Debt, word of the year, and a motto

Time to take stock and admit to myself that I am in debt again. I haven't been denying it, just pushing it to the back of my head really. There are a couple of reasons but mostly just being careless and spending whatever I felt like over the past month or two, along with one or two bigger ticket items. €320 for an injection into my hip? Yay. Anyway, time to get back of track. I bought a budget calendar from PositiveReduceMyDebt (who I've been following on instagram for a couple of months now) and have filled out some goals for January. 

1. 15 no-spend days
2. Stick to €25/week for food (given I ended up spending just over €90 already, this will be very tight)
3. No-spend year - exceptions for January: step ladder and watercolours
   

I have taking some money out of savings to cover some of the bills and will work on getting the overdraft back down to zero over the year while building my savings back up. I do technically have enough in my investment account to cover all of it but I want to leave that where it is if possible. Head down and onwards. And the same applies to food and eating and meal planning. I let things go completely to pot in December and while I enjoyed it, I also badly need to get that under control again. 

So, over the Christmas break, I made a meal plan for January, wrote a shopping list and on Sunday I cooked. My aim is to mostly only have to cook every second week or perhaps twice a month. I think time will tell on that one. On Sunday I made a big pot of vegetable soup, lemon chicken with veg and potatoes, and a chicken and spinach curry. 

My meal plan is not one planning exactly what to have each day but rather a rough outline and then I can choose what I want to have on each day. 

Yikes!

• Butternut squash and ricotta frittata (6 servings)
• Chicken and spinach curry (4 servings)
• Oriental lentil stew (4 big servings - new recipe, depending on what it's actually like, this may make more servings than 4, I think)
• Cauliflower and broccoli gratin (4 servings)
  
• Lemon chicken with potatoes and veg (6 servings)
• Honey chilli pork (4 servings) - except they had no pork in the butchers so I took the suggested veal instead. Without checking the price first. Veal is expensive. How carelessness leads to yet another drop on the debt puddle!
  
  

 

So that's 28 dinners. For lunches, I planned for potato and leek soup, spicy lentil and carrot soup, pumpkin soup, and vegetable soup. Since I didn't even use half of the cabbage I got in the vegetable soup I made at the weekend and still ended up with 10 servings, I don't think I'll need to make all of the rest of those this month. I am also having a week or two of eating some of the meal replacement pouches that I should have, but didn't, use in December. Essentially starting over with a couple of weeks of the transition phase that was supposed to end just before Christmas. That will actually take care of some lunches, too.

The only word I could come up with for a word for the coming year was support. It made me kind of uncomfortable though, so I tried to think of something else. Before realising that I was feeling mostly uncomfortable with the idea of needing or asking for support. Probably a good indication that it really is the right word for me this year. Support it is. 

And then on Saturday I read something in a tweet that I am also adopting as a kind of a motto for a while. If the right words come along at the right time for me, I'll grab on to them: Discipline always trumps motivation. 




Don't wait until you're motivated to do something. Don't wait until you feel ready to start. It may never come. Discipline always trumps motivation.
Decide the kind of life you want to lead and say no to everything that isn't that.
#2022

— Cécile Chemin-Gordon (@MuayCe) December 29, 2021

Savings

Although I do keep a budget spreadsheet, it essentially serves to make sure I'm not overspending and compared to many finance spreadsheets out there, it is pretty basic. One thing I've never incorporated is a good way to look back at totals at any given time. I can look back and see what my current account balance was at the end of a month but that's it. I just updated the page with the overview of accounts manually on a continuing basis. Perhaps something to work on in the future sometime. I really should do some Excel courses anyway, and it would give me something practical to practice on.

In the meantime, I've decided to just take a snapshot of my sidebars whenever I update them. It's the same story there - I just update them manually on a continuing basis.

I can tentatively say that things are kind of going alright with money at the moment. I do have a small balance on my credit card but will clear that as soon as an outstanding invoice is paid. I could use savings but it's a psychological thing and since it's not a lot of money, I'm going with it. I have been making a better effort to live within my normal salary though - need to stop getting used to having side-income to stop up the gaps. I will use some of my side income to fund a trip or two later this year and to finally do some of that house stuff I've been promising to get done for over a year. Otherwise, I will be using it to pad my various savings accounts and give myself a bit of a head start. And next year, the target will be as far as possible to save all of my side income.






This month, I got to the end of the month with just over €40 in my purse and €45.22 in my current account. So I am calling that the start of the float I have been wanting to have in my current account - well, I have adjusted the totals in my spreadsheet to show less €50 (the 45.22 plus rounding up from this month's salary lodgement). €50 seems to be a good number for me to work with so I'll be trying to add €50 to the float every month by not spending to zero, but rather to €50 and then adjusting my totals to subtract that fifty every month. We'll see how it goes.

Keeping track of money - September 2016

After doing so well with tracking almost every single day's spending in August, I managed to do it for a big fat five days in September. And really, it was only three because on one of those days I forgot and afterwards couldn't even remember what I had spent where and on another one I never left the house. I'm glad that the start of October has been a weekend and that I've seen other people posting financials for the end of September as it was a good reminder to me to really try and get on top of tracking again this month. I've just spent the last three days at home (it's a bank holiday here today) and have done just about nothing other than reading, watching a film or two, and a bit less than the bare minimum of housework needed (however I have managed to get washing-up back under control and have cooked two days in a row, which is progress compared to most of September).

Part of the reason for not tracking was some careless spending brought about by me basically freaking out about not having any money. Stupid response obviously but I felt like I was struggling to really not fall back into the habits from the worst of my spendy mid-twenties. And yet, given the amount of stress I have been feeling about my lack of money, I have been strangely ambivalent about finding a second part-time job. I did have an interview at the start of September but looking back, I really didn't do a good interview, and it's not because I didn't find the position interesting (same as now but working in the law faculty for a human rights lawyer - how cool would that have been!?!) but I wasn't simultaneously stressing about money and about having to go back to working fulltime. And part of it was because my current position does want me to increase my hours up to 75% (30 hours a week - it's currently 20 hours/50%), which I told them I was definitely interested in but now I know that the money for that probably won't start until March. At any rate I haven't heard back from that interview and since she wanted to make a decision the week after it, I assume that means she has chosen someone else and is just waiting for the paperwork to be finished before sending rejections for everyone else.

After almost no translation work in July or August (hence the lack of funds - my salary from my office job is not enough to cover any but the most basic of expenses and I had a few non-regular ones come up in August and September), I was very grateful to get a big job from a new client in September. It turned out to be slightly shorter than originally envisaged but a week later they contacted me to translate something else as well. And an existing client turned up with a small job, too. So, I knew there was money coming in but just didn't actually have any. I've more or less depleted by savings entirely, the overdraft on my Irish account was almost up to its limit, and I had to use my credit card to buy groceries where possible, to leave what cash I had free for things that you can't use a credit card for (which is quite a lot in Germany - it's only in the last few years you can even use a credit card in most supermarkets).

