Can anyone help please - debt

[pansydansy]

Hi sooo..

Dh have been looking over our finances today and it's shocking!

Dh earns a minimum of £2880 a month.

We get £47.12 child tax credits and £302 child benefit a month. Which equals £3,229.12

And our outgoings are month is £3,230.01 a month.

There's £23,987.65 of debt too. And only some of it is being paid which is included in our outgoings.

What are we going to do? Step change can't help us because of dh self employment. Cab weren't much help. Can anyone point us in some sort of direction please.

You say hospital appointments for the dc, are any of them eligible for dla, then carers allowance?

the overpayments are high (several thousand) it's gonna take years to pay them off. But we pay them and it's only £60 for one and £40 for the other.

Go back to council and ask for a statement of means, get the amounts you are paying reduced. That way you could use that money to reduce your debts with interest. It will mean you have to put down every single penny you spend outgoings and incomings - but because you have more going out than coming in .....

Money advice service have a budget planner, it’s a really good one. I would really recommend you sit down and enter all your outgoings and incomings into it. One reason I like it is due to you being able to put bills in weekly or monthly using drop down boxes on each section and it will do the calculations for you so everything is monthly

Can you list ALL your outgoings, and all your debts with interest rates & payments?

On the face of it, the things you’re repaying are not accounting for most of your budget. So you must have really high fixed costs?

Agree that it sounds like your fixed costs are very high, £2880 take home is nearly £50k salary, but agree that you should check whether DC are entitled to DLA.

But you must watch his salary as if it goes over £50k after any pension contributions, you will start to lose CB and could get into debt with that too.

Have you carefully reviewed your budget? How has the debt arisen - specific things or paying for normal household costs with loans? Have you had professional advice - if you have no assets and no spare income to pay the debt, a formal solution like bankruptcy or a debt relief order may be appropriate.

I would start from scratch with the Moneysavingexpert money makeover which will look at increasing income, cutting costs, and solutions to get out of debt.