lemsicle's ramblings

So, I have my new car now and the first month where I have had the first payment taken out of my salary and I still had a net income of around £130 more than I was expecting which was a bonus, of course much of this has had to be paid over into the IVA but I have had a nice little surprise back, they have reviewed my current salary now and it means I have actually overpaid this month by £28.50 and I can deduct that from next months payment!!!! what a bonus!!!

We had a fantastic holiday and managed to bring a fair bit of money home with us with which we have done some decorating at home and also I have managed to start xmas shopping, I am never normally this organised so early but as my son had already written his list from his ‘bible of toys’ the argos catalogue, I spent some time having a look to see if any offers were on, his list in total came to around £330, but some of the stuff has money off at the moment which took the total down to £260, so, I have been and bought the bits with money off using the gift card I won for blog of the week to take another £25 off and spent a total of £165 so I’m a happy girl, that’s him more or less sorted for xmas now, just have our dear daughter to sort out, hubby got £30 worth of high st vouchers from work so I am going to use those at New Look for some clothes for her and then do the rest at the end of the month when I am paid again.

I have managed to save around £150 in saving stamps for Tesco and Asda so my xmas food and booze shopping is taken care of too, it’s amazing if you just buy a few £££ of stamps each week you do your shopping how it soon mounts up, I’m so glad I have been so organised so that we don’t have to worry about affording xmas this year and we may even have enough to get each other a small gift or too which will make a change from last year!!!

My dad still isn’t talking to me and my kids are still very hurt and upset, to say he only lives a mile away and we have just had the 6 weeks summer holidays, he has not made any effort to be in touch with them at all during that time, my little boy is only 8 and I am so upset for him as he doesn’t understand why his grandad is behaving this way.

My new car is great, a little cheaper to run that my last one so what turned out to be an extremely tight fuel budget we agreed in our IVA proposal meaning we didn’t allocate enough for what we actually use!) is now comfortable for us to manage within which is making life a little less stressful. I received my renewal for my car insurance for my old car yesterday which when I had been paying £28 a month over the last year has now gone up to £46 a month!! I don’t know where they get their prices from, not sure if being in the IVA has anything to do with it, I’m sure it hasn’t but I was astonished to be honest and I’m so glad I could take great pleasure in ringing them up to cancel the renewal as I don’t need it now I have my work car.

So I am starting to get geared up for xmas, having a good clear out at home sorting the kids clothes out that are too small, I was just going to bag the lot up to send to the charity shop but I may actually try to sell some of it on ebay as some of the stuff is very good quality and condition (like coats from Next etc) which may raise a few £££

I’m on an emotional rollercoaster at the moment.

A week ago or beautiful 12yr old daughter ran away from home, this has nothing at all to do with our IVA but then, my ramblings are just that, echoes of our life over the next few years and how we manage to get through this to a better life for our future.

I got the call from hubby an hour after I had gone to work, as normal on a Thursday she had gone to her grandads straight from school for tea, then she was due to go to drama club in the evening, instead she took a taxi to a town 7 miles away, sat in Sainsbury’s for an hour collecting her thoughts, the staff became suspicious and called the police.

After long discussions with her it turns out her grandad and his partner whom he has lived with since my mum died 3 years ago have been talking about me to my daughter, how disappointed they am in me, how I am uncaring, illmannered etc etc and told her to ‘keep this secret’ so she has been bottling it up for weeks on end and can’t cope with it anymore, with her grandad disrespecting her mum.

I am devastated and heartbroken and feeling cheated if I’m honest, my parents were together 50 years and within 5 months of her death my dad was looking for someone else, it was hard to deal with but I understood he didn’t want to be alone, after 2 initial failed relationships with women I never met, he got together with a friend of my mum’s who lived over the road from them, initially I was very happy for him, welcomed her into our family and looked forward to us being ‘happy’ again, but this woman who is widowed has never had a family of her own and very quickly it became clear that while she was prepared to accept us, she didn’t really want to become involved with us as a family and would not compromise on her busy social life to include us, even the party we threw for my dad’s 70th birthday he did not attend as they had something else on.

I have for some time had the feeling she did not really like me, my dad unfortunately is very much a sheep and does as he is told (he was the same with my mum), he has turned into a man I no longer know and I have had to let go over the last 18 months after fighting to be a part of his life he made it clear he had a ‘new family now’ and things have drifted. He only lives a mile away from me, but we have gone form seeing each other daily, to now once a fortnight if I’m lucky he can fit me in.

To hear now that the pair of them hate me so much is difficult to deal with if I’m honest, following getting our daughter back safe and sound, hubby spoke to him about her reasons, after initial denial, he has since said he will never trust my daughter again, she should have kept quiet and his partner has grasped the opportunity to launch into a tirade about what she thinks of me.