I have been obsessively checking my bank account to see if my new client had paid their invoice. It's always a bit tricky with bigger organisations as they can sometimes take a month or more to process an invoice. I know that myself from having worked on the other side. Despite it being a bank holiday today, however, when I logged in, my account was showing that it had been paid. Phew. I really can't describe the feeling of relief. I immediately transferred enough to pay most of the credit card bill (there are a couple of transactions that haven't cleared yet but the amount for the total will just come out by direct debit mid-month as usual - I still prefer to have cleared the bulk of it immediately) and also transferred €500 to my Irish bank account. I will most likely need to withdraw money from that account again, if not this month, then next, but at least that's a bit of a chunk off the overdraft, which I have been finding very stressful to have again.

So, I now have enough left in my normal bank account to cover all of the bills I am expecting for this month and have a bit left over to buy food/drink each week. I will have to be very strict with myself but it's doable. That invoice was enough, so to speak, to cover the shortfall between by salary and what I really need for September and October. Now I need to try and get some work in so that I have something else coming in to cover the shortfall for November. I'm not too worried about December as we get a type of bonus/extra salary paid out at the end of November. It's not quite a full month's extra salary and because of tax, will be a bit less than salary, too, but it'll be enough to cover the shortfall for December. So that's that. We'll see how it goes for October. One thing about not having a lot of money is at least that there's less tracking to do, too.

Keeping track of money - how I (attempt to) do it

I did really well at tracking all of my spending in the first two weeks of August. Then came the week of summer school and I completely and totally forgot to even think about it. I very nearly gave up then but once I got back from Dusseldorf I actually sat down to see what I could recreate. Whenever I have tracked before it has never quite matched up anyway and, to be honest, I've rarely managed to keep it up for an entire month. Rather than just deciding it didn't matter, I've now added another field into my spreadsheet to try and figure out exactly what the discrepancy is and account for it as best I can. My budget spreadsheet runs from Fridays to Thursdays and luckily enough 1st September is a Thursday so the mis-match between the end of the month and the end of my budget month is only one day. I can manage to not spend any money for a day, or at least to use my credit card if I need to get some groceries.

Some general notes: My aim in setting up the tracking portion for cash spending on my spreadsheet was to see what percentage of income I was spending on certain categories. So I have a cash section and a banking section, for what of a better word. The banking section is divided into the following sections:

1. Rent
2. Private pension/investments
3. Various charities
4. Transfer to Irish account
5. Basic income supporter (see here for details - I've just started contributing €6/month to this)
6. Annual expenses (incl. holiday savings)
7. Transport
8. Other house related
9. Dental insurance
10. Visa (my old Irish credit card)
11. Phone/internet
12. Mastercard (my German points-earning credit card)
13. Misc. (food etc.) - cash
14. Misc. (food etc.) - debit card
15. Bills (not including phone)
16. Tax account
17. Bank charges
18. One-off out
19. One-off in

It's a little bit of a muddle as it has evolved to this over the years but since I'm the only one who has to understand it, that's ok. Some items, for example, visa, really don't need to be there anymore as I only use that visa card as the holding card for the deposit when I rent a car. Not quite ready to give up the card though (want to have €4,000 in savings first, as that's the limit on that card) so here it stays for now.

Private pension/investments: At the moment I'm still just contributing a very small amount to my private pension. I reduced it once I knew I was going to be on unemployment for a while and since I now have some debt, I won't increase it again until I'm a bit more secure, if at all. It's mostly a tax efficicency vehicle so I'll see what my accountant has to say about it next year. I added a field for investments as I wanted to start at least investing a small amount into an ETF fund but still haven't gotten around to setting that up.

Phone/internet at the moment just covers the landline and internet as the topping-up of my current mobile phone happens online and I use my mastercard for that.

Bills is generally just the gas and electricity, although in my new place I don't have a gas bill.

At the moment one-off in includes the income from my translation work and I'm happy enough with that. To the side of my main spreadsheet I have a small box to list the one-off things happening in any month and those numbers feed in here. So at the start of a month I check if any annual or quarterly bills will be due, note if I'll need money for a particular trip or gift and so on. I don't add one-off income until if has actually hit my bank account. Trying to keep it as real as possible. I also use this category to account for any money that I transfer from savings to my current account in order to, for example, pay for annual expenses. Basically this spreadsheet is focused on my current account, in case that wasn't already clear.

In an ideal world, and if I was better at tracking (and accounting, come to think of it), the amounts for misc. cash and misc. debit card would equal the amounts that I track in the daily cash portion of my spreadsheet. As I do sometimes use my mastercard for these expenses however, things were always a bit skewy. So I've now added the mastercard amount to the reconciliation for that portion, as well as including mastercard expenses in the tracking. Much better.

The only thing is that the billing period for the mastercard is different than everything else and I can't change it. So, since it runs from around 10th to 10th (sometimes 9th or 11th, depending on weekends), I track any spending on that card after the bill has been isssued in the following month's numbers. It means I'm not really tracking one month in one place but it's the least complicated way I've come up with, at least for me. I must stress that my spreadsheet is generally focused on helping me to not overspend and to get control of my debt. If I ever move fully into needing something to figure out more than that, well, this should be a good basis for it I think.

The cash section of my spreadsheet is divided into the following categories:

1. Transport 
2. Food - necessities
3. Food - luxuries
4. Canteen food
5. Toiletries
6. Gifts (incl. postage, card and wrapping)
7. Clothes
8. House/garden
9. Medical
10. Other (lotto, etc.)

So the idea is that every day, I add in whatever I have spent in cash, debit card or mastercard. And all of that should add up to the amounts for these in the banking portion of the spreadsheet. I track a daily and a grand total for these items. At the moment, I have a €79 discrepancy between those two totals and am only certain of the reason for €50 of that. But, I didn't count the money in my purse at the end of last month and am not certain I managed to remember absolutely everything spent during the week I forgot to track so hopefully in future this will be less of an issue.

For all of the above categories, both from the banking section and the cash section, I also have space in my spreadsheet to show me what percentage of income each one is. Of course, everything all together should give me 100% but that has never happened. So it's more of a general guideline really. Not sure if it's my spreadshset or my tracking that leads to difficulties but for now, it's close enough for me. 

So, that grew to be a much longer post than I had planned on. I'll post actual numbers on Thursday when I know exactly how it has shaped up. So far it's telling me that I've spent (or will spend, as non-cleared items are already included in the totals) 91.36% of my income. 

If anyone has any questions about any of that, let me know and I'll try to explain. There are lots of ways I could improve this spreadsheet (starting over from scratch perhaps) but it works pretty well for me so I'll stick with it for another while.

