Let’s talk about debt.

How are things today?

It’s 12.35pm on Saturday 14th November 2020. I am in the bath with a glass of rosé and you’d be forgiven for thinking this is me relaxing and enjoying the first of my 9 days off work.

Rather, picture the scene like this. My knees are hugged against my chest and I’m cupping the wine glass with both hands. My eyes are puffy and sore from crying and tears are still rolling freely down my cheeks. I’m not even really aware that I’m crying anymore, and there’s no stopping it. On the floor beside the bath is a letter of enforcement from a county court somewhere up North. It’s asking for an immediate payment of £145 due to a toll charge I missed in February. If I don’t pay this, the bailiffs turn up and take my things.

First of all and before we delve into my history of debt - I have a serious issue with the Mersey toll. I have no problem paying a toll charge if I choose to use one. But it is unreasonable to expect people who do not frequent the area to remember to log online to a URL they can't remember reading on a signpost, in an evening after a busy day, and pay a toll charge for a bridge they barely remember crossing on their journey. What’s worse is that there’s no reminder, just an instant fine for not remembering to log on and pay. It’s disgusting and an easy and shameless way of robbing people. Sort it out, Merseyside.

Anyway...

A number of factors fell against me on this one - clearly I had indeed forgotten to pay on this occasion. And I know why; work was so busy in February before the lead up to lockdown that I’d been on the road for about 16 work days in a row. I was exhausted and working crazy hours. I don’t even remember going to Liverpool in February but I don’t doubt that I did. I had zigzagged around the country for weeks. I also moved house in March and it would seem that the letter scolding me about forgetting to pay and demanding instant compensation for such a heinous act was lost between addresses before I’d gotten around to changing my address details on my car logbook. And of course, moving house in March clashed with the national lockdown, and my stress levels were through the roof panicking that I wouldn't be able to move and arranging last minute moving companies when the first didn't show up... Essentially, this £2.50 toll charge was never given a second thought.

So when I opened the notice of enforcement today to see a £145 fine, it took a while to compute. But this is not the first letter of enforcement I’d ever received and having experienced bailiffs before I went into panic mode. I rang the debt collectors and sat on hold for 20 minutes and when a chirpy young man finally answered I told him I was in an IVA and we agreed a payment plan of £36/month for the next 4 months.

I hung up the phone and I broke down.

Now, I imagine you’re sat there right now thinking “£145 isn’t so bad, and you’ve got a payment plan set up to help. What’s the problem? Don’t be so dramatic.” Or at least thinking to that effect perhaps. Maybe you're also thinking "sort your sh*t out, you've dealt with bailiffs before, clearly you just can't be arsed to deal with your bills." And fair enough, you can only see this through your perspective and as such, I'm glad that you in particular are reading this.

If you’re not thinking that, I imagine you’re in a similar situation to me already, or maybe know someone who has struggled with debt, and I want you to know that I see you and please take some solace in the fact you are not alone.

Regardless of your current viewpoint, to understand this better you’ll need my full story and I will give it to you. There’s no point in this story if I’m not going to be explicit and totally open. So buckle up and let’s go back to the start.

How did I get here?

My family were never well off, but we were never poor. I certainly didn’t experience poverty; we had food on the table, decent clothes, birthday and Christmas presents, even the odd treat on a day out or a takeaway here and there and most years we had a summer holiday. In later years we even managed holidays abroad. Dad worked 3 jobs at a time to keep his family happy and mom worked full time while also being a full time mom. Regarding work ethic, I had fantastic role models and you’ll see that working hard was never my problem.

However what I did experience growing up were remortgages, loans and credit cards, all to make ends meet but also to give us the treats that they thought we deserved. I saw how easy it apparently was to get “instant” cash for treats and emergencies if it was needed. What I never saw, because my parents never wanted me to see it, was the desperate climb out of debt once you start. I never realised my dads 3 jobs were to pay off debt; I thought they were to give us nice things. I never saw remortgages or loans as a way of consolidating debt because I didn’t know that was a thing when I was little. We only ever saw the “positive” consequences of those actions in our holidays and things. I’m not blaming my parents for anything, they did everything for us - but these things start somewhere and there’s no denying that’s where my relationship with money started to skew through a thorough lack of understanding.

