About Me

I’m Sam, I’ve just turned 30 and I’m massively in debt. Rather than sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich (my previous strategy, which, let’s face it, wasn’t working too well), I finally decided that 2009 is the year to do something major to sort out my finances. I got my husband, CJ, on board, and we’re finally working together to rein our living costs in as far as is humanly possible, while raising our income through any means (well, almost any - there are some things…). Even our dog is joining in the fun and eating cheaper dog food – luckily he’s a labrador so will eat anything (and here I do mean anything!).

To keep up our motivation I decided to write an online diary (I’m much more likely to keep an e-diary going than a hand-written version), and I also hope that it will give other fellow-debtors the necessary inspiration to start to tackle their debts, and maybe even some cost-reducing/ income-increasing ideas. Ideally, I’d also like my blog to be a wake-up call to anyone who is gradually creeping into debt – trust me, you don’t want to end up where we are now with almost half your wages going on minimum debt repayments, so sort it out while the debt’s still small and manageable. Once it gets to a certain stage, it takes over your life, reducing you of opportunities (nights out, less well paid but more interesting careers, travel, romantic gestures…) and providing unimaginable stress.

In this blog I generally try to detail any money-saving or money-earning efforts we make, and do a debt update on the 1st of each month so that we can see how we did in the previous month – you’ll find these in the ‘monthly debt overviews’ category. If you’re new to my blog, you could start with http://diaryofadebtor.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/the-start-of-the-challenge/, which details how we got ourselves into this mess.

I hope you enjoy reading about our efforts. Any comments or constructive suggestions on how I can improve this blog are gratefully received – and if you’re in a similar position to us, let me know and we can commiserate together and motivate each other to get our finances back in the black!

Sam x

PS The (47-318) in each entry’s title is ‘day of the year – days left in 2009′. It’s useful to remind myself how quickly the year is going!