SpendIng out of control, I’m in debt my credit is ruined.

[FacingUp]

I have a problem with my spending, I just spend without thinking. I’ve always been like this for as long as I can remember.
I know I need to stop but I just don’t, money burns a hole in my pocket as the saying goes.
I’ve looked at my credit report today as I’ve finally decided to try and sort myself out and it’s awful, so many defaults from payday loans old credit cards I’ve just never paid off and so many searches where I’ve been trying to get another loan recently due to overspending yet again over Christmas.
My current debt including 3 CCJ’s is £7500.
I work on a zero hours contract and work 36 hours a week at the moment and earn between £1200-1400 a month after tax.
My husband is out of work due to redundancy, we receive some housing benefit, rent privately and have 3 children.
I don’t know where to start but I have to stop this terrible spending behaviour, we have zero savings and live week to week on tax credits and HB payments and then all the rent comes out of my wages at the end of the month.
So as not to drip feed I have specific learning difficulties so I can find numbers in particular hard to get my head around but that’s not the problem, I know it’s just my irresponsible attitude to spending and borrowing and then burying my head in the sand when I inevitably can’t afford to repay it and it’s got to stop.
Any advice please? I’d love to hear in particular from people who have come back from bad debt and bad credit and are now financially stable.
If this thread does attract people who want to stick the boot in- don’t waste your time, there’s nothing you can say to me that I haven’t already said to myself. I already know I’m an irresponsible dickhead 👎🏻

Not going to put the boot in at all, I'm currently a bit in debt to family but I am similar in terms of my financial situation. Can I just ask, does the HB cover most or all of your rent? Could your husband get even a small part time job so he is helping to bring something in? That strikes me as a quick solution but I know finding work can be really hard. ANything is better than nothing.

I'll let more knowlagable people give you advice but it sounds like you need to restructure you existing spending a bit so that HB goes towards rent. Just psychologically I think it's important to keep it separate. Maybe having a bank account that the HB goes into and that you top up (if needed) with tax credits etc if there is a shortfall between HB and rent amount. And then the rent money is ring frenced and you can start to look more clearly at what you have left. Do you try and budget on a weekly basis?
Hope you are feeling brighter soon. It will be okay in the end.

Op, about 5 years ago I was still with my husband. He was ‘in charge’ of the finances, he worked part time, and no matter how much overtime I did, we never had any money for anything.
Made me feel like I was drowning constantly, almost a failure, he made me think I’m crap with money and that’s why we never have any.
So I went to the library and took out as many books as I could find on finance/budgeting etc.
One that stayed with me was Love is not enough

The more I read, the more I understood that finances are not at all complicated. And that actually, women are better at finance than men. And all that mumble jumble jargon is only there to deliberately confuse us, the little silly women. We need the men to translate it all for us.
Errrrm, actually, no, we don’t.

If we educate ourselves a bit, we can make it on our own just fine, thank you very much.

Money is something we can take control over, it really isn’t rocket sience.

I din’t know about you, but I grew up knowing nothing anout finance/savings/investing. I was never told I am in control of it, it’s alway been ‘a man’s job’ in my family/circle of friends. No girlfriend of mine ever talked to me about investment funds. I thought they were for rich people, not me.

So, anyway, I started small, really small. Saving £5 a month in a regular saver account, then upping it to £30 (it felt like such an extravagance, what if I need those £30?! Turns out I don’t, I didn’t notice them coming out of the account after a bit).

The more I learnt, the more I realised that the problem wasn’t me, it was my H, he really was more ignorant than I was, but not only that, I realised that the reason we never had money was because he didn’t agree with budgeting, his motto was: if you NEED it, buy it, no question. In effect it was him saying: ‘If I need it, I’ll buy it. If you need it, there are no money.’
So I separated our finances. I told him: this is how much it costs us to live, I put half, you put half.
One of a sudden, I was ‘loaded’. I had money to save. And saving I did. And budgeted. And allocated different accounts for different expenditures, I had a cushion.

Cut an already too long story short, take control yourself. It’s no one else’s responsability but yours.

Write down a statement of affairs, there is one on money saving expert. Have a look at your budget. And say to yourself: finances are not just for rich men.

It should be taught in school. It’s elementary. It’s power. Not sure why we aren’t encouraged more to learn about finances🙄.

Thanks for being so kind RhubarbTea
DH is trying to get work, just no luck at the moment he’s had only 2 interviews in over a year and not been successful. He was planning to try and get some temp work over Christmas but the upset it would cause to our HB claim just wasn’t worth it- they’d stop it to reassess which would leave us struggling and then when the temp work finished it would need to be reassessed again, can’t wait for him to find permanent work again so we can just get off the dreaded HB altogether.
A separate account for the HB sounds like a good idea though, it covers about £600 of the rent we cover the remaining £800.
I’ll speak to DH today about another account.