At 13yrs old I started to recognise that mom and dad were struggling a bit to make ends meet. So I got the usual paper round job and I went out and got a job at a pub, pot washing then waitressing and eventually working the bar. I worked there for 5 years and I worked hard. I was determined to take some pressure off mom and dad and pay for my own things. Not food and bills, my parents still provided for me, but new clothes or days out with friends, I paid for those and if I couldn’t then I went without. I stopped asking mom and dad for treats and started funding them myself.

At 18 I got a full time job in a care home and also started helping my dad with one of his other jobs which was cleaning the local council offices. Around this time Dad had paid for a car for me and I had agreed to pay him back monthly plus rent as I was now an adult working full time. But even then he only asked for £200/month from me, £100 for the car, £100 for rent. I had money spare but to this day I cannot tell you where it went. For a year I was living at home on a full time wage (and more with the council job) paying only £200/month to dad and minimal bills like my car insurance. I saved nothing. And I have nothing to show for it. It wasn't even a concept to me, really. There was always the future for doing grown-up things like opening savings accounts and ISAs and mortgages; and there was never any risk of debt or consequences because they weren't in my perception yet.

While I knew the value of money, I guess I also knew that I was prepared to work hard. At this young age and with so little life experience I hadn’t quite appreciated that you could get to a point where no amount of hard work would help anymore. As far as I was concerned, I spent what I earned and I worked harder to earn more if I wanted to spend more. Fairly simple and actually quite logical, yes? I was enjoying my wage and I had not even considered anything other than spending my money because I didn’t need to yet.

When I started university things started to take a downward turn. I’m under no illusion now that my year with minimal bills should have been spent learning good habits and saving money but in honesty the best habits in the world would not have gotten me through uni with no debt, though, arguably I'd have been able to navigate these years better had I "prepared" in my gap year. In fact I have thought about this often and I see now that uni was the worst thing I could have done where my debt is concerned and I should have looked for a full time career that I could work my way up instead. However, "where my debt is concerned" is key there: I am where I am now (and where I will be) because of my nursing degree and honestly, I still can’t tell you which option would have been better at this point in my life. I’ll discuss this more later.

When I started uni I had a student account with Lloyds and part of the student account was a bigger and bigger overdraft each of the three years. This is where it started. This overdraft became essential to me continuing my course because I was not entitled to a maintenance loan more than £65/month, I didn’t get a bursary and I had to commute to uni daily. I was spending around £50/week on petrol so already I was around £150/month down. Dad, proud of me embarking on a nursing degree and wanting to make sure I got to the end, stopped my rent and actually transferred me £100/month to help and I’ll never, ever be able to thank him enough for that. So, I’m now £50/month down. I got a job in a pub again and worked my evenings and weekends. But that money just covered my petrol, nothing else. So I got a job in another pub and when I finished at the first at 11pm, I drove to the other and worked until 3am there. But I still needed more money to cover commuting costs to my placements and food between shifts and, god forbid, the odd day or night out when I wasn’t working; and boy, did I get to a point where I felt so guilty about spending my money on something other than necessities. I picked up bank shifts in two care homes to try and ease the strain further. I was now at 4 part-time jobs picking up every shift that I could and was doing my university course full time and I was just getting by but I was exhausted. I was running off 2hrs sleep some days which was so dangerous with my commuting, but I was just on autopilot and honestly, at the time, I didn’t notice. It just had to be done so I did it. That work ethic I mentioned earlier: it’s in my blood. There was no question, I just had to keep working harder and so I did. But this was the first time I started to realise there may be limits - I couldn't physically work any harder and things weren't getting any better.

Then my car failed it’s MOT and had to be scrapped...

I introduce to you, my first loan.

I took out a loan so I could get a new car and continue my degree and my 4 jobs. But now I had to work harder to pay the monthly loan payments but with only a couple hours of sleep a night most of the time already it was impossible. I really had finally hit the limit of “work more to spend more”.

