: Living in London is expensive. That’s the first of many shiny nuggets of wisdom you’re going to get from this blog, and I hope you appreciate it. It’s not like I was eating diamond-encrusted swans for breakfast, but an Ikea spree here and there soon adds up.

Over the last year or so, I’ve had the feeling I should be getting out of my debt-hole. My credit rating has gone past ‘high risk’ and into ‘extreme’ territory – only adrenaline junkies and the mafia would lend to me now - but mainly I want to cut up my credit cards because being in debt feels horrible.

So far, I’ve made the following efforts:

• Although I’m self-employed, I’ve got a second job as a part-time secretary. It’s almost unbearable, but it pays the rent.

• My biggest debt was on my Barclaycard at nearly 30% APR, so I’ve transferred half the balance to a Tesco card on an interest-free deal.

• After doing that, I cancelled my Barclaycard and set up a standing order to make regular payments. When I explained why I was doing this, the Barclaycard people were kind enough to drop my Standard APR by a couple of percent.

Even after that, I’ve still got credit card bills of £200 a month and those payments are covering little more than interest. I also have an overdraft limit of £3,000, which I was always straying past before I got the temping job (bad news at the time, but I might be able to claim back some bank charges – more on that later…).

So, here’s the bottom line: How much I owe.

Barclays overdraft: £3,000 (I’m always at the limit by the end of the month)

Barclaycard: £2,977.46 at 27.9% APR

Capital One card: £999.00 at 24% APR

Tesco card: £2,399.00 at 12% APR

NatWest card: £123.99 at 13% APR

That’s a total debt of £9,499.45 (plus interest), which I plan to eliminate completely by my 30th birthday at the end of April 2010. I then plan to fit Jupiter into a blender and become the first woman to unicycle across the Atlantic.

My first job is to pay off that pesky little NatWest card as quickly as possible. I currently pay off that card at £10 a month so, once it’s taken care of, I can add £10 onto my monthly Barclaycard payment.

I’m open to suggestions, so please help me out!

 I’ve got 24 months to get solvent and apart from Ebaying all my belongings and working overtime, I need to know: 

1. Can I make more money?
2. How can I save money so I can increase my card payments without feeling the pinch?
3. What have you done to pay off your debts?
4. What works and what doesn’t?

 Over the coming weeks I’ll be trying out any suggestions I’m given (apart from illegal ones) and regularly reporting back.