Saturday randomness

• Have a vague feeling at the moment that I really want to get back to blogging regularly but don't really feel like I can be bothered putting the effort into composing posts. Which makes it sounds like I do put effort in normally, which isn't really the case. I normally just sit down and start typing. And while sometimes I do manage to take and post photos, not having any doesn't really ever hold me back either. I'm just in kind of a funny place as far as writing is concerned in general I think. Still toying with the idea of trying to write a romance novel, ideas of maybe digging out the chapters I wrote for the 3-day-novel contest a few years ago and working on that have started surfacing and I still think about actually trying to write properly researched essay-type things for the blog or just for myself sometimes. I think working in a college environment now is simultaneously inspiring and intimidating me, leading to a kind of paralysis. That's not the right word really, though. It's more like I feel somehow stifled. It's all a bit strange. 
• After a week or two where it seemed like the weather was cooling down and I had started to look forward to long autumnal walks it has gotten hot again. Heading for 35 degrees every day over the last few days. So today I decided I wasn't even going to pretend that I'd do anything or go anywhere. I closed the shutter on the east side of my apartment this morning and have only just re-opened it. And then once the sun started making its way around to the other side I closed the windows and the shutters. I know it's worth it, even though it seems a pity to shut out the light. Just can't handle it at the moment. 
• Having decided to not do anything at all today I did of cousre then get up and make myself a lovely brunch. Onions and tomatoes sauteed with a splash of balsamic vinegar, then a tin of tuna and three eggs added to make a very tasty omelette. Or at least it would have been an omelette if it hadn't all fallen apart. 
• And then for good measure I actually cut up the beef I bought the other day and prepared the marinade for the stir-fry dish I saw on 59 pounds to go. At nearly 13 euro!!! for enough for two people (albeit generous portions), I'm reminded of why I really quite rarely buy meat. And that was the cheaper of the cuts. So yep, reminded again of why I don't buy a lot of meat and why most of what I do buy is cheaper cuts for slow-cooking. And particularly glad that I didn't end up wasting the beef just 'cos it got too hot for cooking again. It's marinating in the fridge now and if I don't do it this evening, it'll still be fine for tomorrow. I have frozen beans and broccoli so apart from chopping up a couple of carrots and some onion, it'll be a minimal effort meal. I'm not even going to bother making rice, it really is too hot so I'll just pile on the veggies and enjoy it like that. 
• I've almost made it to the end of the month without spending a whole pile more than intended. Won't quite end the month without needing to pull a small amount from savings but that's because I forgot about the letter I know was going to arrive from the social welfare. Have to repay 320 euro from May (my last month of dole money) as I earned quite a bit in translation work that month. So if I don't spend anything for the next week I'll need to pull 60 from savings to pay that. It has left things tight the past week but I'm still glad I decided to just live with things being a bit tight for a week or two rather than pulling the whole lot from savings. I was paid for one big job I did at the end of June (new client and it took a while for me to be added to their database as a creditor) as well as a couple of other outstanding invoices and most of that money went straight to savings. I'm really trying to be conscientous about putting money aside for tax and will have a few more big annual bills to pay in September. And I'm trying to knock down the overdraft on my Irish account finally. Even if I only manage to pay 50 a month to that I really need to see it going down. 
• July and August brought almost no translation work so I will need to be careful to take account of that in the coming years. There are some industries that basically go on holidays for those two months in summer and translations seems to be one of them. I was starting to get really worried as I don't have any other outstanding invoices (except one, which it looks like I'm going to have to start down the legal route to try and recover) and I wasn't sure how I was going to come up with the money I need on top of my day-job salary to cover my expenses. And then on Tuesday I had two separate queries from potential new clients. One, I am happy to say, confirmed on Thursday that I had gotten the job and it'll be enough to cover the gap between salary and expenses for two months so that creates a bit of breathing space. The other was for an agency that wasn't offering a lot of money and I was in two minds about it as it would be a guaranteed three-years of continuing jobs for one particular client so even at a very low rate, it might be just what I need to keep things going. However, after two emails they haven't responded to the rest of my questions so I think I'm going to take it as a sign that I may be better off without that agency. They've also been banned from one of the big translator websites, which probably isn't a good sign anyway. 
• On the day-job front, there is a posting up for another half-day job in the university but it seems like it's for a permanent position. I'm in two minds as to whether to apply for it or not but I think I will go for it. If I did manage to get offered the position, I don't have to say yes. I don't really want to go back to working full time at the moment (full time and then some, if translating picks up again) but I think I would feel much better with the security of a permanent position. My boss is definitely working on trying to get our program funded long-term, bringing with it the possibility of a permanent or at least far longer contract than I have now but these things work very slowly. And of course he's on holidays at the moment so I can't even check in and find out how all of that is going. So I think I'll apply for it and then see what happens. It would scupper the possibility of increasing my hours to 75% at the current job, too, probably. Unless the new professor was willing to allow the 50% job to be shared among two. 
• There was a bird on my balcony railing for more than two hours earlier. I was worried it was injured but it didn't seem to be. I put some water out but I don't think it touched it. It has gone now so I hope it is alright and just needed a long rest.
• I've used the excuse of too much work and stress due to the summer school we held a week ago to eat far too many sweets and crisps. I think I've finished absolutely everything that's in the house now, though, so I may try the blood sugar diet again for a couple of weeks before going back to fasting properly. I've fasted for shorter periods on and off over the last few weeks of craziness and still find it remarkable how much better I feel when I manage to do it. I'm going to do a variation of the blood sugar diet though. Thinking about it I realised that one thing that kind of holds me back is using fats in cooking, or rather having to count the caloires of those fats. So, I think I'll do 800 calories plus oils/butter. I don't use a huge amont anyway and I think it's a restriction that was having more of an impact on my mind than I realised. Even if I'm going above 800 calories on most days, it will still be enough to be losing weight. 
• For years and years, ever since blogger introduced stats as a standard thing for people to see, I've checked on mine on and off. And for years and years, it was pretty normal for this blog to receive about 50 hits a day. I think about 15 of these were actual regular readers and the rest mostly as a result of google searches. Haven't ever really tried to do anything to increase readership or stats in any way and am perfectly happy with that. It gave me a bit of a thrill in April 2013 when I participated in the A-Z of blogging and saw a spike in numbers for that month but not so much of a thrill that I'd ever really be bothered chasing them again if you know what I mean. Still, it wsa nice to know that someone was reading. Since May this year I think I've been found by some kind of bot though. I now have bewteen 500 and 1,000 hits every single day. For absolutely no reason. And with no-one new commmenting, I think my impression of "fake" hits probably isn't too far off. It's mildly irritating as it means my stats are now completely meaningless.

• And finally, I bought a new red sheet a while ago and just before leaving for summer school I put it on the bed for the first time. Was worried about it looking a bit bordello-like but it's actually just really cheerful and I love it. Best impulse purchase for a long time.

Let's try to focus on the positive

Everything has been so lovely since I moved here (once I started getting over the moving part of moving that is) that this week's setback is kind of knocking me for six a bit. I hate feeling like if I had the financial means rights now, I would prefer to move house. I've all but completely forgotten about keeping up with my list of simple things that make me happy because, well, just about everything has been so great it felt a bit like there wasn't much of bad to be mitigated. So, now that there is negative stuff, I really need to try and put some of the tools I have learned about over the years back into practice.

