Well, it’s been ages since I’ve posted anything on here. The reason is that things got so bad with my debts that I was spending hours every day trying to figure out how to, well,  rob Peter to pay Paul, I suppose.

What initially pushed me over the edge was the holiday my other half booked for us at Christmas last year as a ‘nice’ surprise. Well, it was a surprise alright! She paid for the holiday which was great. It was when we came to the spending money that the problems started.

The other half had a couple of hundred pounds and had figured that, since we spent money on food and petrol and whatever while we were at home, and that since we weren’t at home for that week we wouldn’t be spending it, then we could spend that money while we were on holiday instead.

It would have worked ok if we had gone on holiday on our own, as we would have known how much money we had and could’ve budgeted, but we went, instead, with some friends and that made it much more difficult as we hadn’t told them about our financial situation. What also made it worse was that the other couple weren’t exactly throwing their money around, they were just spending quite reasonable sums for a normal holiday, so it was very difficult to say, “oh we can’t afford to do that cos we’re skint”, without looking like some total really sad party poopers.

So instead I ended up drawing out money on my credit cards and pushing them all to their absolute limits. Don’t get me wrong we’re not talking massive amounts here, just 300 quid spread across 4 credit cards. Now that might not seem like a lot, but it pushed me right to my card limit BEFORE they added on the month’s interest. So when they did add the interest on, I was over my credit limit, which meant that when I made the minimum payment, it only just cleared the interest, meaning I could hardly spend anything on the card without going over my credit limit again. Basically I had spent that month’s money the month before.

And what was worse was not only was I totally destitute the month after the holiday, but I couldn’t afford to make any headway into the amounts I had spent on holiday – I paid as much as I could, was short of money as I hadn’t cleared  any room to respend on the card and I was still up to my credit limit before the interest payment went on -  I was now totally screwed and there was no way back.

What is so scary is how little money made that much difference between just getting by and being totally over the brink. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t living the high life and there was no way I could have ever got myself out of debt carrying on the way I was going, but I was keeping up the payments and successfully servicing my debt every month – £90,000 worth! And it only took £300 to push me over the edge – that’s one third of a percent of the total debt that pushed me forever over the edge with no way back!

So, that was pretty much that. I struggled on for another few months, but every month, a week after I’d been paid, I’d have no money left as I’d paid it all out on credit card bills and was waiting for that money to clear on those cards so that then I could do balance transfers to other cards, then wait again while that cleared and then finally I had a little money to spend, but not enough to make ends meet.

By October, things were so bad that I was having to borrow a couple of hundred pounds a month off my Dad, but I couldn’t afford to give it him back and it was at this moment that I finally cracked and just couldn’t cope any more. I’d had a sort of ‘light bulb’ moment a while before this and inadvertently contacted one of those get you out of debt companies that charge you, thinking it was free, but they gave it a real hard sell and when I asked how much of a cut they took they were really reluctant to tell me, but I stuck to my guns and eventually they told me.

I sat and prevaricated a while longer and in the end I was glad I did, because in the meantime, I was constantly badgered by that same debt management company, phoning me every couple of days badgering me to start the debt management plan with them. I’ve been a lifelong hater of the hard sell approach, so that was really all it took to convince me that they were not the right company for me. Eventually, I did answer one of their calls and told them  I was thinking of going with the Consumer Credit Counselling Service instead as I wanted all my money to go towards paying off my debts. They were very rude about the CCCS, saying they didn’t do a very good job because they were a charity and didn’t have the same strong relationships to negotiate with creditors that they did and that was pretty much the final nail in their coffin as far as me doing a DMP with them. So I prevaricated a little longer……………..

………….and finally, when I worked out one month that after I’d paid everything off and paid the mortgage etc., that I’d have £70 to pay for food and petrol for the rest of the month, I decided enough was enough -  I really wasn’t ‘handling it’ any more – and contacted the CCCS.