And so I crept further into that student overdraft.

Every year I maxed my overdraft and I added more top ups to my loan and as a result, more outgoings to my budget, just to buy myself some time until "things were better".

At 22 I was in deep. Deeper than I realised at the time actually, now I look back. I qualified as a nurse and realised that I would have to make a new bank account for my wages or Lloyds would take all of my first wage to pay my debts and I still had bills to pay. So I opened an account with Barclays. After a few months of wages guess what... I took out another loan. I wanted to close my Lloyds account and never think about it again and this was my first experience of reconsolidation. It was fine, I actually felt better for a while.

But here I was, 22 with a decent wage for the first time in my life and I’d struggled so hard for 3 long years. I now only had the one loan, and it didn’t matter how big it was because it was one monthly payment to watch instead of multiple, so I felt calmer and "in control" and so I treated myself. Of course I did. I bought shit I didn’t need, I didn’t save money, I got a car on PCP (which was so overpriced but I had no idea at that point) and soon, somehow, once again, my outgoings were more than income.

I’m not going to give all of the rest of my history here because we’d be looking at 4 more years of repetition, but instead I’ll fast forward to rock bottom. Just know that between this point and rock bottom there were 4 years of numerous overdrafts, high interest loans, payday loans and guarantor loans all in the name of "reconsolidation". I was in a bad, bad way but my kicking legs were keeping my head above water. I was struggling but I was breathing.

Hitting rock bottom.

In October 2017 I met someone who would later accelerate the problem. I’m not blaming him entirely but he is not blameless either. What I will say is he is pivotal to my journey because with him I hit rock bottom. And it is no cliche and it is as bad as they say. And of course at the time I’d have given anything to have never met him but now, I see that he was important in my journey as the worst things we experience usually are. Without hitting rock bottom I would have spiralled for so much longer and the eventual fall could have been so much worse.

So, the story goes on...

Somehow, despite my clear problems with debt, I had a credit card with Aqua (NewDay I think they are now) and they kept chucking more of an allowance on there for me. I ended up with almost £3000 available to spend. And of course after multiple reconsolidation attempts I got to a point where this was pretty clear and I was only using it for work expenses. At this point in my life I felt like I had actually gotten fairly level and things were terrible but again I felt "in control" for a brief moment. My credit cards were clear, I had one massive loan that had consolidated everything else and I was living happily in a little flat in the country.

But I’m going to give you an insight into how bad my debt problem had gotten at this point and it’s an insight I can only see with hindsight. I was no longer working as a nurse but for a private clinical software company and I was earning £30000/year at 25 years old. Even on that wage I was having to use a credit card monthly to cover food and fuel. While it wasn’t having the same impact every month that I had struggled with before this huge consolidation loan (which for your perspective was £17,000) I was still very slowly eating into a credit card.

But it was ok because I had a very clear, detailed and comprehensive plan that I really had spent months working on before committing to this £17,000 loan. I’d set a budget in place with my loan to clear my debt and live comfortably every month for the next 5 years so I would be debt free at 30. That didn't mean lavish spending, "comfortable" at this point was being able to afford fuel for work and £35/week on food that didn't require input from a credit card. It was the best position I'd been in for many years and I certainly felt "comfortable".