With that in mind, here are a few positive things from the last couple of days:

• Got my renewal notice for house insurance. My insurance premium went down when I moved to this area (hooray). The insurance perios runs from August to July and this year's renewal also included a deduction for the difference for the few months since I moved here until 1 August. So as well as the savings for the next 12 months, I didn't have to pay 6.89 of the bill that I did get. 
• Receiving that renewal notice reminded me that the renewal notice for my personal liability insurance came in last week. That'd be one of the things my guest from hell tidied out of sight out of mind on me so at least I was able to go searching for it and get that paid as well. 
• I may not have paid off the moving costs yet but I did have money put aside for these two bills and was able to pay them without stressing.
• Despite an extraordinarily unproductive day in work (spent two hours not actually working, just surfing the internet), overtime that I worked last week means that I haven't actually gone into minus hours. Being solely responsible for tracking whether or not I have worked my 20 hours, with nobody tracking it at all, is just so great and it's really keeping me honest, which is, y'know, one of my favourite feelings.
• I can hear thunder rumbling in the distance so am hopeful that the heat might break a bit and I'll be able to sleep properly tonight.
• Tomorrow I'm going to go and buy turquoise/blue paint to paint the remaining bookshelf and get some colour cards to decide what colour red I want to paint my dresser. 
• There's a half-packet of maltesers in the fridge.
• I found local, organic produce at a supermarket that's on my way between work and home. So I have courgettes, salad and tomatoes waiting for me to eat over the weekend.
• This morning started off with a lovely phone call with a good friend.
• I managed to get through to a podologist who lives just down the road from me and have an appointment next week. I really hope she's good because it would be so convenient. And her rates are very, very reasonable.

Nearly the end of the month

The month has flown by. I can hardly believe I've been in my new job for a whole month. I'm still enjoying it although I do sometimes still feel a bit frustrated at just not knowing quite how things work. I'll get there eventually but for now it does kind of feel as if something or other comes up every day that I haven't done yet. My boss seems happy at least - she commented the other day that she thinks things are going really well.

And, since the last day of the month is fast approaching, so too the day I'll finally get paid again. Since I'm only working a 20-hour week I am, of course, only getting a 50% salary. There are online calculators to figure out how much you'll get but I'm always a bit wary that they might not be entirely accurate. So I was glad when I got my payslip today to see that what I had thought I would get is what I am getting and the online calculator was only a couple of euro out. June started out very quietly in terms of translating but I've had a few jobs over the last week or so and as soon as those invoices are paid, I will have enough to not only cover this month's expenses but also to make a bigger payment to my credit card.


So, since I know people like to know the actual numbers. My new salary is just shy of 1,000 net per month. And my fixed expenses are:

Rent	590
Pension	50
Donations	65
Phone/internet	30
Mobile phone/internet	15
Electricity	40
Montly ticket	40
Dental insurance	40
	870

So, my normal job is enough, just about, to cover fixed expenses and even to buy food for the month, assuming I kept to a fairly strict budget. Of course, I do have other expenses, the annual stuff that comes up needs to be saved for, for example. And, you know, some of those pleasures in life that I'd rather not do without (travel, for one. And choir). And of course paying off the rest of the moving costs. But that's what the sideline is for. I'll keep an eye out for a second third job but I don't need to stress too much about finding one. If the opportunity presents itself, I'll take it but for now, I'm happy to continue on like this.

And the not so good about the move...money

Considering how much this move has ended up costing me, it seems even more crazy that I've done it for the sake of a not-highly paid 20-hours-a-week job. I still think it was the right decision though and although part of the debt I have now incurred did arise from careless, even reckless spending during the very stressful weeks of the move, a lot of it is just part of the cost of doing anything in Germany. It is a land of three-month notice periods so moving in just over a month meant some additional costs that I have no control over. Of course, there are some things that I still haven't gotten around to actually cancelling yet so a portion of these costs are ones where I've just missed the boat. But there's only so much I can do and I was close enough to breaking point a few times during May that I just had to decide to let them go and focus on getting the more urgent stuff done. Like making sure things like insurances and internet were transferred properly. As it turns out, the move will end up saving me about 25 euro per year for my house insurance, so that's something at least.

What with having to pay double rent for May (1,200), double monthly transport in June as I cancelled my ticket in Dusseldorf too late to avoid having to pay it there (80), pay a three-month deposit upfront for the new place (1,350), pay 2,000 for the movers (that was just the actual invoice and doesn't include other money for lunch, drinks, moving boxes and so on) and multiple train tickets between the two places (at 90 euro for a return trip), not to mention money spent on paint, supplies, and some to people to help with the painting (I'd estimate probably over 1,000 for this but am not going to wreck my head going back to figure it out - a lot stemmed from running out of time and just needing to get things done no matter what), it feels horribly like I learned nothing from previous mistakes. However, although there was a certain amount of "fuck it, if I'm in debt anyway let's just spend more money" spending as well, I did keep what costs I could to a minimum and, more importantly, I didn't let that kind of thing go on for too long. And for the most part, even that money was spent on things that I did need (even if I could have managed without some for a while) and will use for a long time.

And of course there are all the new costs that come up with living in a new place, such as joining the library, security deposit for a canteen card, security deposit for keys to the office and so on. It's always feels like a constant drip, drip, drip. Added to which, I will now be travelling for work on occasion. At least for the first three or four months this will be fairly regularly and being at a university, there's plenty of paperwork involved before I'll get the money repaid to me. I'm hoping that submitting everything promptly will result in prompt repayment. At least all of the travelling I've been doing means I've been building up loads of points on my credit card. And I have this lovely view to look at every day. It makes me happier than I can describe to be back near some mountains (okay, hills) again.

I have no concrete plan in place as yet to pay off what I now owe. A lot will depend on my final salary (not long now until I know how much I'll be getting every month), and how I manage with financing part of my life from translations. I'm keeping my eye out for a second job as well, preferably what is called a mini-job or 450-basis job here if I could find a good one. In terms of tax, health insurance, social insurance etc., I can have one mini-job in addition to my normal job and not have to pay any contributions. It's probably the most effective way of earning an additional 450 a month but it's a bit of a minefield as these jobs can often be the most exploitative, with people being asked to work outrageously long hours and so on. We'll see how that pans out. 

Is that enough rambling for now? I've gotten back to tracking my budget properly again over the last couple of weeks and I think all of the really big expenses for the move are over and done with. As things stand today, my debt (made up of credit card, overdraft and 3,000 which my sister loaned me) comes to 7,140.93. The credit card will be the first to be paid off. The minimum payment is one-fifth every month and comes out by direct debit so there is no chance to put it onto the long finger. Apart from travel for work, I'll be doing my best to not use the credit card at all until it is cleared. It's currently at just over 1,500.

After that it'll be the overdraft (currently 2,600) and then I'll repay my sister, who doesn't seem to even really want the money back (she offered me money and I insisted that it be a loan). I have a lot of annual expenses coming up in the next few months though, so it is going to be a slow journey. At least one advantage of being in a new place is that there are no expected behaviours - I don't really know anyone to be going out for dinner with, assuming we'll go to that nice place, for example. I can just be the frugal/stingy person straightaway and no-one is wondering why I've changed.