I use this www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en/tools/budget-planner

Input the figures and it gives you a monthly figure

Try stepchange for help with debts

But make sure you pay council tax and rent as priority.

This was me this time 5 years ago. Similar amount of debt, c.£6000, working part time and in receipt of tax credits. DH was working full time.

January 2014 was when I finally decided I'd had enough. I'd regularly miss payments on credit cards, was always up to my overdraft limit and could never seem to climb out of the downward spiral of debt. I contacted Payplan, and they went through a budget with me based on income and outgoings and negotiated with my creditors to free interest and agree to a lower monthly payment.

Five years down the line, and my debt will be paid off by June and I'll finally be debt free. It's been hard, my credit score is trashed for at least another two years but it feels so good to finally be in control.

OP, do get in tough with Stepchange, Payplan or another of the FREE debt services. I stress free as there are some who charge for their help. Being in debt is awful, but there is a way out.

8FencingWire thank you for that advice, I’ll have a look at MSE and see what tools they’ve got. Sorry about your exH sounds like he was financially abusive, my DH is just as bad as me with money we’re great together in every other sense but money is our Achilles heel, we just have this awful ‘fuck it’ attitude of ‘its only money’ which is fine when you’re rich and but we are very very not! 🤦🏻‍♀️ We both need to change our attitudes and he agrees so we’re going to try and sort this out as a team.
I also grew up with no clue about finances which I agree doesn’t help when you have to start managing your own.

The spending is one issue
but you will not get it sorted until you get your head into the right place.

I generally suggest starting to keep a mood / spending diary.
Every time you want to buy something write down how you feel
why you want to buy that thing
do you need it
will buying it make you feel better now / in a week / in a month
as once you take control of the thought processes around spending
then controlling the spending gets easier

Next, go and talk to stepchange
as they will help you to prioritise the debts
TBH I think its immoral that card companies are allowed to offer you more credit when you clearly cannot afford it.
On that basis you can push back at them a bit to freeze interest and get some capital cleared

and YYY to getting books out of the library about finance
if nothing else, when you are reading you cannot be spending

Pop your credit & debit card in the freezer and just stick a small amount of cash in your purse, this then is for lasting the week. Having actual money focuses the mind as to whether it will last all week

TBH I think FacingUp and her DH need to take scissors to all credit cards and JUST live on the debit card.
They also need to remove card details from ALL online accounts (like Amazon / ebay / shopping)
And focus really hard on understanding WHY they spend on anything other than the essentials.
Sell it to the kids as a January health kick and it can become a positive rather than a negative

We don’t have credit cards anymore, we defaulted on them and no ones else will give us one on account of being twats 🤦🏻‍♀️

FacingUp
Not Twats. Just not thinking in a long term manner.
You are not alone. And actually having the cards stopped is a mercy in the long run
it just does not feel like it yet.

While its quiet and dark, sit down with your DH and work out a budget
(on my spreadsheets thread on this board is a template one you can download to then play with)
then you can start to assess which bits of spending are essential and which you can easily stop.

Silly thing. Could you do some decluttering to raise funds to at least get the CCJs under control?

Thank you, I’ve got lots of clothes I can EBay but nothing major to sell, the CCJs amount to almost half out overall debt.

Start by getting a small notebook and committing to writing down everything you buy. Ask DH to do the same. At the end of each week add up all these expenses. The act of knowing you will have to write it down will make you think twice.
Don't cheat. So if you go to the supermarket but also buy yourself a coffee and cake in the cafe, don't put it all under 'supermarket shop' but list the coffee and cake/magazine/nail varnish/ chocolate bar or whatever separately.

Agree with what Christmas has said.

Its an interesting thing that the mindset on weight loss threads and the mindset on debt loss threads are incredibly similar.
For weight loss we have myfitnesspal
there is not yet a debt loss app - maybe somebody should write one

Ta1kinPeace I’m also really really overweight so that’s an eye opener! Can’t to stop spending and can’t stop eating fuck!😳🤦🏻‍♀️

FacingUp
Interesting
BUT
here's the good news
If you sort your eating compulsions
and your spending compulsions
for they are one and the same
life will get a LOT better

the other name for the mood diary is the food / mood diary
and the money you'll save by all eating less will surprise you

Good Luck. Onwards and upwards

Then it sounds like you are driven by emotions I.e you spend/ eat when ow, deserve a reward etc. You have to work out exact,y what you need each month and start to think in terms of needs first. A tip that really helped me was oversaving I.e putting £100 a month away even though I could only afford £70. Almost every month I found I didn’t need the full £30 and having to physically withdraw funds from savings made me think twice

That should say you spend/eat when feeling down

I agree I spend and eat depending on my moods, when my account is empty I’m irritable and down when money comes in I feel great and then the spending starts and as the numbers go down my mood drops with it, that sounds awful but it’s true. It’s like I live to spend. My eating habits are similar, feeling shitty? Eat junk to feel better, except I don’t feel better I feel worse 👎🏻

I’ve taken the plunge and filled in some forms for Payplan, waiting for someone to contact me with some options now, wish I felt more in control but for some reason I feel totally totally shit, reality is biting me on the arse today. 😢

First off, make peace with your past decisions. We all make messes at times, the key is to make peace with them while learning from them.