In February 2019 I moved in with my then partner to the house he had just bought and it became apparent very quickly from this point that he was a true narcissist who had seen my £30000 salary and not a lot more. I paid half towards his brand new kitchen (I’m talking an entire suite, tiles, paint, everything, the kitchen was a bare brick room) and new carpets in all of the bedrooms and multiple other £100 purchases here and there for furniture and blinds and things and I put a £1500 holiday on my credit card for us that he promised he would pay half back. You guessed it; he never did. His treatment of me got worse; I paid £400/month for the "privilege" of living with him and in return he would call me a lazy c*nt for not walking the dog one day, he would look for things I hadn’t done or hadn’t done right when he got home from work, he would tell me to get out of his house if I asked him to do something he didn’t like (like not turning the bedroom TV on at 4am when I was trying to sleep before work), he would bollock me for filling the house with “my shit” (which he later bought off me for a measly £200 because he had nothing when I moved out), he would ask to see receipts for the food shop and cross off what he wasn’t prepared to pay for before he gave me any money and I have never, in my life felt so worthless and depressed. On “our” £1500 holiday (that I only actually managed to get him on because his mates were going out there for a football match at the same time) he told me I was walking a “thin line” and, whilst drunk, he spat venom at me 4 of the 7 days we were there. I was terrified to speak or suggest anything, scared to move in case I got in his way, and when we got home I was told that I’d intruded on his time with the lads on that holiday. I’d intruded on the £1500 holiday I’d paid for, for us. Oh and that holiday... it was for my birthday. It was my birthday the day we flew out.

Writing this now is still hard and I’ll do a separate story on it another time because I know I’m not alone and I’d do anything to reach someone who is going through what I went through.

But this story is about debt and so I’ll take us back there. In the end, 6 months after moving in with him and after cutting myself for the first time since school (a separate story on this too one day, I promise), I realised I had to get out. I couldn’t stay any longer because I would lose myself. In fact, I already had lost myself. I was terrified to exist in his presence.

So, I got out.

I ended up in rough a flat with no windows, in the middle of our town, and it just had to do for a while. I was out and it was better.

As I sat there one day listening to people getting drunk on the stairs and slinging abuse at each other I realised I had to do something. I had to stop this spiral I was in. I had the potential, in my career and in myself, to be doing so much better but I was lost.

I made a huge decision and what I know now to be the only practical decision I could have made. I decided to stop paying my debts and accept that bankruptcy or an IVA was now my only way out.

The ascent.

I stopped all monthly debt payments because my first priority was to get myself somewhere that I could settle for the long-term and to do that I needed money. I accepted that I'd be chased by my debtors for a while, but it was important that I started looking long-term. I found a house for rent that I could settle in for the next 5 years. I moved in and got myself sorted and then contacted StepChange and set up an IVA.

My total debt going into my IVA was £36000. I was drowning. I couldn’t have carried on on my own.

I'm just going to give a very quick and high-level insight into the process for my IVA, from my own experience. I am not a debt advisor and I have no idea if this is how it goes for everyone but hopefully it'll ease the minds of some of you that are considering an IVA (or any debt management) that it isn't as terrifying as it first feels...

I signed up to the StepChange website (this isn't an ad for them but I have linked the website if you want somewhere to start) and entered my financials into their interactive budget tool. This generated a suggestion from them to look into IVAs and other debt management options - I had already done my own research prior to this and knew an IVA was the way I wanted to go forward but they're the experts and can help and discuss the other debt management options with you if you're not sure. I then had a call back from someone who talked through my budget with my and the technicalities of the IVA and I confirmed with them that I wanted to proceed. Next came the worst bit really and I would say, if you're struggling with debt, start pulling together any and all paperwork from your creditors including outstanding balances, correspondence and account numbers etc, because the next step for me was a comprehensive look at who I owed what to, detailing any and all account numbers and all outstanding balances. It took a long time to pull all of this together but StepChange were with me all the way. I say this bit is scary because, well, there's really no more hiding from this point and this was the first time I'd seen that my debt had totalled over £36,000. That was the only scary thing about it, the process was fine it was just facing reality that hurt. There was some back and forth, making sure everything was correct and nothing was missing and then my IVA proposal was drafted. I signed and agreed the legal bits and then my virtual meeting of creditors was arranged for October. On the day of this meeting I was available by phone and email (but still at work as I wasn't required at the actual meeting) and I had to agree (or not if the case called for it) to any modifications to the proposal; there were a couple for me that I agreed to and then I was informed at the end of the day that my IVA had been approved. I'd never felt relief like it and a few days later my "Chair's report" arrived to confirm the IVA had been approved and that my payments would commence from December. Done.

This period of my life - the last 11 months - has been a rollercoaster.