I'm considering however, once the credit card is paid off, taking some time to build up a bit of savings. I'd like to have a constant 500 euro float in my current account so that even if I don't have a lot of translation one month, I'm not stressing too much about next month's money. I will have some tax return money coming to me so I might divert that perhaps. And I will hopefully get at least something back from my deposit from the old place. We did the handover on 31 May and she said she was happy that there was nothing I needed to pay for. A portion will be withheld to cover the annual costs (heating, electricity in common areas etc), which won't be calculated until early next year. However, there wasn't anyone ready to move in on 1 June so technically I'm still on the hook for the rent for June and July. They wanted to replace the floor in the bathroom so if the work can start on that, or if someone else moves in, I'd be officially released from my contract and no longer need to pay the rent for the remainder of the notice period. I'm trying not to be too hopeful though, to avoid disappointment. She did offer at least, to deduct whatever rent I will owe for those two months from the deposit so I'm spared having to fork over cash for the rent. Much as I love Germany, these three-month notice periods are a pain in the neck. If I hadn't moved so quickly I wouldn't have been able to take the job I got though, so in the end, it all worked out. Or it will. Watch this space.

Discipline

Have I mentioned yet that I found a quote on mortgagethreeinfree recently that really resonated with me?

Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most

I started reading MFin3 last year and for some reason I never added it to my list of links and then forgot about it. I revisited in the run-up to christmas and got a great recipe for advocat cake, which became the most popular thing I baked all winter. And it had been on my mind to go back and have a look again for a while. So, for the past week or two I've been making my way through the archives and getting lots of inspiration. And a tutorial for making a thermal cooking bag, which I can't wait to try and make.

But that quote, which I printed out and have sitting propped up against the wall in my sitting room, is ringing in my head every day. No more excuses, if I want to take a month off in November I need to start saving big time. I don't have enough time to do anything other than scrape every cent together that I can. And if I want to lose weight, then eating large packets of crisps every day won't get it done. If I don't want to have to face piles and piles of washing up at the weekend then ignoring the couple of things that need to be washed every day will not help.

Last week, on Friday no less, I had my first proper fast day. The 5:2 fast diet did work really well for me when I started it way back in summer 2013 and although life got derailed a couple of months later, I've only ever half-heartedly gotten back to it. But that won't get it done. So, Wednesday was my second and so far it's going well. Didn't do one today for a couple of different reasons but I think I'll go back to my old pattern of Sundays and Wednesdays being my fast days.

This week, despite being very tired, work being pretty crap and feeling in general kind of overwhelmed, I have been managing to spend very little money and cook proper meals, using up all of the veg that has been sitting around for a couple of weeks. Or months, in the case of these sweet potatoes.

Terrible photo, I know but it looks lovely in real life, I promise

So I've been getting home from work so wrecked I don't want to do anything. It's a constant battle in my head on the way home to not stop in the supermarket to buy something frozen to throw into the oven or at a fast food place to buy chips or a kebab. And it has been warm. Not terribly, usually around the mid-20s but really, really humid and stuffy all that time. I have been making it home without giving in every day though and then I've just been collapsing on the couch. After half-an-hour or an hour, by which time it has started to cool down, I've gotten up and headed into the kitchen.

On Tuesday I used up baguette from the freezer, half a jar of my own passata from last year, a grated courgette, the last of some grated cheese and a couple of slices that were in the fridge begging to be used up as well as the other half of the very big tomato that I'd gotten to have with my salad at lunch time. Delicious French bread pizzas - more nutritious, tastier and more filling than the frozen version. While they were cooking I sliced the remainder of the courgettes and sauteed them (buying me a couple more days time to do actually use them up) and got the washing-up done.

On Wednesday morning I managed to be slightly organised in the morning and had time to mix up some quark with some tuna and a "lemon curry dip" spice I have. Half of that into a Tupperware container along with a couple of sliced up scallions became lunch when it was added to the last of my lettuce and a wrap. In the evening, I just went into the kitchen to get the washing up done and then since I was there I decided to cook the cabbage I'd meant to do at the weekend anyway. That cabbage is one I got two weeks ago and I did not want any more veg going to waste. And so, although I wasn't going to, at half-ten at night, cook the full meal as planned (red split lentils with cabbage from Smitten Kitchen), I thought at least I could get a headstart and make the cabbage part of it. Oh my is all I can say. I used four times as much cabbage as given, added bacon bits, increased the spices, used dried chilies instead of fresh and ended up cooking it for longer than the recipe says (because I was doing the washing up. Yay me!). But it seems to be a forgiving recipe and was absolutely spectacular, if I do say so myself. I wasn't even going to eat any, being on a fast day and not actually particularly hungry but it smelled so good I couldn't resist a small plateful. The rest went into the fridge in Tupperware to wait for me to do the lentils.

On Thursday then I took the rest of the quark and tuna mix to work for lunch, buying a couple of bread rolls on the way to work to have with it. And when I got into the kitchen on Thursday evening, I ended up just heating up the rest of the cabbage and eating the whole lot of it. Okay, I was very full (had some garlic bread with it) but if you had told me a few years ago I'd happily sit down to a very large plate of cabbage and not much else, I'd have called you mad. While that was cooking I threw together a quick pastryless quiche, using up the courgettes, the rest of the sliced cheese, some more of the bacon bits and the remaining eggs along with a good sprinkling of herbs. Half of that became my lunch today and I'll have the rest tomorrow. And I even got the washing-up done before sitting down to eat.

Pastryless quiche. Still not quite sure why I don't just call it baked omelette. 

So, now I have some chard and some bread beans in the fridge (they've been there since last Thursday and I haven't checked to see if they're actually surviving) and I have some carrots and celery as well. Then there's the remaining quarter packet of bacon bits, the rest of the jar of passata and another container which has the other half of the quark, which I mixed up with an Italian herb mix. This evening, although I did end up eating the frozen pizza baguettes I had in the freezer (really, not a patch on the homemade ones from earlier in the week), I used the time they were in the oven to do the washing up. And then decided that since I had the oven on, I really should cook those sweet potatoes. So I peeled and chopped them, added a glug of oil and then mixed cumin and salt (a la the Ottolenghi recipe from Plenty that I have made several times in the last couple of years) with the addition of a little bit of coriander, cayenne and cinnamon. Then into the oven with them. That'll be a quick and easy lunch tomorrow then.

In the same way that Mr. Money Mustache talks about exercising your frugality muscle, I'm slowly trying to build up my disciple muscle again. It's all just the normal stuff that millions of people do all the time all over the world but to be honest it has taken every bit of energy I've had spare this week. This week it seems like taking a break and sitting (or lying) quietly for a while after getting home has been the key to getting the food side of things sorted. We'll see how next week turns out.

