kalmar wrote:
What's the scale of debt to monthly pay minus rent?
Heh, it's a hell of a lot. The good news is that I've never missed a payment on anything and I am able to make the minimum payments on stuff, but last night I worked out that after paying all my bills and stuff every month, I'm left with about £150 - £200 a month to myself. Until now, that has also been with making only the minimum payments on my two credit cards, which is obviously pretty fucking disastrous - I mean, I worked out last night that, of the £95 MBNA have off me every month for my Virgin card, only £1.50 goes towards paying the balance, all the rest is interest!
At the very least, I discovered that my other credit card, the one I have with my bank, is offering 0% interest for 6 months on balance transfers and due to the obscene credit limit they've given me on that card, I was able to move all but £300 quid from the Virgin card onto that. Now there's absolutely no way I can pay off the balance in 6 months, but hopefully I'll be able to knock a chunk of it off.
I've seen the same model car as mine with similar mileage sell for anything between £6k - £8k, so the plan at the moment is to sell that soon and get something really cheap, no more than £1k and use the change to go towards that credit card balance. I've never sold a car before so I'm not entirely sure how best to go about that - was thinking of waiting till around March time when the weather improves and maybe people have gotten over the typical post-Christmas skint period. I need to sort out some of the minor scrapes to the paintwork, clean up the upholstery and it needs a new front tyre, but it's got a full dealer service history (sadly, it'll need another before I come to sell it), so maybe I'll get a decent-ish amount for that by selling privately.
Then whatever is left I'll try and transfer to another 0% deal.
Debt problems are a bit embarrassing, and I've made a lifetime's worth of embarrassing posts here in the past, so I'll spoiler the details of it all:
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
I'm about £26,000 in debt and my salary is only £21,500, so I owe more than I earn in a year even before tax and I fucking hate my job and need something else. Half of it is in the form of a personal bank loan which I used to buy my car from the finance company and pay off one of my credit cards, that's currently at £13,500. After the balance transfer last night, I owe a little under £10,000 on one credit card (thankfully the vast majority is at 0% interest for the next 6 months), plus I'm £2,500 overdrawn (though still within the limit, and I get paid in a week's time).
It's frightening. Part of how it's got so bad is that I have an amazing ability for simply ignoring it, because thinking about it makes me feel very sick and really quite distressed - in fact last night was the first time I was able to bring myself to tell my own mother about it. The stupid thing is is that I used to be fairly careful with money. Four and a half years ago, the only debt I had was a £2,000 credit card bill. Then breaking up with my ex and leaving the home we mutually owned cost me a huge amount of money, particularly as she wanted to keep the place and, out of guilt, I continued paying my share of the mortgage and bills for about 9 months until she was able to sort it out for herself. Plus I'd had to move back in with my parents and pay them rent. Plus, they wouldn't speak to me for months over the whole thing, so I'd go out all the while and eat all my meals out to avoid them.
I got a new job that paid more, but I needed to learn to drive. That took 44 lessons at £22 each, plus I had to take my theory test twice. I needed my own transport, so rather than doing the sensible thing and chucking a couple of hundred quid at an old banger, I bought a £13,100 Honda Civic so as not to look a complete twat parking up next to all the cunts in their BMWs and Audis in the work car park.
You all know about the pregnancy saga and how I came down with a proper dose of the mentals then, so I got properly stuck in with retail and alcohol therapy for a good while too. I wince everytime I read about JC buying yet another computer part because I too used to just buy shit all the time for no good reason and now I have to deal with the consequences.
Anyway, I like to think now that those mental days are behind me. The last stupid purchase I made was probably around June time last year and I'm now very much wanting to sort this problem out once and for all. If nothing else, I have a daughter now, unquestionably the most important thing in my life bar none, and I want to make sure she doesn't suffer too much from her father being a bell-end.
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) but what the hell.
Best of luck with it all though matey, sounds like you've turned the corner so you will get there in the end, but it looks like it's going to take a little while...
Buy it cheap, don't spend anything on it, sell it if it breaks and buy another 