I got out of - what I still don't feel comfortable saying out loud but I know to be - an abusive relationship, and I got settled and I have a home now that I love dearly and I have an IVA in place to finally manage my years of struggling with debt. And of course the trade off is that I have halted my life for around 6-10yrs. I can’t really save any money for the duration of the IVA because all of my disposable income goes to my creditors, and I will have a mark on my credit file for 6yrs which means I won’t be able to buy a house or settle properly for, realistically, around 10yrs. But what I do have now is time to reflect and change my attitude towards money and the "control" aspect I was chasing is out of my hands for the forseeable future, which it needed to be.

I wasn't able to control my spending because I never took the time to learn how; now I have that time to learn while someone else controls and restricts my finances for the next 6 years.

This is ok. I’m on the right path now and I can fill that path with goals and learning so that in 10yrs time I’m exactly where I want to be.

The reason that £145 letter caused a breakdown today - it reminded me that I’m not free. That when I think I’m looking up, debt is still there to pull me back down and that I'm still fighting my way back out of years of mess. There are still things that I'm going to have to tie off and tidy up, that budgeting will - and should - always be a way of life for me before I spend any money.

That breakdown was exhaustion, not regret or self-pity. And please hear me:

It is okay to feel exhausted.

Debt is a battle and it is constant. It's a cloud that hangs over every single thing you do. Your food shop, your utility bills, the birthday and Christmas presents you can't afford not to get for the people you love, the meals out to celebrate a friends' success, the new baby gifts you absolutely must buy.

You carry it with you everywhere and very rarely will anyone even realise until it's too late because we refuse to talk about it.

The mentality of debt is as psychologically damaging as every physical implication of it.

When I tried to tell my friends that I was struggling I would get the response "You earn £30,000 and you're in debt?! Are you kidding?" or words to that effect.

Every. Single. Time.

And so every single time I would shut up. I'd feel guilty because I earned almost double their wage in some cases. I'd feel stupid because I couldn't afford the takeaway that someone earning half my wage could.

So what would I do? Pretend it wasn't there, of course. I'd order the takeaway on a credit card or, in later days, I'd make excuses to not see people and avoid the situation totally. I have lost many friends over the years because I was too proud, too embarrassed, too guilty, to say that I was struggling with money and to ask if we could get together and not spend money.

Instead I made people feel like I didn't want to see them because even that was easier than facing debt head on.

I could talk for hours about the way debt makes you feel. And I hear every single one of you that is saying “debt is your own fault, just pay your bills and don’t spend more than you earn.” And I agree. I agree now.

But as a student at 19 who is being told “just get that degree and your life will change. You’ll have a job for life and you can sort your money out then”, it’s not so easy. And everyone can talk from the benefit of hindsight.

If I could do it all again with the knowledge I have now, I’d have drawn up a budget to see if I could do uni without debt (aside from government student loan costs) and the inevitable “no” would have spurred me to go into full time work instead.

But that's not how my life played out and there a million things that could have gone differently and led to a debt-free life for me just as there are a million different ways some of you have gotten to this post now and are sat nodding your heads avidly because you know exactly how it feels, you just took a different way here.

Game of life: university or work?

I said I’d discuss the degree over full time work thing for those of you that may be reading this at a point in your journey where this decision is particularly resonating.

That nursing degree has gotten me to where I am today, without a doubt. I am on £42,000 salary at 28yrs old in a job that I adore. And if you were wondering, I am actually now a Product Owner for a clinical communication tool and clinical portal. If you ask me now, the degree was the best move I could have made for my career. I had no idea it would end up like this. I nearly quit my degree - debt aside - because I hated what nursing was in this age. I can discuss that more another time. But that nursing degree put me in a theatre placement where I fell in love with that specific branch of nursing, which put me in contact with a wonderful mentor who later got me a job at a theatre management software company, where I discovered that I really love working with and implementing important clinical systems, which in turn led me to a career progression that now allows me to have an important say in the way our clinical systems are designed and built.