Overspending and debt - update posts

A little over a year and a half after first posting my attempt at explaining how overspending by a small amount on a regular basis spiralled into a large amount of debt on askaboutmoney I went back to give an update. Not two weeks later, life was turned upside down when my sister died. I'm including those posts here now for the sake of completeness. Long-time readers will already be familiar with a lot of this, I suppose.

Posted on 6 September 2013

And here's another update just in case anyone is interested. In February last year I was all set to be debt free by about May. I also gave in to my sister's prompting/complaining (that none of her family bothered to visit when her husband's family had done so multiple times) to organise a trip to Australia to see her. I booked a ticket because with debt gone by summer I'd have plenty of time, not to mention an expected bonus at the end of November, to save and pay for my December holiday, wouldn't I? With the way the bank holidays fell last year, it was the optimal time to do it as just over three weeks holidays would get me just over four weeks off (bank holidays in Germany don't automatically transfer to Mondays, so on years where christmas falls on a weekend, you don't get any time off). 

Then, at the beginning of April my uncle (and godfather) died unexpectedly. Two aunts had died the year before and although I had contemplated going home for the funerals I knew it was just too expensive, difficult to arrange time off work and didn't do it. This uncle was, however, a different case and I didn't care how much it was going to cost, I just wanted to be there. So between flights, a hotel for one night (stayed with friends the other), buses and taxis as well as meals etc., I was close to 700 down. Somewhat upset about the loss as well as the financial setback but determined that a couple more months wasn't going to throw me off stride.

Four days later I got a text that my brother-in-law, who I was very close to, had died unexpectedly. This death hit me very hard. And again, I had short-notice flights, hotels, meals, transport - another 700 or so down. 

If I had had an emergency fund in place, most of that cost could have been covered - Dave Ramsey recommends that the first thing to do when trying to get out of debt is to save 1,000 in an emergency fund. I never quite got the logic behind saving that much when you have debt to pay off but it certainly would have made a difference to me last year.

I had already had a long weekend home booked for the end of April, so a couple of weeks later I was back in Ireland but my planned very limited budget was blown out of the water. There was far more meeting up with family groups, eating out and just general spending than had originally been planned. I just didn't care and it took me a month or so to get back on track with properly managing my money and getting back to focusing on paying off my debt. I went through a very bad period of depression during 2009 and 2010 and had only really started to come out of it properly when all this happened so I was struggling with that as well.

I spent a lot of time thinking that I should just cancel my trip to Australia but in the end decided not to. It was the first time in sixteen years that I was going to have longer than two weeks off work and getting some sun in winter also seemed like it would be more advantageous than being in debt a while longer would be disadvantageous. To a certain extent, I just didn't care anymore either. I think that is a very real danger when you're in debt: it seems neverending and so you cease to care whether your actions are contributing to the neverending or not. I know that has definitely set me back more than once.

So, debt repayment slowed to crawl (more than minimum payments but not much more) while I prioritised paying for my ticket to Australia. My spending money was mostly provided for by virtue of the bonus I was paid in November, just before I left although I did find Australia far more expensive than expected and used my credit card a few times also. I also managed to catch the worst cold I've had for a long time so although I had a good holiday and it was great to have a bit of sun (especially given how long and miserable our winter was this year), spending the last week snuffling and then another couple of weeks missing work did put a bit of a damper on things. My depression was finally properly lifting though and although this seems to be my year for being sick (that cold, 2 serious bouts of bronchitis, 1 episode of contact dermatitis and 1 not very pleasant week of stomach bug so far), I am feeling positive and focused and have kept going with paying down my debt. 

My hopefully final setback came in March when a close family member asked for help in clearing ESB arrears as they were about to be cut off. Arrears turned out to be over 1,000 and although many would say I'm a fool for doing it, I paid. I don't expect to get the money back, certainly not any time soon, but at least I was able to make sure appointments with MABS were set up and proper budgets put in place etc. It's not the first time I have helped this person and probably won't be the last but I'm hoping this time was a serious enough wake-up call that they'll get their act together and what I have seen since has done nothing to diminish that hope. I'm not by any means advocating that people use credit to help their families out - everyone should really be responsible for their own financial issues - but in this case, I know I will always do anything I can to help. There are a myriad of reasons and a complicated background so although in general I would be among the first to advise people to be extremely careful in helping family out, and especially would always advise against going into debt to do so, it's one of those situations where I'll never take my own advice and more fool me for it.

So, as things stand, more than a year after I expected to be debt-free, I'm still not. For reasons that many will consider ridiculous and unnecessary but mostly I'm writing this not for those who will think that, but for those who do equally ridiculous and unnecessary things. If even one person, seeing it all laid out in black and white, can relate any of this back to their own behaviour and see where they're going wrong, then laying out my own folly for the world to see is worth it. And I think one of the most important things to remember is that life happens, everyone has their own "damage", their own issues to deal with - doing so, even if it means not always doing what you know is the sensible thing, is fine so long as you don't lose sight of the goal and make sure to get back on track as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I have gotten much better at trying to build up savings so that this year, I fairly consistently managed to maintain a small balance at all times. This was wiped out in August when all of my normal annual bills fell due and what has surprised me and shown me how far I have come, is how uncomfortable I felt for the month of August until I was able to make another deposit into my savings account at the end of the month. Although those expenses were expected and the money had been saved to pay for them, not having that 500 euro always sitting there really, really disturbed me. I'm going to hold on to that feeling and remember it every time in the future that it seems like a good idea to dip into savings for something I don't really need (as has happened too often in the past). 

Hopefully, I will be back in another couple of months with a "debt-free, yippee" post rather than another catalogue of misery!

Posted on 14 September 2013 (the day after my sister died)

I'm over the initial shock and just concentrating on the practicalities now. Am doing my best to keep the costs to what I can pay back immediately when I get paid at the end of the month (and since Avant are raising their interest rates I have absolutely no desire to let this become debt that drags on - I am deliberately putting stuff on that card and will clear it in full straightaway while just making minimum payments on the already existing debt for next month). So far I've booked a one-way flight (don't actually know when funeral will be so it was just easier to get one-way and I'll book the return when I know, probably for Saturday) at a cost of 213, car hire for 155, hotel for the night I arrive 49. A very generous friend has offered to let me stay with her in Inchicore so I'll need the car for getting over to Killiney and ferrying who/whatever needs ferrying while I'm there. Assuming another 200 or so for the return flight and petrol and eating costs if I'm careful it shouldn't go too much above 800. I think I'm kind of hoping that saying that out loud, so to speak, will help me to stick to it.

Posted on 24 September 2013

Hahahahaha. Do we have a "you're so funny" emoticon? Obviously not having had a car for the last few years has distorted my memory of how bloody expensive the things are! Just my return flight was nearly 200 and I spent what felt like a fortune on petrol (when on earth did things get to the stage that a Corsa needs 70 quid to fill it up even when it wasn't even three-quarters empty?), not to mention M50 tolls. Okay, I could have driven other ways but the convenience far outweighed every other consideration given the circumstances. 
Final tally on my credit card was a bit more than 750 but I also ended up spending nearly 400 in cash (perhaps half of which could have been avoided, I suppose) and mobile phone top-ups (from my already overdrawn BoI account). However, I decided that clearing my "new" debt immediately would leave me feeling more like I have stood still than anything else and so have changed my mind on how to tackle this.

