Oh boy…debt! Don’t talk to me about debt
Where to start?

As you all probably know by now, I wasted the best part of my youth having fun. This was brought on by a worse than expected (by me anyway) set of ‘A’ Level results meaning I didn’t get the uni place I craved.

Consequence? One year working/bumming around, one year wasted on a course I hated, another year working/bumming around – temp jobs, bar jobs, factory jobs; grape picking, olive picking, orange picking, satsuma picking…

…then just before my 22nd birthday I met Mrs Grimsdale (lets call her Xena), wild, exotic, sexy, and before too long we were an item. She was poor in a way that someone with no family, no career, no savings is poor. She lived hand to mouth, walking home to Cricklewood from the West End towards the end of the month because her money had run out.

I was wealthy by comparison: I had a credit card, some savings in the Post Office amounting to a massive £500 (hey, this was 1984) and I had a supportive family. On the minus side, see above.

I’m not sure if there is any way to cut this story short, but perhaps if I say that we spent the savings on a two month trip through France to Portugal then came home to live in a bedsit (see last week) and look for work, both got shit temp jobs then made the earth-shatteringly bonkers decision to have a baby…perhaps you can start to appreciate why debt has been a constant nagging worry over the last 20 years, except when it becomes a very large and urgent worry at other times.

I don’t want to go into too much detail in case my daughter ever reads this, so I’ll blur the edges slightly, but Xena has low self-confidence despite being a beautiful, talented and very intelligent woman, this has meant that between looking after the kid, getting a good degree and little bits of work, I have been virtually the only bread-winner since we met. Now she is self-employed but not in a way that creates an income stream, the kid is at university and bleeding us dry.

For the last ten years or so I’ve been working for a multi-national financial services company who shall remain nameless. Starting as a temp, I’ve clawed my way up the greasy pole but seem to have hit a glass ceiling, having started a decade too late.

We were lucky, my folks helped us buy our first house in London in the late 80s when prices were sky-rocketing. Then they started to fall, we had to sell and we managed to just get back what we paid – of course, if we still lived in that house, it would be worth about 10 times what we paid for it. As it was, we moved north, bought cheap, borrowed against the positive equity, did the place up, moved again, etc. the sorry tale continues.

I now have more credit cards than I need and a personal loan, with total debt of around £18,000. That is on top of a mortgage which is four times my salary – details withheld because I can’t bring myself to type it. Out-goings per month; mortgage + council tax + utility bills + credit card minimums + loan repayment = my salary just about. Food, fuel, paying for daughter, sundries…don’t ask.

Still, on the bright side….
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Fri 24 Nov 2006, 9:37, Reply)