I just read an email newsletter from the Motley Fool entitled ´Five Steps to Debt Free Heaven´, which says that 47 is the magic age when the number of people who have beaten their credit card debts exceeds the number who haven´t.
That means I have just 214 days left to clear my debts!
That means I need to raise £403.56 per day, or £16.81 per hour, or 28 pence a minute, every minute of the next 214 days!
If you´d like to help me, why not trundle over to my other website www.psychobanana.co.uk and give me a helping hand?
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.
Tim Ramsey
By: Tim Ramsey on August 4, 2008
at 1:53 am
Love the website. I’m trying something very similar and the CCCS are on the call list. Bit nervous but it can’t be as bad as the daily phone calls wanting money I don’t have.
By: mydebtdiary on August 20, 2008
at 10:57 am
Hi there mydebtdiary
Sorry for taking so long to moderate your comment – Thanks to some very kind friends letting us have their holiday apartment for nothing, I managed to go on holiday with the missus and the sprog for a few days!
Glad you like the website.
As far as phoning the CCCS goes, if you haven´t done it yet then you should – it´s a bit embarrassing admitting you´ve been a bit of a twonk with your finances, but the phone call only lasts about an hour and then you can feel very relieved.
The worst bit of the whole thing is the time between the initial call to the CCCS and the date they give you for the call where you tell them what you owe and work out a budget – in the interim, you have to phone all your creditors and tell them what you´re doing and offer them a token payment. Some of them can be very nice about it, but some of them can be quite worrying as they constantly phone you asking for payment and ignoring what you told them on the last 24 phonecalls they made to you, but if you just persevere, within around 3 to 6 months, they get the idea that you´re doing your best and eventually leave you alone.
The good news is that your budget will be quite fair and you certainly won´t starve – you won´t be having 3 foreign holidays a year and champagne with every meal either, but you will be able to run to the odd bottle of wine/beer!
The main thing is that you get some support from the CCCS and it really does take a weight off your shoulders. They hardly ever contact you and just work in the background and are available to offer advice if you need it.
It´s really difficult when you´re heavily in debt to try not to get any worse into it and for me, dealing with my debts literally took over my life, shifting money from one account to the next and slowly but surely getting further and further into debt when I really was trying my best to handle it and get out of debt. The sense of relief I felt when I´d phoned the CCCS and actually done something about it was unbelievable.
Your debts do actually still go up after you´ve phoned the CCCS as some companies continue to apply interest until they´ve had all your details from the CCCS. I´ve recently reached the point where I finally now owe a bit less than when I contacted the CCCS and though it´s a bit disappointing to see how little progress I seem to have made over the last few months, I now really feel like I´m starting to get somewhere.
Anyway, as I said – if you haven´t phoned the CCCS yet, do it – go on, you know you want to!
Oh, and whatever you do, avoid all the other companies who charge you like the plague!
By: psychobanana on August 28, 2008
at 3:04 pm