Before photos of the study/craft/junk room (#27)

Here's the before photos of our study/craft/junk room so you can see the magnitude of the task ahead.

In the corner, buried by junk, is a corner piece of our couch.  On top of the basinette is a box with old bedsheets donated by my mother-in-law to my sewing projects.  By the vacuum is an overflowing basket of clothes that need to be mended or sorted into my fabric scraps and button container.

 This is my desk and bookshelf.  There's a large stack of cook books I'm getting rid of next to my desk.

Hubby and his desk.  It seems an avalance of old bags, papers and junk is always about to fall.

Progress report -

• Cleared one box worth of books and random items to go to Lifeline;
• Removed the corner couch and replaced with a free filing cabinet that we were given by Geekling's daycare;
• Filled an old laundry hamper with sheets that can be used for sewing projects and fabric scraps;
• Organised beading supplies and sewing supplies into two boxes for storage;
• Listed Geekling's old basinette and port-a-cot on ebay.  

So far we have a bit more floor space, the space looks more organised but a long way to go!

Tackling our debt (#12)

Time to confess the extent of our personal debt:
Personal loan - $38,800
Credit cards - $8,500 across 3 cards

I'm also going to cheat a little here, as I'm ignoring interest that will be charged on my loan over the next 12 months, and I'm hoping to tackle some of the credit card by rolling it into our home loan before the end of next year.  At least with the credit cards eliminated, we can't keep adding to the debt as we pay it off and end up getting no where.

So, in order to achieve #12 on The List (Get rid of our credit cards and halve our personal debt), I'll have to pay $19,400 towards the personal loan and $8,500 on the credit cards, totalling a whopping $27,900!  At first glance, that's kind of overwhelming.

How on earth will we tackle this?  To start with, I'll break it down into what of these amounts is regular payments we're already making, and what is extra that we need to try to find.

I currently pay $650 a month onto the personal loan.  Over the 18 months of the challenge, I will have paid $11,700 off our personal loan in regular payments alone.  Leaving a deficit of $7,700.  That looks much more manageable!

I am currently paying $160 a month onto a credit card (that was chopped up and thrown away when it arrived) used to purchase an appliance on interest free terms.  The interest free is for only 12 months so I have to ensure I would pay it off in that time, which finishes at the end of this year.  From then on, I will use that $160 a month to add to our personal loan payments, which over 12 months will pay an extra $1920, leaving only $5,780 to pull out of thin air.

I'm still not sure exactly how we're going to come up with that, especially as so many other items on my List will involve spending money rather than saving or making money.  I've heard that the average Australian has between $5000 and $7000 of clutter in their home that can be sold on ebay, the markets or such.  I might look for extra work outside hours.  We might try a savings plan, and put all the money we saved on that loan.  Watch out debt, here I come!