I got paid early this month, i.e. yesterday so what I've done is to clear my Mastercard (which was what I used to help someone out with their ESB bill earlier this year). I made a slightly more than minimum payment to my visa and the same to the overdrawn BoI account - firstly to just have paid something but mostly also to round the numbers off. Am I the only person who does that? 

Next month I will clear the visa so that I am left with just one debt. And then we'll see. I had been toying with the idea of a week's holiday somewhere cheap but sunny at christmas and am still torn about that. There's no doubt that I really can't afford it, which should be the end of that thinking. And yet I have a feeling that anything that will help me get through this winter would be a good thing (timing of christmas is because of mandatory two-week holiday from work). At the moment, I'm leaning towards debt-free being a better feeling than Malta in December but am not making any decisions. If I end up clearing my debt in November/December/January it would be great. I might decide that waiting until January/February/March doesn't make that much difference though. A lot might even depend on what kind of winter we start having - snowy and bright or grey and drizzly, big difference between the two. And if the dentist's appointment I have in two weeks brings expensive news then all bets will be off anyway. [In case anyone is wondering, I didn't go away for a sun holiday that christmas]

Sorry to be boring on about this now but it's helping me work things out and keep my focus so I'm just going to go with boring ye all for now. 

And let's focus on the positive - the visa card has gone back in the drawer and won't be coming out again unless there's another emergency. A few years ago I would have kept spending for another few months before coming back to my senses!

Posted on 25 September 2013

"... the visa card has gone back in the drawer and won't be coming out again unless there's another emergency"

I should know better than to express a thought like that. After all, some people do call their emergency fund their "Murphy" fund. I had just logged on to check that the payment had gone through on the Mastercard and to enjoy the sight of a zero balance and my glasses fell off. Perfect. Is that ironic? Never sure ever since that Alannis Morrisette song.

It's not a very serious break and might be reparable and/or I can search out my old glasses and use them for a while but I was actually at the eye doctor less than two weeks ago and found out that my prescription, after about 20 years, has changed. I was going to wait until the new year to get them (if I've been wearing the wrong ones for a while now another couple of months won't matter) but maybe this is just a sign from the universe to get it sorted now. Le big sigh.

And finally, posted on 25 October 2013

Right then, another payday, another few fleeting seconds of feeling "rich" before all the money gets sent off somewhere else again. 

Have just put through the payment to clear my visa. I also made a payment to my mastercard, which will leave it in credit to the tune of 100 euro. I may travel to Frankfurt at the end of the month (costs around 80) so that money is there if I do and if not, will sit there earning me interest. It's a German mastercard and they work slightly differently here and on my particular card interest is charged from the day of spending, regardless of whether you clear the full balance or not at the end of the month. However, since I can earn interest (at ECB less 0.5% I think it is), even if it's just a small amount, it makes more sense to put the money straight onto the card rather than leaving it in my current account where it earns nothing. [This has changed in the meantime so no more interest earned for maintaining a positive balance]

So, that just leaves me with the overdraft on my BoI account, which currently stands at just about 2,500. 

I did get glasses and managed to keep the cost of that to 95 euro so not too bad. I'm definitely not going away anywhere sunny at christmas but have arranged to house-sit for a friend in Frankfurt over New Year's so will get a bit of a quiet break anyway.

At the moment I plan to clear an small amount of the overdraft in December and otherwise try and enjoy the festive season. I already have a long weekend in Dublin booked for the beginning of the month (around my birthday) but almost everything has already been paid for months ago (flights, hotel, 2 x NCH concerts and a friend is treating me to a flotation session) so I'm going to go ahead with that. Main object is actually to go to the Arts and Crafts fair in the RDS - I've been saving change in a sealed pot all year and am taking whatever is in that to buy myself something nice. The bulk of the overdraft would normally then be cleared by the end of January. 

Unfortunately when I went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago for a check-up I found out that I had a huge cavity underneath an already large filling. So was back to the dentist a couple of days ago and he drilled it all out and tidied it up and put in a disinfectant type temporary filling. He wants to leave it now for a month or so and then he will check if the roots are still alive (they certainly hurt like the devil the last couple of days! Never had electric shock-type toothache before). He thought there was a very good chance that I wouldn't need a root canal but it depends on how it reacts/heals over the next few weeks. At the very least, I'll need a partial crown. Worst case scenario will be a root canal and full crown, I think. I do have a supplementary dental insurance but am only in the third year of it so only get a limited amount paid out. Will have to wait and see what happens in December, how much the estimate is, how much the health insurance will pay, how much the supplementary insurance will pay and then how much I'll have to fork over myself. A few hundred at least, I assume. So it may be the end of February (barring any other emergencies) before I actually clear the overdraft. [I'm too lazy to go back and look now but I didn't need a root canal and ended up getting a partial crown. A couple of months ago I had to get yet another partial crown and also an inlay. So very happy to have had the supplementary dental insurance to cover some, most actually, of these costs. Having to just cover a couple of hundred instead of in the thousands is a huge help. Once I get to the beginning of 2016, I'll have been paying that insurance for five years and the full amount of coverage will kick in (which is between 85% and 95% of most things) so just need to try and make it to the end of this year without needing any more major work as I have used up every allowance available already. One day I'll sit down and work out exactly how much I've gotten out compared to how much I've paid in and how much I've had to pay in costs myself]

Overspending and debt - follow-up posts

In reply to the askaboutmoney thread I started a few years ago on my debt story, one person posited that the lenders must bear some responsibility. This was my response:

Posted on 24 February 2012:

At that rate you could argue that my parents or my school are responsible for not teaching me how to budget properly. My dad died a couple of years before all this started and he would have been horrified if he had ever known. Neither a borrower nor a lender be and all that - yet that never made it as far as lessons in how to actually manage things. On a side note I have to admit I was tremendously impressed when doing Hamlet for the Leaving to realise that my dad had been quoting Shakespeare all those years.

It's good that banks can no longer up the limit on a credit card just because. But otherwise, well, I'm the one who kept spending the money. I did need someone to teach me the error of my ways, so to speak, but don't think anyone can really be held responsible for that task. One of my older sisters often says that if she hadn't met her husband, who's very good with money, then she'd have been the same as me.

And even when I did get some advice I didn't always feel it was relevant to me. For example, the first few years of my working life I worked for American companies in Dublin (call centre boom victim here  ) and I remember once we were sent around a newsletter type thing with tips on how to manage finances, which included a tip that you should always have six months worth of salary in an emergency fund in case you lose your job. That just struck me as totally irrelevant and a bit 'American' (oh the innocence of me back then!). I couldn't imagine ever being out of work, despite growing up amid the multiple redundancies of the late 70's and 80's. And six month's salary seemed like such a hugely unrealistic amount to need for anything. Things look different in your early twenties.