6 years ago as a newly qualified nurse if you'd have asked me "where do you think you'll be in 2020?", I'd have just said theatre sister. Though, there's a lot none of us could have predicted about 2020 to be fair...

I really, really love my job and have found my niche and I wouldn't have found any of this without that awful degree.

But my career and my debt are two VERY separate issues and I’m sure when I’m debt free in 10yrs I’ll say the degree was the best thing I could have done, period. But right now, I’m still wading through the quick sand of debt and though I love my job and I am more than ready to enjoy my £42000 salary one day, maybe (hopefully!) even more by the time I’m debt free, I honestly can’t say that I would do a degree again. In fact, if I had my time over and I could do it all again I’d have found a trade and I’d have worked my way up with a wage from day one with a steady income and standing order into my savings every month and if the desire to study hit me, I'd do it part-time distance learning alongside a full-time job.

In closing.

I've put more effort into this post than my last two uni assignments...

"But you said you wouldn't do a degree again..."

I know and I'll talk about it another time.

The takeaway point is that I've learned there is no real way to know what the best thing to do is because you just don't know what's around the corner - 2020 should have taught every single one of us that lesson!

There is certainly no point wasting time and energy on beating yourself up over what you “should have done”. You can’t possibly know what you should have done and ultimately, everything can and will work out for the best because you can only make the best of the situation that you’re in, not the one you “could, maybe” have been in.

For anyone struggling with debt out there I leave you with a few takeaway points.

Stop blaming yourself. Regardless of whether you are the reason you’re here or not, you’re here and blaming anyone isn’t going to do a single thing to help.

Face it. Don’t hide, don’t run away because it will find you and it will get worse. I mentioned earlier that the bailiffs have turned up for me before: I had a parking fine I couldn’t pay when I was moving house and I came down from my home office one day 6 months later to a letter through the door saying I’d missed the bailiffs but they were coming to retrieve my car that afternoon if I didn’t call them. I have never felt so sick as I did in that moment. I had to pay £350 there and then to stop them coming back and of course, all of my bills then went unpaid and I was thrown off track for the next 3 months. What I should have done is call the council and arrange a way to pay my £25 car fine the day I got the ticket. I now have severe anxiety about answering the door and letters coming through the door (exacerbated by today but I will cope). Remember, you're always dealing with real, human people - they will listen to your situation and help you but if you ignore your debts, you're forcing their hand and they can only work within the tight constraints laid down by their managers that you - yes, you - have put them in by leaving it so long. Pick up the phone, talk your way to a reasonable payment plan that suits you both.

Speak to someone for more general help. I am not a debt or financial advisor, I want to make that very clear. All I am is someone who has hit rock bottom with debt and is still swimming back to the surface. Everything you're feeling; I get it. If you need someone to talk to who can’t necessarily help but that just understands, please reach out to me. I can talk to you and I can tell you what steps I took to start improving things.

For something more formal than a friendly chat (but still a friendly bunch!), I worked with StepChange. This is not an advert for StepChange but they are who helped me and who I’ve dealt with since May when I finally made the call for help, through to approval of my IVA in October this year, and so they are the only people I can credit. There are many other companies who can help but please, just start a conversation with a company and in my experience The Money Advice Service is a great place to start to find someone to talk to. They WANT to help, you need to keep that in mind.

My last piece of advice is for those of you who are still reading who can't personally relate but have had someone say to you they're struggling or who you think might be struggling. Reach out to them and please, do not dismiss them based on how you perceive their circumstances. If they're telling you they're struggling, that's the only thing that matters. Listen to them, and if you don't know what to say or do or can't remember where else to direct them, direct them to this page or even just the paragraph before this one!

Fin.

This is the longest thing I've ever written, second to my dissertation. If you're still here, thank you for reading my debt story and if it isn't something that you can relate to but you know someone who could maybe relate, please do pass it on.

There will be many more posts about my life on here - not because I'm particularly important or have anything insightful to share, but because if I'm learning anything with age, it's that talking about things really isn't so bad and that reflection is how I'm going to turn my life around.

After all, this is my story...