I need to add at this point that when my hubby called me at work to let me know what had happened, I immediately called my dad to find out if they knew anything or noticed anything when my daughter was with them, my dad was in bed and his partner would not let me speak to him, even though she knew my daughter had run away, she has since said she was ‘protecting’ my dad.

A week on, my relationship with my dad is over, he has used this as an opportunity to say I have been ‘nothing but trouble’ since I was 13 yrs old, I am finding this difficult to deal with, as a 38 year old woman now who did well at school, worked hard, went to university, became a nurse met and married my husband and had 2 wonderful children together, I fail to understand how I have disappointed him so greatly, my husband can do no wrong and is perfect in my father’s eyes, but to him and his partner I am now a complete failure. They have no idea about our IVA or that we have ever had debts thankfully.

My daughter now never wants to see her grandad again and I have to accept that his partner has ‘won’, I have lost my dad and it breaks my heart.

Now, we have to get on with our lives, pick up the pieces and love our family as best we can, my daughter is seeing a counsellor at school and is much more settled and happy, I will never stop her from seeing her grandfather but she has made her own choice on this.

It’s been another nightmare week really and I wonder how much more I can take emotionally, I feel I am standing on a precipice as the moment and what else will happen before I am pushed over the edge.

God we need a holiday

well I have to say it’s turning out to be an expensive month this month, we have had the MOT and service on the car (£180), car failed it’s MOT and needed another £40 worth of repairs, an advisory on something that I don’t quite understand that is another £50 that needs doing before the end of the month and 3 tyres are needed (another £180) on top of the car tax which we could only afford to do for 6 months (£90) it has in total cost us, or going to cost us £540 and it’s only a 4 yr old car. Where on earth the CCCS get £22 a month for car maintenance is beyond me. Little help was forthcoming from our IVA company (we could reduce our payments but would have to pay it back over 3 months) so we have just bitten the bullet and reduced our food budget this month immensely to cope, beans on toast again tonight kids!

At the end of the month we have the house insurance to renew and also car breakdown insurance, another £230 to find! I’m a bit sick of it really, all these costs are coming at the beginning of our IVA and it’s just a bit galling, but I guess we just have to get on with it.

Even so despite all this, we have been able to afford for hubby to take my little boy to see the new Transformers film a couple of days ago, he is only 8 but a huge Transformers fan, Orange Wednesdays are brill so the tickets only cost £7 for the 2 of them, plus they took a bag of popcorn from Home Bargains (£1) and a couple of small bottles of coke (39p each!) so all in all was a cheap treat! and son was mightily impressed!!

We have our holiday to look forward to in 4 weeks, we do have some savings put aside for this but I don’t want to erode those for car repairs so have cut back elsewhere for those, I am really looking forward to getting away, it’s been a very stressful year so far and now things are calming down a bit, it will be nice to get away, although I must admit, it’s been very difficult trying to save enough to go even though we had paid for the holiday before we looked at an IVA, and I will be glad when the holiday is over so we can relax a bit and not worry so much about what we are spending, we won’t be going abroad next year as we definitely won’t be able to afford it, but I am sure we will still have plenty of camping trips in the UK.

Daughter brought home a letter from school a couple of days ago about a trip to the olympics next year, it’s an overnight trip where food is not included and is to see womens basketball which is only a qualifying event anyway and not a medal event and they want £265!!!! I have told her poltely she aint going, even if we weren’t in the IVA I wouldn’t pay that for an overnight trip with food costs on top!, maybe if it was track and field events.

On another totally random point, the field opposite is currently being harvested of potatoes and there are loads lying on top of the soil discarded, I am sorely tempted given the state of affairs!!!

Next week will be our third payment, I’m trying so hard not to see this as a prison sentence but finding it a bit hard at the moment. I’ve done myself a spreadsheet with all our payments mapped out so I can see the total decreasing every month, how sad is that?

I have overspent seriously this month so things are now very tight before I am paid in 5 days time, and I still have to put fuel in my car to get to work for the rest of this week.

On the plus side, I should be getting my new lease car through work next month, this was all budgetted for in the IVA and means I am going to have hassle free motoring during my IVA which will be a blessing, just have to hope my 11 yr old Fiesta continues to hold up for another month or so.

On a more personal level, we lost our beloved mum to breast cancer 3 years ago, it would have been her birthday on Friday this week and my dad phoned me last night to announce that he needs me to speak to my brother as a matter of urgency to arrange a mutually convenient date this summer to make the trip down to Cornwall to scatter her ashes as he can’t put it off any longer, I am stunned. This is the first time he has mentioned this for a year and both my brother and myself can’t find the time to plan this for this summer now. He can only go on a weekend and I work weekends as I am a nurse, we have our shifts planned until October now, can’t go just for the day as it’s an 800 mile round trip!

