You may recently remember a post about how I was not sure if I made the right decision moving my Debt Management Plan to StepChange. Well after some thought the decision has been made to start my own Debt Management Plan once more. It worked well in the past until I had a few career related changes. Now some stability has returned into my life it is time to get back to what works.

Setting up again

The first thing on the to do list was to find out exactly how much is owed to each debt. This involved a lot of phone calls to different debt collection agencies some of which use 0870 numbers. However you can usually find an alternative number at SayNoto0870.com. If you have a mobile phone the calls are cheaper or free to the alternate numbers as normal numbers are usually included in your call allowance.

Armed with all the balances it was then possible to work out how much to pay each creditor or debt.

Making Offers of Payment

After finding out what was owed it was time to make the offers of payment. I decided to do this all over the phone as well as my printer has decided to give up and not print out any more. I mainly set up direct debits instead of the usual standing orders to make life easier. However I still have seven of the standing order payments to set up.

Phoning my creditors also mean’t I knew straight away if my offer had been accepted or not. They have all accepted the repayment offered as it is the same as what they were getting from StepChange. It would have been a surprise if they decided not to co-operate but nothing would surprise me nowadays.

Repeating an income an expenditure 20 times is not fun by the way. I think next time I will write. That’s the major downside of doing it over the phone. Note to self, fix printer.

Debt Demolition

I am starting a new thing called Debt Demolition on DAB. Basically debt demolition is one debt that is to be demolished or paid off in full. An easy target has been selected for my first debt. The lucky debt is from Wage Day Advance because it is a small debt and therefore an easy target. In fact it is the smallest debt out of them all. Settling this debt should help get me back on track and retrain the focus back onto sorting out this debt mess. In one of my previous posts I talked about how I had lost focus on paying back the debt, as well as loosing focus on what DAB is all about.

So far things are staying on track but please let me know if I start deviating from the main goal here which is to provide information about my debt and help others.

Your turn

How is your debt? Have you made any progress paying it back? If you was in the same amount of debt as me, how would you tackle it?