Decided to also post on here. I’ll be honest, I’m looking for reassurance that it’s not just us!!
so I’ve had another rubbish night sleep worrying about our debts. We are in the process of trying to sort out an absolutely mountain of debt that we’ve racked up over the last decade. Some of it has been racked up due to things that were to unforeseen, however, some of it is also down, to us not communicating with each other properly and generally making poor financial decisions
The thing that I am most embarrassed about is that we are a professional couple with good jobs. People probably look at us and think that we are doing okay, however the real reality is so so different.
It’s all came to a head about a year ago when I discovered the extent of our debt.
I had stupidly delegated all of the financial stuff to my husband and had left him to get on with it. He had tried his best, however, he had this false sense of needing to protect me from reality and that meant that we didn’t attack the death as aggressively as we should have.
apart from the two of us, nobody in the real world knows how much we owe. We have told some family members and very close friends that we are cutting back but the reality is that on top of our mortgage we have 80 K worth of debt. this is spread across credit cards loans and overdrafts etc. I also owe my mum 12 K however she has told me that this can be put on the back burner for the time being as it’s not money that she needs back urgently. It is still a priority for me though.
When husband was managing the money, he dropped a few balls and made some late payments, this means that we struggle to get 0% deals at the moment and therefore we are paying quite a lot of interest on some of the debts.
Thankfully, we have a good income. My husband is a head teacher and I work in a senior role in the local authority. Our joint gross income is around 118 K. Thank God we have a decent income otherwise they would be totally Insurmountable
Since discovering how much we owed, I have taken charge of our finances. I still expect husband to be involved but I do the budget and work out what needs to be paid. At the moment I am following the snowball method where I am throwing the majority of the money at our highest interest debts. Once this is paid, I will move onto the next one. Everything else is paid at the minimum level during this process. This seems to be working for us at the moment and it is nice to see some of the balances going down.
The thing that I really struggle with is that we are a couple who earn well, in our 40s. We shouldn’t be in this position and when I look around everybody else seems to have made far better choices. I know that money and personal finance is somewhat of a taboo topic, and therefore none of us really know what’s going on in other peoples lives. on my worst days I just feel as though we are the only ones dealing with such a ridiculous level of debt. I know that comparing ourselves to others is pointless, but is anybody else dealing with similar circumstances to us? He feels so lonely at the moment.