I’m worried about my dad, he is living with someone else (a neighbour across the road) who he moved in with a few months after my mums death, that was hard enough to deal with but he has more or less disowned the rest of his family as he has ‘a new family now’ his words, not mine and we don’t see much of him, he only lives a mile away from me but I don’t get to see him at all as his partner keeps him very busy with her life, family and friends, it hurts but there is nothing more I can do, I have fought to have a relationship but now have given up to protect myself. But I do still worry about him, he is my dad. He has no idea about our predicament. I know if he knew he would be very angry, but I also know he would sell his house and give me some of the money to pay off our debts and I couldn’t allow that to happen, there is no way I would ever be bound to him like that.

Anyway, almost to payday, and then we have the dreaded MOT and service of hubby’s car, I am PRAYING it will pass, it’s going to cost over £400 as it is (needs taxing aswell) and if it needs anything doing I don’t know how we will afford it

Ok so here we go again, my third attempt at a blog that hopefully this time won’t get deleted!

We are a month into our IVA now so how did we get here? Well, I guess like many people over the years, we consumed more than we had income for and that’s the bottom line.

I met my hubby 17 years ago (blimey!) and within months we bought our first house together, got married had kids, saw the value of our house rocket and remortgage after remortgage to pay off bills have ended up at the point where we now have a massive mortgage, are in negative equity (just) and have unsecured debts of almost £60k, and what do we have to show for all these years of spending?, nothing, nada, zilch. It sickens me actually, but there we go.

After the last few years of paying minimum payments and being ultra savvy with our budget to make ends meet, it finally dawned on mid summer last year that we couldn’t carry on this way, I am in my mid thirties, hubby in his late forties and we would NEVER pay this debt off in our lifetimes if we carry on the way we are. We had changed our mortgage to interest only 3 years ago to try to hack away at the debt but it had made no difference.

So, last summer, I was in a highly stressful but well paid job but i was almost at breakdown, I hated my job and decided that I wanted to go back into nursing, this would mean a 50% wage cut for me and 3 months at uni with no income at all to get me back on the register.

So I took the plunge, we had saved a little to get us through those 3 months, but it soon became apparent that we just wouldn’t be able to manage.

By mid November, I realised I wanted an end to this, I had a job lined up for when I was back on the register in January, but even then, knowing what my wage was going to be, things were going to be incredibly tight.

I looked on the internet at DMP’s and IVA’s, a DMP would take us 20 years to pay off, that made me feel physically sick, bankruptcy was not an option as hubby would lose his job, so I looked into a IVA. I found this forum and it answered a lot of my questions, I knew about IVA’s previously as I had briefly looked into it years ago but at that time thought we would manage.

so in December 2010, I made a call and started the ball rolling and we were approved in May 2011. It took a few months due to the various changes in my jobs, tax situation etc which i wanted to get right first but we made it. We have made 2 payments now and things are going ok, our budget seems fine and after having a few years of budgeting ferociously, I haven’t found these early days too much of a shock to the system so far.

So how do I feel now?, after the initial elation of being accepted wore off, I guess the realisation of the next 5 years has hit me quite hard, my salary changes month to month and is always more than a basic salary that our IVA payments were worked out on as I get extra payments for working unsocial hours, this means extra into the IVA pot which is not an issue in itself, but I do feel there is a lot of intrusion into our finances that I find hard to deal with, on the positive side it does mean we can earn a little extra cash with helps with the budget.

we are fortunate that we don’t have expensive hobbies or interests, we never have had, we never ate out anyway, or had takeaways, or go to the pub or cinema much, we like to go walking and camping, I like my running, but we do like our holidays.

We have a holiday booked to Switzerland in August which was paid for last year, I am just desperately trying to save spending money for us now but it’s hard, I have also had to get a new passport for me this month £80, and the MOT and service plus a tyre is due on hubby’s car, we could do without the expense of the holiday to be honest but as it is paid for an we just need spends I don’t want the kids to be disappointed now, this will be the last ‘extravagant’ holiday (if you can call it that!) we will be having for the next five years.

So our goals, to get through the next 5 years with as few hiccups as possible, I don’t want to wish our lives away though but I do hope it goes quickly!, then we are going to take the kids to Florida, this time last year (a year ago tomorrow in fact!) we were on our way to florida and the kids had a fantastic time, I know how much they wouldlove to go back so we’re aiming to be able to take them a few months after our IVA completes.

Beyond that, who knows?, 5 years ago I never dreamed this was where I would be now, so an element of positive uncertainty for the future would be good!

just testing if this blog is actually going to work!

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