Secondly, if you have been over spending on “stuff” then sort it and sell it. This will do 2 things:

• extra bits and pieces to pay off debt (even a few pounds here or there will help you, both in terms of eating into the interest accruing and psychologically in seeing the balances go down)
• help you note what you have over spent on, what you can live without. This will help you “check yourself” before buying more of the same kind of “stuff”

Also think about where / when you are when you overspend? A particular time of day / year? For me it was online late at night when feeding DS and the house was quiet - so I shifted to mumsnetting! If you can spot the pattern you might find a decoy.

And do contact stepchange, they are fab.

There are some great debt advice threads running on this board too, you will feel less alone then

Saving/budgeting is one thing but the spending also needs to be addressed. Not from a practical perspective but an emotional one.

debtorsanonymous.org.uk

Would this be something you could find helpful?

I was in debt a number of years ago not due to overspending but going through a messy divorce, ex not paying maintenance consistently/in full (but according to govt 1 or 2 payments meant he was, so my benefits were reduced by how much he was meant to be paying to the penny). Horrific time.

Then they changed the rules on maintenance being deducted from benefits (because the above was happening to a lot of single parents and putting their families into poverty) and I had a slightly better paying job.

I used mse site to get advice and sat and worked out my income & outgoings but I also contacted a debt charity (I had 2 overdrafts and credit card debt which I'd incurred just to pay for essentials! And I'd still had to go without food and replacing essentials at that time) and the debts were frozen while I paid them off.

Took time and was hard going but did it eventually.

My tips would be:

Be realistic and make sure you include ALL outgoings. Lots of people forget to include occasional expenses, thinking only of day to day stuff.

Allow a LITTLE bit of spending for non essentials - otherwise it just becomes too disheartening and you get fed up and give up. It's like being on a diet, if you set yourself the goal of only eating virtuous food you miss the treats FAR more than if you allow yourself the treats occasionally.

Speak to a debt charity and take their advice. It's their area of expertise. They're also great at representing you and getting debts frozen/reduced, sometimes even written off altogether.

Track your spending - people often don't realise how much they're spending on the "little" things, the often quoted example is takeaway coffees but even a daily choc bar bought from a newsagents rather than buying a multipack from the supermarket that you take with you makes a difference in your annual finances. 1 60p choc bar every day = £219 spent a year!

You can do this using a notebook or there's loads of apps you can do it on. But you MUST do it honestly and accurately EVERY PENNY you spend recorded. If you find this difficult insist on a receipt for every transaction, keep them safe in your purse and then transfer the info to notebook/app each evening - easy enough to do while chilling watching tv.

I'm a big fan of mse site - but I'm having trouble accessing it it's not loading properly for me - if anyone else having same problem especially if you've solved it I'd love to know! It's driving me nuts!

Depending on your incomings vs your outgoings, a Debt Relief Order might be the way to go. These are for people with very little disposable income and no assets, so they can't pay their debts. If you qualify, your debts will be written off, although you might have to pay an affordable amount towards them.

Another advantage would be that you would not be able to get any credit and you would have to learn to budget with what you have available. This includes saving money for Christmas, insurances, car repairs etc.

But first you need to get a budget in place so you know what your essentials cost.

www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/money-help/

You can probably skip a lot of the stuff about 0% credit cards, because you won't qualify, but you do probably need advice about your debts and setting a budget. Perhaps your DH can take the lead on all this as a useful thing to do while he is out of work?

Multiple accounts can also help. If all your income goes into one account, and your rent and direct debits come out of this account. Set up a standing order to a second account to pay for food, travel, DC expenses, other regular essentials (you'll need to do the budget planner as well to work out what this needs to be).

Finally, if you have some disposable income (even on a debt management plan etc, you should be allowed a small amount of 'pocket money' for adults) - split this between you and your DH and this is the money that you can spend without worrying on a 'when it's gone, it's gone' type basis.

Good luck!

MSE seems fine for me Graph. Maybe they were doing maintenance overnight?

Direct MSE link to debt help:

www.moneysavingexpert.com/loans/debt-help-plan/