Serious debt and in need of advice

[Motheroftenrec]

Hello,
It's my first time posting on here so please bare with.
I am in need of some advice. My partner and I are in serious debt, which only came to light after my partner has been stressed for months and put onto anti-depressants. The catalyst was him losing his job which he was due to start after moving from his old company.
Some background: he is a contractor and works on the trains - a job which gives no financial security, strange hours, a lot of travel but pays extremely well. He has been out of work for about a week now, in which we sat down to go through finances. I knew we had one full credit card and had been struggling since around May, (we also bought a house last April and setting up was quite expensive) so I didn't worry too much and thought we would find our feet. Well, it turns out we have three full credit cards, a large car loan (for a car that my partner purchased and later sold for way less because it wasn't economical) credit with Next for furniture and quite high monthly outgoings with our mortgage and other expenses.
Things we have done: we have immediately cut out as many luxuries as possible: including making a food planner with a food budget of £60 per week (for three of us, plus pet food), cutting out all subscriptions to Netflix, YouTube, prime and various charities, we are going to be cooking all meals from home with no more eating out, or getting in takeaways. We have paid off one card with interest on completely (my partners parents did this, knowing the full scope of the debt and knowing we have a baby on the way - we will repay them when we are in the clear). We are also selling my perfumes, camera, some jewelry and expensive kitchen things if they will sell, on eBay.
My partner has promised this will never happen again and is very sorry, but even so, we have set up a joint account for bills and other essentials to go from and I will have full access to all of his accounts from now on.
Has anyone got any advice on what else we could be doing to help the process along? Obviously a job will be essential and he is looking night and day and I will be working from home again selling on Etsy if I can.
Just looking for other people who are or have been in the same position with any good advice for me please?
Thank you in advance.

Are the cc 0 percent? Is he signing on for contribution based JSA or UC? Do you get child tax credits and child benefit?

Can you transfer any debt to a 0% credit card? That may ease the monthly outgoings and stop interest building. Call Next (and other companies) they can freeze the interest for you in some situations. Thats all I can think of right now.

Jonb6, the remaining cc are interest free for now, one does run out soon though and the other in September. He isn't, I'm not sure what he is entitled too, as he was a very good earner before he lost his job, and it was very recent. We do not get child tax credit or child benefit as he was earning enough that we wouldn't be entitled to anything. Thank you Partyforone, that may be the smartest option for us, provided he is allowed to take out another credit card. We only really need to move the money from one card, as we have until September to try and tackle the second one.

you need to post this in the Money Matters section. We have a support thread for people paying off debt which you might find helpful to read through.

First urgent thing - look at the interest rates on your debt. anything more than 5% or so try to find ways to get it into lower interest rates. if you are in deep trouble you can get the interest frozen.

for lower priority debts keep paying the minimum you can to keep them ticking, but pour the majority of what you can repay into your highest priority debt and get them gone one away a time.

highest priority debts are the ones that could trigger you losing your home or going to jail if not controlled. next is just by highest interest rate that can't be reduced further, or if you can get debt into 0% rates then highest priority is the soonest-ending deal.

Thank you HigaDequasLuoff, I will post their tomorrow, right now we don't have to pay interest on anything, everything is still 0%, the one card that did have interest is now paid off. We are going to look into moving one card to a new 0% interest one to avoid interest as that will start in March, so that's our priority and we have a few smaller debts to his friends, ect that we are going to work through by selling things.

Contribution-based JSAis paid for up to 6 months, but only if you paid enough Class 1 National Insurancecontributionswhen you were working. Youcan getit even if your partner works or if youhavesavings.It is 73.10 per week. This is what he should be doing.