And for the lenders, well, they were doing what they are in business to do. Making money. And they have made a lot of money out of me. I've always repaid what I owe on time (or early, in the case of loans that got consolidated into other debt) so, for celtic tiger Ireland at least, I was an ideal customer for them.

Posted 29 February 2012 (partial reply to another question but an important point for this story)

Perhaps you should think about making sure that you have enough money to cover your expenses and then make a smaller payment to your credit card instead of putting all your money on the card and then needing to use your card to pay for things during the month. Because it's very easy to, for example, got to the supermarket and say to yourself, well I'm using the card anyway so I might as well stock up on x, y, or z that's on special offer. If you only have twenty euro in your wallet you might be less inclined to spend more of it than absolutely necessary. 

How overspending by a small amount on a regular basis spiralled into serious debt

I first posted this on the excellent Irish financial website, askaboutmoney. In case anyone is curious, my username over there is Janet, and no, that isn't my real name. I was mostly using Misty Moon or Moonwaves for my online presence when I first joined AAM but felt that since it was a "serious" website, I should have a "proper" name. So I plucked one out of thin air, more or less, and decided it might be fun to see what other side of my personality I might discover hiding in a "Janet". :-)

Posted on 24 February 2012:

On another thread someone asked:

How could it possibly take 11 years to pay off that level of debt?

in response to my post saying 

About two years of being careless when I was younger led to eleven years of debt (and I'm not talking about having gone wild buying designer gear every week, more like spending an extra fifty quid in the supermarket every few weeks).

Since my answer became somewhat long, I decided to split it into this new topic in order to not let that thread get too off-topic. Hope that's okay with everyone.

It's actually very easy. And obviously that's something of an oversimplification but it went something like this: starts off with just a few hundred on a credit card (being 'sensible' when I first got a credit card I set the limit at 500 pounds, which was about what I earned per fortnightly paycheck at that time) because you haven't really figured out the whole budgeting thing yet and since everyone is throwing money around like mad you must surely be able to at least go to the supermarket without having to worry about what anything costs. But then you can't pay it off so just make the minimum payments for a while and then the bank ups your limit (they were still allowed to do that at that time) and you think great, pressure is off. But you still can't/don't pay off the balance and over time it creeps up more and more. 

So you think well, I'll get a loan to pay it off ('cos interest is lower and that's what 'sensible' people do but unlike said sensible people you don't chop up the card). So now you're paying a loan with payments that are too high but instead of doing a proper budget and cutting down on expenditure you're finding yourself using the credit card to buy all your groceries. No money left over at all for things like clothes so although you only buy them when absolutely necessary, you end up doing something like going shopping as soon as you get paid just so you can buy a new suit for a job interview and between that and making a loan repayment and making a maybe slightly more than minimum payment on the credit card as well as potentially having cleared any overdraft you might have run up on your current account, there's not a whole lot left over for the rest of the month. So credit card and overdraft come into play again. And then after a year or so of that you decide to consolidate your debts because that's what sensible people do. 

So you get a big loan to cover remaining loan balance, credit card and overdraft and the bank says well why don't we round it up to [nearest thousand] so you have a bit of leeway and a chance to sort yourself out. So you do that, maybe go away for a week to relax but still don't cut up the credit card or cancel the overdraft facility and for a while everything's going according to plan but then you have to move house unexpectedly so there's the cost of deposit, double rent because you have to start paying for the new place before you've finished paying for the old one, hiring a van and buying a fridge because you've moved into an unfurnished place (with second hand furniture donated by a family member). So all of a sudden there's a couple of hundred on the credit card again. But your loan repayments are taking all your spare cash so now that you're also trying to pay off a credit card again you're struggling every month and end up dragging out the card or using the overdraft to pay for a bit here and a bit there. And you feel like you're constantly paying off debt but never getting anywhere. Don't forget that all the time interest is building up as well.

And then you decide it's all getting too stressful and it would be just better to get a bigger loan and have one payment so you again go to your nice helpful bank and consolidate your debts, again taking the slightly more than you need that's offered because it'll take the pressure off. And this time the loan is to be paid off over three years. And things go well for a while. But then something else happens and because you have no savings and the loan repayments are taking up most of your spare cash (because you still haven't quite gotten the budgeting thing down, although you're trying a bit at least) it's back to using your money as soon as you get paid and then having to use credit card and overdraft (neither of which have been cancelled) to pay for the basics. 

So it was perhaps two years of careless spending, followed by three or four of trying to get out of debt but not really having a clue, still doing silly things and sort of thinking that it wasn't a big deal anyway because sure everyone else you know is in the same boat. And now six years of properly dealing with my debt and getting a handle on finances (but still by no means perfect).

When I finally started to really get a handle on finances it was because I was also in a terrible job situation and badly depressed and decided, many years overdue, to go for counselling. That cost 70 euro per session and I needed to make sure I had the money every week - that was for the first few months, after that I changed to a different job with lower pay and could only go every second week but the key difference was that I knew that and made changes to what I was doing with my money based on what I was earning rather than trying to carry on doing the same things with less money. I had been using an excel spreadsheet to 'manage' my budget since the laser card had been introduced as I had ended up in trouble a few times because of transactions not appearing for a few days and me forgetting about them. But it was a really eye-opener to sit down and start properly managing my money. My previous model had relied on checking my bank account to make sure there was enough money in it whenever a standing order was due to come out and hoping bills wouldn't be too high to pay when I receive them. Now I actually wrote down what my fixed expenses were, including things like rent, bus ticket, an amount for phone and esb and the 70 a week for counselling. And realised that once I'd done all that plus left a bit for making some payments to debt, I only really had, say fifty euro a week leftover to spend on everything else (food, going out, presents, clothes). Plenty to live on perhaps but if you're eating lunch out every day, you'd have already spent more than that, even if it's just a sandwich, packet of crisps and bottle of water. It took me a while but I finally got to the point where I consolidated for a final time and took out a loan for what was by then a very large amount of money, fixed rate this time and no delusions that I would pay it off earlier than the five year term. I never did cut up the credit card but reduced the limit to a small amount and paid it off in full every month. 

All went well, and I even managed to finance a move to Germany. Unfortunately four thousand euro worth of dental work has left me a year behind with being debt free. My loan was cleared late last year and I expect to have cleared the final debt from the dental work by May. 

And that is how spending a small amount more than you earn every week can spiral into more debt than you would have thought possible. A bit of carelessness, a pinch of stupid behaviour, a touch of depression, (not to mention a fervent desire, regardless of how irrational, that the millennium bug will wipe it all out) and, it must be admitted, a smidge of what can only be called an unjustified sense of entitlement (every else goes out to eat every week so I will too, etc.) and all of a sudden the girl who at fourteen was earning five pounds a week working for the family business and still always had money to loan her elder siblings is the one up to her eyes in debt.


Edited to add: Link to follow-up post 1
Edited to add: Link to follow-up post 2